Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje (1973)

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje finished composition studies at the State Academy of Music in Oslo in 2000. Her music has been heard all over Europe as well as in other continents and she has been performed by Klangforum Wien, Oslo Sinfonietta, TM+, Cikada and Vertavo string quartets among others. Her portrait concerts have been heard in Toronto and Vienna. She has received many awards and commissions, p.ex. from the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Ratkje is active as a singer/voice user, electronics player and studio engineer, mainly in connection with the improvisation ensemble SPUNK or as a solo artist. Other groups are the metal band Trinacria, duo with Jaap Blonk, the performance trio Agrare and a workers' songs collaboration with the acoustic trio POING. Ratkje has performed her own music for films, dance and theatre performances, installations and other projects. In 2003, she played a leading part in her own opera, based on the texts from the Nag Hammadi Library. In 2005 she sang the solo part of her first big orchestral work, commissioned by Radio France.

gagaku variations is written for Vertavo string quartet and Frode Haltli on accordion. It was formed after a month long travel to Japan in the autumn 2000. My interest for the gagaku music grew greater as I started to analyse and transcribe some of the authentic music. Although it is based upon Japanese harmony and melodic frases, it was never my intention to write a piece in a Japanese style. The term 'wabi sabi' could have been the subheading for gagaku variations, as a description of how I try to deal with the material. In the words of the author L. Koren it means "a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things unconventional." He continues: "Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace."

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