January 18, Else Marie Pade (died today in 2016)

Since July, I have been concentrating solely on female composers.  You can read about that in my post from July 19.  If I can’t find one born on the calendar day, I may not post.  On with today’s composer.

“Else Marie Pade (December 2, 1924 –  January 18, 2016) was a Danish composer born in Aarhus, a magical city which is today a hotspot of Danish arts.  As a child Pade contracted chronic pyelonephritis which, according to Wikipedia causes “persistent flank or abdominal pain, signs of infection (fever, unintentional weight loss, malaise, decreased appetite), lower urinary tract symptoms and blood in the urine.  She was confined to a bed where she listened to sounds outside her window, which she called “aural pictures.”   After getting better she started studying piano first with her mother and then with a more professional pianist.  Her playing caught the attention of the director of the People’s Music School in Aarhus, who offered her a position as a student.  There she was exposed to New Orleans Jazz, and began playing in a jazz band.

During the WW II, she joined the Danish resistance and was trained as an expert in an all women’s explosive group.  She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and imprisoned in a concentration camp.  One night in the camp, she looked through a window, saw a star in the sky and heard music coming from inside her head.  She took her belt buckle and scratched the melody into the plaster of the cell wall.  She called it “You and I and the Stars.” (Which unfortunately, I cannot find on youtube.”

After the war she entered the Conservatory of Music and studied twelve-tone and heard the work of Pierre Schaeffer, who invented Musique concrète.  She started composing and became the first Dane to “compose a “”concrete” and electronic music work: A day at Bakken.”

“”Syv Cirkler” (Seven Circles)	Himmelrummet and Kong Vinter
Symphonie Magnetophonique (collaboration with Jacob Kirkegaard)	Faust (1962)