Else Marie Pade Et Glasperlespil

Else Marie Pade Et Glasperlespil Electronic Music 1 Else Marie Pade by Henrik Marstal and Ingeborg Okkels lse Marie Pade (b. 1924) is one of the pio- movement within the French field of electronic E neers of electronic music in Denmark. From music: musique concrète. Schaeffer was prima- the beginning of the 1950s, she, in close co- rily interested in “concrete” everyday sounds, operation with technicians and assistants on the which he recorded by means of a microphone Danish Radio, produced a substantial amount and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and then pro- of concrete and electronic music, partly in the cessed electronically in his sound studio at the shape of independent works for radio broad- French national radio, RTF. After visiting Schaeffer casts, partly in the shape of accompaniments to in 1952, Pade began to study the concrete aes- various radio dramas. So far, the music has only thetics of music and the technique behind it. existed on tapes in the archives of the Danish Back in Copenhagen, she began to work free- Radio; this CD is thus the first ever musical docu- lance for the Danish Radio, and there she be- mentation of her work. came acquainted with M.sc. (Electrical Engineer) In 1946 she became a student at the Royal Holger Lauridsen. He was also interested in elec- Danish Conservatory of Music, the piano being tronic music and was, moreover, well connected her solo instrument. Even though she went on with the circle around Werner Meyer-Eppler, the to take the exam, she herself felt that she was originator of the likewise new electronic sound not meant to be a pianist. At the same time, she studio in Cologne. Contrary to the Paris school’s began to feel the necessity of exploring “an in- concrete aesthetics of music, here one worked ternal universe of sound”, a universe which she with synthetically generated sounds based on had been hearing with her internal ear since serial principles, launched under the name of childhood and had wanted to bring into being elektronische Musik. Pade benefited from this in in a form she was not yet familiar with. She there- her music, as she was thereby able to supple- fore started taking private lessons in composi- ment her knowledge of musique concrète with tion from both Vagn Holmboe, Jan Maegaard the German movement’s systematic use of sound- and Leif Kayser. It was in 1952 that Pade dis- ing bodies like oscillators and pulse generators. covered the means by which she could bring In the latter half of the 1950s, Pade, together into being her universe of sound. The impulse with Lauridsen, organised an interimistic elec- came from a broadcast on the Danish Radio tronic sound studio at the Danish Radio, where about Pierre Schaeffer, the originator of the new one could work with both concrete and syn- Else Marie Pade, sound-monitoring of Faust, Lab. III, 1962 2 3 thetically produced sound material – a synthe- music, and music critics from Copenhagen news- sis which was also a prominent issue in the papers took a swipe at Pade and her foreign new Italian sound studio, Studio de Fonologia colleagues more than once, when their works The works Musicale, where people like Luciano Berio, were performed at concerts or played in the Henri Posseur and John Cage were working. radio. For Pade, the aspect of gender might have Sound and Light (1960) MAN Pade and Lauridsen also established a study played a part in this criticism. The combination Sound and Light is a purely electronic work, Return to us, untouched, the clang of sound circle, consisting of interested technicians, pro- of a woman daring to compose music from such based upon a poem by Piet Hein with that title. and light. gramme personnel and writers. Here, well-known a radical sound material was too provoking for According to Else-Marie Pade, it depicts “the Allow us to sense space and time – as if for figures of the international electronic avant garde the Danish contemporary male dominated and speed of a note out into space”. In the course the first time. environments – amongst whom Karlheinz Stock- tradition-bound musical environment. Pade her- of the work it undergoes different transforma- Pull away all things’ dusty covers of thought. hausen, Herbert Eimert and Ernst Krenek – were self has later said that she felt doubly isolated: as tions until it explodes in the end. The work Make us close to the naked stuff we are of. invited to come and lecture on their work. Pade’s a composer of electronic music, and as a woman. was originally meant to be a multimedia-event connection to the electronic avant garde envi- From 1957 until the middle of the 1960s, Pade in which the poem played a part on several lev- A VOICE IN SPACE ronment was further broadened by her visit to experienced a productive period in which she els: It would, simultaneously, be recited by two You tame all things with names and habits. the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958, the created a long series of electronic works and readers, performed as an electronic work of But now you yourself are trapped within the performance of electronic works at a concert thereby made a name for herself, both in Den- sound, and, finally, represented visually as a magic circle of words. put together in co-operation with Henri Pousseur mark and to a certain extent in international elec- composition of light by the director Jens Hen- Now you cry out for the lost, raw, mineral game. and Bengt Hambræus in 1962, and, in the same tronic circles. A central selection of these works riksen. Pade herself has talked of the work as a Are you ready to give up everything you have year, her partaking in the so-called Darmstadt are represented on this CD. After 1965, her artis- “ballet for searchlights and loud speakers”, as covered it with? seminars, which were the central forum for the tic output decreased radically, partly due to her three different art forms would share the scene. MAN European avant garde. Finally, two of her works, obligations as an employee for the Danish Ra- The work was first performed in Falkonercentret All those prisons we made for ourselves – Seven Circles and Glass Bead Game I-II, were dio where she worked as a producer. This, to- in Copenhagen in 1960. The music came out let them be torn asunder. used by both Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez as gether with the diminishing news value of elec- through loud speakers in the auditorium and Show us one thing made only of reality. examples of electronic music, at their frequent tronic music, meant that Pade thereafter became made full use of the acoustics of the room by lectures given around the world. increasingly marginalised as a composer. means of the newly invented MS-stereo effect. A VOICE IN SPACE The leading Danish musical environment was Lately there has been a renewed interest in Jens Henriksen’s composition of light was me- Good, on your condition this prayer can be met. generally not very interested in the new elec- the early Danish electronic music. This interest ticulously choreographed to follow the dynam- Forget what you know. tronic movements that had begun to reach the can partly be seen as the result of a general need ics and movements of the music, and it was Prepare, this is the now of Creation, where public ear, primarily via the radio, in the latter among Danish electronica musicians, sound performed on a so-called “light organ” by two everything is new. half of the 1950s. An influential composer like artists and scholars of music, to (re)discover their light maestros, directed by Jens Henriksen him- Time flies and lasts. The universe is loud – listen. Knudåge Riisager clearly stated in an essay that electronic roots – within which Pade plays a self. Two readers, one on either side of the stage, these new movements had nothing to do with significant part. proclaimed Piet Hein’s poem: As Sound and Light was originally meant to be an independent part of the multimedia-event, the poem is not included in Pade’s work. 4 5 Seven Circles (1958) Faust is built around a basic material of fre- 6. Movement Epilogue. The long, loaded ex- The music is written for percussion, prepared Seven Circles is the first Danish piece of elec- quencies, covering a very large part of the au- panses of sound lead back to the prologue piano and violin, which are then electro-acous- tronic music that was performed in Denmark dible spectre of frequencies (that is, from 21 Hz and ends the work. tically manipulated. The work also has a purely for the first time, namely as a radio transmis- to 10028 Hz in intervals with 7 Hz between them). electronic part. The concrete music was re- sion from Radio Denmark in 1959. In concor- On this basis, Pade has mixed selected frequen- Glass Bead Game II (1960) corded by Poul Leerhøj on percussion, Niels dance with the German electronic movement, cies which, when put together, unite in a spe- Glass Bead Game II is an electronic work, origi- Nielsen on violin, and Pade herself on prepared the work is based on serial principles of com- cial acoustic phenomenon, the so-called floatings. nally consisting of two parts, I and II. The first piano. It was first performed in 1965 as tele- position. It builds on a serial succession of seven These lightly pulsing floatings run through the part is inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel The vised theatre for Nordvision, with the participa- notes, spread over a broad compass, in the fixed work, symbolising the love between Faust and Glass Bead Game, in which a fascination of and tion of dancers from the Royal Danish Ballet.

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