Lars Graugaard – Select Discography

Composer Jack Price Managing Director 1 (310) 254-7149 Skype: pricerubin [email protected] Rebecca Petersen Executive Administrator 1 (916) 539-0266 Skype: rebeccajoylove [email protected] Contents: Olivia Stanford Biography Marketing Operations Manager [email protected] Press Acclaim Karrah O’Daniel-Cambry Select Discography Opera and Marketing Manager [email protected] List of Works List of Writings Sample Blog Mailing Address: 1000 South Denver Avenue Workshops Suite 2104 Selected Video Links Tulsa, OK 74119 Photo Gallery Website: http://www.pricerubin.com Complete artist information including video, audio and interviews are available at www.pricerubin.com Lars Graugaard – Biography Lars Graugaard is a very experienced and highly trained musician, composer and scholar with an artistic vision and musical understanding that lets him move freely between sophisticated surroundings and popular culture. He has a strong academic background with a degree in flute performance from The Royal Danish Academy of Music and a PhD in interactive music from Oxford Brookes University. Lars’ musical background lies in a mix of styles and his production comprises compositions in the modernistic European tradition from large-scale orchestral pieces to chamber music, as well as popular projects and digital experiments into the latest trends of interactive music and cross-modal forms. He is Visiting Faculty Artist at New York University Steinhardt music department since 2010 and composer-in-residence at El Grup Instrumental, Valencia, Spain until 2015. In 2015 he will commence a composer residency with the young and promising Hamburg-based Decoder Ensemble. Although trained as a performer Lars has always been very active in music creation, with more than 180 score compositions released on numerous LPs, CDs and digital formats to his credit. His compositions always have a direct appeal and are crafted with great musical knowledge on all levels. There is at times a strong eclecticism in his music, adapted to the circumstances of a commissioned composition. Moreover, Lars permeates his compositional process with recent discoveries in human perception and cognitive musicology, and all of this makes for a body of musical work that equally appeals to the senses and to the mind. Recent major compositions include the orchestra work ’Venus’, the sinfonietta works ’Blind Lemon’ and ’Engage & Share’, ’Book of Throws’ for 12 players and improvising piano soloist, the interactive opera ’Trenes de Marzo’ and ’Milbank’s Football’ for symphony orchestra. A CD in surround format with his most significant works commissioned by NYU Steinhardt will appear on the Danish dacapo label during 2015. Lars Graugaard – Biography As a performer Lars continues to gives concerts all over the world. When the flute was his principal instrument he performed and recorded CDs with the music of his contemporaries as well as classical composers such as J. S. Bach, Boccherini, Spohr, Beethoven, Rossini and Reger. He holds a diploma in flute performance from the Royal Danish Conservatory, Copenhagen. In recent years he has turned to the laptop as his preferred performance tool, shaping it as a sophisticated vehicle for interpretation in interactive and generative music. Many if the ideas Lars make use of come from music research into expression and emotion in music. His performances are always in real-time with procedures written into custom computer code to algorithmically guide and intuitively shape basic musical ideas and sectional development. A recent group performances are guided improvisations with instrumental performers that are skilled in free improvisation in duo settings with top-level international performers. This includes NYU Steinhardt affiliates such as pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, bass-player Drew Gress, wind-player Dave Schroeder, flutist Robert Dick and guitarists Brad Shepik and Keisuke Matsuno, as well as NYU Improvisers’ Ensemble and NYU Jazz Composers’ Ensemble. The richness of these activities provides Lars with a platform for continuous development in research and theory and subsequent application in composition, performance and programming. Lars was professor of interactive music at Carl-Nielsen-Academy-of-Music and lectured for five years at Aalborg University’s Medialogy Department, both in his native Denmark. Lars has participated in and directed several research projects and he has held a handful of trusted positions in international organizations in the field of music and is on the board of the International Society for Contemporary Music – ISCM. Lars was composer-in-residence 1996-1999 at Odense Symphony Orchestra and he was Artistic Director 2007-2014 of re-new forum for digital art’s annual festival and conference. In 2013 Lars initiated the record label and music promoter clang. Lars regularly hosts workshops in composition techniques in interactive music and real-time laptop performance.International Competition Paolo Spincich Prize (Trieste), III edition of "The Voice" International Competition for actors. Lars Graugaard – Press NYU Symphony Orchestra/ NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble/NYU Percussion Ensemble Graugaard: Venus; Book of Throws; Layers of Earth; Three Places (DaCapo) “Danish composer Lars Graugaard (b. 1957) created all four works here for these New York University groups -- he became Visiting Faculty Artist at NYU in 2010 but, far from being a stuffy academic, he incorporates electronics/computers and sometimes performs as Lars from Mars. Venus, the album's "title track," is the most intriguing; written for solo violin (Patti Kilroy), double-bass (Patrick Swoboda), electronics, and orchestra (conducted by Jens Georg Bachmann), it creates a mysterious world unto itself. Book of Throws, "for ensemble and improvising piano soloist," is a progression of orchestral eruptions through and over which the pianist, jazzman Jean-Michel Pilc, threads his way with no prior knowledge of what the ensemble will be playing, even though their music, unlike his own, is completely notated. Layers of Earth, for oboe, interactive computer, and percussion ensemble, demands the oboist (Ian Shafer) produce otherworldly timbres (even by the standard of oboe; I wonder whether sometimes it's electronically mutated); built, it seems, in cellular fashion, it finds the soloist fighting free of the surrounding textures to soar rhapsodically at times, but the metallic timbres of the percussion also enthrall. Three Places, with no soloists, is an ensemble piece of three contrasting moods, he says; they seem defined by timbres -- flutes swooping like flocks of birds, percussion chittering like insects, etc. This is all pretty far out in terms of structuring sounds across time with little or no relationship with past styles of music, yet not abrasive or hard to listen to as long as you're willing to forego easy melodies, tonality, and steady rhythm. I find it positively riveting.” -Steve Holtje, culturecatch.com Lars Graugaard – Press Lars Graugaard & Thomas Hejlesen – Tears of Dionysius “Explorations of sexuality are certainly nothing new, and while every generation likes to think it’s reinvented sex and sexuality, it is of course, what’s ensured the survival and expansion of the human race since it first evolved into its own species. We know we’re by no means the only primates to enjoy recreational sex, but we are, of course, the only ones capable of making art. Graugaard’s Tears of Dionysius is an unusual project, an audiovisual work which juxtaposes high art with low. The visuals are a collection of anonymous black and white movies, compiled and sequenced by writer and film-maker Thomas Hjlesen, the texts composed by Graugaard ‘after Friedrich Nietzsche’ (taking ‘Geburt der Tragödie’ – ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ which dissects the dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as its basis) and the score composed by Graugaard for 18 players and performed by Caput Ensemble, along with Gudini Franzon and Stina Ekblad. As such, its ambition and scope on a purely technical level is vast, and in terms of its theoretical philosophical context, it’s equally immense. In many ways, the enormity of the project proves to be the audience’s greatest challenge. Quite simply, how does one assimilate a work like this? Graugaard’s score is magnificent. ‘I ask again and again, why are you so sad’ is a bold neoclassical piece which has the drama of ‘Mars’ from Holst’s Planets suite, which stands in contrast with the blurred, grainy images. Hands grabbing, squeezing, kneeding, flesh, malleable, dough-like, the figures become almost abstracted and cloud-like at times, and it’s often difficult to be certain exactly what you’re watching. The effect is akin to a merging of Henry Moore’s figures with the style of Lucian Freud and the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange. ‘When Your Shadow is All Over Me’ – a jumble of limbs, pumping male buttocks toward the lens, then cut to a torso, a male and female abdomen in rhythmic Lars Graugaard – Press slow-motion, something more akin to jellyfish floating through the deep than the actuality of copulating bodies – cut to a close-up of a woman’s pubic thatch, rising and falling in a slow rhythm. The music is sparse, creeping, cinematic, eerie. In a way, this corresponds with the strange detachment of the nature of these anonymous films: there are no faces in shot. We hear the voice of Stina Ekblad narrate the relationship between Apollo and Dionysius while a penis fills the screen plunging in and out in a fluid motion. When we do finally see a face, during ‘No Matter How Hard We Try’, it’s a high- contrast image of a man’s forehead and eyes in close-up, slowed to almost a still. Against a soundtrack of unsettling discordance, how do we read those eyes? Freeze. Saturate to fade. ‘You Are in the Arms of an Angel’ finds scraping strings teeter on the edge of a dark abyss over a stuttering loop of a lesbian kiss. Again, the film quality reduces the features to washed-out whites and shadows, the eyes deep hollows, the mouths vortex-like black holes, expressions of lust transformed to anguish and agony.

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