7.30 Doors
8.00 Welcome, reading by Ain Bailey
8.15 Presentation by Jacob Kirkegaard
8.50 Short film En dag på Dyrehavsbakken
9.30 Short talks: Sanne Krogh Groth, Mads Kjelgaard, Jo Langton
10.15 Group Q&A: Jacob Kirkegaard, Sanne Krogh Groth, Mads Kjelgaard and Jo Langton,
moderated by Frances Morgan
10.45 Close
A special opportunity to hear more about Else Marie Pade with talks, film screening and discussion. “Soarings” is a rough translation of the Danish word svævninger – a word coined by Pade to encompass both the phenomenon of different frequencies colliding to make an interference beat, and the more poetic image of soaring through the air.
The evening begins with a reading by Ain Bailey taken from Else Marie Pade’s Collected Writings. Recently published in Danish by Passive/Aggressive, this extract has been specially translated into English for the evening.
Jacob Kirkegaard will speak about Pade’s life and work, from his unique perspective of having collaborated with Pade on their joint composition Svævninger (2012), from which the evening takes its name. His presentation will include new images, including recently digitised scores never previously shown in public.
The evening will include the UK premiere of Pade’s extraordinary audiovisual piece En dag på Dyrehavsbakken, one of her very earliest works, which was first broadcast in 1955 by DR (the Danish Broadcasting Corporation). It consists of pictures and sounds recorded over two summers at Dyrehavsbakken, near Klampenborg in Denmark, and also includes electronically produced sine tones and echo effects. This makes it the first piece of musique concrete and electronic music made by a Danish composer.
The night concludes with a panel discussion with diverse contributions and reflections on Pade’s work and its wider context, from Kirkegaard, Sanne Krogh Groth, Jo Langton and Mads Kjelgaard (Passive/Aggressive), moderated by Frances Morgan.
Thanks to Morten Pade for his support.
Supported by Electra, SNYK, the Danish Composers’ Society, and the Danish Arts Foundation.
Else Marie Pade
Else Marie Pade is increasingly recognised as Denmark’s first composer of electronic music. Born in Aarhus in 1924, she was active in the Danish Resistance before studying as a composer after the Second World War. She studied under Stockhausen, Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer. A 3LP retrospective of her work from 1958-1995 was released on Important Records in 2014.
Supported by Electra, SNYK, the Danish Composers’ Society, and the Danish Arts Foundation.
Jacob Kirkegaard
Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist and composer who works in carefully selected environments to generate recordings that are used in compositions, or combined with video imagery in visual, spatial installations. His works reveal unheard sonic phenomena and present listening as a means of experiencing the world. Kirkegaard has recorded sonic environments as different as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, Arctic calving glaciers and tones generated by the human inner ear itself. Based in Copenhagen, Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums and concert spaces including MoMA in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark, KW in Berlin, the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Aichi Triennale in Nagoya and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He is a founding member of the sound art collective freq_out. In 2016 he was the sound artist in residency at St. John’s College, University of Oxford.
Panelists
Ain Bailey is a sound artist living and working in London. Her current practice involves an exploration of sonic autobiographies, architectural acoustics and live performance, as well as collaborations with performance, visual and sonic artists. Among these is performance/visual artist Jimmy Robert, who commissioned Bailey to create a composition for his 2016 show Desendances du Nu at the CAC-Synagogue de Delme, France. Bailey has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, and Oh Adelaide, her collaboration with the artist Sonia Boyce, has shown at Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Kitchen, New York. In 2016, Bailey was commissioned by Art Basel Miami Beach to compose for the Soundscape Park. Recently she devised a Study Week at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, which considered the role of sound in the formation of identity, and collaborated with Gaylene Gould on the creation of a Sonic Trail for Tate Britain in response to the recently acquisition of William Stott’s painting La Passeur. Bailey is a doctoral scholar at Birkbeck, University of London.
Jo Langton is a TECHNE-funded PhD student at Surrey University researching a history of Radiophonic art and analogue technology in electroacoustic music. As a studio manager for BBC Radio 3, she records music and studio programmes and concerts. She also creates sound designs for art documentary films and museum installations of electroacoustic music and field recordings, and is one half of the electronics duo Maesh. Her work has been presented at Tower Bridge Museum, the Dickens Exhibition at the Museum of London and the City of London Art Film festival at Tate Modern.
Sanne Krogh Groth holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Copenhagen (2010) and is the author of the book Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (Kehrer; 2014). Her recent field of research includes performative aspects of sound art and contemporary music, about which she has recently completed a research project affiliated with the Royal Library in Copenhagen. She is an associate professor of Musicology at Lund University, Sweden, and editor-in-chief of the Danish/English online journal Seismograf.org.
Frances Morgan is a writer based in London. She writes about music, film and sound for The Wire, Sight & Sound and others, and is currently researching histories of electronic music at the Royal College of Art and the Science Museum.
Passive/Aggressive
Passive/Aggressive was established in Copenhagen in 2017. It is an open music forum that releases magazines, tapes and online writings on PassiveAggressive.dk. In March, Passive/Aggressive published a collection of writings and interviews by Else Marie Pade – the biggest and most comprehensive of its sort – with the purpose of letting Pade speak for herself, tell her own story in her own words. The book Samlede tekster (“Collected Writings”) was edited by Simon Christensen and Mads Kjeldgaard. Kjeldgaard (b. 1988, Horsens, DK) is a writer and electroacoustic composer concerned with algorithmic music and its intersections with musique concrète, microtonality and minimalism. He is enrolled in the Electronic Composition programme at the Danish Institute of Electronic Music (DIEM) at the Royal Academy of Music and is currently living in Paris.