Is it True That This is Happening to Me?
Childhood. As a boy, I grew up in the countryside of Lejre Municipality in a home with a piano but without radio or television. My mother was a homemaker, fully occupied with managing our home and raising four children. My father was a butcher who ran a shop and slaughterhouse together with his brother. He started working at 14 and continued until he retired at 75. It was a good and harmonious home, where faith in God was an integrated part of daily life. We had many valuable experiences in the independent church, which was located just across the main road from our house. Faith has been a faithful companion, although it has undergone shifts in intensity, reevaluations, and reformulations over time. At the age of seven, my sister Merete taught me to play the piano. However, I was more fascinated by removing the wooden panel from the piano, holding down the sostenuto pedal, and creating magical sounds by playing directly on the strings, with the lights off and the curtains drawn in the living room. This awakened an inner stream of sonic imagination. At ten, I became passionate about playing the guitar, strongly influenced by my cousin Filip and my brothers-in-law. But when my guitar teacher told me he could no longer teach me anything new, I began piano lessons at the Allerslev Music School at fifteen. My teacher, Aksel Skjolddan, a conservatory-trained, inspiring, and engaged musician, helped guide me toward the idea of becoming a musician.
High School Years. My high school years were an explosive change from a small local environment to everyday life with 600-700 peers at Roskilde Cathedral School, from which I graduated in 1984 with a music-mathematics specialization. In music class, we had Valdemar Lønsted, who opened my mind to music history, chorale harmonization, figured bass, and folk music arrangements. He took us to performances at Radiohuset, where I experienced Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The fourth Adagio movement can push any sensitive teenager to the edge of their emotional register. The concert also featured Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, which left a deep imprint due to its foreign yet articulated expression in a time when the Cold War and nuclear threat were stark realities. Other revolutionary musical experiences from this time in the high school music room included encounters with Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw.
Conservatory Years. In late 1984, I contacted composer and professor Ib Nørholm to discuss whether he believed I had the potential to study composition. My heart raced as I knocked on the door of his villa, Solhaven, in Hellerup. He encouraged me and suggested that I should apply for admission to the double major in Music Theory and Composition. I began this program at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in 1986. Ib Nørholm was an outstanding teacher who introduced me to American minimalism as soon as I started. In 1989, I married my wonderful wife, Anne, with whom I have two sons—Valdemar (born 2001) and Villads (born 2004). Although I grew up in a secure and loving home, I never imagined becoming a father—it was a role I could not initially identify with. Yet, I must say that becoming and being a father is the greatest thing that has happened in my life. In 1989, I was also hired as a substitute teacher for Ebbe Knudsen in music theory at the conservatory.
In 1990-1991, I took a leave of absence to immerse myself in my studies. I had fallen head over heels for a highly abstract modernist composition style. I admired the progressive music of Boulez and Stockhausen’s KONTAKTE and KLAVIERSTÜCKE. Since Ivar Frounberg had written several analytical articles on Boulez’s music in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift (Danish Music Journal). I continued my composition studies under his guidance in 1991. When I completed my diploma exams in both majors in 1993 and was admitted to the soloist class as a composer, I looked back on seven fantastic years of music theory studies with harpsichordist, composer, theorist, and professor Yngve Jan Trede, whose unmatched expertise spanned from the Renaissance to early 20th-century music.
Dear Ib Nørholm, Ivar Frounberg, and Yngve Jan Trede—I am deeply grateful for all that I learned from you. You shared an immense wealth of knowledge and insight.
Debut Concert. In 1996, when I held my debut concert with an expanded Figura ensemble, I took another year off to study music theory with Professor Lev Koblyakov in Israel. Together with Figura, I performed my debut at the conservatories in Odense and Aarhus, in the grand hall of the former conservatory in Copenhagen, and in Radiohuset’s Studio 2 (now called the Studio Hall at the current conservatory). These four concerts were a manifestation, accompanied by an extensive program book authored by my friend Jakob Goetz. The concert was released on my first CD, Unsägliche Stelle, which is now available on digital streaming platforms. It features three acoustic works and three live electronics pieces, blending acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. However, Figura’s regular and excellent clarinettist, Anna Klett, had to find a substitute – this turned out to be Fritz Gerhard Berthelsen.
Contemporánea and Max/MSP. This led to the next chapter when Fritz and I founded the ensemble Contemporánea in 1997, coinciding with a series of tours in South America. Following the German-Swiss ironic-grotesque music theatre project Happy in Dorado City, directed by Wolfgang Häntsch, we expanded with percussion in 1998 and later added violin and double bass in 1999. From 2000-2001, we gained national recognition with a series of portrait concerts at Huset i Magstræde, broadcast by Danish National Radio and receiving significant attention in newspaper reviews. This led to performances at ICMC in Cuba (2001) and ISCM in Asia, culminating in our first concert in the USA at New York University in 2003. Around this time, I received the great honour of being awarded the Danish Arts Foundation’s three-year working grant (1998-2001). This period resulted in my next CD, Contemporánea (2001), featuring five works with Spanish titles. In 2000, Max/MSP became a defining part of my artistic practice. Max, also known as Max/MSP or Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual (object-oriented) programming language for music and multimedia. My journey with Max began around my debut concert in 1996, where I used it via MIDI to control an Ensoniq DP4+ effects processor, later adding an AKAI 3200XL sampler in 1997. I eagerly embraced the Macintosh launch of the MacBook G3 in 1999 and intensively spent much of 2000 studying Max/MSP. Since then, I have continuously developed a range of Max patches that have become integral to my artistic expression and compositional tools.
The Crisis. In 2005, my small family moved from Nørrebro to Frederiksværk into a red brick house built between 1942 and 1950. When the electronic music program at the conservatory in Aarhus started in 2004, and as I felt closer to Aarhus via Odden, I was hired for that program from 2005 to 2008. However, the number of teaching hours was too few for it to continue. During the same period, Contemporánea received a three-year grant from the Bikubenfonden for the Interactive Art project, which included a new series of concerts at LiteraturHaus. Somehow, 2007-2008 became a void. Commissions were scarce, there was little funding for artistic projects, and the international financial crisis had hit hard. I saw ghosts everywhere and imagined resistance that didn’t exist. At that time, Klaus Ib Jørgensen was a membership consultant for the Danish Composers’ Society. I met with him in 2008, and he had a decisive impact on making the ghosts disappear and rekindling my artistic vision. It was the friendly kick in the ass I needed at that moment.
On the Other Side. In 2009, I co-founded EarUnit – concert series with Carsten Bo Eriksen and several other composers. Through my work in Contemporánea and EarUnit, I have helped to commission and premiere numerous works by both Danish and foreign composers in Denmark and abroad. Contemporánea has also released CDs, including Morten Skovgaard Danielsen’s Roadmovie Accessories and Mogens Christensen’s Echoes of Dreamless Fragments. That same year, I returned to New York, this time with Frode Andersen, to participate in Suzanne Bocanegra’s installation concert, ReRememberer, featuring 100 non-musicians on violin, an amplified loom, accordion, and live electronics. The project toured Texas in 2014 and will be restaged in May 2026 at Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival in connection with a CD release of the work.
In 2011, I released another Contemporánea CD, Flug der Farben, featuring ensemble and solo works in both stereo and 5.1 surround – a time when many had their own surround setup connected to their flat-screen TVs. In 2012, the CD Auxiliary Blue followed, presenting a 45-minute joint composition with Berlin-based electronica composer Frank Bretschneider.
2013 was a monstrously creative year in which I composed Obscure Transparence for JACK Quartet, Skyggen, a school concert performance for clarinettist and video, Texture 1 and Mosaico 1 for TRANSIT Ensemble, Fluctuant for flautist Zoe Martlew, Nine Waves for Messer Quartet, and Partita Melancólica for pianist Alfredo Oyaguez.
Pianist. In 2015, I was hired for a project position at the conservatory in Esbjerg, teaching in the electronic music program. Over time, this has grown into a position where I teach 3D sound, Interactive Sound, Music Technology, and main subject composition, with three teaching days twelve times a year. That same year, I was employed as a pianist at an independent church in Frederiksværk. Four years later, the joy of performing music for others on the piano inspired me to compose my Danish Golden Age Pieces, which cellist Josefine Opsahl and I premiered at the National Gallery of Denmark in 2019 – essentially a kind of rebirth of my pianist dream. Since the paintings are from the 19th century, I took the opportunity to compose simple tonal harmonic music. It is also one of my only works in more than 20 years without live electronics. This led to a new Contemporánea project with cellist Ida Nørholm, clarinettist Fritz Gerhard Berthelsen, and myself as pianist in the acoustic work Garden of Gethsemane – Hommage à Arne Haugen Sørensen (2021), which in turn evolved into LEGENDE, set to a poem by Ib Michael, again for the same instrumentation but now with the addition of Matias Seibæk on percussion and a return to live electronics via Max/MSP.
The provisional culmination of my career was the world premiere in 2023 of Slender Trees at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, performed by the string quartet American Contemporary Music Ensemble with myself at the keyboard in the prelude, some interludes as well as in one of six movements. I am now looking forward to composing a commission, LYSHAV (Sea of Light), from the legendary Bang on a Can society, for soprano, violin, flugelhorn, accordion and Max/MSP at the Long Play Festival in May 2026 in New York as well as the world premiere of a string quintet later in 2026 at Carnegie Hall.
In addition to this new piano trajectory of recent years, the past 15 years have been characterized by my approach of composing works into larger projects that can stand alone as full-length concerts. Some work series date further back, but this working method has only become more pronounced over the years. Naturally, there have been other smaller projects alongside, but work series have become a fundamental part of my artistic practice, allowing me to delve deeply into specific digital techniques, theoretical musical issues, as well as poetic or visual themes.
Work Series
Elegie 1-8 (1993-2004)
– different formations inspired by the Rilke Elegies
Passage 1-5 (2010-2012)
– different formations, score music with improvised passages
Stillstehen 1-5 (2009-2017)
– Ensemble Adapter, Berlin, 4 musikere (47-51’)
Textures & Mosaics
– 1) Textures & Mosaics, volume 1 (2013-2015), Transit Ensemble, NYC, 5 musikere (34’)
– 2) Textures & Mosaics, volume 2 (2013-2018), 4 strygere, JACK quartet, ACME (34’)
CRATAEGI (2012, 2022)
– slagtøj solo/MSP/video baseret på kunst af Nes Lerpa (47:47)
Nordic Trilogy (2020-2022, 71′)
– 1) Nordic Broken (messiaenkvartet)
– 2) Nordic Fragments (klavertrio)
– 3) Nordic Extraction (klaverkvartet)
BILLOW (STURMWELLE, 2020, 2024)
– solo clarinettist (Bb, G, bass), Max/MSP, video (45:47’)
LEGENDE (2023)
– Contemporánea, cl/vc/perc/pno/MSP (51-53’)
Artist Pieces
– 1) Hammershøi Pieces (2015) – Light in Structure 1-6 (23’)
– 2) Danish Golden Age Pieces (2019, 19’)
– 3) Arne Haugen Sørensen Pieces – Garden of Gethsemane (15:45’)
– 4) Slender Trees (2023, 21’) – a Hammershøi drawing
– 5) Giacometti Pieces (2024) – Fragile Fortitude 1-5 (19:31’)
String Quartet No. 1-9 (2004-2025, including Die achte Elegie)
Characteristics. A defining characteristic of my work is the blending of acoustic instruments and electronic sound. The performing musician with the living and human expression as a fundamental condition, sometimes in interplay and fusion with electronic sound, at other times as an opposition, where rather a conflict or friction is in focus. Purely music-theoretical issues are another source of inspiration. Form and proportion. Harmonic structure. Polyrhythmic layers. I have returned to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry many times, and Ib Michael is the author of the poem LEGENDE in my work of the same title. The meeting between music and visual art is seen in my Artist Pieces and music and video (with artists such as Anders Elberling, Lillevan, Simon Janssen, Kim Dang Trong). Not least the large percussion solo work, CRATAEGI, premiered and recorded by David Hildebrandt, composed with inspiration from Nes Lerpa’s paintings.
It is a great joy to meet the young generation in an educational context, it is deeply inspiring to see what they are engaged in. It is stimulating to delve into new and old material, convey it in new ways, and explore new fields. Always with a focus on the individual student’s abilities and interests.
Recording Artist. Strongly aided by composer Carsten Bo Eriksen, I have since 2022 released a wide range of works on digital streaming services. I have a consistent working method, where a commission not only leads to a premiere but is followed by a studio recording, preferably immediately after the concert. Especially in connection with the electronic part of my works, it is fantastic to refine and in some cases change and further develop the electronic sounds, which is possible and inspiring in the subsequent production that is thoroughly worked through before a release. In this way, the music reaches millions of people.
Style and Craft. When I was in my late 20s, I was a convinced modernist. Complex atonal music was, in my view, progressive. But the experimental electronica and break-beats penetrated into some works already in the 2000s. Also, the melody kept pushing its way in. Since then, tonal, and modal music has become part of my artistic expression. These are, of course, foreign elements in a modernist aesthetic. It seeped in more as something insidious, something driven by desire, not by mature consideration and strategy. Why should I hold back from composing Renaissance polyphony, a Baroque fugue, reinterpreting the Baroque suite or partita, a passacaglia or chaconne? Or a techno movement or 80s-inspired fusion music? Arabic-influenced Balkan music? I became a stylistic chameleon, writing what I wanted to hear. However, not stylistically pluralistic in the sense that styles are mixed layer by layer or in rapid succession. On that point, I am dogmatic: each work or at least each movement has its dedicated stylistic expression. The crucial thing for me is craftsmanship, not style. I have sought to challenge the boundaries between the acoustic and the electronic, between the strictly composed and sparks of inspiration. A constant interplay between structure and freedom, between technology and human sensuality. Music, for me, is an existential exploration. It reflects our time, our inner life, and the patterns we move in. It creates connections between past and future, between the personal and the universal. I see my music as a dialogue – between me and the listener, between sound and silence, between order and chaos.
Looking Back. Now, as I reflect on six decades in music and life, I feel privileged and grateful. I do not see this as an ending but as a continuation of a process that has always been in motion. Just think of all that has become possible in my life – all the experiences with so many people, the many places. I, who in high school barely dared to hope for a conservatory education as a pianist with a career as a piano teacher at a music school in the province, yet I have been granted a life that has far exceeded my wildest dreams. Thank you to all of you who have helped and supported me along the way – practically, financially, and existentially. Music evolves, just as we do. And I am still driven by the same curiosity, the same desire to explore the unknown. For there is still so much to discover. I love my work as a composer.
Ejnar Kanding, March 29, 2025