TREKLANG - 1st performance of new work for 30 double basses!
What a bass weekend it was in Hamar!! Many thanks to the Norwegian Double Bass Club and all bass players, big and small, for a fabulous effort and pleasant company. Thanks to brilliant teachers and fellow musicians Ellen Andrea Wang, Guro Moe, Ane Elise Lassen, Einar Bergem, Håkon Thelin and Erlend Skei for superb collaboration and musical contributions. Thank you Hamar cultural school for brilliant premises for rehearsals, thank you to all the bass parents for their efforts, thank you to the concert series Morgenkonsert and Domkirkeodden - and not least many thanks to the approx. 120 in the audience who came to listen to us for the concert Sunday May 5th!
The Hamar Cathedral delivered as usual with its powerful acoustics, one would almost think that the room was made to be filled with the sound of 30 double basses!
I couldn't be happier with the premiere of the work TREKLANG that the double bass club had commissioned from me. TREKLANG is inspired by the life cycle of trees, how they blow around with the wind like small seeds, take root and grow to become large, fullgrown trees, and finally - if they don't become, for example, a double bass along the way - how they grow old and die. The last movement was called OLD-GROWTH FOREST, which there is less than 0.5% of in Norway. Did you know that pine trees can live for more than 500 years if left alone (pines have been found that are more than 800 years old!), and that they takes several hundred years to rot before turning to soil? Things take time in old-growth forests.. For those who want to read more about old-growth forests and what they mean to bio-diversity, this is a very nice interview with biologist and author Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson:
Many thanks to the Composers' remuneration fund / Musikkfondene and Sparebankstiftelsen DNB who have supported the making of this new work.
Now on to more new music and the work "Solstrenger" which I am writing for a new duo collaboration with Helga Myhr. More on that soon!
