Reel to Reelly Cool

Danish Composer Else Marie Pade

Okay, I was meant to find this pic on the net. How cool was this woman? So I looked her up.

Eighty-two-year-old composer Else Marie Pade is a phenomenon in the history of Danish music. As a child she was often ill and bedridden. She would listen to the sounds around her... on the stairs, from the yard and the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began. During the Second World War, she was arrested by the Gestapo and placed in solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she began composing music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners on her garters. After the war and her discovery of the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer and the French avant-garde, she realized that the sounds resembled those she had heard in childhood, and that this was the music she really wanted to compose. She became the first Dane to devote her life to concrete music-and to electronic music-but had to wait fifty years to be "discovered."
--from the International Festival of Films on Art website

Wow. That's inspiring. The next time I read some sob story from some current twenty something, upper middle class born, emo troubadour who claims he/she went through hell and its hand basket to get their music written, recorded and heard, I think I'm gonna shed a single tear. Not for them. For the mere thought they can't see past their own level of "comfortable suffering" to realize that there exists pretty substantial history of musicians before them who genuinely had to struggle to make it through.

I dunno. Maybe I'm being unfair. A bit bit-chay. But maybe "I wrote this number one emo hit to deal with a breakup" just pales in comparison to "I wrote my music on a prison wall to avoid a mental breakdown".

Anyway, I got some heavy home work to do on this great Dane of a dame, Else Marie Pade. Inspiration is best enjoyed when it is discovered by accident. Funny, I was just googling "pastries", and she was the Danish to emerge. Kidding. But you knew that. I had meant to type in "pasties".


A more current pic of Else Marie, from the documentary, "Sound On Life"

currently listening to: Wendy Carlos, A Clockwork Orange, the Complete Original Score