Partitur

Artists

Else Marie Pade

Press release

Partitur is the first international exhibition dedicated to Danish composer and sound artist Else Marie Pade (b. 1924–†2016, DK), a path-maker of musique concrète and European electronic music. Over a career spanning multiple decades, Pade approached sound as a visual medium of intensities, multitudes, and dissonance. Her works carry listeners through fairy tales, cityscapes, and nightmares, with scores that capture notation, process, and life’s cacophonous narrative spaces.

With Pade’s seminal musical arrangements and works on paper as its point of departure, Partitur traces the composer’s artistic trajectory beginning in the 1950s. The exhibition unfolds as an immersive listening space, shaped by the spatial structures of her scores and the language she reimagined for electronic composition. It is accompanied by a live program that engages with, and extends on Pade’s legacy, featuring Berlin-based sound artists and contemporary discourse on music, collectivity, and the heritage of women artists in electronic music.

Else Marie Pade (*1924–†2016) is regarded as Denmark’s most significant pioneer in electronic music and musique concrète. She began composing after the Second World War, during which she was imprisoned for her involvement in the women’s resistance. In 1952, she discovered musique concrète through radio broadcasts, which inspired her to establish an electronic music studio at Danish Radio in the early 1950s. She closely followed contemporary European trends in new music and her encounters with Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and György Ligeti were influential for her development. Her versatile oeuvre spans electronic works, chamber and orchestral music, children’s music, radio plays, and music drama.

Her work, although largely forgotten in Danish music history after the early 1980s, has received renewed attention since the 2000s, with numerous new recordings, remixes, and performances.

Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen