Fat Battery: Knut Vaage

Alwynne Pritchard

Victoria Johnson

Knut Vaage

Edvin Østvik

Contact
we would like to hear from you

Links

Home

Keyboards/hardware electronics/composition

Knut Vaage was born in 1961 and now lives and works as a composer in Bergen. He graduated as pianist and composer from the Grieg Academy and has also received a professional certificate as a lecturer in composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music. Although he has worked in many musical genres, Knut’s musical activities have focused on improvised and contemporary music. Many of his projects have investigated the boundaries between composed and improvised music, and his trio JKL has released a number of improvisations on CD.

Knut has composed works spanning orchestral, chamber and educational pieces, with performances from the BIT 20 Ensemble, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Court-Circuit and the Ter Jung sextet and others. Several of his pieces have been performed in concerts and festivals in France, Japan, Spain, Germany, England and Italy and his collaboration with writers has led to a number of works. His opera Nokon kjem til å komme, based on the Jon Fosse play of the same name, was premiered at the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival in Oslo in the Autumn of 2000, receiving rave reviews internationally. The opera was released on cd at Bergen’s Borealis festival in 2006.

Electra for electric violin and live electronics was commissioned by Victoria Johnson and premiered by her at the Autunnale festival in 2003, with computer programming by Thorolf Thuestad. The work is a dramatic dialogue between the computer and the violin, with the former stealing energy in real time from the violinist, who has to fight back in order to maintain the focus of the musical dramaturgy.

Knut is currently working on an opera for Den Norske Opera together with librettist Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen.