On my way - our first version of our first piece

When the pandemic hit Norway, I felt as if I was not going anywhere. And creatively I have been standing very still since March. I was walking to my office one day, and got the idea for the piece "On my way". The video is a mix of some video clip's from this spring as well as the gray sky above me in early September. The sound is made by both me and Ásbjörg. This is not the finished version, just the first of many.

What "On my way" is about

One can interpret the piece both in a small context and a larger one. There are many structures in the world, some hidden, some quite visible, that decides where we as people are welcome or not. This plays a part in where we are heading both personally and as a society. I never understood that composition was something I could do until I had been studying music for three years, and then I had been going to music school for 14 years. When I told my piano teacher he asked "And who has give you the idea that you could compose?". If I had listened to him, I would never have applied to do a master in composition. I would have let him decide where I was heading, or worse, where I was not heading. In Bodø, where I grew up, if you went to a classical concert, you would only hear pieces by male composers. So I grew up learning that one had to be a man to compose. When I moved to Trondheim, I met female composers for the first time, and found out that it was a way I could go too.

"On my way" is about where we are heading. It's about the realization that you can decide your own way. Our society tells us that based on for instance where we're from and how we look, somehow decides our way. For me personally it's about my own story of where I am heading as a composer. It's also the first step on our way into the unknown in OUTPOST.

The process

The first step for me was the idea. I wanted to make a piece that both Ásbjörg and I could do ourselves and then later make a new version with the students in Bodø. I started filming, and then I gathered the video material I had. Then I wrote a text score which you can find here:

On my way, text score

.pdf

Download PDF • 23KB

I wanted the first version to be just by Ásbjörg and myself. This made the text score a sketch/idea of what the piece could end up being. I edited the videos and recorded some sounds on top of that, all improvisation based. Then I sent it to Ásbjörg who recorded some sounds as well. Here's the result of the first version:

The questions that remains is: Where will OUTPOST go from here?