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9/17/2015 Knudåge Riisager Long Biography Music Sales Classical
http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/longbio/Knud%c3%a5geRiisager 1/1
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Knudåge RiisagerBorn: 1897Died: 1974Nationality: DanishPublisher: Edition Wilhelm Hansen
Knudåge Riisager was the cosmopolitan in his generation of Danish composers. Hisfather was employed in the Danish engineering firm F.L. Schmidt and the family wasstationed in Riga in Latvia when Riisager was born.
Riisager’s life unfolded in many respects in a kind of duality. On the one hand hetook a political science degree and had a career as a civil servant in the centraladministration (what is today the Ministry of Finance and the Public Auditor’s Office).Alongside this he took on a number of offices on various councils and boards andended up as principal of the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. On theother hand he was a free creative artist trained in Paris and oriented towardsinternational musical life and the latest currents in art.
His interest in instrumentation and in the capacity of music to tell a story is clear asearly as the youthful work Overture to Erasmus Montanus, which is based onLudvig Holberg’s comedy of the same name.
In 1923 Riisager spent a study period of seven months in Paris. He came homepreoccupied with and inspired by all the new currents. A number of original works from the period clearly show inspirationfrom composers such as Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie as well as themost important, trendsetting artisticmovements of the 1920s.
The orchestral work TDOXC, for example, is a Futurist tribute to a new aircraft. The choral work Four vocalises uses soundpainting texts and includes elements of Dadaism. With the small chambermusic jewel Sonate Pour Flute, Violon, Clarinetteet Violoncello, however, Riisager found his way into a characteristic, light, diverting Neoclassical style. The French inspirationand the Neoclassical appear again in the ballet Benzin (Petrol), the oftenplayed Concertino for trumpet and strings or thesuccessful little piano suite A Happy Trumpet.
Alongside these Neoclassical works one also finds works with more experimental features such as the music for the balletQarrtsiluni. Qarrtsiluni is based on a number of Greenlandic motifs and the rhythm and dynamics are the bearing elements ofthe music. To these we can add the music for the ballet The Lady from the Sea, which employs serial techniques, not to forgetRiisager’s last major orchestral work To Apollo,which has almost minimalistic stylistic features. Throughout his career oneclearly senses a will to innovate and incorporate new composition techniques.
A constant strand in Riisager’s work as a composer is his collaboration with a number of outstanding choreographers: fromHarald Lander, with whom Riisager created what is absolutely his major work, the ballet Etudes, through Birgit Cullberg toFlemming Flindt.
Besides his activities as a civil servant and composer, Riisager was also a particularly busy writer and debater on culture.
Hjarne Fessel 2014
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