Day 16: And now we shift into something completely different. Allow me to introduce you to one of the current crop of wonderful contemporary choral composers, someone you may not know:
Lasse Thoresen (b. 1949) is a professor of composition at the Norwegian State Academy of Music where he has taught composition, electro-acoustic music, and sonology since 1975. He received a graduate degree in composition in 1972 from the Oslo Music Conservatory, where he studied under Finn Mortensen, after which he studied electro acoustic music and composition under Werner Kaegi at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, the Netherlands. From 1978 to 1981 he conducted a post graduate research project in sonology with support from the ‘Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities’. From 1988 to 2000 Mr. Thoresen occupied the principal chair of composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo where he is still teaching composition.
Whenever I have featured his visionary choral works on any radio broadcast, we always receive an amazing response. Happily, the Nordic Voices are great champions of this composer, and we feature just a few of his sacred choral settings. We start with “Let me nourish your beauty.”