Ragnhild Berstad
Composer
,
1956-
Ragnhild Berstad was born in Oslo in 1956 and started her musical career as a guitarist and music teacher. She later studied music theory at the University in Oslo and composition with Lasse Thoresen and Olav Anton Thommessen at the Norwegian State Academy of Music, where she received her diploma in 1997.
As Berstad herself says: “My work as a composer is characterised by the wish to create a sonic space which insists on an intimate, auditive consciousness. Music has an inherent ability to reveal the extended moment. This has stimulated me to compose a series of introverted pieces where proximity to the sound source is a recurrent theme and where the form of the music is the result of my contemplation on the inside of the sound texture.”
Selected works by Ragnhild Berstad:
“It is thus possible to create a tradition that is held together by strict rules, and that is also successful, to some extent. But is it desirable to support such a tradition to the exclusion of everything else?...These are questions I intend to ask...And to these questions my answer will be a firm and resounding NO.
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--Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method