Asbjørn Schaathun

Norwegian Academy of Music, Composition, Music Theory and Music Technology Department, Faculty Member

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Born: 1961
Asbjørn Schaathun was educated at the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. Further studies led him to IRCAM, the Institute for musical/acoustical research and coordination in Paris. His stay at IRCAM culminated, in 1992, in the commission 'Double Portrait' for violin, ensemble and electronics.Schaathun has been a pioneer in computer-aided composition in his native country of Norway. Besides his work as a composer, he has also written several articles on other composers and their music. Furthermore, he is the founder of the Norwegian Academy of Music's Contemporary Ensemble and its professional successor the Oslo Sinfonietta.Asbjørn Schaathun has received several prizes for his work. Among others, he received the the Gaudeamus Foundation's Louis Vuitton Prize for the bass-clarinet concerto, 'Actions, Interpolations and Analyses' in 1991.
Phone: +4798609162
Address: Bringebærstien 5
NO-1424 Ski
Norway

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Papers by Asbjørn Schaathun

The Orchestra as Creative Personae

Parergon, 2010

In my work as a composition teacher at, among others, the Norwegian Academy of Music and later th... more In my work as a composition teacher at, among others, the Norwegian Academy of Music and later through my position as chairman of the Norwegian Composers' Association, there has gradually, in a natural way - given the diverse contexts in which I have worked - grown an awareness that a (successful ) organisation and a (successful) creative individual, seem to have many standard features in their internal "organisation". By comparing the individual's creative personae1, represented by the "faculties", or different abilities, which constitute its creativity - with that of the company, the organisation or why not the ensemble, one can find some essential prerequisites for an organisation, a team, an individual, must be able to succeed in his intentions.

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Webern Variations for Orchestra, op.30: Variations on a Contour

The periodical Ballade, Oslo, Norway, 1989

In what follows, we will approach Webern's Variations, op. 30, to facilitate studying the work. W... more

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Knitting and Weaving : Using OpenMusic to Generate Canonic Musical Material

Asbjørn Schaathun is a long-time user of CAC systems; he first started to use this kind of softwa... more Asbjørn Schaathun is a long-time user of CAC systems; he first started to use this kind of software during the autumn of 1983 at the EMS-studios in Stockholm (at that time part of the Swedish Radio). There he met people who helped him understand Xenakis’ Stochosprogram. He found in Xenakis a way of thinking that, he intuitively understood, could help him construct large-scale musical forms in which the rather microscopic constitutive parts of complex textures could be mapped out according to a global plan. Xenakis’ influence was crucial in Schaathun’s piano concerto Musical Graffiti (II), notably in a passage of the piece where the latter created a cloud of vibrant, iterating rhythms for the orchestra, or in another passage where he composed a palette of intervallic relationships with the help of a stochastic algorithm.1 During the summer of 1984, he attended the Darmstadt Ferienkurse where he met Magnus Lindberg and his friends. They were trying to notate improvisational rhythms wi...

Formula composition Modernism in Music made Audible

Examples of use of Formula-composition and derived techniques in the works of Karlheinz Stockhaus... more

$hematical frequency relation of an interval — e.g. a fifth — may be described as a ratio. Sor example, 200 Hz/300 Hz (*2/3), which is the same as e.g. the fraction 40/60. hus, the ratio 1=40/ 6=60 is a tempo relationship that is analogous to the interval of 1 fifth, on the pitch side of the auditory threshold. It 1s possible to generate a totally -hromatic (logarithmic) tempo-scale in a similar way (see figure 2). In figure 1 we see he chromatic tempo-scale arranged in a manner analogous to the interval-relations of he formula-melody. Note the small «informal» liberties with the tempo within its stherwise rigorous system.$

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The Computer as Psychoanalyst

We shall try in the following to describe a possibly navigatable route, with respect to the use o... more We shall try in the following to describe a possibly navigatable route, with respect to the use of technology in the creation of music, a Third Way, that we choose to call computer-AIDED composition. The term springs from the question of how the computer can be used as an aid in writing instrumental music.

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Knitting and Weaving: Using OpenMusic to Generate Canonic Musical Material

by Asbjørn Schaathun and Serge Lemouton

This chapter presents some compositional procedures developed by Asbjørn Schaathun for a generati... more This chapter presents some compositional procedures developed by Asbjørn Schaathun for a generation of melodic material using canonic processes and for the calculation of rhythmic interpolations. These processes are derived from earlier computer programs elaborated by the composer and recently ported to OpenMusic. The violin concerto Double Portrait is an example of the use of such processes.

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The Orchestra as Creative Personae

Parergon, 2010

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Webern Variations for Orchestra, op.30: Variations on a Contour

The periodical Ballade, Oslo, Norway, 1989

In what follows, we will approach Webern's Variations, op. 30, to facilitate studying the work. W... more