Else Marie Pade (Dec. 2, 1924 - 2016) was a Danish avant-garde composer and pioneer within electronic music. She had a fascinating life: Very sickly as a child, she nonetheless became obsessed with music and the sounds of the city at a very young age - discovering jazz when she was 12! During the German occupation of Denmark in WWII she was active in the Resistance movement and got sent to the Frøslev camp in late 1944. There she organized song and music activities to boost the prisoners’ spirits...
In the 1950s she studied at the Royal Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and started creating compositions in the concrete music genre and with ample use of tape recorders, found sounds and electronic manipulations. She was a follower and student of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Boulez. Quickly she gained the respect of Stockhausen in particular, and soon they worked together as equals.
Pade left behind more than 40 works - many of them songs, ballet pieces, and music for radio and TV. Her major works include Symphonie Magnétophonique, 1958-1959, and Glasperlespil II, 1960. She was largely forgotten in Denmark after the mid-70s, until a rediscovery occurred around 2000 when people realized what an important ‘grandmother of electronic music’ she had been...
