Morten Eide Pedersen

About Morten Eide Pedersen

Morten Eide Pedersen (1958-2014) was a composition teacher, composer, musicologist and writer. He completed a master’s degree in musicology at the University of Oslo, with a minor in philosophy and sociology and secondary subjects in mathematics and informatics, and then studied composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music. In 1989 he joined the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, where from 1996 he created and led Norway’s second full-time composition programme. He also supervised for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.

As a teacher he knew how to support and challenge students while helping them develop their own artistic voices. In his teaching and in his own work he was concerned with how tradition shapes creativity, and how the past can be a resource for today’s artists. He was particularly interested in the relationship between text, sound and language, and wrote score-based music, live electronics, computer-assisted music and more open forms. His commissions included work for Concerts Norway, the National Theatre in Bergen, the BIT20 Ensemble, Music Factory and the Avgarde concert series, and he collaborated with pianists James Clapperton and Signe Bakke.

Pedersen was also an active writer and musicologist. He edited the music magazine Ballade for five years and volume 5 of Norges musikkhistorie, and was a driving force behind the Grieg Academy project Wheels within Wheels (2015-2018), in which early music performers and composers developed new forms of expression together.