Alf Hurum

About Alf Hurum

Alf Hurum was a Norwegian composer and painter whose career bridged early twentieth-century European training and a later life on the Hawaiian islands. Born in Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1882, he studied composition in Berlin between 1905 and 1907, including lessons with Max Bruch, and married in the city in 1908. His musical output, produced mainly in the years following his return to Norway, included two violin sonatas, the men's chorus piece Lilja, the orchestral suite Eventyrland, the symphonic poem Bendik og Årolilja, and a Symphony in D minor completed in 1927. 

Alongside music, Hurum pursued a parallel career as a painter, and in 1934 he settled permanently in Honolulu, where he became an active figure in the local arts scene, serving as president of the Association of Honolulu Artists and an honorary member of the Morning Music Club. His paintings entered the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Bishop Museum, and he has been described as Norway's first Impressionist painter. Hurum's career thus stands apart among Norwegian composers of his generation for its dual artistic focus and its unusual geographic trajectory, from the concert halls of Berlin and Oslo to the art world of the Pacific. He died in Honolulu in 1972 at the age of eighty-nine.