Magne Hegdal

Magne Hegdal

Magne Hegdal (b.1944) had his début as piano player in 1969 and took a diploma in composition at the Music Academy of Oslo in 1972. In the seventies, Hegdal’s music was dominated by recurrent aleatorics (alea in Latin is dice). This means that he constructs the structural grids, and then leaves the musical details to coincidence. He has later developed a more open style, and with the piece Stort sett for violin and piano, getting great reviews on the première in 2008, he sets a final period to his work on dices. His list of works comprise some 50 titles for piano, in addition to chamber, vocal and orchestral works.

Hegdal was for many years the permanent music reviewer in Dagbladet and also sent articles to Ballade, back in the days when it was still a pure magazine for contemporary music. In his ”Manifest” in the Parergon issue #10 (1999) he concludes: ”My method demands time – and not rarely it results in music that change character throughout the process of its making. Even though the work is part of a mental process, I experience it as physical, almost bodily – as an ”act of manual work”. I am a manual worker.”