The Music Relay Race

Music's voyage into arts - from music to painting, and from painting to new music and dance.

Music Relay Race (2010) was a cooperation between the Music Conservatories in Odense, Esbjerg, the Arts Folk High School in Holbæk, the Danseværket in Aarhus and the Kolding Music School (MGK = Musical Basic Course)

The idea of the initiator, pianist and professor Erik Kaltoft, was to tie arts genres together, and to tie Denmark together with this project.

The spark that was to set fire to the whole process was Olivier Messiaën’s Quartet to the End of Time – a work taking its point of departure in the Apocalypse (The Revelation of St. John the Divine), written in a Geman concentration Camp and premiered by prisoners from there. The performance of the piece, which took place at the Holbæk Folk High School of Arts, made a number of pupils from the school start making large paintings of their impression. These man-size and very colourful pictures were sent to Kolding, where MGK-pupils together with a local composer, Gitte Viuff, under the leadership of composer Mogens Christensen, would create music in various ways with direct point of departure in the pictures, and over a span of time. The compositions were passed on to the Danseværket in Aarhus, where a modern choreography for the music was elaborated.

All threads were gathered at a concert in the Odense Conservatory’s hall, with sound-, light-, dance- and picture impressions, which turned the traditional concert form upside down. And further opened up the access into art’s innermost room to all participants, through a rich variety of entrances.