Else Marie Pade 
Partitur

Partitur is the first international exhibition dedicated to Danish composer and sound artist Else Marie Pade (b. 1924, d. 2016, both DK), a path-maker of musique concrète and European electronic music. Over a career spanning multiple decades, Pade approached sound as a medium of electronically generated tunes, exploring intensities, multitudes, and dissonance. Her versatile oeuvre spans electronic works, chamber and orchestral music, children’s music, accompanying scores for TV and radio plays, and music drama, which carry listeners through fairy tales, cityscapes, and nightmares.

Shaped by the structure of her scores, the exhibition forms an immersive listening space. It brings together ten of Pade’s seminal musical arrangements, which play throughout the space. Together with a selection of her works on paper, the exhibition traces her artistic trajectory beginning in the 1950s, when she met French composer Pierre Schaeffer. A trained classical pianist, Pade looked to Schaeffer’s concrete music in order to build the abstract sonic spaces she had been drawn to since childhood. Pade, a single mother of two, began to sample the acoustics in her home and the surrounding urban landscape. The artist later founded the first electronic studio at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) in Copenhagen, where she continued to experiment with applying new technology in musical composition. When attending the “Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music“ in the 1960s, avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez became Pade’s mentors, with whom she continued to exchange ideas and insights.

In addition to machines, physics, storytelling, and later, Christian spirituality, Pade’s musical understanding was also rooted in her experiences from World War II, during which she was imprisoned in the internment camp in Frøslev, Denmark, for her involvement in the women’s resistance.

Due to the post-traumatic stress disorder she developed after her confinement, Pade’s health deteriorated and she officially retired from music in 1973. Her work, although largely forgotten in Danish music history after the early 1980s, has received renewed attention since the 2000s, with numerous new recordings, remixes, and performances.

The exhibition is accompanied by a live concert with cellist Khabat Abas, that is part of MaerzMusik 2026, as well as a conversation that centers the heritage of women artists in experimental electronic music.

Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen