Lars Graugaard

Lars Graugaard is active in a variety of musical areas. He has a strong academic background with a degree in flute performance from The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark and a PhD from Oxford Brookes University in interactive music. His background lies in a mix of musical styles, and he has always been very active in music creation. He has composed over 170 score pieces, and he was composer-in-residence for two-and-a-half years at Odense Symphony Orchestra. As performer he has given concerts all over the world, and when the flute was his principal instrument he recorded CDs with the music of his contemporaries as well as classical composers such as J. S. Bach, Boccherini, Spohr, Beethoven, Rossini, Reger etc. In recent years he has turned to the computer, shaping it as a sophisticated performance vehicle in interactive and generative music. There is at times a strong eclecticism in his music, always dependent on the circumstances of its usage.

When performing laptop music Lars Graugaard often uses the alias Lars from Mars. Releases under this alias have been coming out on the online netlabel Pueblo Nuevo, and several of the tracks have videos as well as some unreleased tracks. This music is characterized by an often very strong grounding in rhythms combined with at times quite abstract sound-worlds. Performances are always in realtime with use of procedures written into custom max/msp code for algorithmic rendering of the basic musical ideas and sectional development. Many if these ideas come from research into aspects of music that account for generally perceived emotional content music. Sometimes performances are realtime improvisations with instrumental performers skilled in free improvisation, and the richness of these activities provides a continuous development in research and theory and their application in composition, performance and programming.

Mr. Graugaard has been professor of interactive music at Carl-Nielsen-Academy-of-Music and was for five years lecturer at Aalborg Universty’s Medialogy department. He has participated in and directed several research projects, and holds a handful of trusted positions in international organizations in the field of music. He is part of the re-new forum for digital art.