A New Look at a Nation’s Composer
Ragna Moe ’83E (MM)
admits she’s a bit of a missionary when it comes to getting
people interested in the arts. That passion came in handy this year
as the musician and arts administrator organized her native
Norway’s national celebration of the centennial of composer
Edvard Grieg’s death.
“I like to spread the gospel about the
arts,” Moe says. “But I also hope to give people a
better sense of who Edvard Grieg was, his music, his work, and his
humanism.”
GRIEG STATE: “There are many people all over the world who know Grieg’s music,” says Ragna Moe ’83E (MM), who oversaw a year-long commemoration of Norway’s most famous composer. (Photo: New York Public Library)
Best known as a composer who drew on Norway’s
natural settings and folk music traditions, Grieg was an
influential artist in the latter half of the 19th century whose
lyrical and Romantic compositions remain part of the
orchestral repertoire.
He’s perhaps best known for his incidental music
for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and as Moe describes his
music, she can’t help but hum “In the Hall of the
Mountain King,” part of the Peer Gynt cycle that
sometimes shows up in TV commercials and often gets piped through
shopping malls.
“There are many people all over the world who
know Grieg’s music, but they may not know that it’s
Grieg,” Moe says.
Moe, who is a native of Bergen, the same Norwegian town
where Grieg was born, was the director of the Grieg museum at the
composer’s home before heading up the centennial. As
director, she has emphasized the ways that music can reach out to
children by involving them in projects to understand how music is
composed. Grieg was known to spend a lot of time walking through
Norway’s natural areas and listening to the country’s
folk musicians, traditions that can be heard in his work.
As part of the centennial, Moe helped organize a
children’s sampler, in which kids learned how to record such
natural sounds as a way to understand the “music” all
around them. Many of the recordings can be heard through the
centennial’s Web site at http://eng.grieg07.no.
A bassoonist, Moe enrolled at the Eastman School on the
advice of a violinist friend, and she studied with David Van
Hoesen, professor emeritus, an experience that she describes as
“wonderful.” While at Rochester, she also began to
recognize how the roles of artists and arts administrators
intertwine.
She went on to earn a master’s degree in arts
management from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University
of Cincinnati.
“It’s an interesting challenge to find the
balance between artistic and managerial leadership,” she
says.
But she notes, the lessons of studying music resonate
with the lessons of managing an arts organization.
“There’s so much of what you need as a musician
that you use as an arts manager,” Moe says. “You need
discipline; you need to know how to present a message
with zeal.”
Culminating with a festival and symposium in Bergen in
September, the Grieg centennial formally ends this fall. While the
music took center stage, Moe hoped that fans of his music would
also discover that Grieg was an ardent and often outspoken
supporter of democracy and the rule of law throughout Europe. Part
of the symposium focused on his commitment to human rights.
Moe says that aspect of Grieg’s work is often
overlooked.
“[His music is] very much a part of the Norwegian
soul,” Moe says. “But I think the centennial has made
the Norwegian people aware not only of his music but also of his
work as a humanist. It has been a real eye-opener.”
—Scott Hauser
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