Anders Monrad is a Danish composer and pianist. A predominant feature in Monrads music has been the simultaneous presence of (seemingly) contradictory elements or idioms – in the form of contrasting musical styles or conventions, as for example representations of “high” versus “low” culture or “the intuitive, spontaneous” versus “the calculated, controlled”. Such “postulated dichotomy” is a means of creating a polemical, dialectical space which, in Monrads opinion, sharpens the individual musical elements, thus achieving a stronger, overall aesthetic statement.
As a consequence, Monrad has worked in a myriad of different styles and idioms: glitsch-electronica, serialism, jazz-improvisation, 19th century piano-tradition etc. Currently, Monrad is working with adaptive music for videogames and programming of interactive music-applications for the new digital massmedia Iphone and Ipad.
In addition to composition, Monrad is active as a painter, in a style inspired partly by op-artist Victor Vasarely and also by musical, “polyphonic” structures, with a special interest in techniques enabling him to work with many different motives layered on top of each other.
Monrad’s music has been performed at festivals and concerts in the five Scandinavian countries by musicians such as Michala Petri, Dame Gillian Weir and The Arditti Quartet among others. In addition, Monrad has been active as a freelance writer on musical topics since 2006.
Monrad received an undergraduate degree in musicology and economics from Copenhagen University and Business School in 2006. In july 2011, he completed a Master in composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. From 2009-2010 Monrad did a post-graduate year-in at The Royal Academy of Music in London.
Homepage: www.andersmonrad.dk
"Late Night at H.C. Andersens Boulevard 36" is a composition for 11 percussionists. It is actually an instrumentation of a piano improvisation I recorded in the spring of 2008 - late at night at H.C. Andersens Boulevard 36 (the address where The Danish Royal Academy was situated until summer 2008) - hence the title...
Since the piece was improvised, it reflects my harmonic inspiration from jazz pianists such as Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett. The Rhythm in the piece is very much inspired by glitsch-electronica (which I was very much into at the time) - with irregular rhythmical accents and semi-random numbers of repetitions of certain lines - like the sound of a broken CD skipping during playback...
Because of the repetitive rhythm, the piece slightly resembles American minimal composers - especially certain works by Steve Reich. To summarize, the piece can be labeled: "Minimalism meets Glitsch meets Modaljazz"...