Some exciting news – my saxophone quartet Crumblings won the 10th edition of the Croatian New Note composition competition.
Crumblings was originally commissioned by the Keuris quartet and premiered at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in 2018. It’s a piece that is essentially concerned with fragments as thematic and constitutive material. But it’s also a bit of an outlier within my works, in that it has one of the most clear-cut forms I’ve ever written. In all of its relative simplicity, it’s a piece that is still quite dear to me. It was an important stepping stone in exploring simplicity of form, coupled with a complexity of material.
I’m very much looking forward to the performance on the 1st of October with the Zagreb saxophone quartet at the 2021 edition of the Samobor music festival. In the meantime, you can listen to the premiere performance with Keuris quartet below:
Frej Wedlund – Biography
I was born in 1991 and grew up in Östersund, Sweden, and am currently based in Copenhagen.
In my current work, I am largely concerned with quiet tension, exposedness, and the simultaneous grandiosity and intimacy that a “small” music can create. A recent interest of mine is incomplete, unbalanced or unfulfilled form, which probably is an attempt to make my music approach some sort of “sublime imperfection”, in turn a step in the search for an ever more intimate music.
My pieces have been performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain, ensemble recherche, the Arditti Quartet, the Keuris Quartet, New Danish Saxophone Quartet and more in the Nordic countries, Europe and the USA. Some recent highlights include Plasticity being selected for festival mise-en 2019, Nordic music days 2019, Young Nordic music 2019, and Universal Artists festival 2019. My works have also received numerous prizes, among them 4×4 Prizes, NCNMI composition award, and O/Modernt composition award.
