His music has been called an art of ‘resignation,’ silent despair, and reduction, and he describes himself as a melancholic. But if all this suggests a man in retreat from society, Lars Petter Hagen’s career suggests quite the opposite. As a composer he has attracted international acclaim for his work, which maintains a unique and questioning stance towards the great musical milestones of the past. The UK’s Gramophone magazine described him as “essentially swearing in church, at the same time as crafting the most heavenly sounds this side of the pearly gates” and described his 2014 album of symphonic music performed by the Oslo Philharmonic as “genuinely visionary…the most important new music disc to arrive for a long time.” Works such as "Norwegian Archives", "Tveitt-Fragments", and "The Artist’s Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins" grapple with the heavy burden of history and the anxiety of infl uence for an artist in an age of retromania. He imports the dilemmas of dealing with and overcoming the past into the present tense of his music. "Archive Fever" – the title of a sound installation he produced for the International Music Institute at Darmstadt in 2016 – could be a neat summing-up of Hagen’s approach to his artistic practice.
Between 2009 and 2017, he was the Artistic Director of Ultima, not only Norway’s largest contemporary music festival but also one of the most important of its kind in Europe. Under his leadership, the festival achieved the highest audience ratings in its 25-year history. As curator of the Ultima festival (and previously other key organizations in Norway’s musical life), Hagen applied similar thinking: each event arranged around a theme or tapestry of concepts, each encompassing modernist masterworks, new commissions, and wide representation of contrasting avant-garde techniques.
Just as a festival can be a conversation about past, present, and future, the same idea can be applied to composing a piece of music – that it can be a platform for discussion. Hagen has always kept a loose yet highly informed relationship with tradition, often questioning it by forcing it to have a conversation with a multiplicity of styles, musical languages, and performance approaches. This extends across the broad range of his music, from notated and score-based work, to his collaborations with electronica projects Pantha du Prince and The Bell Laboratory. Hagen’s focus, as both composer and curator, is often about fi nding the arbitrary lines drawn around cultures and traditions, and applying pressure until cracks begin to show.
From 2017 Hagen took on the role of curating the centenary celebrations of Norway’s leading orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic.