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An evening with author Andrew Mellor in conversation with Vanessa Blander and a surprise musical guest.
Andrew Mellor has been travelling the Nordic countries with his notepad and pen for more than fifteen years - first as a magazine reporter living in London, and since 2015, as a freelance journalist and critic based in Copenhagen.
The Northern Silence is his first book: the culmination of his experiences as a music critic and journalist covering the Nordic region for international media. It is a journey from Aarhus to the Arctic, from Reykjavik to Rovaniemi, that goes to the heart of what makes the musical and wider societal life of the Nordic countries so rich and distinctive. The book takes in topics as wide as social democracy, alcoholism, football chants, Scandinavian cinema and design and the influence of landscape on the artist.
For this talk as part of Books & Company’s regular series, Andrew will be joined by two musicians from English-speaking countries who have also made their homes in Denmark: Canadian-born violinist Vanessa Blander Hedegaard, a member of Det Kongelige Kapel, and Welsh born harpist Helen Davies, who will use her instrument to bring the world of Scandinavian folk music to life.
About Northern Silence
‘He could be writing about Sibelius — or Lindberg, or Hillborg, or Saariaho. Vivid, penetrating musical descriptions are at the heart of his journey, whether the ‘elasticated soprano and anti-gravitational orchestra’ of Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you or his brisk-but-fair dismissal of Stenhammar’s symphonic output: ‘high-quality music that works itself hard’. Mellor travels from Reykjavik to Lapland; from Scandi-chic urban venues to music festivals in the Faroes and Arctic Norway. Grieg, Sibelius and Nielsen are his initial focal points, but he expands outwards and circles back, identifying and anatomising similarities and (often stark) differences.’
‘This is not (happily) a work of musicology — no specialist technical knowledge is assumed, though you’ll learn a great deal about Sibelius’s debt to Finnish rune-singers, the musical semantics of yoiking and the sound of the nyckelharpa. There’s no aspect of Scandinavian or Nordic life that doesn’t illuminate Mellor’s understanding of the whole, and he writes as enjoyably about the music of Outi Tarkiainen or Fartein Valen as he does about ABBA, Björk or (brilliantly) Finland’s Eurovision-winning heavy-metal monsters Lordi. In short, then, the best kind of music book — one that takes literally Nielsen’s declaration that ‘Music is life’, and makes it the heart and soul of something infinitely wider and more fascinating.’
Gramophone (September 2022)
“The best kind of music book…one that makes it the heart and soul of something infinitely wider and more fascinating” Gramophone
About Andrew Mellor
Andrew Mellor is a journalist and critic.
You can find him on Instagram or check his work on his website.