Eighty-two-year-old composer Else Marie Pade is a phenomenon in the history of Danish music. As a child she was often ill and bedridden. She would listen to the sounds around her... on the stairs, from the yard and the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began. During the Second World War, she was arrested by the Gestapo and placed in solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she began composing music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners from her garters. After the war, and her discovery of the “musique concrète” of Pierre Schaeffer and the French avant-garde, she realized that these sounds resembled those she had heard in childhood, and that this was the music she really wanted to compose.
She became the first Dane to devote her life to “musique concrète” and to electronic music, but she had to wait fifty years to be “discovered”. Set to the sounds of her compositions, this profile retraces her unusual path.
"The film is interesting for me because of its very specific (psychological) entrance to the ‘musique concrète’ of the composer in relation to the postwar atmosphere." (Prof. Nicolaus A. Huber, Composer, Member of the Academy of Arts / Akademie der Künste, 2007)