Audun G. Vassdal is a Norwegian composer located in Oslo. His music has been nominated for several awards, and he has composed music for ensembles and projects that have been performed and screened all over the world. Currently, Vassdal works with music for visual media and classical music.
Audun’s interest for music started with his piano lessons as a child, and his composition classes in High School opened his eyes to a whole new world of musical composition. He has since gotten a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oslo, where he studied a variety of different genres of music while mainly focusing on classical composition. Later he went on to complete a master’s degree in Composition for Screen at the Royal College of Music in London. Having a father who worked in the Norwegian film industry, it felt to him like a natural step to take, having grown up on film sets and production studios. Audun also has a certificate degree in audio engineering at the Musicians Institute in LA.
Having worked for many years in the Oslo Concert House and directly for the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Vassdal is heavily influenced by orchestral music, and has spent a lot of time studying orchestration through work, education, and privately. This has made his orchestration style quite unique and often very experimental, utilizing odd combinations and techniques to try to create interesting colors. This and the use of extended harmonies and harmonic progressions is quite typical of Vassdal’s style and is found throughout his body of work.
Vassdal’s music often combines techniques and tonal languages from several types of music, often leading to interesting and atypical approaches. His style of composition is mainly influenced by early 20th-century music and he combines techniques from impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, jazz, and folk music, among other genres. He now composes both classical music and music for the screen through his sole proprietorship AGV Music.
News and Projects
I’ve been offered a grant!
I am pleased to say that Det norske komponistfond (The Norwegian Composers’ fund) has offered me a composer grant to develop the musical piece The hero with a thousand faces. Heming Valebjørg, percussionist in the Oslo Philharmonic, ordered the piece for the windband Østre Aker Musikkorps. We are in the beginning stages of development right now, but I can reveal that the piece will explore storytelling through music, – and I cannot wait to share it with you all! I also want to express my gratitude to Det norske komponistfond for this opportunity.