Lönner, Oddvar

Oddvar Lönner – String Quartet no. 3 (2005)

(b. august 24th 1954)

Oddvar Lönner was born in Tønsberg. Between 1972 and 1975 he studied piano at the Barratt Due Music Institute in Oslo. From 1976 to 1983 he studied composition with Professor Andrzej Dobrowolski at Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz, Austria. He also graduated as a conductor at the same institution in 1982 after studies with Prof. Dr. Milan Horvat.

Lönner has given several lectures on his own music in connection with performances of his works in Graz and Vienna. He also was a deputy lecturer in composition for Prof. Robert Boury at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA in 1985. Towards the end of the 1980s he alternated living as a freelance composer in Vienna and various states in the USA studying Indian music, shamanism and mysticism with a number of Indian shamans through the American Indian Centre of Arkansas.

In order to develop an alternative style of composition, he studied Greek philosophy and religious philosophy for one year with professors Torstein Tollefsen and Finngeir Hiorth at the University of Oslo. His main helper, friend and advisor was the hermit Oscar Hansen, who lived in a self-built cottage in a forest outside Tønsberg. ”He lived like the gods”, says the composer..

Read full preface > HERE