Else Marie Pade wrote Sange fra en væg (Songs From a Wall) when she was arrested and later confined in the Frøslev Camp in Southern Jutland during World War II. The songs are not only historically interesting but they offer a deeper understanding of the person Else Marie Pade and her versatile production.  

Dybfølt, comprised of cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen and double bassist Mathæus Bech, has together with the singer Kira Martini reinterpreted the songs. The musicians have used Pade's original scores as a starting point and included their own backgrounds in both classical, folk and jazz music, and the result is a moving and charming meeting across time and genres. Listen to a single here while you read.

Music created out of necessity

During World War II, teenager Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) composed a series of seemingly innocent songs, yet they were written against a dark and tragic backdrop. Pade was deeply involved in the resistance against the German occupation during the war. Initially relatively innocent activities, but later involving transporting explosives and espionage – in activities that ultimately would have resulted in the death penalty if she had been discovered.

On a September morning in 1944, Pade was apprehended and taken to the Gestapo headquarters at Aarhus University. After the initial interrogation, she was placed in a cell at Aarhus Arrest and made a crucial decision: "One night, when chaos reigned inside me, I screamed loudly in fear and despair in my solitary cell – but no one came. Then I promised myself that if I survived this, I would devote myself to music for the rest of my life. Then I felt a strange calmness. Light, warmth, and love surrounded me. I was no longer alone. This became the turning point in my life."

During the night in her cell, she began to compose, lacking paper, she scratched the notes into the cell wall with a suspender buckle. The first composition from the cell was the song Du og jeg og stjernerne (‘You and I and the Stars’). After some time, she was interned in the Frøslev Camp where she continued to write songs, many of them in a naive and humorous schlager style (including the song Swingsko, which addresses the youths of the time). "It is music created out of necessity, like a dandelion shooting up through the asphalt", as the musicians in Dybfølt point out.

The sound of the Frøslev Camp

As a duo, Mathæus Bech and Kirstine Elise Pedersen have previously interpreted music by Rued Langgaard among others, in a personal style characterized by improvisation, folk music and classical training. With a playful and curious approach, they together with singer Kira Martini have interpeted Pade's compositions in a contemporary style with a keen eye for the historical context. Even the sound of the barracks in the Frøslev Camp can be heard on the new recording: 

"On a frosty and snow-white January day, we drove down to the Frøslev Camp with three speakers, two microphones and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The idea
was to play our recordings out into the room at double speed, then record them through the reel-to-reel recorder and slow it down to half speed, so that the
music is now back at the original speed, but the reverb from the barracks has doubled in time," Dybfølt explains.