Danish composer It gives Karsten Fundal (b. 1966) a kick to get a new musical idea, he says himself. One of his more recent ideas has been realized in an orchestral work for choir and two orchestras. It is nothing less than a vision of representing The Big Bang. The whole orchestra starts with one note and expands from there. A shift – which one in fact cannot hear – arises during the first half second. But it is still the developing factor for any kind of development at all. After this, everything ramifies into an enormous mass. This very quickly becomes huge entities. The whole tonal material in the work generates itself from this microshift. Karsten Fundal calls his 35-minutes work Entropia, thus he associates it with the word Utopia. Entropia (1997-2001) for soloists, choir and large orchestra is written for the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR. Artistic creation and lived life is to sides of the same coin for Karsten Fundal. When you consider Karsten Fundal’s music you also have to consider what exists alongside the art – all which in the end is the precondition for the art to be manifested in the form of musical expression. It’s about balance in life and in art, in the final analysis also about forming part of a meaningful social context, about establishing a kind of humanity and being something – for others as well as oneself.   In recent years Karsten Fundal’s talent has evoked a response in the film world. He has ‘gone wide screen’. After great success with the music for the Dreyer film Mikaël (2003), premiered live with the Copenhagen Philharmonic, he wrote the music for Nikolaj Østergaard’s Robert-award-winning Kort Film Om Tro (Short Film About Faith) (2005). Recently he has written the music for Peter Schønau Fog’s feature film Kunsten At Græde i Kor (The Art of Crying)(2007). At the moment he is working on a major music film project about human identity in a globalised world. In this project Karsten Fundal goes on working with some of the themes from Entropia: Understanding of time and human excistence in the space between the microscopic world of the atomes and the gigantic world of the universe. Karsten Fundal has among others studied composition with Per Nørgård in Denmark and Louis Andriessen in Holland. A meeting with Morton Feldman also took on great importance for Fundal’s development as a composer. Karsten Fundal has been awarded the Wilhelm Hansen Composer’s Prize 1994, the Prize of the Danish Composers’ Society 1995, the Hvass Foundation’s Artist’s Grant 1995, the Queen Ingrid Memorial Grant 2005 and the Carl Nielsen Prize 2005. In 2005 he received the three-year grant of the Danish Arts Foundation to develop his  music film project about globalization. By Malene Wichmann August 2007

One of Karsten Fundal’s recent musical ideas has been an orchestral work representing a vision of The Big Bang. The idea is realized in Entropia (1997-2001) for soloists, choir and large orchestra. Read more about Karsten Fundal at: Karsten Fundal's personal website   Edition Wilhelm Hansen