1. Marcus Paus's work includes chamber music, choral works, solo works, concerts, orchestral works, operas, symphonies and church music, as well as works for theatre, film and television.
22 Facts About Marcus Paus
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Marcus Paus has said he considers himself to be a "musical dramatist" or storyteller.
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Marcus Paus has referred to himself as a "melodist," "anarcho-traditionalist" or a humanist composer, and is known for advocating musical pluralism.
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In 2022 Marcus Paus was commissioned by the Norwegian Armed Forces to write a major "identity-building and unifying" work for the armed forces.
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Marcus Paus is one of the few Norwegian contemporary opera composers and has written several operas for children in cooperation with Ole Paus.
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The Marcus Paus family belonged to the regional elite governing Upper Telemark from the early 17th century, the "aristocracy of officials" consisting of judges and priests of the state Church of Norway.
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Marcus Paus is a descendant of Peter Paus, commemorated in a Latin elegy authored by his son, Paul Paus, both 17th-century priests.
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Marcus Paus took two summer courses at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood in the mid-1990s.
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Marcus Paus studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music from 1998 to 2002; at the age of 18, he became one of its youngest students ever to be accepted at its composer programme.
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Marcus Paus made his debut as a composer in 2000 with String Quartet No 1, based on pictures by Edvard Munch, which won the Oslo Grieg Society's award.
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Marcus Paus lived and worked in Berlin from 2011 to 2016, when he returned to Norway.
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Marcus Paus became a member of the Norwegian Society of Composers in 2005, and has been one of the four members of its music committee, its expert body in artistic matters, since 2019.
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Marcus Paus is a noted representative of a reorientation toward tradition, tonality and melody.
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Marcus Paus's harmonic writing is typically complex, combining non-traditional structures such as clusters and symmetrical harmonic shapes with triadic harmony.
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Several of Marcus Paus's works have been influenced by folk music and non-Western classical music, among them Lasuliansko Horo for violin and piano, the flute concertino A Portrait of Zhou, and Fanitull from Two Lyrical Pieces for string orchestra.
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Marcus Paus is influenced by film music, and has cited John Williams as an important influence in the way he embodies dissonance and avant-garde techniques within a larger tonal framework.
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Marcus Paus said that he has never been an anti-modernist.
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Marcus Paus's work includes church music, including the widely performed O Magnum Mysterium, Missa Concertante and Requiem, the latter written with his father Ole Paus.
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In 2018 Julie Kleive and Joachim Kwetzinsky released the album En hellig, alminnelig lek with songs by Marcus Paus based on poetry by Andre Bjerke.
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In 2020, Marcus Paus released the song cycle Good Vibes in Bad Times, written for mezzo-soprano Tora Augestad based on texts by Donald Trump reconceptualized as poems.
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In 2022 the Norwegian Armed Forces commissioned Marcus Paus to write a major work to tell the stories of the recipients of Norway's highest honour, the War Cross.
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Marcus Paus has expressed interest in writing an opera based on Ibsen's Peer Gynt.