Audun G. Vassdal

Audun G. Vassdal is a Norwegian composer currently located in Los Angeles. Vassdal started playing instruments at an early age, and his obsession with understanding how music and instruments works led him to pursue music further. He is primarily a pianist, and attended a high school with a music education. This is where he discovered his passion for composition, and decided that being a composer would be his life goal. Being fascinated by many forms of music, he has pursued an education in both classical music and film music, as well as other genres.

He has 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.

His 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. He combines techniques from impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, jazz, and folk music, among other genres. His goal as a composer is to find interesting parts of all types of music and try to combine them in different ways.

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.

Currently, Vassdal works with both music for visual media and classical music, often letting the genres overlap and trying to create new approaches to both. 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.