Karsten Fundal (1966-Present)

Introduction
Karsten Fundal is a Danish composer from Valby, Copenhagen, Denmark. He was born is 1966 and takes a lot of his inspiration in his music from his personal life. His music not only evokes emotion but also includes a social context about "establishing a kind of humanity and being something". A meeting with Nigel Osborne and Morton Feldman took a huge role in Fundal's development as a composer.

Work Analysis
For Fundal's work I wanted to look into his piece, "A Portrait of Silence" from 2011. This piece is very ambient with its main purpose being how to navigate the physical acoustic space. This piece uses 2 percussionists, saxophone, and piano. This piece has a few repeating sections but the sound develops over time, becoming slightly more ambient as the time goes on. This piece seems to operate more like a sound painting than a phyical piece of music. The music is being used to paint this aural canvas with sounds. Some of the sounds used include bells, marimbas, and other pitch based percussion instruments.

Comparisons
This piece seems to be very similar to the work of Stockhausen. This very ambient, atonal approach to music is something that characterizes them both. The sounds made fill the empty space of the piece and give the music a physical atmosphere to occupy. The legacy of the music of Karsten Fundal definitely is the continuation of Stockhausen ideal of a three dimensional soundscape. The different harmonics of the instruments used in A Portrait of Silence intermingle in interesting ways that give the piece interesting timbres to play with.

Observations
I do not think i enjoyed this piece. With more of the modern ambient music it doesn't seem to be revolutionizing the music world, like when Stockhausen did in his career. I feel like there are more ways for artist and composers to play with ambient music that would allow for a lot of it not to just sound the same. I learned that music really is timeless from this piece because you could compare Stockhausen's early work to this and it could still be just as, if not more, modern in sound.