Spotted: Tormod Tvete Vik – Koral & Vocalise

Spotted: Tormod Tvete Vik – Koral & Vocalise

My main focus on this blog is piano music. But sometimes people send me things that intrigues me. Like when Norwegian composer Tormod Tvete Vik sent me this wonderful composition for four cellos.

Nowadays Tormod lives in Sweden just outside Gothenburg. He mainly plays the violin, and has studied composition/arrangement at the Music Academy of Trondheim in Norway, and further studies in musicology at the University of Oslo and film music composition at Lillehammer university.

Tormod has composed music for TV-documentaries and shorts and worked as an orchestrator for TV-series and successful Nordic feature films like «A man called Ove» (SE) and the new animation movies of the Bamse character. 

  • Tell us something about one of the tracks! Is there a story behind it? (Could be what the song is about, how you wrote it, a funny anecdote from the recording session or something like that.

Tell us something about Koral & Vocalise!
Koral & Vocalise is inspired by music I wrote for a Norwegian documentary about what happens to prisoners spending years in an isolation cell. The music is performed by 4 cellists from Gothenburg Symphonic Orchestra, a quite rare combination of classical instruments, compared to the more traditional string quartet (2 violins, viola, cello). The piece is recorded live, even the music video you find on Youtube in Nilento studio. “Koral” relates to the hymn character in the beginning and the end of the piece. “Vocalise” traditionally means a song without words and relates to the “singing cello” in the second part of the piece.  

Thank you for sharing this beautiful piece of music with us Tormod! Please check out these links for more information:
Website / Spotify