Maren Selvaag Askvig

Maren’s presence in her music is something you can feel. Warm, curious, playful, bold, moving to its own rhythm. It seems this is how Maren has always moved through the world. By twelve years old, she already felt that the strict rules of her classical piano training were small-minded. Growing up, she had seen her father bring all the world to her small town of Lillehammer, as an organiser of the 1994 Olympics. She knew that anything was possible. 

Maren soon began composing her own music. It started with her piano teacher writing five musical notes on a Post-It and telling her, ‘Make something with this.’ Here was a thrilling new way of being with music, where there were no rules, no mistakes.

‘It cannot be wrong if you are playing your experience,’ says Maren, ‘pulling the music up out of your body, your heart.’

At eighteen, Maren was admitted to a jazz conservatory in Trondheim, not only the youngest student, but the only female pianist. She admits that she was met with some resistance. I am struck by the courage it must have taken to stay true to her intuitive, embodied music. 

Maren’s passion for piano and for life, is magnetic. While visiting her sister on a year abroad in America, she attracted the attention of jazz pianist, Russ Bowman, who played at Billie Holiday’s last show. With his support, she won a fellowship in New York and spent the next years composing her first album, Close to the Shore. 

After three years living in vibrant urban chaos, Maren missed nature and wanted to bring her music back to those she loved. Norway was calling her home. On the flight back, she chatted to her seat neighbour, who shared her love for the pianist, Bill Evans. He also happened to be a patron of the arts. He would go on to help Maren buy a piano, put on performances, even send her off on an extreme sports course. This is how Maren found herself hanging off the side of a mountain; how she discovered that fear could be a gateway to presence.

Lived experience is the foundation of Maren’s creative process. After a week in silent retreat at a convent, she went to a cabin in the woods to write her second album. It was an intense period of work, at the end of which she sat down at the piano, exhausted, just to let her hands wander dreamlike over the keys. When Maren listened back to the recording she made on her phone, she discovered she had composed the song Salme Nr.1 in its entirety. How fitting that the album’s title Bare Være means Just Be. 

One of the things I find most moving in Maren’s music is its openness, each song feels like a vast new space. In concert, she invites her audience to inhabit these spaces by telling the story of each piece – what she was feeling and exploring as she wrote it. Her desire for co-experience has even led to piano concerts in the woods, by the sea, on a mountaintop. With Maren, we are not just listening to the music, we are living it.