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Wind Power Horror Serenade
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This is a true story of an old freedom fighter’s valiant stand against the unjustice of wind power, with music as a weapon.
On April 9th, 1940, Denmark was occupied by German troops. The first years of occupation there was no resistance. Then a small group of youngsters in a high school in Aalborg, Northern Jutland, started a kind of sabotage and began to steel weapons from the Germans. Their activities had no real results, but the youths became known as the Churchill Group. After a year or so the members were arrested and imprisoned for a long time.
Knud Pedersen was one of them. Today he is 86 years old and one of the last surviving freedom fighters from the time of German Occupation (1940-1945). Since he was freed, for decades Knud Pedersen and his wife Bodil have had a house in the forests of Southern Sweden. In 2009 their paradise was threatened by a wind project in the forest around their home. That made Knud start another resistance fight against this injustice. His contribution to our common resistance is a musical composition called “Wind Power Horror Serenade”, which will be played in the middle of Copenhagen on December 9th.
Click here to download the entire work (18-minute 30-MB MP3 file).
3rd movement, “250 Meters”:
Letter from Knud Pedersen, November 2011
My wife and I had owned a summer house in Torup for 35 years when we were threatened by a wind park with 180-meters-high wind turbines about 500 meters from our doorstep. Since then we have worked hard to draw attention to the sound levels from giant wind turbines. We suggested to Vestas to sponsor a concert with sounds from wind turbines. As could be expected, the answer was no.
Together with a good friend, Casper Henning Hansen, who is drummer in the well known Danish band called Moi Caprice, I then composed a wind turbine concert which we call Wind Power Horror Serenade. There are three movements: First movement is entitled 180 Meters, the second, 75 Meters, and the third, 250 Meters.
We have now received a grant from the Danish Arts Council for an outdoor concert to be performed on Kongens Nytorv immediately in front of Charlottenborg and next to Nyhavn in Copenhagen on Friday, 9 December, from 4 pm to 6 pm.
The composition is based on wind power sounds and drums. From the Danish Meteorological Institute we have borrowed an instrument to measure the sound level of wind during the concert. Ida Auken, Denmark’s new Minister for the Environment, recently announced on national television that regulations for the distance between wind turbines and houses based on low frequency sound measurements will be made public in the near future.
Best regards,
~~~
Knud Pedersen
The Art Library, Copenhagen
