The story of Else Marie Pade, one of the most important Danish electronic composers in the post-war period, is a good story. So good, even, that more and more people have started telling it. Some with a keen historical insight into the history of electronic music, others with a, what shall we say, more freely relationship to the facts.
When Aarhus Municipality inaugurated the first section of the city's new light rail system in December 2017, it thus not only marked the beginning of easier travel around Else Marie Pade's hometown. It also became an occasion to make the composer part of the story of the city, which previously carried the slogan »Aarhus – Danish for progress«.
So when Aarhus Letbane [the Aarhus tramway company] published five short podcasts earlier this year about some of the historic stops on what today amounts to more than 100 kilometers of rails, one of them was about Pade. Here we hear about her rebellious attitude towards the German occupying power: that she spat at one of the soldiers, but got away with it by fleeing in a tram. And that she became a woman of resistance and ends up in the Gestapo's prison, where she scratched notes into the wall.
