Marianne Clausen (25 December 1947 – 17 September 2014) was a Danish musicologist and choir conductor. She was the daughter of composer, choir conductor and musicologist Karl Clausen (1904–1972). Her main achievement, begun in collaboration with her father in the early 1970s, intensified during the 1990s, and concluded just weeks before her death, was the preservation of traditional Faroese folk singing, which she presented in a number of large volumes with music notation transcriptions of sound recordings. Based on more than 6,000 such recordings, collected by many different scholars, including herself, throughout the entire 20th century, she published around 3,350 music notation examples of various genres of traditional Faroese singing, together with hitherto unpublished song texts, as well as historical and musicological analyses.
Marianne Clausen also led and conducted several amateur choirs, most notably 1978-2000 the Faroese choir in Copenhagen, Húsakórið, and 1984-2013 the Danish choir Con Brio.
Early works
The daughter of high school teachers Karl Clausen and Grethe Clausen, born Jensen, and the youngest of four siblings, Marianne Clausen grew up in a large rented apartment in the 18th-century villa “Stormly” on Godthåbsvej in the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Frederiksberg. During the 1950s, her father, by then a well-known choir conductor and musicologist, who had specialized in folk singing, gradually became aware of the very rich Faroese folk singing tradition. He went to the islands several times with a tape recorder to collect, first of all, examples of the religious, spiritual singing, known as Kingo-singing, which had so far not received much attention from collectors.
During trips with her father from the mid-1960s and onwards, Marianne Clausen was introduced to the Faroese people and their singing. Her father discovered that she possessed a special talent, surpassing his own, for writing down accurately and unbiased, as regards musical harmonics and scales, the melodies that were sung in the recordings. After his death she completed a volume containing 97 melody examples, with lyrics, of Faroese spiritual singing. Part of this volume she used as the thesis for her major degree in music from Aarhus University 1975. In c. 1983 she finished her MA degree by taking a minor in English from the University of Copenhagen. A little later she also passed the PO organist's exam.
Following her failed first marriage, which was insecure and traumatic, and the death of her father not long after, Marianne Clausen went through some years around 1980 with alcohol abuse. She managed to get out of the abuse in 1983, and she never touched alcohol again for the rest of her life. However, repercussions of the mental and physical damage from those events were probably at least partly responsible for her premature death many years later.
After some years where she recovered and mainly worked with choirs, she went on a number of collection trips to the Faroes 1988-94, which resulted in a publication about spiritual singing and one about Danish language ballads, Hundredesyv-visebogen The latter in particular gained positive attention among the Faroese, partly because it was the first publication for many years to deal with Faroese dance, the folk singing genre that had best withstood the modernization of the Faroese community in the decades after World War II, and was still thriving, as it is today, in various dance associations across the islands, as well as in the Faroese communities in Denmark.
Hundredesyv-visebogen was released on the 300th anniversary of Peder Syv’s songbook, which was itself inspired by Anders Sørensen Vedel’s songbook Hundredvisebog from a century earlier. Hundredesyv-visebogen was the last of Marianne Clausen's books based exclusively on her own collections of folk singing; her last five books were all primarily based on folk singing recordings by other, earlier collectors.