THE life of Danish composer Else Marie Pade, who has died at the age of 92, was extraordinary in all sorts of ways.

Pade was the first person in Denmark to make music using electronics, and is regarded as the country’s “grandmother of electronic music”.

Her career was largely spent making music for dramas in Danish Radio’s music department, and she is often compared to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s legendary composer Delia Derbyshire, who most famously composed the Doctor Who theme tune. Pade was one of the last living members of this generation of female electronic pioneers, which also included Derbyshire’s Radiophonic Workshop colleague Daphne Oram, pictured below, who did great things in the overwhelmingly (and often oppressively) male studio environments of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born in Aarhus in 1924, Pade was often bedridden as a child as a result of the kidney infection pyelonephritis. Her illness and convalescence actually played a pivotal role in developing her fascination with sound – she spent a lot of her time just listening to the outside world and creating “aural pictures” of what she heard.

In 1943, at the age of 19, Pade became an active member of the Danish resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War. She began this work by distributing illegal newspapers in 1943, and in 1944 joined an all-female explosives group with a brief to identify the telephone cables in Aarhus.

The idea was that the wires would be blown up when the British invaded, so that the Germans would be unable to use telephones in co-ordinating their response. Pade was arrested in September 1944 by the Gestapo and sent to the Frøslevlejren prison camp.

As she explained, this wasn’t a labour or concentration camp, so the main danger she faced was the crushing boredom of being left in isolation without stimuli of any sort. Her way of negotiating the tedium was to make musical works in her head using the sounds she could hear through the window of her cell. She devised a notational system, and carved out notes on the wall of her cell using the metal buckle on her garters.

After the war, Pade read at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music, and eventually became a composer out of necessity, as complications arising from her imprisonment left her unable to play piano.

The real catalyst for her career came from hearing a radio programme in 1952 on musique concrete and its creator, Pierre Schaeffer. Inspired by him, she created A Day At Bakken, Denmark’s first piece of electronic music, and a host of other works as the years passed. As Mats Almegård, the producer of Swedish National Radio’s Elektroniskt i P2, notes in Philip Sherburne’s look back at Pade’s life for online magazine Pitchfork: “She was a unique pioneer, one of the earliest in Denmark, and as such, for a long time very alone in the work she did. There was no attention from other composers, the audience, etc.—she was too ‘out there.’”

In recent years, Pade’s name had risen to a level of prominence that eluded women such as Derbyshire (pictured below) and Oram during their lifetimes. Electronic Works 1958-1995, a compilation of her major works, was released to much acclaim by Important Records in 2014, and she collaborated with the sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard (an artist 52 years her junior) on a piece entitled Svaevninger.

It was through this work in 2012, at the age of 87, that Pade finally played in front of an audience for the first time after a lifetime spent working alone in studios. “On stage, the two figures sat behind a mixer and Kirkegaard’s laptop,” begins a description of her and Kirkegaard’s live premiere of the piece at Copenhagen’s Wunderground Festival in a lengthy profile on her in a 2013 issue of the music magazine The Wire.

“Occasionally Pade whispered something to Kirkegaard and he would adjust levels, as hypnotic, ghostly veils of high-pitched tones undulated and quivered around the Danish Music Academy Concert Hall. A standing ovation at the end left Pade visibly moved. It was a touching moment.”

The Wire actually visited Pade in 2013 in the nursing home where she spent her final years, and found a sprightly, engaged woman – “the celebrity of the house”, as a nurse put it – who was humble about her achievements and still coming up with interesting new composition ideas in her 90th year.

In an apposite conclusion to his piece, Sherburne writes: “Electronic music is often treated as a boys’ club, but the truth is, from the very beginning, women have invented devices, techniques, and tropes that would define the shape of music for years to come; they just went unrecognised for their efforts. [But] you don’t detect any resentment on the composer’s part, just an abiding fascination with the world of sound. In fact, at 89, living in an assisted living community, she was still planning new compositions based on birdsong.”