About the Music

Hiding of the Hares for bass clarinet choir (7 parts) is an early work, originally composed for piano. Writing this piece marked an important moment for the composer, as it was her first work in traditional notation and affirmed her interest in composition. The piece also reflects a long-standing fascination with rabbits, whose character serves as a central inspiration.

The original piano version incorporates a theatrical playing style, requiring the performer’s hands to leap rapidly across the keyboard, echoing the sudden, energetic movements of a jumping rabbit. While this physical element is absent in the present arrangement for bass clarinet, the music retains its characteristic sense of motion through quick passages and lively gestures.

The work is rich in playful symbolism. For instance, the short trills represent a “binky” - a joyful jump rabbits do when they are excited. Throughout the piece, these details contribute to a vivid and imaginative world of wild hares.

Score: 12 pages, spiral bound. Parts: 4 pages each, booklet. Extended-range instruments NOT required.

Hard Copy Edition

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About the Composer

Basha Öberg is a Swedish-Russian composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work reimagines what sheet music can be. Moving beyond ink on paper, she creates performative scores, including works in the form of board games and 3D puzzles. Her practice is rooted in a craft-based approach, combining disciplines such as graphic design and 3D modeling to shape musical experiences. Through this, she brings together theatrical elements and combinatorial approaches to her work.

Raised in a musical and artistic environment, Öberg was early exposed to the world of performance through her mother, an opera singer. She began piano lessons at the age of five, and by the age of ten she was already performing for audiences. At the same time, she showed a strong aptitude for drawing and was encouraged to develop her visual artistic skills alongside music. Through her experience at the piano, she developed an early interest in composition through improvisation. As a child, before learning traditional notation, she created her own visual representations of the keyboard on paper, adding illustrative instructions to guide how the music was played.

During high school, she studied percussion and performed in a drum corps ensemble, an experience that shaped the playful and rhythmically driven character of her music. Later, during her composition studies at Luleå University of Technology, she became engaged with the contemporary music scene and began developing the fusion between graphic design and composition that now defines her artistic practice.

Alongside her compositional work, she develops pedagogical materials that make music more accessible to beginners, using visual and playful methods to introduce the fundamentals of basic music theory in intuitive and engaging ways. She also collaborates with other musicians as a visual designer, creating graphic material and visual identities that support and extend their work.

Through her practice, Öberg continues to explore how music can be experienced not only as sound, but as interaction, art, and play.