I’m Andrew Mellor, a freelance journalist and critic based in Copenhagen.
My book on Nordic music and cultures The Northern Silence was published by Yale in the summer of 2022.
Here you can keep up to date with developments, events, reviews, extra material, excerpts and blogs that continue themes established in the book. Enjoy!
More about me
I was born in St Albans, raised in Devon, went to school in Bristol and studied music at Liverpool University. After working for Manchester Camerata and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, I joined Haymarket Media Group in 2008 where I was trained as a journalist – initially on Classic FM magazine, later on Gramophone.
In 2015, I moved to Copenhagen to work as a freelance journalist and critic. Both those magazines had been sending me to the Nordic countries on assignments and I had grown fascinated by the music and culture I found there. As I prepared to go freelance, I figured I could double my potential market by being based abroad; I was already working for the Danish magazine Klassisk and there was no English-language opera critic or culture correspondent in Copenhagen.
The plan was to stay for a year. I swapped my apartment in south London for one right on the canal in Christianshavn, owned by a French writer and translator and full of her books and artifacts (and with a decent piano). When the year was up it seemed like madness to return to London.
I remain in Copenhagen now – still reporting from around the Nordic region, still working as a correspondent for a bunch of opera, music, design and architecture magazines, still writing essays for orchestras and record labels around the world, and now working as an occasional critic for the Financial Times while presenting broadcasts now-and-then for Medici TV and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. My Danish partner and son mean I’m probably here for good. There are worse places to be.
The Northern Silence
In a sense, The Northern Silence is the culmination of my reporting on Nordic music and culture to date. It’s not a compendium of articles, though it does draw on previously published material. It’s more an attempt to put my journalistic and critical experience of these countries – and their music – in some sort of wider context.
As I write in the book’s preface Tapiola, I was keen to ‘trace some parallel lines’ between the musical, cultural, political, social and so on. As a Scandinavian taxpayer of seven years, I have become convinced that the music and culture of the Nordic countries are inextricable from the wider societal, geographical and topographical realities one experiences here…for better or worse.
Showreel
I’m a writer really, but I sometimes work in broadcasting as both a presenter/moderator, or as a guest/interviewee. Here’s a little showreel demonstrating some of my recent broadcasting work for Medici TV, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Tivoli Festival.
Contact
You can stay in touch with me via Twitter and Instagram where I post links to my work as @operalastnight