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Lars Hegaard (b. 1950) became a composer in the vacuum of the 1970s, when modernism was an accomplished project, but when there was as yet no recognition of a postmodern reality within innovative art music. The preconditions for his engagement with music were culturally diverse, and included dance music (heard on his parents' radio) and rock music. In high school Hegaard became familiar with classical music too: a string quartet by Shostakovich, Handel's Messiah and Verdi's Requiem were to be crucial to his choice of music as a profession. At first, though, it was the guitar (the 1960s instrument par excellence) that he chose to study. But the lifestyle experiments of the 1960s brought the hippie movement, openness to alternative religions and religious expression as well as ethnic music into the sphere of experience that became the basis of Hegaard's artistic idiom when he began his composition studies with Ib Nørholm at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.