Ihsahn — Vegard Sverre Tveitan, born in Norway on 10 November 1975 — is Emperor's singer, guitarist, keyboard player and principal composer, and one of the most technically respected musicians to come out of the Norwegian scene of the 1990s. His contribution was to take black metal into territory it did not occupy. While the scene Emperor emerged from prized deliberate rawness and the refusal of technique, Ihsahn wrote arrangements with symphonic keyboards, harmonies in several voices, changes of metre and long structures. In the Nightside Eclipse (1994) and above all Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (1997) founded symphonic black metal — a subgenre that would become one of the style's most popular branches in Europe. His training is classical and he never hid it: the harmonic vocabulary of Emperor's albums comes from art music, not from rock, and it is what allows seven-minute tracks to hold tension without repeating a formula. Since Emperor ended in 2001 he has kept a solo career in which he moved progressively away from black metal, taking in jazz, progressive rock and even saxophone — the path of someone who treats composition as a craft in evolution rather than a fixed identity. He returned to performing with the band's reunion from 2013.
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