When the 17-years-old Nørgård
became the pupil of Vagn Holmboe, it was the force of
destiny. For Holmboe's concept of ‘metamorphosis', the
idea of a musical embryo in continuous organic
transformation, was made to measure for Nørgård's
temperament. In Constellations for 12 solo strings (1958),
he started using the principle not only on motifs, but also
on rhythm and tempo. The musical ideas, which he was later
to keep circling around, seem present in an embryonic state
here. Organic change occurs at all levels, and first and
foremost is the experience that time - the stuff music is
made of - is not something just going like clock-work. Time
is also a miniature world, which in close-up proves to be
full of life and colour, endlessly complex and
multi-layered. Experiencing time as layers, like a river
with countless tributaries and deltas, was to become the
clearest of all the threads throughout Nørgård's
ongoing metamorphosis.
In a series of works called Fragments he
left forever the severity of the Nordic provinces. Fragment
VI for orchestra is exalted and aggressive in its protest
against Nordic isolation, aloof respectability and
traditional craftsmanship. This work belongs to the heaviest
armada breaking ice for new Danish music. Technically it was
related to Darmstadt, and it won international acclaim, but
for once in his life Nørgård had not complied
with his ears, and he withdrew the work! What was an
epoch-making event in the history of Danish music had become
a parenthesis in his own.
What followed was a period of
reconnaissance, with each work like a fragment of a greater
whole. The friction between the extrovert and the introvert
in his music of this period never occurs so strongly
argumented again. Didactic musico-dramatic works such as The
Judgement and Babel are grand, comic and scary frescoes of
western music viewed as a case of Babylonic confusion, and a
host of ‘musics' interact here, some vulgar, some
sublime. In the opera The Labyrinth (1963) and in the ballet
The Young Man to be Married (after a synopsis by Ionesco,
1964), parody and the grotesque also prevail, but the music
eerily blurs all musical class distinctions, between art and
kitsch, vice and virtue. In works such as Iris (1967) and
Luna (1968), however, Nørgård's orchestral
polyphony begins to sing like a thousand voices, creating
large, vibrating webs of sound. Opposing the musical
establishment and the noisy musical consumerism there is a
dream of pure, intimate and profound beauty; a music capable
of opening the mind, making it flow and drift, and so open
itself as to allow the ears to ‘focus', to penetrate
down into the deepest layers. In Voyage into the Golden
Screen (1968), Nørgård focused his attention on
another miniature world, that of the overtones, in such a
creative way that composers far from Denmark found
inspiration for their own work (the so-called
‘spectral music'). In this work, Nørgård's
so-called ‘infinity series' is clearly unfolded, after
years of a secret life just below the surface. Technically,
it is a principle of growth where one single initial
interval is symmetrically mirrored up and down, thus
creating new intervals, which, when the process is repeated,
creates new intervals ad infinitum. This endless melody
proves a veritable Chinese box: built into each other and
endlessly intertwined you will find the same shapes and
structures over and over, great and smalI - a distinct
anticipation of the principle concerning the so-called
‘fractals' discovered by mathematicians some ten years
later.
Exploring the many aspects of this
universal, regular world kept Nørgård busy for
a number of years, culminating in the huge Symphony No. 3
(1974). But already the opera Siddharta (1975-79) upset
harmony anew; not only the music, but the dramatic plot
itself exemplifies how order and harmony are shattered when
confronted with the darker side of existence, with fear,
chaos and suffering. Subsequently Nørgård
encountered the work of Swiss artist and schizophrenic Adolf
W¹lfli (created in an asylum, where he spent most of his
life), which did more than anything to make irrationality,
conflict and instability surface once again in Nørgård's
music, yet this time not as pluralism and chaos, but as the
inevitable counterpart to universal order (Symphony No. 4).
In the opera The Divine Tivoli Nørgård puts W¹lfli
himself on the stage.
The composer's recent works are more
intimate, open and vulnerable than ever; a subtle
equilibrium confronts uncontrollable forces. The three
concertos for strings from the 1980s show completely new
aspects of this confrontation. Nørgård
continues his exploration of the stratification of time. In
the concertos for cello (Between, 1985), viola (Remembering
Child, 1986) and violin (Helle Nacht, 1988), accentuation,
metre, and beat constantly reveal new melodies within
melodies. The orchestral work, Spaces of Time (1991) and
Concerto in due tempi (1995) are voyages into or out of
time. They have led the composer to a climate of expression,
for which I have no better word than surrealistic.
In the chamber opera Nuit des hommes (1996)
and the string quartet Night Descending (1997; derived from
the opera), however, the atmosphere is unmistakably
characterised by the horrors and inhumanity of war, and the
music contains some of the most profoundly moving and
universal emotional expressions in Nørgård's
oeuvre.
Nørgård's latest symphonies
stand out as skyscrapers in Danish music. The Fifth
resembles none of its predecessors. It is about balance and
turbulence, order and chaos, experienced in an almost
physical way. The long-awaited Sixth Symphony (At the End of
the Day), composed to receive its first performance in one
of the very first days of the new millennium, emphasizes the
composer's conviction that the end is never final.
There are those who travel as tourists, and
those who travel to escape. Per Nørgård is a
traveller in quest of a total vision of life and existence,
unwilling to accept official myths or contemporary prejudice
at face value, but himself a seer by inclination and
conviction; a believer in doubt, a doubter of belief. Per Nørgård's
output mirrors both his untiring curiosity and his sense of
responsibility to music as a bearer of culture. In his
pursuit of hidden treasures in the sensual world and with
his conscious penetration into the collective unconscious
Per Nørgård 's music genuinely expresses values
and experiences we all share. Which is rare indeed in a
musical world seemingly content with the pursuit of
individuality.
(based on an essay by Karl Aage Rasmussen
trans. by Rosalind Bevan)
Symphony No. 6
...with the Lord a day is like a thousand
years, and a thousand years are like a day
(New Testament, 2 Pe 3: 8)
My Symphony No. 6 was commissioned by the
Danish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, the Göteborg
Symphony Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. It
was premiered during the Millennium celebrations in 2000.
The subtitle At the End of the Day can be
understood literally or it can mean ‘when all is added
up'. However, in my opinion, nothing ever quite adds up,
there is always ‘something' missing, any ending may be
provisional...
This symphony appears to end only a few
minutes into the first movement (the first passage), as the
music fades away to near-silence, after a brilliant start.
But then there is still ‘something', a small motif
(first heard in the initial sound-waves) which reappears,
hesitant, but persistent, and this embryo is what leads the
musical progression. An agitated section of many
instrumental voices comes next, until all the voices become
obsessed with the same phrase, a see-saw motif based on
thirds. This section evolves into almost martial ferocity,
when broken off by a tutti descent into an extreme
bass-world (a bass-world, which actually permeates the whole
symphony, employing instruments that I have never used
before: double-bass tuba, double-bass trombone, double-bass
clarinet, and bass flute).
The second movement (the second passage)
apparently takes off where the first passage ends, but now
the events are more ambiguous, and the same music may be
perceived as fast-moving one moment and slow-moving the
next. This section is a kind of passacaglia, a
characteristic Baroque basso-ostinato variation form.
Without a break follows the third and last
passage, in a contrasting high register. The music is
rhythmically knotty as well as freely flowing. As in the
beginning of the symphony, a never-ending descent or fall
breaks off the events, and at the very end a delta of new
beginnings, of ‘other worlds', is revealed...
The symphony is dedicated to Helle, my
wife.
Per Nørgård
