Biography

In Paris

Nørgård lived in Paris with his wife from January 1956 to May 1957. He received the Lily Boulanger Award, which helped to finance their stay.

However, Paris was not just a bed of roses. Nadia Boulanger criticised the young composer for his 'provincialism', which really offended Nørgård. In Paris he was confronted with a sophisticated style of life, especially among those concert-goers who frequented the new 'scandal music' of Cage, Tudor and others - an affected and superficial lifestyle which he abhorred. He wrote his most Nordic works in this period and felt, as he once said in an interview, like a spiritual exile.

The composer as teacher and critic

In 1958 Nørgård was attached as a lecturer to the Funen Academy of Music in Odense, and remained there until 1961. In 1960 he also began to teach at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where he was a lecturer until 1965. Apart from his duties as a lecturer he was a music critic for the newspaper, Politiken, from 1958 to 1962.

Photo: Per Anders Hellquist

The photo on the left shows Nørgård teaching students at the Funen Academy of Music.

From the outset Nørgård was an influential teacher, a calling which he maintained alongside his work as a composer until he retired from the post of Professor in Composition at the Jutland Academy of Music in 1995. Of course, composing has always been the most important thing for him, and as a young man Nørgård was determined to earn a living as a composer. In fact, he is one of the very few Danish composers who has been able to realise this dream.

In those years I travelled to Odense every week to teach at the Academy of Music. As ‘Constellations’ calls for an incredible amount of concentration, I was afraid that the work would come to a halt because of the many unavoidable interruptions. Consequently, I decided to force myself to write at least one note a day. I grew accustomed to sitting down and composing during the ferry crossings over the Great Belt, and the experiences that accompanied these crossings were woven into the structure of the work itself: the steady forward movement of the ship, the dull rumbling of the engine, the regular sounds from the signal buoys fading away into the distance, and over it all the cries of the gulls...

Meeting with the European avant-garde

Back in his student days Nørgård had heard compositions by Stockhausen, Cage, Maderna and other avant-garde composers, but their works had exercised no particular influence on his own creative activity. He felt that the serial works were lacking in gestalt, nor was he attracted by musical happenings.

Even so, Nørgård was convinced that there was a need for new thinking in Denmark, and he was not alone in this: his fellow students, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and Ib Nørholm, who were of the same age, felt the same. They decided therefore to go on a trip together to the ISCM World Music Days in Cologne in 1960, along with Helmer Nørgaard. At this music festival a large number of works were performed which were, or were later to become, modern classics: Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, Maurizio Kagel's Anagrama, Stockhausen's Kontakte, Pierre Boulez’ Pli selon pli and Ligeti's Apparitions (as well as many other works, of course).


In a very readable article in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen has given an account of this trip, which was not only of considerable musical importance for the composers who took part in it, but was also marked by youthful high spirits and quantities of Rhenish hock, not surprising when four young men set off on a trip together in a Volkswagen.

Fragment VI

On their return from Cologne they decided to establish a study circle to focus on new ideas and techniques. 'They' included not only those mentioned above, but also Mogens Andersen, Poul Rovsing Olsen, Mogens Winkel Holm, Sven Erik Werner and a number of other well-known Danish composers. They met once a week to discuss, study, listen to works and carefully analyse them.

Whilst Per Nørgård at the time he was studying under Boulanger had felt removed from much of the new music, in the following years he increasingly experienced the need to know more about what was happening round about in the world of the modern composers. He began to analyse works by Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Schönberg and Webern, and to listen to the new electronic music - all before he went on the trip to Cologne! He reflected intensely on the philosophy of the new music, apparently feeling the same need as the European avant-garde to be released from convention and the tyranny of fixed ideas - although he was clearly often sceptical about the tonal effects achieved by the new composers. In an article entitled Tempelskænderne (Desecrators of the Temple) in the Lousiana Year Book 1959 (when he was in the middle of composing Fragment VI), he offered a detailed description of this situation, ending with a passage which could have been the conclusion of a manifesto - the manifesto of doubt:

He who steadfastly believes - in the incommensurable importance of music, apart from being entertainment, background noise and a plaything for initiates - must seek today with all his might to actuate this extreme tension between the will to individual self-expression and the challenge of the time. At all events this is not to be found in established conventions.
He must become a doubter.

Constellations places itself on the outer edge of the usual conception of tonal relationships, but Nørgård wanted to move further along the multipolyphonic road and to create new musical relationships, so he set off on the creation of a major 'serial' work which would encompass long musical distances. This was 'Fragment VI' for orchestra, which was composed in 1959 and revised in 1962.

He chose to enter precisely this work for the famous Gaudeamus Festival in Holland in 1961. The jury, which included both Krenek and Stockhausen, selected Nørgård's score. The young Danish composer won first prize for the best foreign work, an achievement which firmly established him on the international scene. The excerpt from the score shows the complicated notation, which at the time presented musicians with problems of interpretation.