Aesthetics

By Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen

• Interference
• A model of humanity
• New awareness

Interference

What is interference?

The concept of interference is the central source from which all of Per Nørgård's music flows.

In connection with Nørgård's music, interference means that two different musical events evoke a third event in the consciousness of the listener. In "Retrospect - while moving forwards!" (1982) Per Nørgård explained his use of the concept as follows:

For me, 'something between' or 'intermediary' interference, means, amongst other things, that what is most important is not manifested physically. As is well-known, 'subjective', non-electrically produced tones come about when two oscillators each produce their own wave. [...]

However, interference covers more than just this simple phenomenon. Two different patterns can also produce interference. Per Nørgård gives the example of bell-ringing, where there are two bells each swinging in its own tempo, so that they are out of step with each other all the time:

This elementary tonal phenomenon can be recognised in a rhythmic form in the familiar two-bell duet heard in [Danish - tr. note] churches - as an extended metrical-formal simultaneity that creates interference.

Moreover, as Nørgård indicates with the phrase, 'metrical-formal simultaneity', two fixed rhythmic patterns, or even two different form characteristics can run simultaneously and thus create interference.

The phenomenon of interference as an aesthetic choice

By persistently working with the phenomenon of interference, Nørgård draws the listener's attention to the fact that this 'something more' than the sound that is physically produced arises within (or perhaps 'between'...) the ears of the listener, and only here. By thus focusing on the listener, Nørgård stresses that music must consist of perceivable elements - melody, rhythm, sound - which the listener can catch, or 'almost catch'. For as a matter of fact, it is often the case with Nørgård's music that the interfering structures shift so rapidly that they appear to be transient, or, if you like, ambiguous.

Thus, Nørgård's aesthetic calls for a type of music that consists of perceivable elements.

In an interview on the occasion of his 60th birthday (published in the German journal, Musiktexte No. 50, 1993), Nørgård himself described the kind of music he wanted to write:

[..] a kind of music which in an almost indescribable way bore within itself a major musical statement, and yet at the same time apparently seemed to materialise in the given moment because it could not do otherwise than materialise in that moment. In other words, a music not governed by an absolute ruler, nor consisting of a series of discrete nows without memory or recollection of each other. Neither alternative seems human enough to me.
(Zwischen Chaos... page 35).

The following explanatory comments by the composer reveal that he understands the term 'interference' in a very wide sense.

It's this, that the music seems harmless enough for even my aunt to be able to follow it [...], and yet the more you listen to it, the more incomprehensible it in fact becomes.

In other words, music that gives the impression that one can get hold of it relatively easily in terms of form, style and so on, apparently anyway, but which in fact contains within it an endless series of repeating mirrors.
(Zwischen Chaos... page 35).

In this case there is interference both between the immediate, simple sense impression and the complexity behind it, and between the various levels of the music.

The interference between what is immediately comprehensible and the unfathomable mystery behind can be described as follows:

I am drawn by a kind of music which makes a sort of promise: "Its all right, you can understand this", but which at the same speaks with another voice that says: "Look at the bird, it's here - it's not moving, the bird, look, it's here, it's here, it's here"..

And while one perhaps is thus absorbed in this bird world, the music has moved on somewhere else [..]

I dream of a kind of music in which the forms, that is, the musical forms, provide a foreground and a background for each other. This might be a rhythm, or a resounding theme, clear and pregnant with meaning, like the one in Beethoven's Ninth.
(Zwischen Chaos... page 31).

The task of the listener in relation to all this is to choose between the various elements in the music, or rather, to compare them, to experience the way they interfere.

On the other hand, this is a task that calls for time, absorption and concentration, and the listener has to be prepared for this. I have to admit quite unreservedly that none of my aunts would feel that Nørgård's music was holding out a hand to them.