A model of humanity

"In creative art man must experience himself - his total self - as a cybernetic model" (Ronald D. Laing: the term 'cybernetic' here means in balance with oneself). In ordinary language this would mean, for example, that the Jupiter Symphony is a cybernetic model, an image of the human psyche, of man's total self. A totally [...] balanced musical masterpiece contains wisdom in the same way as a creation of nature (of which it has been said that the fibre structure of an ordinary  human thigh-bone is such a masterpiece that the combined engineering skills of our time would not be able to reproduce it). A work of art - and let me stick to music as the art form most devoid of short-term objectives - offers us a wise model of our own humanity!
(Følsomheden er en revolutionær pligt (Sensitivity is a Revolutionary Duty), 1974)

Nørgård's aesthetic taste dictates that music must be comprehensible, and this is closely connected with his understanding of the significance of music - his ethics of music.

As the above quotation indicates, man can learn something about his own being through music. The ears thus become the sense organs that can delve into and explore works of music, partly to catch the themes and internal connection of a piece of music and their significance, and partly to explore the being of the hearer. What effect does the music produce, how much can the ears perceive, what can be remembered? The natural corollary here is that the composer must create a piece of music with comprehensible components that can in fact be explored.

See also the sections on Phenomenology and on Myths

New awareness

'Human' music, which is built up around interferences and can contribute to a deeper knowledge of humanity, is created on the basis of a concept of 'Genuine' art. As the following quotation (from the interview on the occasion of Nørgård's 60th birthday) reveals, genuine art is art that discovers something new:

When they [a school of Danish landscape painters] appeared on the scene, a field was green, a tree trunk brown and the sky blue [..], but after Syberg and the others had demonstrated that a field might just as well be violet, a tree trunk bright red and the sky black, people began to see them like this. [..] There is a direct link from this to the idea that in order to be genuine, Art has to discover something that was not known before!

Nørgård goes on to offer a deeper explanation, showing that this 'genuineness' has nothing to do with 'nie erhörte klänge':

I am so taken up with the elementary things in life because I go around with this kind of childlike idea that from one moment to the next I can come to look at life in a new way; and in fact this has happened sometimes, with the result that my view of things has been definitively changed, as in the case of drops of water, for example: at one point I began to hear drops of water as tones [..]. In this way we can all the time come closer to hearing something which we did hot hear the day before.
(Zwischen Chaos... page 36).

(For a more through treatment of Nørgård's position based on an analysis of Martin A. Heidegger's work, Kunstværkets oprindelse, [Danish translation] Samlerens bogklub, Copenhagen, 1994, see Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen's Virkeligheden fortæller mig altid flere historier (Reality is always telling me new stories), The Funen Academy of Music, 1995).