Today marks the 90th birthday of the phenomenally imaginative, innovative, and prolific Per Nørgård. The eminent Danish composer, born in Copenhagen in 1932, grew up in a non-musical family but showed talent at an early age. The evolution of his musical language has been fascinating to behold, moving from an identification with the sound world of Sibelius and “the universe of the Nordic mind” (his phrase) to experiments with European Modernism, the development of a unique kind of serialism through his “infinity series” method, and on to the astonishing series of transformations in his style ever since.
Fellow composer Karl Aage Rasmussen describes Nørgård’s inspirations as based in an openness to “the unending variety in nature, the endless connections between things, and not least the infinitely complex universe represented by any sound, no matter how modest.”
Filed under: music news, Per Nørgård
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 