Danish composer Per Nørgård has a vast catalogue of over four hundred works released over sixty years. These works include six operas, several ballets, eight symphonies, music for orchestra, concertos, choral and vocal works, chamber music (of which there are ten string quartets), and pieces for solo instruments. Despite limited access to production, he is nevertheless known to the wider public as the composer of the score for Gabriel Axel’s 1988 Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast and author of a piano arrangement of the Beatles song “Blackbird.”

Nørgård studied from 1949 to 1951 with Vagn Holmboe (a disciple of Carl Nielsen) and again with him as professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Music where he studied for five years. The following year, from 1956 to 1957, Nørgård studied in France with Nadia Boulanger. Quickly, Nørgård began teaching music, first at the Odense Conservatory, where he taught piano, composition, and music theory until 1961, before returning to the Royal Danish Academy of Music from 1960 to 1965. He then joined the Royal Academy of Music Aarhus where, in 1987, he became professor.

After a period of experimentation in musical collage at the end of the 1950s, Nørgård began the 1960s with a keen interest in serial music, developing his own technique called the infinity series. This technique was an extrapolation of his teacher Holmboe’s conception of metamorphosis, which was the idea of a musical embryo caught in a constant state of organic transformation. The nucleus of this idea can be heard in Nørgård’s Constellations (1958). This technique was founded on the process of perpetual self-generation in a series, in which the same musical structures are reintroduced at different levels of a composition, renewed each time. The technique dominated Nørgård’s scores from the 1960s and beyond, notably Voyage into the Golden Screen (1968) and Symphony No. 2 (1970), the entire structure of which is determined by infinity series. In the 1970s, Nørgård developed similar concepts related to infinity in rhythm and harmony. His Symphony No. 3 (1972-1975) became the archetype of this hierarchical technique.

In 1979, upon visiting an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Nørgård discovered the work of Adolf Wölfli, the schizophrenic Swiss art brut (outsider art) painter. Wölfli’s musical cryptograms inspired Nørgård to turn his compositional practice toward expressionism, introducing shifts in intensity, abrupt changes of climate, violent sound modifications, and general interruptions to musical flow. This emergence of conflict and irrationality in his work came directly in response to the previous decade, in which he had been inclined toward compositions based on mathematical regularity. A large number of his most important works date from this later period, such as Wie ein Kind (Like a Child, 1980), Symphony No. 4 (1981), I Ching (1982), and an opera on the life of Wölfli, The Divine Circus (1982).

In the 1980s, Nørgård began exploring the temporal dimensions of composition with Remembering Child (1986) and the concerto for violin and orchestra Helle Nacht (Bright Night, 1988). He investigated the stratification of time by surveying the tempo of such melodies where accentuation, meter, and rhythm continuously reveal new melodies within melodies. Nørgård equated this to a turning prism or fractals.

Spiritually saturated, Nørgård’s oeuvre was in a state of constant renewal, with no breaks in its aesthetic development. The opposing themes of chaos and universal order create a singular stylistic tiling, exemplified by Nørgård’s belief that “existence is based on my conception of non-equilibrium as the basis of life at all levels.”¹

Awards

• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, 2016
• Wilhelm Hansen Composer Prize, 2000
• Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, 1957

^{1. The original French can be found in Jean-Luc CARON, “L’itinéraire esthétique de Per Nørgård en constant renouvellement,” ResMusica, 20 March 2017 (accessed 17 May 2023). ↩}