Per Norgard, daring symphonic composer, dies at 92

Boston Globe

04-06-2025

Mr. Norgard's musical evolution encompassed the mid-20th century's leading styles, including neoclassicism, expressionism ,and his own brand of serialism, and it incorporated a wide range of influences, including Javanese gamelan music, Indian philosophy, astrology, and the works of schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli.
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But he considered himself a distinctively Nordic composer, influenced by Finnish symphonist Jean Sibelius, and that was how newcomers to his music often approached him. The infinite, brooding landscapes of Sibelius -- along with the intensifying repetitions in the work of Mr. Norgard's Danish compatriot Carl Nielsen and the obsessive, short-phrase focus of Norwegian Edvard Grieg -- have echoes in Mr. Norgard's fragmented sound world.
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The delirious percussive expressions of his composition 'Terrains Vagues' (2000), the plinking raindrops of the two-piano, four-metronome 'Unendlicher Empfang' (1997), and the vast, discontinuous fresco of the Eighth Symphony (2011) all evoke the black-and-white northern vistas of Sibelius, with their intense play of light and shadow.
As a young student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen in the early 1950s, he was immersed in the music of Sibelius, writing to the older composer and receiving encouragement in return. 'When I discovered there was a kind of unity in his music, I was obsessed with the idea of meeting him,' he said in an interview. 'And to let him know that I didn't consider him out of date.'
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The two never did manage to meet. But Sibelius, who died in 1957, was a lifelong inspiration and mentor from afar.
'From the moment I discovered the music of Sibelius, I felt in much more of a relationship with his music' than with that of fellow Danish composers, Mr. Norgard said in a 2012 interview.
'There are the long horizons. And a feeling, maybe, of a kind of nostalgia,' he added.
Mr. Norgard developed a unique compositional technique he called the 'infinity series,' a slightly repeated, but constantly shifting, sequence of notes, which the British critic Richard Whitehouse described as 'a way of creating layers of melodies that move simultaneously at different speeds across the texture.'
That technique recalls what Mr. Norgard called the 'symmetric turning around' of Sibelius. Mr. Norgard himself aspired to a music in which 'everything came out of a single note,' he said, 'like the big bang.'
Both composers are credited with renewing, and prolonging the life of, the imperiled symphony.
Whitehouse called Mr. Norgard's Fifth Symphony (1990) 'arguably the most significant reappraisal of symphonic form in the past half-century.' Sibelius' own Fifth Symphony, composed in 1919, had been characterized the same way in its day; Mr. Norgard was inspired by what he called its 'growth, where different motifs are more and more connected, to a great vision of unity.'
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Mr. Norgard had a brief brush with popular consciousness with his hauntingly simple music for the film 'Babette's Feast' (1987), an adaptation of the 1958 story by Karen Blixen, writing under the pen name Isak Dinesen.
Despite his stature in Europe -- there were frequent recordings, some with major orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic -- Mr. Norgard found a muted reception in the United States. In 2014, he was awarded the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music by the New York Philharmonic, although the orchestra had 'never played a note of his music,' New York Times critic Alan Kozinn observed at the time.
A 2016 concert series, 'Norgard in New York,' went some ways toward remedying the neglect. David Allen wrote in The New York Times that 'at its strongest, Mr. Norgard's music has an unbridled organic power, bursting with overlapping lines inspired by mathematical patterns like the golden ratio or natural forces like the rush of an ocean or the dwindling bounce of a ball.'
Mr. Norgard, for his part, described his award from the New York orchestra, two years earlier, as 'quite mysterious.'
Per Norgard was born July 13, 1932, in Gentofte, Denmark, north of Copenhagen, the younger son of Erhardt Norgard, a tailor who owned a wedding-dress shop, and Emmely Johanne Nicoline (Christensen) Norgard.
He was composing piano sonatas by the age of 10. At 17, he began studying with the leading Danish composer Vagn Holmboe, and in 1952, he entered the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where he continued his composition studies. From 1956 to 1957, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who taught many of the 20th century's leading composers, a period that led him to write at least one Neo-Classical work in the Stravinsky mold.
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Under the tutelage of Boulanger, he rebelled somewhat against her hyper-French, Neo-Classical universe, advocating, in an article, engagement with 'the universe of the Nordic mind.'
Teaching at Danish conservatories in Odense, Copenhagen, and Aarhus followed, along with music criticism for the daily Politiken newspaper. By the early 1960s, Mr. Norgard had developed the 'infinity series' concept, which began with experiments with simple piano pieces.
A steady stream of large-scale choral, symphonic, and chamber works resulted, culminating in his last major composition, the Eighth Symphony, which Mellor likened to the works of Mahler, the 'idea that the symphony strives absolutely to contain the world -- that the composer is offering us a glimpse of the universe.'
Mr. Norgard's wife, Helle Rahbek, died in 2022. He leaves a daughter, Ditte, and a son, Jeppe, from an earlier marriage, to Anelise Brix Thomsen, that ended in divorce.
In an interview with the New York Philharmonic in 2014, after being awarded the Kravis prize, Mr. Norgard described his compositional technique, and discussed the 'infinity series.'
It was 'a kind of homage to the mystery of life,' he said, 'which has always been a guiding line for my music.'
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