This is a composer I don't know much about. I remember years ago being impressed by his Second Symphony (based on a systematic unfolding of his fractal-like "infinity series") and the Fourth (using as its starting point the writings, art and music of Adolf Wölfli, as quite a few of Nørgård's pieces did around the same time) but I haven't heard them for a long time and I don't know any of his other work at all. I might as well admit that my main reason for starting the thread was to gather a little information in view of the fact that there's a number of Nørgård CDs in MDT's current Chandos sale. He seems now to be less talked-about than he was in the 1980s. Any comments/recommendations?

Just spotted this thread. I'm quite a fan, though there's a lot of his work I don't know (he's quite prolific), in particular the works of the 'Wölfli' period (early 80s), which I don't know at all.

His output seems to be generally thought of as divisible into various consecutive periods - rather like Ligeti, perhaps. And indeed -- after a 'student' period, up to and including Symphony No 1 'Sinfonia austera', in which he seems to have stayed fairly close to his Scandinavian teachers and influences (Holmboe etc.) -- he seems, very much like Ligeti, to have been freed up by Central European developments he encountered in the early 60s not to imitate the 'Darmstadt generation' but certainly to do something more radical and interesting than he had conceived before.

In Nørgård's case this primarily involved the development of a sort of proto-minimalist technical device called the infinity series (or infinity row), which is essentially a melodic line in which every 2nd, 4th, 8th etc. (or 3rd, 9th, 27th, ... as you will) note can be picked out to form another line which is identical in intervallic content to the first. In the simplest example this would be an inversion in double rhythmic augmentation, and an actual identikit in quadruple augmentation, viz.:

G - Ab - F# - A - Ab - G - F - Bb - F# - A - G - Ab - A - F# - E - Bb - etc.

(You'll notice that the even-numbered pitches also pick out the basic melodic shape a semitone higher.)

Now, this might not seem especially interesting except as an automatic generator of somewhat crabbed-sounding melodies, but what Nørgård does with it in a piece like Voyage into the Golden Screen is quite extraordinary: the basic line is played 'straight' in quite fast quavers throughout the 5-or-so-minute second movement (bear in mind that another property of the series is to go on forever without ever exactly self-replicating at the micro-level, in complete contradistinction to the proliferation of fractal equivalences at other levels), while picking out regular but slower rhythms in other instruments to produce a rather disconcerting Escher-like effect of the same thing being heard in multiple superimpositions whose precise interrelation the brain finds surprisingly hard to analyse.

The first movement of Voyage ... (it's in two movements) doesn't use an infinity series at all, nor does it have much melodic content, but is a sort of proto-spectral exploration of two, well, spectra, based respectively around G and G quarter-sharp, which seems to me to 're-tune' your ears in a way which only adds to the weirdly illusionistic sound of the (contrastingly equal-tempered and otherwise only obliquely related) second movement.

Sorry for the long analytical spiel. I should be out in the sun. That piece is on a DaCapo CD and is well worth getting as an introduction to Nørgård's work, but I don't know if the DaCapo stuff is in MDT's sale. If they're focusing on the Chandos issues, the Second Symphony also is based on a relatively straightforward linear presentation of an infinity series (the same one, I think, though extended for much longer).

Later works tend to be more inventive than you might have guessed was possible in finding both new poetic applications and technical extensions (e.g. something called 'tone lakes', which Nørgård discovered in the 80s around the time of the Fifth Symphony (or maybe the Fourth, I forget)) of the infinity series. In the Wölfli period (which includes the Fourth Symphony, subtitled something like 'Witches' Garden and Chinese Rose-Lake', as well as an opera and several other pieces) I believe the sound-world and harmonic language got more varied and in places fiercer - as I said, I don't know these works, but I can believe it, based on the much wider range of the Sixth Symphony, which I like very much (I've picked up on a general sense among Nørgård fans that it's somehow a falling-off, though I can't really hear why, except maybe that it's less processually single-minded than some (but not all!) of the earlier works; to me the knife-edge orchestration of just the opening bars, a bit like Carceri d'Invenzione I but shinier, less 'vulgar', is enough to keep my ears awake for the next half-hour).

I rather liked Nuit des hommes, especially the electronics, though I haven't followed it with the libretto, so I'll beg to differ with xyzzz__ on that one. If I were you, though, I'd start with Symphonies 2-6, which should set you back the price of four Chandos CDs from MDT I think. And the 3rd comes coupled with the rather special Piano Concerto, called (rather confusingly) 'Concerto in due tempi', which pretty much shows the 'early mature' style (1970s) at its best.

I'd also get the DaCapo Voyage into the Golden Screen, if it's on sale. And there's a new disc of chamber and ensemble music with harp on the same label which is supposed to be very good, though it's still sitting in my 'to listen to' pile at home.

One finds no beauty in them.

One has the impression that he is making them up as he goes along, using ineffectual and ultimately unmemorable gestures from moment to moment, without any overarching plan. They are not organic wholes; hence they are unworthy candidates, really, for consideration as works of Art.

We class him therefore as no more than a sixth rater among the known composers.

Not so well up on Schnittke, though I think he's due for a reappraisal once I've got through Shosta. Fascinated by the thought that there are unknown composers among whom Schnittke would no longer be a sixth-rater ...

Just edited some typos out of my long Nørgård post. Voyage ... is here (definitely worth getting for the Second Violin Concerto too, which I'd forgotten was on the same disc: a recent work not dissimilar to Ligeti's Violin Concerto in the strange aural world it inhabits by virtue of some very involved microtonal operations, though structurally you might find it interestingly messier than the Ligeti):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/N%C3%B8rg%C3%A5rd-Violin-Concerto-Voyage-Golden/dp/B0000X7KFA/ref=sr_1_1/203-0733541-3225529?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1176204608&sr=8-1

Also noticed that this (usually rather expensive) book is going for some very reasonable asking prices on Marketplace:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1859283136/ref=sr_1_olp_13/203-0733541-3225529?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1176203426&sr=8-13

Definitely worth getting, if the CDs pique your interest enough for some further reading.

You're getting very free with your kisses.

Thanks for the link there. I'd been looking for the only recording of Voyage I knew about, which was coupled with the opera Gilgamesh, and that seems to have disappeared, but I thought you might have one you could... hence the... never mind. <blush>

Having worked through it with painful slowness, my bid for the prize is that the note number 16 (it would be the ruddy last one....) should be a B not a Bb.

If I've got it wrong this message gets deleted so it would be a very cruel and heartless person indeed who quoted it for posterity before I had a chance to do that.   

Regarding that book on Nørgård, can anyone explain why the Amazon price is £55, the new copies at the Marketplace are mostly around £15, while at the same time there are three second hand copies at around £115? Are these just random numbers, or what?

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your comments, which have been noted here with interest.

The prices for the book in question were established by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, KBE.

After sufficient customer complaints we would be most willing to ask our moderator Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to re-calculate the prices based on his flawless 'magic square' technique.

Yours,

The Amazon Team