Per Norgard: Controlled chaos

Per Norgard's Sixth Symphony has its UK premiere at Monday's BBC Prom. And about time too, says Martin Anderson - his expressive complexity deserves a live audience

Wednesday 24 July 2002 19:00 EDT
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For a country that was one of the first outside Finland to take Sibelius to its heart, Britain has been remarkably slow off the mark in appreciating the major Danish symphonists. Carl Nielsen's six life-enhancing symphonies didn't become a CD staple until 50 years after his death, and they're still concert rarities. Vagn Holmboe wrote 15 symphonies, the last premiered in Copenhagen in 1996, just before his death at the age of 86. And yet almost none of these muscular, powerful works have enjoyed a live performance in this country.

Incredibly, it's only now that Per Norgard – Holmboe's heir and student, and one of the towering figures of contemporary music – is getting a hearing at the Proms, with the UK premiere of his Sixth Symphony on 30 July, performed by the visiting Danish National Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard. And it's not as if Norgard (pronounced something like "nur-gor", but make sure you throttle those concluding Rs) were some aspiring young talent waiting to attract attention – he has just turned 70.

Mind you, the sense of quiet energy he exudes hardly suggests a septuagenarian. With his tanned, weather-beaten face, unruly wisps of blonde hair and disdain for formality, you'd be more likely to take him for a well-worn tour-group leader. Yet the casual manner obscures one of the most original thinkers in music alive today.

Norgard is neither traditionalist nor modernist – in fact, he's a fusion of both, with a deep admiration for the cohesion of Sibelius and a habit of pushing ever outwards the degree of expressive complexity that music can achieve. Even at the very outset of his career, Norgard was never an explicitly "Nordic" composer. What his work has in common with Sibelius's, and with Nielsen's and Holmboe's, is a central concern with energy, with music as a form of natural, organic growth.

The means with which he has realised his aims have evolved as a Hegelian thesis, antithesis and synthesis across the half-century of his career. At the end of the 1950s, Norgard discovered what he called the "infinity row", an extension to music of the hierarchical relationships found in nature, in scientific theory, in social relationships. It enabled him to generate a theoretically infinite number of pitches from a given musical unit – a melodic scrap, a tone-row – by projection of their intervals, to produce music in ever-expanding structures.

The results were first heard in fully developed form in the orchestral work Voyage into the Golden Screen (1968) and the Second Symphony (1970). The endless variety produced by the infinity row seemed to threaten manic profusion. But the row simultaneously generated discipline. It sounded like a tightly controlled chaos, some boiling life-force that nonetheless obeyed natural laws.

At the time, Norgard had no idea he was applying a sequence first articulated 60 years before by the Norwegian mathematician Axel Thue, nor that he had independently discovered the basis of fractal theory developed by Benoit Mandelbrot, who devised the infinitely expanding patterns known as Mandelbrot sets. Indeed, Norgard roared with amused delight when he discovered that Voyage into the Golden Screen is accredited in the mathematics literature with the first adumbration of a particular theoretical principle.

The antithesis to this world of uneasy order came in 1979, when Norgard discovered the paintings of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), whose fantastic, disorderly visions suggested to the composer that his music lacked spontaneity – another illustration of the productive tension that draws him between chaos and control. The following "Wölfli period", Norgard explains, "was necessary for developing a new openness for rhythm and musical melodic inventions."

The central preoccupation of the Sixth Symphony is bass sound – the sounds below the ones we normally listen to. "I have a feeling that there's a negligence towards the deeper areas in western music. We use the bass as a kind of accompaniment to the real music in the middle registers. I felt an attraction towards finding the nuances: it's not only black – there are many colours down there." Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: on a beach holiday in India, Norgard identified a fundamental tone underlying the noise of the sea outside his window.

The Sixth Symphony has just been released by Chandos (CHAN 9904), in a fine recording with the same orchestra and conductor as in the Prom. But the unusual timbres suggest we really ought to experience it live: "This bass orientation demanded a very special orchestra, because I needed a double-bass clarinet, not only a bass clarinet. I needed also a double-contrabassoon, and some wonderful double-bass tuba – an instrument which goes below the piano, down to the deep C sharp."

The Sixth Symphony bears a title, too: At the End of the Day. Why? "It means there's always something more – at the end of the day there's always a new day to come. The symphony starts very high up, with wavering tones – flute, strings and whatever – but getting closer and closer to touching bass areas. And then in one moment all the deep bass comes in together."

Norgard strides to the piano and punches out the sound of the four bass tubas he uses right at the bottom of the register. "It's a situation where you have sanity but also the mystery at the same time. It seems as if the symphony ends. But then there's a reminiscence from the beginning which returns – and it becomes the germ of a new development. That's the model for the work: each time you think it's finished, there's always something more behind. You think that this very forceful sinking-down of the bass, fortissimo, is the end, but there are left pianissimo strings with some ethereal melodic stuff in the high treble. And in my mind, the composition had ended there.

"But then late at night, as I was going to bed, I heard a deep bass layer, big bass drums but pianissimo, tambourine, harp harmonic and a piano. I wrote it down like dictation. It's only half a minute – and that's now the end of the Sixth Symphony. It's absolutely nothing you've heard before in the work. It's the end of the day – and the very last thing is a tone you've never heard."

How readily does Norgard think his audience can grasp the complexity of his work? He shrugs with genuine modesty. "Who can conceive the full complexity of any complex music? How much can you conceive, in fact, of a Bach fugue for organ? I like music where you don't just see down to the bottom from the beginning and say, 'That's that.' I like the mystery."

The Sixth Symphony will be performed at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on 30 July at 7.30pm. It will be broadcast live on Radio 3, repeated 2 Aug 2pm (020-7589 8212; www.bbc.co.uk/proms)

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