Per Norgard, Daring Symphonic Composer, Dies at 92
Per Norgard, a prolific and daring Danish composer whose radiant experiments with sound, form and tonality earned him a reputation as one of the leading latter-day symphonists, died on May 28 in Copenhagen. He was 92.
His death, at a retirement home, was announced by his publisher, Edition Wilhelm Hansen.
Mr. Norgard (pronounced NOR-gurr) composed eight symphonies, 10 string quartets, six operas, numerous chamber and concertante works and multiple scores for film and television, making him the father of Danish contemporary music. Following his death, he was described as 'an artist of colossal imagination and influence' by the critic Andrew Mellor in the British music publication Gramophone.
Mr. Norgard's musical evolution encompassed the mid-20th century's leading styles, including Neo-Classicism, expressionism and his own brand of serialism, and incorporated a wide range of influences, including Javanese gamelan music, Indian philosophy, astrology and the works of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli.
But he considered himself a distinctively Nordic composer, influenced by the 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 the Norwegian Edvard Grieg — have echoes in Mr. Norgard's fragmented sound world.
The delirious percussive expressions of Mr. Norgard's 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 'And to let him know that I didn't consider him out of date.'
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