Klaus Ib Jørgensen's works for accordion - from solo and duo music through chamber music to concerto - form not only a group of works with a common instrumental denominator, but also a natural gateway to the composers musical universe. For the instruments musical-technical potential, which ranges to the extremes within most musical parameters, appeals greatly to Klaus Ib Jørgensen's musical thinking, in which the opposition of well nigh all conceivable extremes is a crucial aspect of the impetus of the music. The contrasts well out of Klaus Ib Jørgensen's music, and vital energy is liberated in the friction and the encounters between the opposite expressive poles - between hectic density and breathless suspension, between intangible airiness and insistent presence, between the sound of brightest light and gloomiest darkness, between fragile and violent, high and low.

Because of this wish to navigate through expressive extremes along an elastic timeline, the musical elements appear to have been formed intuitively and freely - and without prejudice. And yet one senses behind the teeming energy and the will to expression a restraining consciousness of form. But even though the proportions of the works may be calculated in minute detail, they are usually experienced as organic rather than mathematical. The unfolding of the music is governed, in both the short and the long, work-oriented temporal perspective, by a sense of process and timing that can best be characterized as epic/dramatic. This is almost thematically expressed in a group of chamber music works with Greek titles: the two early works from the beginning of the 1990s, Prologue - Stasimon - Epilogue and Epeisodion, and in the works Kommos (1995) and Parodos (1996/97). In these works as in others, the course of the music follows a narrative logic that extends further than the momentary musical point and permeates the whole work.

We find a dramaturgy of a different, but no less "speaking" nature in the accordion concerto Temperature (1993), which, with several performances on both Danish and Swedish radio and a presentation at the UNESCO Rostrum for Young Composers in 1996, became a breakthrough work for Klaus Ib Jørgensen. The music moves through a number of "energy states" characterized by various degrees of activity and forms of motion. Here for the first time ? clearly audible in the first part of the work ? the composer uses a note-generation method which, with the aid of reflection and register distribution principles, produces most of the material of the work from a four-note aggregate. This method of developing musical "matter" is used to generate the tonal material in a number of later works including Moments (1995/99) for piano solo and Per Archi (1997) for string orchestra, as well as the above-mentioned Kommos and Parodos, although it is not as immediately audible in these works as in the accordion concerto.

The thinking behind this principle for generating material is indebted to Per Nørgård's "infinity series", but the characteristics of the material and its tonal manifestation are quite different. Not least in the exploitation of the material, Klaus Ib Jørgensen takes a different approach from his older colleague. The note material is the basis of the work?s melodic/harmonic "climate", but it is organized in gestalts whose pointed, extreme formulation and often abruptly changing interrelationships make up the music?s particularly complex, sometimes jagged-sounding surfaces. Given this attitude to the material and the idiom, Klaus Ib Jørgensen thus inscribes himself in a perpetuation of the modernist path from the second half of the twentieth century in Denmark as represented by among others the composers Axel Borup-Jørgensen and Ivar Frounberg and, in Klaus Ib Jørgensen's own generation, Ejnar Kanding and Jexper Holmen. However, we are far from the soundscape of "old modernism" despite superficial resemblances in the extremity of the musical devices and the complexity of the music: Klaus Ib Jørgensen's music never or very rarely uses the traditional serial techniques characterized by extensive organization of the fundamental parameters of the music. The focus of Klaus Ib Jørgensen's freer treatment of his material is more general (and internally interrelated) parameters such as tempo, texture and the musical experience of time. The care he devotes to the internal balance of these parameters helps to give the extremely dense nature of the music a remarkable transparence, a quality that has becoming increasingly evident in Klaus Ib Jørgensen's output.

The works for accordion solo or duo and the works for accordion in combination with other instruments are an important strand in Klaus Ib Jørgensen?s oeuvre. But in addition he has worked in a number of other genres: one can mention Five Studies (1993) for marimba, the chamber opera The Bridegroom of Time (1992), Parodos II (2000) for sinfonietta, and the choral work As a Wife Has a Cow: a Love Story (2001).

Klaus Ib Jørgensen trained at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen in music theory (Yngve Jan Trede) and composition (Niels Rosing-Schow). Alongside his composing work he has been deeply involved ever since his student years in organizational and political work in the music field. In 1989 for example he was a co-founder of ATHELAS Sinfonietta Copenhagen and since 1993 he has been President of the Danish music publishing house Edition SAMFUNDET.