Per Nørgård is one of the most original artists in the cultural life of Denmark. His work and efforts as composer, teacher, and theorist through almost half a century has had an enormous significance to the development of contemporary Danish art music. Nørgård has written works in all categories, for amateurs as well as for professionals: From large-scale operas to modest hymns, from simple movements to imposing edifices.
As a young man, Nørgård was a student of Vagn Holmboe, and indeed his early works display that he was inspired by the Nordic character of his teacher. From this period, the 1st Symphony and Constellations for strings are key works. During the last half of the 1950s, Nørgård expanded his compositional field of vision by exploring the new possibilities in the Central European modernism. His occupation with new structural approaches lead to the discovery of the so-called infinity row, a serial system or musical growth principle, which can be compared to the symmetrical formations of nature. This way of composing has been compared with fractional geometrical forms - edifying structures in an indefinite, hierarchical system. Amongst the works that employ this technique, the significant 3rd Symphony assumes a prominent position.
But in Per Nørgård, the artistic universe is connected from beginning to end as one big work in progress. This is a paradox, because, as mentioned, in his music through the years, the composer has been continuously breaking with his own traditions, in the name of self-transgression: Ironic pastiches, infinity rows, Golden Section proportions, beauty-seeking metaphysics in the 70s, via the wrestling of the 80s with great existential questions, centred around a large group of works strongly inspired by the schizophrenic artist Adolf Wölfli, to the experiments in the 90s with those phenomena that Nørgård himself calls ‘tone lakes’ - all these are constituent methods for generating new tone rows to support the superior will to express.
A survey of Nørgård’s output creates an image of a superior project: The wish to create music that unfolds like meetings between elements of differing natures. It may be the triteness of everyday-life that gains meaning in the middle of a pompous passage in a symphony. Rationality and spontaneity, structure and freedom, yin and yang, local and global, system and chaos, art and kitsch, construction and expression - in Per Nørgård’s universe, opposites are constantly taken into consideration. The tension or interference in Nørgård’s music is this dialectic between opposite tendencies in the different material layers.
Per Nørgård’s art constantly creates the vision that the potential of music is far greater than we think. The conductor Sergiu Celibidache once precisely expressed the potential of Nørgård’s large-scale, faultless creation: »Only the mind of a new time in the new millennium will be able to understand the scope of Nørgård’s music.«