Galaxy Anders Brødsgaard
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Galaxy Anders Brødsgaard Odense Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Austin hectic months. Galaxy is Brødsgaard’s most Anders BrødsgAArd volumi nous orchestral work to date with a (b. 1955) Anders BrødsgAArd duration of 42 minutes. In it he wanted to Anders Brødsgaard was born on the challenge the audience to try to span a huge Galaxy island of Funen in the mid-1950s, when amount of information without pauses for musical modernism was all the rage south breath. It should therefore be added that a of the Danish border. It was as if this distant CD recording may be the ideal medium for Odense symphony Orchestra thunder brought him his birthright, for in such a demanding work, as you can choose Christopher Austin his young, formative years he was totally ab- the time and place for listening to suit your- sorbed in modernism. Brødsgaard began as self. The orchestral ensemble is as ample a piano student, and his teachers included as in a Mahler symphony: it prescribes two two female champions of twentieth-century percussion groups with among other things music: Rosalind Bevan and Elisabeth Klein. two pianos, a harpsichord, two bass drums But soon his own creativity made its debut, and one tam-tam placed on each side of the 1 Galaxy (1990-93/1999) 42:38 and for some years pianist and composer platform. The strings often play divisi and at went hand in hand. In the work on music certain points have 25 different parts. Monk’s Mixtures (2009) 27:05 paper, too, he had outstanding mentors: Per Galaxy was composed as an attempt 2 1 Moving 8:41 Nørgård, Hans Abrahamsen and not least to challenge the ideologically entrenched 3 2 Walking (Passacaglia) 9:35 Karl Aage Rasmussen. These and many other thinking in con tem porary music, the 4 3 Flying 8:49 names have contributed to the blossoming struggle between the speculatively technical of a rare talent, a strong, richly faceted voice and the spiritually sensual. On one front, Total: 69:42 in Danish musical life who draws on his in symbolic form, you have the whole heritage but at the same time is constantly Darmstadt School and all it implies, and on his way towards new horizons. on the other mentors like Per Nørgård and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Why not bring these Galaxy two basic techniques toge ther and let the Anders Brødsgaard worked on this major work move between the two poles, alternate one-movement galactic work for two peri- between the introverted, passive and explo- ods. The first half was created in the years ratory processes like the harmony and the 1990-93, then it lay idle for a while. With a harmonic series, and the extroverted, active view to a first performance in 1999 the sec- and inventive processes like melody and Dacapo is supported by the Danish Arts Council Committee for Music ond part was finished in the course of three polyphony? In other words, an integration 3 of tonal and atonal music, triads and cluster and so on. Quickly added to the process is a Monk’s Mixtures Monk’s Mixtures emerges as an extremely chords, diatonic scales and twelve-tone rows. rising twelve-tone row in the double-basses, The jazz luminary Thelonious Monk, one of diverting work. One is tempted to add that it It became important in this process that as a theme that comes to proliferate in the first protagonists of bebop and a quite is ‘neo classical’, because it evokes associa- there had to be no ruptures – the music had what follows. For after a good 13 minutes unique piano artist, more or less consciously tions with the rhythmic magicians of the last to develop coherently, imperceptibly grow the double helix has moved forward to haunts Monk’s Mixtures (2009). Since his century: the play of shifting time signatures, and contract, smoothly change tempo, move twelve overlapping notes, each with its own youth Brødsgaard has been inspired by the the displacements of the stress and the met- from the simply grasped to the overwhelm- overtone harmonies. All the events appear more progressive harmonies of jazz and the rical counterpoint that also came to influ- ingly complicated, finally arriving at a to take place in a zone of weightlessness, in instrumentation of the big band, especially ence the great jazz musicians. The orchestral synthesis on the highest plane. unpredictable patterns and soft collisions. the phenomenon called the ‘thickened line’ configuration is in principle that of Vienna As the bearing principle in the composi- The tempo mark ings vary, but you do not – the block harmonies that arise when you Classi cism, with winds in pairs and two tion Brødsgaard chose the spiral form. In notice this. build up a melody line in several parallel score of strings, but extended with a rich, mathematics a spiral is defined by a plane There are four of these overtone-harmo- parts. However, you also find this sonority often resonant percussion battery. Precisely curve coiling around a fixed point while ap- nized sections where the strings predomi- in the disposition of the organ stops. The with a view to the basic idea of the composi- proaching or receding from the same point; nate in a con stantly varying sound spectrum. sound produced by the ‘mixture’ stop comes tion – ‘mixture’ sounds – the shrill pic colo is a circle in motion that returns to its point of Four times they are interrupted by the op- from not one, but several ranks of treble often used at the high pitches, while the ‘off- origin but at a different level from before. posite pole, the wild, rhythmic, complicated, pipes, as a rule at octave and fifth intervals, side’ winds, the bass clarinet and the contra- In nature we know the spiral form from the percussive and virtuoso music where the and the stop is normally supplemented with bassoon, operate in the depths in both solos galaxy, the DNA molecule, the tornado, the percussion of course predominates. The to- a given selec tion of fundamentals to produce and parts moving in parallel. In this way, sunflower, the snail shell and even the water tal of eight sections gradually draw together, a unified strong and brilliant sound. contours strangely remini scent of the Duke running out of the kitchen sink. Brødsgaard become shorter and shorter, and in time you Anders Brødsgaard says that Monk has Ellington and Gil Evans orchestras emerge also mentions two subli mated spiral forms can grasp the 12-tone spiral that is built into influenced his own view of harmony. Monk from the mists of sound without leading you in world literature as models: Dante’s each section, and the poles then merge: the used dense, dissonant chords, indeed to believe that Brødsgaard intended to write encounter with the Ten Heavens of Paradise divisive (regular) string music and the addi- often clusters, and together with his jagged a true jazz score. But the inspiration is not in The Divine Comedy, and the final scene of tive (irregular) percussion music fuse into rhythms this playing style resulted in a to be denied, as indeed the movement titles Part Two of Goethe’s Faust. something new and integrated. The ninth unique personal idiom that left most listen- express: Moving, Walking and Flying. The spiral motion runs through Galaxy in section is the turning-point. And look, says ers fairly mystified. Monk had none of the Woodwind, brass and strings. These are two parts, that is, it forms a double helix. At Brødsgaard: the acceleration that has just horror vacui of the other beboppers. The the three sections that leap forth in blocks in first you hear the note D in one apparently ended is reversed, and the whole work turns pause played a quite crucial role in his com- the neoclassical game of the first minutes of unending breath, while at an underlying out simply to be a semicircular motion in an position – he was extraordinarily economical Moving. Forward in shifting time signatures, level the note is harmo nized ‘spectrally’ even larger spiral. Galaxy is dedicated to Karl with his material and left it to the listener first in the woodwinds: nine, six, five quavers with the natural harmonics. A little later Aage Rasmussen. to fill out the spaces, for example in his own in the three-part legato melody of the wood- you hear the twin spiral on the note E flat, versions of the classic ‘Round Midnight. winds, with the pizzicati of the strings and 4 5 harp as reinforcers of the sound of the pulse. the depths with cello and double-bass, but The Performers One of the UK’s foremost conductors special- It may not be intentional, but now comes a gradually ramifies quite wildly into the rest With two internationally recognized ising in contemporary repertoire, Christo- flashback to Stravinsky’s neoclassical Psalm of the orchestra. One soloist after another conductors in the forefront, 73 outstanding pher Austin has given more than 80 world Symphony, launched into the lake of sound is manifested across this straying bass-line musicians from 17 different nations, and an and local premieres in the last decade, in- with a similar vision of sonority: the beat on where one is particularly fascinated by the International Carl Nielsen Competition and cluding works by Hans Abrahamsen, Simon the bass drum and timpani as an initiatory contra-bassoon’s Fafner-like exclamations Festival, the Odense Symphony Orchestra is Bainbridge, Michael Finnissy, Elisabeth Luty- trampoline bound. The brass takes over as a and the bassoon’s affinities with Dexter a cultural dynamo that plays a crucial role ens, Peter Maxwell Davies, Olivier Messiaen, four-part block in shifting duple metres, the Gordon’s unruly tenor sax.