The death of Per Nørgård on 28 May 2025, at a grand old 92, sent me to my ‘article bank’, to look over my writings on, and conversations with, him. For a couple of decades or so, a trip to Denmark was incomplete without a visit to Per. All our discussions, it seemed, evolved into a consideration of the nature of perception, as can be seen from the transcript below – but this isn’t the polished text submitted to Tempo: I was delighted to find that I had kept the working draft annotated by Per, whose comments are in red in the text below. The final version appeared as ‘Composer in Interview: Per Nørgård on recent and Early Nørgård’, Tempo, New Series, No. 222 (October 2002), pp. 9–15.
Per looked the same for years, athletic build, jeans, tousled red hair, always looking slightly dishevelled, as if he had just come in from a storm; above all, he was perennially youthful: it seemed that age could not touch him. It seemed then, when he reached his late seventies, that he did several decades’ worth of aging in only a few years, and it was saddening to find him in a wheelchair when I went to congratulate him after the UK premiere of his Third Symphony (a complex, profoundly moving masterpiece) on 20 August 2018. But his hair still shone red, and the twinkle in his eye was undimmed.
Per Nørgård on recent and Early Nørgård
Earlier this year [2002] I made a visit to Copenhagen, the principal purpose of which was to talk to Per Nørgard about two new works due for imminent UK performances: Borderlines, his Second Violin Concerto, which received its world premiere on 17 July, played by Rebecca Hirsch, with the City of London Sinfonia conducted by Richard Hickox, and the Sixth Symphony, At the End of the Day, which was given its first UK premiere by Thomas Dausgaard and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at a Prom on 30 July. This edited transcript of our conversation is not the first talk with Nørgård to have appeared in the pages of Tempo: an earlier discussion1 had touched on a mutual interest in chaos theory, and that is where Nørgård picked up the thread.
We talked about fractals in connection with the infinity row – this way of letting music grow in what you could call open hierarchic layers. It’s not a director and a slave; it’s an interdependent way of producing. If you choose a scale – for instance, the chromatic scale – it contains itself an infinite number of times; my Second Symphony2 is based on realising this characteristic. But if instead of letting it move in this expansive way, where you get wider and wider waves, you then construct it in the opposite way, you get a figure where it never gets out of itself. But it creates still a fractal rhythmic figure, which was very inspiring for me in all my percussion music from the 1970s. I discovered that feature in the beginning of the ’70s when I composed the Third Symphony3. I found the infinity row at the end of the ’50s, but it was not until I had composed the Third Symphony and some works before it that I realised it contained its dark side, which is just as rhythmic and just as hierarchic. In my Third Symphony it comes out like an inevitable development. If you imagine the place in the beginning where it gets up to a very high trill, it comes in lower at half-tempo, and then again more slowly further down. It contains itself, like a Russian doll or a Chinese box.
Fractal theory is generally associated with Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1970s and ’80s, but it goes back further than that, doesn’t it?
It was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, by two mathematicians, a Norwegian called Thue and an American called Morse4. They had described this phenomenon as the first fractal row – one of my students discovered it on the Internet. It was very strange for me, because I had never heard of anybody who had found anything similar to this. They give examples of, for instance, how the gardener in Paris planned the Champs-Elysées with one tree and then two trees there, one tree over there…. And then people came to say, it seems not to be so new, that you found this. I couldn’t know because I am not a mathematician at all – I found it musically. An interested professor of chemics sent in the infinity row from The Voyage into the Golden Screen5 as numbers to the ‘N.Sloane archive’ on ‘series of whole numbers’ on the internet, and the answer was: ‘I don’t know that. Looks interesting; send me more information’. Then the answer was: ‘This one is new, and I’ve included it as Per Nørgård’s infinity row and you have the author’s right where it is published first’. And you’ll find ‘Published for the first time as music in Voyage into the Golden Screen in 1968’.
So you’ve made mathematical history?
Yes, isn’t that crazy? [Loud laugh] I think it’s humorous, because I’m not formular-reading. I feel that music is numbers – Bach’s music works very much with numbers. Music is very connected to this, so why not? – since our auditive sensors transform them to aural shapes – in time.
Well, since you find the Fibonacci series in plant growth and other natural phenomena, why can’t the infinity row emerge spontaneously and yet still articulate a mathematical principal?
Exactly. So I feel happy about it. But I found, for example, this new thing at the beginning of the ’70s and made later discoveries around it – for instance, what I call tone-lakes, where the infinity rows move forwards and backwards in time, with clock and counter clock. It’s a very interesting concept, because there’s an infinite number of tone-lakes. The smallest one is the twelve tones (not all the chromatics: ten chromatic and two repetitions). The next one is 36, next one 108, next one 324 – each time, it’s times three. It’s constructed by infinity rows going backwards and forwards in a circle, producing fantastic patterns. And there’s an infinite number of lakes, but all of them are finite in number. But they go up to millions, you know, and further – but as I said – they will never be infinite.
The use of the infinity row generates a tension between chaos and control in your music – a sense of burgeoning growth held in check by the same device that allows it to flower.
That’s what has been fascinating. But in the beginning of the ’80s I left using any kind of hierarchical systems when I made the Wölfli6 [compositions] – that’s the chaos period. I found out a kind of pattern which is very surprising (I don’t know why, because I don’t want to live in a form of pattern) but it seems that, over a twenty-year period, it starts in a chaotic way where everything has to be dug up again, in ’60, ’80 and now again in 2000. My last work was called Terrains vagues7, and that’s really out in the big new vagueness. In the middle, in the ’80s, came the chaos for the Wölfli – that was necessary for developing a new openness for rhythm and musical melodic inventions.
Did you need to get away from the sense of control and the regularity?
Yes, exactly. Then come some new impulses – when you thought you had got away from the infinity row, you find out you need it again if you have to go on with this new discovery.
So is the music you are writing now a synthesis of the orderliness of the infinity-row compositions and the ‘chaotic’ works inspired by Wölfli?
A momentary synthesis, because I never end with a synthesis: it always moves on. But at that time, at the end of the ’80s, I was quite sure that without leaving the ‘hierarchic music’ of the 70’s, I had not found those new ways of acceleration. The new rhythmic dimension, the polydimensionality in my rhythm, which has been the most important thing – , the rhythm of ‘1 to the square of two, which is deeply fascinating. There are two basic infinite rhythmic systems: One is the Golden Mean (as you find in nature: the Fibonacci series. From around 1979 I began to focus upon the square of two as a kind of mystery in the way, for example, it’s the basis of the piano tuning, of equal temperament; you cut the octave out in twelve similar pieces – that’s based on the square of two, the root, you know. That put my mind to work, because if you have a fifth, then you hear in fact an impulse of three to two. The same goes for a major third; that’s four to five. Then I asked myself: what about the tritone? The tritone is based on 1 to the root of two so that it is two overtone series on F and B, an F and an equal-temperament B. They will never have any tones in common – with all the overtones, millions of them, they will never have two in common. Isn’t that incredible?
Therefore I thought: what about the rhythmic pattern? If the fifth is three to two, and the third four to five, what is then the tritone? It’s a rhythm where, if you start at the same time, they will never meet again; the impulses will never come together again. It makes a cycle in some way, but it’s always changing a bit. That was very fascinating because it gives a totally new possibility of rhythm.
As I said, I would never have ‘found’ it if I hadn’t given up working with infinity rows in the ’80s. But on the other side, when you find this, you see that it demands acceleration as possibility, and of course you get from one speed to the other as a kind of infinity wheel or something. Therefore I had to return to the infinity row because that’s the only device I have ever come upon where you can accelerate infinitely. If you accelerate by hierarchic means, you can accelerate infinitely because you can always have more material; it has an infinite basis.
But infinite acceleration is a mental construct, surely? If you are a musician with an instrument in your hands…
You can’t even do it mentally, because it becomes too fast. But if you have this possibility, that each time something is going too fast, then you have the secondary
accentuation, and you get acceleration which never needs to stop, since the secondary becomes the primary one, making room for a new ‘secondary’ etc.
Do you feel, then, that you have managed to harness the chaotic energy of Wölfli within an organised structure?
The metaphor is that of an egg which has been fertilised. Normally you think of it as a very high structure when it’s a fertilised egg. But according to science, the first stage before it begins to divide – that is chaos. All the proteins are highly organised in an egg, but when the semen enters they seperate into chaos. In this way the egg regulates into a brand new cell.
It’s also a very violent process.
Yes, it’s violent. Therefore I think it’s a fluctuation between working towards a synthesis and then accept knowing nothing and walking in darkness. That has been my acceptance of how I work in life. So the latest phase has been darkness – terrains vagues, really!
Terrains vagues emerged from the Sixth Symphony, didn’t it?
Yes, Terrains vagues is a kind of black comment to the Sixth Symphony, because it derived from the last half-minute of the Sixth Symphony. [The Symphony] was a commission for the first concert in the new millennium with the orchestra here. I can’t compose festival music or memorial music for the millennium, so I have to compose and see what comes out of it – where am I now? – unless it’s film music or whatever where you are really in the hands of the commission. Normally I insist on my total freedom. Therefore it was not until it was not until I had worked some months or half a year with it I realised that what is going here is that the tendency to move down into the bass had not culminated (in the ’90s, if you look at my Piano Concerto, it is very occupied with deep registers of the piano sound). Western music neglects the deeper areas, I feel: we generally use the bass as a kind of accompaniment to the real music in the middle and the ‘good’ registers. I felt an attraction towards finding the nuances. It’s not only black – there are many colours down there. 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: I had an instrument which goes below the piano, down to the deep F sharp under the piano.
Why is it called At the End of the Day? It means there’s always something more coming – at the end of the day there’s always a new day after. After the first two minutes there’s a big culmination already. The Sixth 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 instruments comes in together. You perceive a Gestalt, but it’s sort of blurred – it’s the attraction I always feel for the situation where you have sanity but also mystery at the same time. And these deep areas open for a big culmination within the first two minutes, and then it seems as if the symphony ends, sort of. But then there’s a drum, a tamburo, always (‘eternally’) accelerating, pianissimo, and there’s a reminiscence from the beginning which then returns – and then it is like the germ; it grows up from that to a new development. That’s the model for the work: each time you think that now it ended, there’s always something more behind. So At the End of the Day means it’s never ending; at the end of the work 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, I thought the composition had ended there. But then late at night, when I was just going to bed, I “heard” a deep bass layer, big bass drums but pianissimo, tambourine, harp harmonic and a piano; I wrote it down as if it were dictation. It lasts only half a minute – and that’s the end of the Sixth Symphony. It’s absolutely nothing you’ve heard before in that work. So it’s at the end of the day – and the very last thing is a tone you’ve never heard, in fact. So this kind of horizon after a horizon seems to be attracting me. And as it turned out ‘The end of the day’ opened for another day ‘Terrains Vagues’ developping from the last half minute.
Was the bass-tuba writing in the Sixth Symphony inspired, even at a distance, by the four bass tubas Rued Langgaard uses in his Eleventh Symphony?
No, because in Langgaard it’s a diminished seventh, it moves downwards, it’s melodic, and they’re standing before the orchestra. In my symphony, the deep instruments are all integrated into the orchestra; Langgaard had no integration – he had them as a part below the orchestra – but I integrate them with the double-bass line. I use, for instance, four English horns in the second movement, really to get it wonderfully deep down.
The Sixth Symphony is divided into three movements, where the first one is a concluding one, with a pause afterwards. The second one is even darker, but you can’t find out if it’s slow or fast music. You can listen to it as if it’s a very slow procession in the beginning. But what comes in between – is it ornaments? No, maybe it’s the right speed, though whether it is slow or fast music isn’t really clear until the end, when it goes directly into the third movement, which has an almost fanfare-like start in a sort of hocketing rhythm and is very high and light, compared with the dark sides of the other parts of the work. It combines the high and the deep, where a theme from the bass comes in the end transposed very high up, in the high flutes and woodwinds.
Is it fair to see a relation to Classical tradition in the shape of the Sixth Symphony?
Yes, but I never think of that in advance. I find the form when I compose. After that work had ended, I had a commission from the BBC to make an orchestral work – and I couldn’t get rid of the ending of the Sixth Symphony. I worked for seven months, improvising with my computer. I had to invent a new way of notation because I didn’t want everything to be precise. I was sweating before I met the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who had worked all their lives to play together, and then I write these special sections called ‘vague’ and they are negated by a sign called ‘strict’. In those vague passages, for instance, there are eight divisions of deep strings playing almost the same – different notes but the same rhythm; it’s almost a pulse but not totally. It might be, for instance, a dotted eighth for some time and then a triple quarter-note, and so on. The new thing is that in each of those parts you’ll find scattered like salt and pepper small commas, which means that the musician playing each part comes in a little late, or the opposite, a little early. It produces an effect like an elephant walking, not quite precise. I was afraid of what would happen at the first rehearsal: ‘We’ve worked all our lives to be precise…’. It’s irrational, but that’s what I like about it – the irrationality. There’s no special duration to those little commas. I’m fascinated in the alternative to the Baroque, banging rhythm – a rhythm that is softer, more human, alive, more natural. Our heartbeat is not a metronome. But the BBC musicians were wonderful. Andrew Davis didn’t talk very much – they just did it.8 In Denmark the conductor maybe wanted more control, and so he tried to work with them – and it became total chaos! They couldn’t even work out where they were after a little while. So I said: ‘Please, can I talk to the musicians now?’ ‘Yes.’ So I said: ‘Forget the numbers, forget the commas, forget the anticipations – just play the rhythm there, but a little sleepily. Don’t think too much’. And then it was OK again. You can’t work too much on the details; you have to play spontaneously. And when there’s a group of eight or ten people, then it gives this blurred interest, which is in contrast to the strict.
How readily can an audience perceive the complexity of this work – or, indeed, of any of your larger scores?
Who can conceive the full complexity of any complex music? How much can you conceive, in fact, of a Bach fugue for organ? For me the fascinating thing is to compose the music where you always have the possibility to dive down into it and nobody can tell you where you can’t go further down. 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. I think we are at the beginning of the human period; we don’t know very much. It’s always ‘’slow’’ out on the deep water when I make a new work.
But are you asking the impossible – can one imagine, hear internally, a tone outside the physical range of human hearing?
I think it would be like trying to imagine a colour that doesn’t exist. I refer to it in the Fifth Symphony9: I have several sort of ‘runnings-up’ that end and then come back after a while, and you can imagine what happened up there. And they also go down, disappear and come up again. So your imagination could be tied to it, but I think it would be difficult to say that you could imagine it concretely.
What was the impulse underlying the new violin concerto?
In Borderlines and also in the Sixth Symphony there are places, not very many, where microtones enter, as also in some of my other works, such as Night-Symphonies, Daybreaks for sinfonietta [1991–92]. I set up a so-called ‘neutral’ third, a third which is slightly minor – slightly smaller than a major third, but slightly greater than a minor third. It’s not major or minor, but in between; it’s called a ‘neutral’ third but it’s anything but neutral when the musicians try to keep that sound. This kind of microtonal activity is for me just as fascinating as it has been frustrating if I’ve used it for strings. In one of my works from the beginning of the ’90s I’ve had the strings play in quartertones; I’ve asked the musicians just to move their hand positions a little and then play normally.
You’re asking them to go against years of training.
Exactly, yes. But on the other side I feel frustrated if I couldn’t hear the music I wanted played by the musicians – and not by electronics: I’m not interested in making strange sounds with electronics. It’s the orchestra which is fascinating; it’s an instrument, a human instrument. I’ve worked more and more and have tried to realise through certain harmonics only played by basses and celli because in the high strings they can’t get those exotic harmonics I want, namely the sevenths and elevenths. In half of the work you hear this kind of harmonic world dominating, and half of the work in is normal tuning, normal temperament, with melodies in a twelve-tone scale. But in the other half the strings are coming up with exotic sounds which are as absolutely as pure as the other ones. The violinist has to be able to apply to both of them. Therefore Borderlines as a title, because it is seen from the violinist’s perspective: she is moving on the borderline because the orchestra is schizoid in itself; it has these two worlds which can’t be combined because they can’t really play together – it would just be an incomprehensible blur.
Is the tension between temperaments readily perceptible?
Absolutely, because it is phase-like, ritornello-like, where you go back to it.
How do these two harmonic worlds co-exist in the work?
The microtone layer is represented by five strings. Remember that this was a commission10 where one of the orchestras has only nineteen musicians, so I cannot make a four-celli divisi. And there are only two double-basses. So they can be augmented, multiplied, but I can’t make more parts than two for the double-basses.
So do the basses and celli inhabit one ‘world’ and the rest of the orchestra a normal one?
No, because the cellos and basses do not only play in this way, they also play quite normally. You can’t see the relationship from the position on the stage; you cannot say you will always hear the traditional music from here and the strange music from there. And I also use this sometimes in the violas, because the deep C string of the viola can produce sevenths and elevenths.
What about the shape of the work?
Three movements. In the first there are very forceful layers in the orchestra. There are different speeds combined. It’s the most complex in some way. The second is when the soloist almost carries all of it – it’s the most lyrical. The third is a compound. It’s very difficult to discuss in words; people would hit themselves on the head if they heard us discuss it. What I’ve been fascinated by in this work and in many works up to this is: you have one melody and you have another melody, or Gestalt, and when they two come together, they produce a third melody. For many years I’ve been almost obsessed that the layers in my music should not come together; they should come between each other. One of the reasons I react against so-called complex scores, where you might have five against three against four, or whatever, is that their nodal point always comes together. It’s like ornament – it’s not several speeds. In order to be several speeds, they have to be produced independently, and there’s only one way, if you want to do it in an accomplished, practical way for orchestra. If you combine five, four and three and not let them start at the common nodal point, who needs the conductor’s downbeat? The question is easily answered: it’s the five. If you conduct four beats, it’s very important if you are playing five that you know where one is. So five has the privilege of coming on one. But if you have triplets, then you can’t use the one, which is occupied by the 1. Of the quintoplets. But you use the 3 beat. The 2’s and 4’s occupy syncopated places between all four beats.
They have to be quite pregnant melodies: I like Gestalts that are not too vague, that you can follow with your perception, and then to make the complexity. I’m obsessed with simplicity and then moving close to the chaos, because then you have the freedom to find for yourself: how long do you want to follow? How long do you want to go into the unknown? You can just stay where you are and listen to those melodies and have the others as background. I’m attracted by the idea of the freedom of the listener.
Both the new works, like so much of your output, is dedicated to extending the range and richness of the sounds your audience can perceive. But you tend to discover them by means that are more frequently intellectual constructs than the product of your inner ear.
Often, yes. You can start from an intellectual point of departure, but if it doesn’t then wake my sensuality, I can’t compose. It has this intellectual fascination, even if it’s small, simple songs, in fact, even when I dream. I dreamt a melody which is not at all conventional, but it’s very popular today in Denmark, a choral song.11 I dreamt it one night and some next morning [I found] some words that fitted it from a poem with very unusual metres [sings]. The last four tones I didn’t remember when I woke up, but all the rest I remembered. Each line corrects what you have already anticipated. As a rule something starts in a more or less ordinary way in my mind, as in other people’s minds, but then there seems to be some kind of protest in me, whatever you look at in my music, to let it develop othervise than the ordinary.
I’m highly interested in perception – it’s a great mystery, in fact. Imagine that if we don’t know a colour, then we don’t see it. Anthropologists have found that there are several cultures where they don’t have the colour blue; there’s only black. In Bellona, a small island in Micronesia, for example, they only have red and green but they don’t have orange.
So what are we not seeing?
Exactly! I think it’s wonderful, thinking this way, because the world will keep young; we never know the world.
The concern of so much of your work to push the ear into further efforts of perception appeals not solely on musical grounds: I am a libertarian and atheist because socialism and theism are closed worlds, which come with answers supplied. I prefer the openness that keeps striving for explanations.
Exactly. That’s my basic feeling – there’s always more to discover. That’s what makes me tick.
Since we were both friends of Vagn Holmboe, I wanted to go back to the beginning of your career, over half a century ago, and ask how you became his student.
Well, I composed quite a lot of drawings and popular melodies while my brother made words for a kind of cartoon films we called ‘teknis’. They were without animation but were projected onto a square metre screen for our poor family members. Stories like how the elephant got its trunk, or self-invented stories. We tried to stay home from school as much as possible to do the ‘ real work ‘! I also made music-hall themes for it, too, with really popular tunes in the Danish music-hall tradition. My brother was five years elder, so when I was around fifteen, he was called up to the army and without a collaborator it was no fun to do these ‘teknis’ any more. So I wrote ‘Sonata’ on a piece of paper, and since I never stopped composing. I had just turned sixteen.
With no formal training at this point?
No, no – well, piano, but that never included any new music. I had a very romantic piano teacher, where it was mostly Chopin’s and Franz Liszt’s love-stories, so there was a big distance between music and me. Anyway, I wrote this ‘Sonata’. I still remember the beginning of it [plays the piano] – very harsh stuff.
It sounds as if you knew Bartók’s music already.
I didn’t know of Bartók at that time; he was not that known in Denmark then. But I knew Stravinsky. I had read Stravinsky’s autobiography where he writes that he went to a teacher, Rimsky, and was not very well received – [Rimsky-Korsakov] was rather cold, but he accepted to keep him as a student. So I prepared myself to be received coldly and then I rang Vagn Holmboe, whom I knew from some of his music I heard on the radio. In Stravinsky you read that he found harmony boring but counterpoint he found more interesting. So I adopted that; I was sure that harmony was boring. I called Holmboe and said I would like to be taught in counterpoint and composition. Then he laughed a little: ‘Counterpoint and composition? Yes, well, OK – let’s have a meeting then’. Then he very nicely proposed a meeting. The first time I came there Meta12 received me, leading me through the toilet – that was the start! She said: ‘We are very sorry to invite you through such unacademic surroundings, but we are having some repairs done in the corridor’. Then I went in; I was nervous but also prepared not to expect anything except, hopefully, that he would guide me. He looked at the piece I had brought with me, called Concerto for solo piano. I liked the idea of the concerto without orchestra; it was too complicated to have an orchestra, so why not just have the piano and call it Concerto, make it concertante in some way? (The Italian Concerto was a great model.) He looked it through and then he turned his head and looked me straight in the eyes and said: ‘I’m surprised’. I was almost shocked. He was very serious – this was not small talk. He accepted to take me on kind of ‘rehearsal’ sessions – he didn’t know if I was apt to study yet. I went four times, where I had to pay a hundred crowns per session; my parents were quite well-to-do and he knew that. After four times he gave me some extra challenges: I had to read a Haydn sonata in one minute and then explain what was going on in it – not play or listen, just look at the score and then tell what was going on. That has never been any problem for me, to see what’s going on – it’s more problematic to play! Anyway, those challenges I solved probably satisfactorily. First of all, I had a new piece brought with me that time, which excited him so much he walked up and down the floor, and the last movement has quite an original ending – I’ve never heard an ending like it by anybody since [plays]. It was not soft, romantic music I presented; it was music that interested me. Then he said: ‘OK, I accept you as a student, and I won’t receive any money personally for my teaching; your parents are going to go on paying me a hundred crowns per session as until now, but I have bought scores for you and I will do that in the future also, because then you can make a collection with my guidance’. He had already bought Boléro, Sibelius First Symphony, Bartók Concerto for Orchestra (the first time I became aware of Bartók) and then Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony. That was a kind of flying start into my career as a composer, because then I had him as a private teacher for one-and-a-half years and then I entered the Conservatory and had him as a composition teacher.
Another teacher I was very happy to have was Finn Høffding, who had been a very good friend of Nielsen (Holmboe knew Nielsen, but he had not been friends: he was very young at that time). Høffding was 98 when he died.13 I used to visit him quite regularly. Even two days before he died he was totally clear in his mind, and since I was going to lecture about Nielsen’s three piano pieces,14 I said: ‘Finn, do you remember anything of those pieces?’; they’re from around 1927 or so, and this old man said: ‘Oh yes, I was almost looking over his shoulder when he made them’ – and then he told me details about the pieces.
So it was a great start for me, to meet those people from the old days.
- Cf. Martin Anderson, ‘The Many Patterns of Per Nørgård’, Tempo, No. 202, October 1997, pp. 3–7. ↩︎
- Composed in 1970 and revised in 1971, the Second Symphony is recorded (with the Sinfonia austere, No. 1) by Leif Segerstam and the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on Chandos CHAN 9450. ↩︎
- The choral Third Symphony dates from 1972–75; it, too, is recorded by Segerstam and the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on Chandos, with the Concerto in due tempi for piano and orchestra (CHAN 9491) ↩︎
- Axel Thue (1863–1922) and Marston Morse (1892–1977). Thue discovered the principle – a binary fractal sequence – that mathematicians now call the Thue-Morse (or Morse-Thue) sequence in 1906, and it was then rediscovered independently by Morse in 1917. ↩︎
- The 1968 orchestral work by Nørgård in which he first used the infinity row as the basis of an entire musical structure. ↩︎
- In 1979 Nørgård discovered the art of the schizophrenic Swiss painter Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) in an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just north of Copenhagen. It triggered a radical re-evaluation of his music. ↩︎
- Recorded with the Sixth Symphony by Thomas Dausgaard and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra on Chandos CHAN 9904. ↩︎
- Terrains vagues was premiered by Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Barbican on 1 April 2001. ↩︎
- 1990, rev. 1991; recorded by Segerstam and the DNRSO, with the Fourth Symphony, on Chandos CHAN 9533. ↩︎
- Borderlines was a joint commission from the Cheltenham Festival, [SECOND ORCHESTRA?] and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. ↩︎
- PER: CAN YOU LET ME KNOW THE TITLE, PLEASE? ↩︎
- Holmboe’s pianist-photographer wife, née Graf. ↩︎
- On 29 March 1997. ↩︎
- The Three Pieces, Op. 59, of 1928. ↩︎
