Per Nørgård (1932-2025)

We’ve learned of the death of the Danish composer Per Nørgård, aged 92. Influential both as a composer and as a music theorist, the biography that accompanied his receipt of the 2016 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize cites him as ‘the prominent Danish composer after Carl Nielsen’, and this is a fitting way to view his impact and legacy.

His music runs an incredible gamut between extremely tonal and approachable, and the opposite; works such as Iris seem to sit in the tradition of the spectralists, more concerned with music’s ‘texture’ than with more conventional elements, while 1988’s Pastoral feels like it could have come from the pen of a particularly sentimental-feeling Arvo Pärt.

Nørgård’s musical education began with the piano, and with composition lessons under Vagn Holmboe, linking him back to Nielsen - who had recommended Holmboe to the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where Nørgård in turn would study. Along the way he provided guidance to a number of composers of the younger generation - Hans Brahamsen, Bent Sørensen and, perhaps surprisingly, Carl Davis. 

The apple initially fell pretty close to the tree in stylistic terms - Nørgård counted Sibelius, Nielsen and Holmboe among his major early compositional influences - though during the 1960s he, like so many other composers, would start to work out his own response to the gauntlet laid down by serialism. His most significant innovation in this area is the use of what became known as the ‘infinity series’ - using a simple, endless numerical sequence to generate pitches in a way resembling fractals in geometry, attempting to translate into music their unique property of resembling themselves at larger and smaller scales. 

Just as the serialist composers evolved to use their tone-rows to govern more and more aspects of music - the move towards ‘total serialism’ - so likewise Nørgård explored the use of the infinity series to give harmonic and rhythmic structure to his works. In a sense, then, he genuinely was one of the first pioneers of spectralism - certainly his 1968 Voyage into the Golden Screen would retrospectively be hailed as “the first properly instrumental piece of spectral composition” by Julian Anderson - and yet he was seemingly incapable of standing still in one place, or style, for long. His output is as prodigious as it is varied - six operas, ten string quartets, eight symphonies, concerti for multiple instruments, choral works, and more.

The Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung again - ‘[Nørgård] churns out entire catalogues for harp, percussion, violin, cello and piano at breakneck speed, now surpassing 300 works in total. Finding the common thread in Nørgård’s work is not an easy task, but by choosing the right focus you will not fail to see that the whole is saturated by the same interests.’ In his obituary for Gramophone a couple of days ago, Andrew Mellor observed that Nørgård always had an ear open to the sounds around him - not just non-European classical traditions but even - in an endearingly circular process - the pop career of his singer-songwriter granddaughter Jada.  

Back in 2014, Presto’s James Longstaffe listened to then-new recordings of Nørgård’s first and last symphonies, noting not just the eponymous restraint of No. 1 (subtitled 'Sinfonia austera') but the marked turn towards impressionism that is apparent in No. 8. It’s this that makes Nørgård so exceptionally difficult to pin down as a composer; but whatever box, or boxes, history may end up sorting him into, what can’t be denied is that his music has left a mark on the contemporary classical scene both in his native Denmark and worldwide. 

Per Nørgård - a selected discography