Light and loans from the
history of music
Anders
Nordentoft writes innovative, poetic music with intuition as his guide. In Lyssætninger (Lightings) the inspiration is
the church interior that is the space of the organ. The title refers to the
various lightings one can experience in a church, and the first movement is all
light. The music actually shines white. The movement begins in shifting times
and rests on a descending five-note motif that can be heard right from the
start in the oboe part - perhaps this motif is the light descending into the
church? The motif twists and turns and forms the point of departure for an
organic transformation process. The second movement, in triple time, has
elements of darkness contrasting with the pure light of the first movement.
Here the light becomes a metaphor of light-heartedness and the darkness an
image of contemplation. The composer himself speaks of "a simultaneity of light
an dark", which makes the music recall a prism in slow rotation. At the same
time the music becomes more sensuous, almost tangible. We hear echoes of the
five-note motif of the first movement, while oboe and organ weave long, meditative
lines over a rumbling, spasmodic bass, which almost gives up the ghost before
the last bars of the piece surprise us with new energy.
As a musicologist, organizer,
academy principal and composer, Tage Nielsen ranges wide. He has not composed a
huge number of works either. On the other hand, what he has written is of
exquisite quality. This is the case with Diptykon (Diptychon), the reference of the
Greek title being to a two-panel painted altarpiece. Each of the two movements
of the piece is inspired by a traditional musical form closely associated with
the organ. In the first movement the form is the passacaglia of the Baroque,
which preoccupied Tage Nielsen in his most important orchestral work, Passacaglia from 1981, and which here gives
rise to the unchanging repetition of a terse seven-note theme in the organ
pedal. Over this theme, compact, toccata-like music unfolds, broken off by the
more birdsong-like and rhythmically free expression of the oboe part.
With its
improvisatory character the oboe ‘lightens' the dense organ sounds. This is
particularly true in the second movement, which takes the form of an organ
chorale where the oboe creates bright, separating passages between the more
rigid, compactly harmonized periods of the organ. While the experience of the
passacaglia form of the first movement is strictly speaking weakened by the
interjections of the oboe, these incidents, with their clear separation of the
sections of the chorale melody, give the second movement a clear feeling of chorale
treatment.
As a
composer the organist Leif Thybo further extended the Carl Nielsen-inspired
classicism of the interwar years, while in his work we also glimpse traits from
neoclassicist composers like Stravinsky, Bartók and Britten. Thybo's Sonate for obo og orgel (Sonata for oboe and organ)
finds its stylistic roots, despite the -Classical--Romantic genre designation,
as far back as Renaissance music - more specifically in the French composer
-Clément Jannequin (c. 1485-1558),
who has above all retained his place in the history of music because of his
many chansons. Thybo's sonata was based on the same theme by Jannequin over
which the French composer Jehan Alain (1911-1940) composed a number of organ
variations. Thybo was inspired by the mysticism and humour in Alain's
variations, and against this background wrote his own three movements - at the
same time -melancholy and witty, archaizing and fresh in their use of the
material of the of Renaissance master.
The
composer and conductor Ole Schmidt has written a set of variations for oboe and
organ based on the melody Lucis creator. As with
Leif Thybo it is again the French composer Jehan Alain who hovers in the
background. For it was he who composed the chorale theme presented with stately
dignity in the organ pedal, symbolizing the voice of the Creator. The first
variation, with its delicate syncopations, is characteristic of the bright,
lyrical and sometimes contemplative mood that typifies the work. The second
movement has a passacaglia character and permits the oboe to speak more freely
with what the composer describes as "creative cascades of sound". The third
variation begins without the oboe, which only later takes over the organ's
large-intervalled figures. The variation is coloured by an almost floating
tonality contrasting with the divinely pure C major triad that concludes the
second variation. The fourth variation is of the greatest delicacy. One
glimpses the light, and the oboe plays the whole chorale melody as a sign of
the consummation of the Creation, before the music moves in the fifth and final
variation from Chaos to Cosmos in a transport of joy that lets the universe
dance. This last variation approaches its close with a luxuriant oboe cadenza
exhibiting beautiful flashes of the original chorale melody. It is a
concertante variation and includes compositional finesses in the form of
imitations and inversions; an encomium of the Creator of Light, ending with
serene joy over the exclamation " - and there was light!"
As for the
French inspiration in Peter Møller's Fem
karakterstykker (Five character pieces), the composer has
explained in a programme note that both Couperin and Rameau were in the back of
his mind during the work on the five movements. He further explains that
stylistically the suite involves little else that could recall the Baroque.
Rather, the five movements represent "a journey through the different epochs of
both eastern and western musical culture". In the true postmodernist spirit the
first movement confronts the elegant French Baroque overture's characteristic
double-dotting in the organ with the pentatonic scale of classical Chinese
music, which is heard in the oboe part. Despite a brief suggestion of a
conjunction of the two different worlds they quickly part again, and the
movement ends as it began: polytonally, and with two musicians who literally
play in east and west. The next movement, a grave allemande, has little but the
2/4 time in common with the dance suites of the Baroque. For in the organ we
hear a classical Indian raga accompanied by an independent bass part which
repeats the ancient Indian rhythmic formula chandrakalâ. Above this the oboe
traces out orientally inspired arabesques. After China and India it is the turn
of the European Middle Ages, whose early polyphony is heard again in the organ
part of the third movement. Despite its sarabande-like character, the fourth
movement returns to the inspiration from classical Indian music, and in this
movement too one notes the feeling of the modal and the polytonal that is
characteristic of the whole suite.
Thomas Michelsen, 2004