Selected Works

The First Tentative Steps: Kalundborg 1957–1967

By Jonas Olesen

Throughout the 1950s, Plaetner earned his living as a music teacher at Øregård Gymnasium and the Holbæk School of the Arts, but in the latter half of the decade he moved from the Copenhagen area to Sdr. Nyrup on the outskirts of Kalundborg with his wife, the piano teacher Hanne Plaetner (née Hansen).

The move was prompted by his appointment as a music teacher at the State Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired – commonly known as the State Blind Institute. Plaetner’s mother, Hansa Marie, knew sign language and had herself taught blind children, so his choice of this particular position was far from coincidental. At the same time, Plaetner also took up a post as a music teacher at Kalundborg Gymnasium. After a divorce, he remarried, this time to Lis Plaetner Aaboe, who also took a position at the school.

Plaetner became very active in the town’s musical life, notably through the Kalundborg Music Society, where he helped organise concerts featuring new classical music by, among others, his former teacher Vagn Holmboe, as well as jazz concerts with Erik Moseholm’s Trio. It was also in Kalundborg that he set up an electronic studio in his home – reportedly the first private one of its kind in Denmark.

In his own words, by 1960 he had “scraped together enough money to buy two Movic tape recorders, which by the standards of the time were reasonably good,” forming the basis of a rudimentary electronic studio. Initially, the studio was quite modest, comprising little more than the tape recorders, a handful of tone generators, microphones, and speakers – both for financial reasons and because, as Plaetner later explained, he could find no one in Denmark with whom he could discuss the setup. In a 1960 article in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift entitled “De første famlende år” (“The First Tentative Steps”), he proposed establishing a publicly accessible studio so that all interested composers could experiment without necessarily having the financial means. Plaetner envisaged a cooperative model, in which a number of enthusiasts would pool resources to buy the necessary equipment and have equal access to it. He planned to contribute his own equipment to the collective and naturally suggested locating the studio in Kalundborg. The plan, however, was never realised, and the studio remained private.

It is not entirely correct to say that Plaetner could not find like-minded collaborators at this time. Around 1960, he participated in a study circle formed at Danish Radio, centred on the music director Mogens Andersen and the composer Per Nørgård. Composers and musicologists such as Jan Maegaard, Gunnar Berg, Henning Christiansen, and Per Nørgård met in this circle to discuss and analyse new music. It was here that Plaetner also met Else Marie Pade and became acquainted with her electronic practice. Activities in the circle included a thorough analytical study of Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître (1953–54) for six instrumentalists, with text by the surrealist poet René Char, with participants taking turns presenting each movement. According to Mogens Andersen, the circle helped “to mark the divide between composers who rejected international avant-garde trends and those who embraced them as a basis for continued experimentation and the development of new expressive possibilities.” There is no doubt that Plaetner belonged to the latter group. At Danish Radio, he also unsuccessfully proposed a not further specified collaboration, presumably intended to allow composers other than Pade access to the sound studios.

Although the cooperative studio never materialised, Plaetner’s very limited and simple technical equipment did not prevent him from composing a large number of electronic works while living in Kalundborg. He called his studio “Studio 60,” and a possible model for its setup may have been the studio at CEM (Contactorgaan Elektronische Muziek) in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, where Plaetner attended a course in electronic composition, probably in the late 1950s. The layout of Studio 60 is well documented, as Danish Radio produced a half-hour TV programme on Plaetner in 1963, most of it filmed in the studio. In this black-and-white broadcast, one can see Plaetner’s apparatus, which included, among other things, a radio, two speakers, five or six tape recorders, an oscilloscope, a sine-wave generator, and a square-wave generator. Plaetner referred to the studio as “my little modest laboratory” and demonstrated the tone generators while the different sound waves appeared on the oscilloscope. The programme was relatively educational in nature, and Plaetner played his own experiments with electronic imitations of church bells. Even in this early TV appearance, one gains a good impression of his personality and pedagogical approach, which he maintained throughout his life. He spoke calmly and thoughtfully, perhaps somewhat pedantically, but very clearly, about electronic composition techniques. A certain awkwardness and a trace of self-consciousness in his manner were also apparent – traits that would recur in his later radio and TV appearances ...
 

The above is an excerpt from the first chapter of Jonas Olesen’s biography: Jørgen Plaetner (Danish Composers, vol. 26, © Forlaget Multivers, 2025). The excerpt is reproduced with permission.

The book in Danish is available for purchase ↗ here.