Popsange

For all their depth of feeling, the words and music of Popsange also convey lightness. This is heard most exquisitely in ‘Løsladte drømme’, where the music fades in a gently upward motion at the words ‘fødderne prøver at lette som løsladte drømme’ (‘feet try to lift like released dreams’). It is as though the music evaporates, even as we listen. Much the same can be said of the dynamics: in this youthful work, Sørensen displays a preference for subtle nuances. What might appear as shyness turns out to be a source of heightened attentiveness. This is true of ‘Tid og rum’ (‘Time and Space’), where everything unfolds in a quiet setting that supports the text, allowing us to step out of time and into eternity. And it applies especially to the fourth song, ‘Illusion’, where the music occasionally falls silent or fades al niente – into nothing. Precisely here, in the encounter with silence, the music commands our attention. With a text that unfolds at night, when the senses are heightened in the darkness, we find ourselves in a state where the inner world begins to overshadow the outer:

And bodies soften in inner song
Everything must move now
everything must rush and glow?

In Popsange, reality hovers on the brink of transcendence – but at times the music takes root, and the words appear genuine, a testimony to lived experience. In such moments, the deeply felt love at the heart of Strunge’s – and Heine’s – words is no mere vision or dream. This is especially true of ‘Hjertestrøm’ (‘Stream of the Heart’), which in this recording has been arranged for piano by Mathias Monrad Møller, based on Sørensen’s choral setting of the poem in Strunge-sange. The piano’s lines trace a steady thread through the music, culminating at the words ‘the stream of your heart.’ Yet just as we sense idyll, external tones intrude, sweeping the song away in a sudden scale that plunges us into a depth where all falls silent.

By contrast, in the penultimate song, ‘(Dine øjne synker ...)’ ‘(Your Eyes Sink ...)’, the illusion holds. With waltz-like music unfolding in shifting time signatures, we are drawn into Strunge’s dream of flight. In this key poem, gravity is suspended – and through the music, the impossible becomes possible:

I am flying
and see your house below.
I need you
flying.

© Caroline Bittencourt

One of the great attractions of Popsange is its melodies, which wind through the music and give Strunge’s words breath. Melodies were otherwise scarce in contemporary composition at the time. In Sørensen’s work, they reappear some years later in the large-scale The Echoing Garden (1992) for soloists, choir, and orchestra, and later in the opera Under himlen (Under the Sky, 2003), where a genuine pop melody emerges.

In Popsange, however, the picture is more complex. Beneath the flowing melodies lurks an abyss. At the heart of the romanticism embraced by Schumann and Heine – and revived in the 1980s in, among other things, punk music and Strunge’s poetry – lies an profound longing for love. In the winter song ‘Smerte’ (‘Pain’), this yearning is ruthless, erupting into existential emptiness and crisis:

Yet it is precisely here – in powerlessness – that Popsange reveals its greatest strength: irresistible art one cannot do without. Through music and words, it becomes possible to dwell within the unbearable.