Well, Would You?

Wallowing naked in old vinyl?! Tell us more!

KG replies: When you're older. Off to bed, now.

Norgard has made more theoretical discoveries than any other single composer of the 20th century. The neglect of him outside Denmark (it's not just the U.S.) is obscene.

KG replies: Please do continue, if so moved. He seems rather amazing to me.

Thanks for lighting up everyone's day with that perfectly lovely music, Kyle! Messiaen had his 64 durations in "Livre d'orgue," so I guess young Bo was showing him who had the bigger quantity. He was plucked to stardom by Boulez when he was only 19 -- hopefully he was at least very cute or something.

For an overview of Norgard's innovations, one can see The Music of Per Norgard: Fourteen Interpretative Essays (Scolar Press, 1996). It only goes up to 1994 or so, so it came too early to cover his recent interest in hither-to unexplored aspects of the infinity series, but all in all it's essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about this sadly underappreciated genius. For some reason, you can buy marked-down copies through Amazon's 3rd-party sellers. I got one for $10, still in its wrapping. Would that this poor student find such bargains in academic publishing more often.

There's also PerNorgaard.dk, which is a rather unpolished but substantial explication of his works and techniques. I'm pissed off at the site's creators, since they refused my offer to update the site to better HTML and re-engrave the musical samples to something that's actually readable, but the site is a good resource.

Why is there so much pretension in music of the educated? Perhaps I don't get it. Is it the norm, or maybe a sphere o' influence thing, or just for show? I'm reaching. I don't know. Thanks.
Actually, whatev, it could be simply common interests. Who am I?

KG replies: Boy, if I could answer that one, I'd have a "genius" award for sure. But I suspect it's a little like asking why rich people buy so much.

Adam, what about this: by divine plan there is a place for all of music on God's earth, and since the uneducated mostly don't want the pretentious music, it ends up with the educated.

I heard Elisabeth Klein in some of her regular piano concerts in recent years at the Music Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. I don't know if she lived nearby. In any case, she is sadly missed.

It's actually a very beautiful piece! (at least, to my taste - but I'm a 50's orthodox-Darmstadt fan - almost all serial music from that period sounds as pleasant and entertaining to me as the better baroque music). I enjoyed reading Music Downtown, btw - I think it's a marvelous and very important book.

Hi everyone:
Okay, so we wonder how Cage "knew" Bo Nilsson's Quantitaten. Turns out to be something that David Tudor was playing between 1956 and 1962 (certainly "mainstream" repertoire). Nilsson's "serially" structured piano work has a surface that sounds like many of the American piano pieces from the same period. Under different circumstances I could imagine that Feldman's Intersection 3 could have had a similar sounding surface.

I'm happy to announce that Per Norgaard will be coming to San Francisco in December as part of Other Minds 12. We too agree that he has long been neglected (e.g. never performed by the SF Symphony .. on second thought, that's not that unusual). Unfortunatly we can't manage any of his extraordinary orchestral pieces, but I think some of his pieces for chamber chorus and maybe a quartet is in the offerings. More about OM 12 later.

Um, maybe I'm just revealing my lack of refined pretentiousness here, but I found this piece totally generic -- pretty only insofar as any piece written in that style would be sort of blandly pretty.

Also, the short answer to "Why is there so much pretension in music of the educated?" is "it's a subtle form of class warfare and self-justification in an environment where the notion that the upper class is objectively superior to the middle and lower classes is not sufficiently supported by the culture at large to satisfy the need of the upper-class to feel justified in its sense of superiority." And rich people buy so much in part because they can afford stuff and everybody wants stuff, and in part because they know that if they can afford that stuff it means they're better than the people who can't.

KG replies: Well, I didn't upload it because I thought it was a wonderful piece, just because everyone who's read Cage's Silence has heard of it and few people (in recent decades) have heard it. And what happened to Bo Nilsson, anyway? Google came up with very little.

Kyle -- Understood, and I appreciate the value of the opportunity to hear one of those pieces that lots of people have heard of but not many have actually heard. I also appreciated the way in which your posting, including the download, was a sort of performance rather than simply an offering of information.

I bothered to criticise the piece only because nobody had done so but two people had praised it. And I'm all about "fair and balanced" commentary :)

KG replies: Hey - I report, you decide.

What happened to him? As far as I can tell, he wrote Quantitaeten, another piece or two, and then essentially dropped off the face of the earth.

Incidentally, Quantitaeten is also cited, disapprovingly and with the composer's name misspelled, in Reginald Smith Brindle's little book The New Music. Smith Brindle criticized its overly meticulous notation in terms of rhythm (where I think Brindle is mistaken) and dynamics (where he certainly is not, given Nilsson's decision to replace traditional dynamic notation with an essentially meaningless decimal scale).



I too liked the piece in a sort of generic way, although I must say some gestures - the high chord near the beginning, the swath of arpeggiated chords, the rising figure at the end - strike me as pretty obviously bad decisions.

Some years ago Hat Art released a CD of David Tudor playing various piano pieces, recorded during the 1950s, by Cage, Cardew, Wolff, Pousseur, and Nilsson's Quantitäten. The one review I read of it began, "Now everyone who has read Cage's Composition as Process finally gets to hear Quantitäten by Bo Nilsson."

Is Nilsson still alive? My impression is that he died young. I'm a fan of Quantitaten and I think Klein does a great job. Thanks,

KG replies: Grove Dictionary lists no death date for him, and includes a work as recent as 2001.

He certainly is still alive. As it happens, he's my mom's cousin, so I'm a fairly reliable source :)