Composers
Hans Abrahamsen
© Tine Harden
Born: 1952
Hans Abrahamsen started by playing the French horn, but even at a very young age he showed a remarkable talent for composition. In 1969 he began to study French horn at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, but already in 1970-71 he had his first lessons in composition with Niels Viggo Bentzon. In 1971 he studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Århus where he was taught composition by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. He has also studied with Per Nørgård and György Ligeti. From 1975-81 he went back to Copenhagen to study music history and music theory. In his early career Hans Abrahamsen was a key figure in the Danish New Simplicity movement which reacted against the complexities of the Darmstadt school. Despite the small scale and brevity of many of his works, his music often has an epic quality, creating the impression that behind the scarcity of material lie expansive concepts and dense thought.
Since 1995 Abrahamsen has himself taught instrumentation and composition at the Academy of music in Copenhagen. He has received among other honors Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens Hæderspris (1989) and the Wilhelm Hansen Prize (1998).
Career Highlights
• Composition studies with Per Nørgård, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and György Ligeti.
• 1982 – “Nacht und Trompeten” is commissioned and premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hans Werner Henze
• 1989 – Awarded the Carl Nielsen Prize
• 1995 – Appointed assistant professor in composition and orchestration at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen
• 1998 – Awarded the Edition Wilhelm Hansen Composer Prize
• 2005 – UK premiere of “Four Pieces for Orchestra” at the BBC Proms, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov
• 2008 – World Premiere of Schnee (complete version) in Witten by Ensemble Recherche.
Key Works
• Stratifications (1973-75; orchestra)
• Winternacht (1976-78; chamber ensemble)
• Nacht und Trompeten (1981; orchestra)
• Märchenbilder (1984; chamber ensemble)
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1999-00; piano, ensemble)
• Four Pieces for Orchestra (2004; orchestra)
• Schnee (2006-2008; chamber ensemble)
A dialogue with the past, the world – and oneself: Hans Abrahamsen
In 1999-2000 Hans Abrahamsen wrote a piano concerto. It lasts just over a quarter of an hour. Nevertheless this compact work holds all the important keys to the understanding of the composer – of his way of working with music and of the development of his oeuvre, which has extended over 35 year so far.
The piano concerto begins with flightily nervous, layered music. It is Romantically coloured music. The idiom is related to what we encounter in earlier core works by Abrahamsen such as Winternacht, Märchenbilder and Nacht und Trompeten; works the composer wrote at the end of 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and which have made his name both in Denmark and abroad.
The piano concerto begins in this vibrant, poetically sensual world with its various simultaneous layers. But after less than half a minute the music freezes – is fractured so to speak, and goes into spasms. Then it develops new aspects of Abrahamsen’s universe; aspects that the composer began to explore after he took an extended break from writing in the 1990s and concentrated on adaptations of other people’s music.
Abrahamsen expresses himself in concentrated form. If we pay close attention as the music requires, we discovers references not only to other works by the composer, but also to the works of older composers. In the trumpet part of the central second movement of the piano concerto, for example, there is an unmistakable if discreet reference to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Where the trumpet repeats the note C sharp, the composer has noted in the score “(wie Mahler!)”. And in the third movement, in the last bars of the horn part, one finds a similar tribute to the Hungarian composer György Ligeti and his use of the natural horn technique in the horn trio.
Transparence and objectivity
How do such quotations find their way into the music? The answer is that they do not ‘find their way’ at all. They come – or better still, they arise or emerge – from the music itself.
“To compose is to go in and find something in the music that I did not know was there to begin with. To investigate the music and find new things in the tonal material that surprises me and captivate me.”
That is how Hans Abrahamsen answers the question about what it means for him to compose. For many people it will probably be a surprising answer. For doesn’t a composer begin with a sheet of blank music paper when he is about to write a new piece? So what kind of music is there to begin with? What is this tonal material that has to be investigated – and which is even able to generate discoveries that can surprise the composer himself and, among other things, take on the character of quotations?
The answer to these questions takes us to the core of Hans Abrahamsen’s art; an art that began as a radically objective, tightly structured game with clearly demarcated tonal materials, but which has developed over the years towards a decidedly expressively coloured idiom, and which has most recently begun to move in new, still partly unexplored directions. It is art that is highly sensitive in expression – emotional, vibrant and responsive – and which is constantly working its way towards new boundaries; but which at the same time listens attentively to the past; both to its own close past and to the great past of musical history.
When Hans Abrahamsen wrote his first mature works as a teenager at the end of the 1960s, it was the era of the hippie movement with its ideals of freedom, openness and peaceful coexistence among all human beings. Against the background of these ideals, and in combination with a critical attitude to the Central European modernism which at that time was the avant-garde in contemporary music, a new aesthetic school grew up internationally – in Danish music it was given the name ‘the New Simplicity’. While the advocates of modernism – towering beacons like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez – demanded that one should accept complexity, the adherents of the New Simplicity formulated a clear counterclaim in favour of music that was thoroughly objective; consistently simple music that was to consist of immediately transparent structures. For the young Hans Abrahamsen the means of creating simple, transparent music was the composition technique that has been called concretism – a technique or perhaps rather an approach to composing that Abrahamsen himself explains as follows:
“Concretism is among other things the fact that music can be treated objectively. That is, some sort of rational and transparent treatment, either of a well known melody or of material that is objective in itself– a chromatic scale, for example. You objectify the material. Make it concrete.”
It is thus this type of material – a simple scale or an existing melody – that Hans Abrahamsen is talking about when he talks about wanting to “investigate the music and find new things in the tonal material”. Things that can even surprise the composer himself. The aesthetic ideals of the New Simplicity – transparence and objectivity – can be experienced in Hans Abrahamsen’s first orchestral piece Skum (‘Foam’), written in 1970 when the composer was just 18 years old. The piece is divided into clear sections, each of which has precisely the same duration. On the other hand the various sections within this rigorous structure are filled with extraordinarily varied content. They splice together judiciously measured ‘film shots’ of very varied characters.
The fact that several kinds of music can exist peacefully side by side like this in the same work – that there is room for all sorts of different idioms in one and the same piece of music – was a crucial ideal for the young Hans Abrahamsen. This stylistic pluralism, combined with the transparence of form and structure typical of Skum, in his own words recalls the contemporary idiom of the Danish painter Per Kirkeby. Abrahamsen explains: “In that period Kirkeby painted certain series of pictures where each series consisted of very different subjects that couldn’t stand alone, but were legitimized by being in this form, as part of a stylistic pluralism. The form of the picture series further referred to the possibility of reflecting on series as pictures of pictures, and so both a distance and an intensified closeness arose in the work.” The same principle can be found in the first part of Abrahamsen’s orchestral piece Stratifications from 1973/75, which similarly has the character of film clips, and in the ten extremely varied movements that make up Abrahamsen’s first string quartet, Ten Preludes, from 1973.
An extreme example of Hans Abrahamsen’s transparent works from the New Simplicity period is Symphony in C, written in the year of the Danish referendum on the EEC, 1972. The original title of the work, Anti-EEC Piece, reveals the young composer’s political consciousness. As a co-founder of the ‘Alternative Music Group’ the hornist and composer Abrahamsen took part in musical happenings at street level. His ambition was to relate composition music to society. The pure, simple – and in many places quite unison – Symphony in C was Abrahamsen’s dual youth revolt. The piece was a political revolt against what the composer saw as the opaque bureaucratic power structures of the European Community. At the same time it was a musical revolt of its own time, against the extreme demands for complexity from modernism.
Poetic qualities
Concretism consists of setting mechanical musical processes in motion, and then, in the extreme case, letting the result of the processes become synonymous with the music. But a concretist can also choose to extract more subjectively composed music from underlying objective material.
While the concretist techniques appear clearly – sometimes decidedly nakedly – in Hans Abrahamsen’s early period, up to and including Stratifications, in the second half of the 1970s the composer was to work more subjectively on the basis of these techniques. The transition to this second, poetic or romantic period is directly reflected in a number of new works with German titles, the first of which is the septet Winternacht, composed in 1976-1978.
On top of the cool concretism of the early works we can trace a new preoccupation with the poetic qualities that concretist structures can permit to emerge. (The coolness is burned away, one could say, in the laser-like intense accumulation of energy that builds up at the end of Stratifications). It is as if a longing enters the music, while at the same time it opens up in a new way towards the past. Hans Abrahamsen himself speaks of “a new consciousness of time” in the works from this poetic or romantic period.
The mechanical processes are not renounced. This can be seen clearly in the first bars of Winternacht, where the starting-point is three simultaneously descending chromatic lines in different tempi – in that respect quite equivalent to the three different rising scale runs in the central fifth movement of Ten Preludes. The crucial difference is that at the beginning of Winternacht the composer has subjectively chosen notes from the underlying concretist structure. One could also say he has omitted the other notes from the three descending chromatic scales – rubbed them out in the same way as in the seventh of the Ten Piano Studies, where music that recalls Chopin can be made out behind the notes and rests of the music. Whereas the structure in Abrahamsen’s quartet piece is identical to the music, in the septet it forms the point of departure for a poetic universe created by a subjective selection of notes from three inherently stereotyped descending scales.
So Hans Abrahamsen did not renounce the structures. But he talks about experiencing a new kind of listening to the material in the second half of the 1970s, when the characteristic, if rarely emphasized affinities among the works also became more widespread.
The Ten Piano Studies are in this respect particularly crucial. These piano studies – not technical etudes in the strict sense, rather a series of character studies – work their way systematically from four sensitively romantic studies with German titles through three more mechanical one with English titles and two in the French spirit to a single, bright Italian study. The first seven studies were composed before the break in the 1990s, as was the tenth, which was however first performed together with the eighth and ninth studies in the course of the 1990s.
Again and again the composer has returned to these studies and has used them as a starting-point for new works. The horn trio Six Pieces from 1984, for example, is a recomposition of six of the first seven studies, although rearranged in order. In the same way the orchestral work Nacht und Trompeten harks back to material from another core work in the oeuvre, the septet Winternacht. The chamber orchestra work Märchenbilder too points back, with the tonally separated layers of the last movement, to the similar bitonality in this septet, which launches the composer’s second period, and whose descending contours can be traced all the way forward to the cello concerto with the linguistically ambiguous title Lied in Fall.
The year the cello concerto was composed, 1987, marks the end of Abrahamsen’s second period, when figurations from the past like fanfares, horn fifths and simple melodies are allowed to emerge clearly. They are not ‘pasted on’ to the music, but are inherent in its structure, emerging so to speak from the material, and are emphasized by the composer. The Mahler quotation in the second movement of the piano concerto, and the horn part’s tribute to Ligeti in the third movement, are examples, and the phenomenon can similarly be studied in Nacht und Trompeten, written as a commission from the Berlin Philharmonic and dedicated to the German composer Hans Werner Henze, who conducted the first performance in 1982.
It was especially between this second period and the time when the piano concerto was written at the end of the 1990s that Abrahamsen, like many other composers, worked intensively with adaptations of the works of other composers. Just as the composer, by virtue of the further elaboration of the material that took place from work to work, was in constant dialogue with himself, he engaged, not least in these adaptations, in a conversation with history and with his own musical time that found its way into his works.
New directions
Let us go back for the moment to the works from Abrahamsen’s first period and the string quartet Ten Preludes. In the central fifth movement of the quartet, simple, tonally constructed chords emerge from the strictly objective, completely concretist mechanics of the movement. It is a crucial point that these tetrads are on the one hand charged with emotional content – they just have to be for anyone familiar with the works of the Classical-Romantic composers – but that they have on the other hand arisen unintentionally, as a result of the concretist process.
The objective process, as we have seen, permits subjective-sounding, expressive ‘objects’ to sound forth. Just as, in the early works, concretism made it possible to fill rigorous structures with a boundless freedom in the variety of the content, concretism makes it possible for the composer to handle emotionally charged musical objects in the works from the middle period.
But the process can also go the other way. In 2002-2003, when Hans Abrahamsen composed the orchestral work Four Pieces for Orchestra, he went back to the first four of the Ten Piano Studies from the beginning of the eighties, wishing among other things to use the expansion to add extra emotional nuances. The idea of recomposing the piano studies for a large orchestra had already occurred to Abrahamsen during the writing of the studies in the 1980s. It was thus part of the original plan when Abrahamsen began the work of recomposing and expanding them both in time and space. And as the orchestral work now appears, the four pieces have become twice as long, arranged for an orchestra of Mahlerian dimensions. In the music we find echoes of the post-Wagnerian orchestral repertoire; but exactly that – only echoes, as transitory emotional memories, fragments experienced in dreams or as déjà vu. The distance of the modern observer is maintained, a distance which in the words of the poet Thomas Campbell “lends enchantment to the view”. And while one can immediately hear the composer’s own fascination with the Romantic masterpieces in Hans Abrahamsen’s music, there is at the same time the pathos of that distance, through which the music of the past (including Abrahamsen’s own) is contemplated from a quite different musical perspective.
And so Hans Abrahamsen’s music is in constant, continuous development, no matter how independent each new work may sound in relation to its predecessor. The music is in a constant, developmental dialogue with itself – as is the composer with himself.
In the second movement of the piano concerto, which begins with the surprisingly beautiful piano solo, the music is in reality not newly composed at all, it is an extract from the piano part of the second movement of Märchenbilder, taken out of its original score and inserted in the concerto.
“I would never be able to compose it, just like that,” explains Hans Abrahamsen. “This solo passage for the piano arose out of the material that surrounds the passage in Märchenbilder. Behind its apparent simplicity, in other words, lies great complexity! It is the history of this piano part has that made it possible for me to write it into the piano concerto.”
Along with the last three of the ten piano studies that were written in 1998 after the break in composition throughout the nineties, the piano concerto, the Four Pieces for Orchestra and Three Little Nocturnes from 2005 for the accordionist Frode Haltli and the Cikada String Quartet mark a new segment of the composer’s oeuvre; a new, third period after the first period’s strict, cool concretism and the middle period’s far more poetic works.
© Thomas Michelsen
|
|
|
|