Composers
Bent Sørensen
© Omar Ingerslev
Born: 1958
“It reminds me of something I’ve never heard!”
Such was the spontaneous reaction of the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim upon hearing a work by Bent Sørensen. And it is not easy to imagine a more strangely to-the-point description of the ambiguous, almost paradoxical expressive idiom of this unique composer, who is without doubt the leading Danish composer of his generation. Sørensen’s music is not recycled, in no way does it rely on the yellowing pages of history for its musical nourishment ¬ his musical language is undeniably of the present day, both aesthetically and technically. The music does, however, appear to be pervaded with memories, wisdom of experience and old dreams, of the inevitability of transitoriness and parting. It is a flickering, glittering world where things seem to disappear at the slightest touch. The moment something becomes tangible and recognisable, it dissolves, becomes obscured, or disappears. But this ghost-like indistinctness is nevertheless the work of an experienced illusionist: Perhaps Sørensen’s most singular talent is his ability to give voice to this indistinctness, to render it distinct and clear. Often he places very simple musical material inside an ingenious musical “hall of mirrors” in which echoes, and echoes of echoes, spread like ripples in water; the quiet, smudged contours, which sound as though heard through falling rain or misted windows, are always drawn in minute, calligraphic detail.
Less enigmatic to composers than to their listeners is the question: “Where does the music come from that a composer invents or creates?” It may seem almost contrary to nature that it does not in some way relate to our concrete world, that the composer does not use “reality” in his sounds and rhythms. When certain phenomena in the outside world attract or fascinate composers, is it not because they wish to reproduce them in music? - perhaps so. Bent Sørensen, however, sees it the opposite way round: when real phenomena fascinate a composer it is because they remind him of his music! Time and time again Sørensen is drawn towards decay and disintegration, rotting tree-trunks, overgrown, dying gardens, cracking paintings or ruins threatened by the mark of time, deserted churchyards being eroded by the sea. But this is only because to him they seem like mental images, sober symbols of spirituality or the soul in his music, which do not exist outside the music.
The ability of music to create images has always helped in bringing it to life in the audience’s imagination. ¬ Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14 would hardly have enjoyed its enormous popularity if it had not been added the element of moonlight. Sørensen’s music has from time to time had to shake off a well-meant yet smothering embrace of literary interpretations. The music does conjure up flickering, transient images in the listener’s consciousness, possibly helped by Sørensen’s own imagination or his references to concrete, extra-musical phenomena. Many have therefore experienced nostalgia and “hyper-romanticism”, and even programme music in these shadow worlds. In addition, Sørensen’s predeliction for classical “tonal” intervals, thirds and sixths, may well sound like the echo of an ancient, crumbling musical heritage.
And even though such readings of the singular nature of the music may seem over the top, they are understandable. They arise from the enigmatic ambiguity of the music, which in German is called “Hintergründigkeit”; in other words, there appears to be an ever-present dimension to the music, something behind the music, a dimension that remains the well-kept secret of the music itself. In its simplest form this ambiguity in Sørensen’s mature works is not only recollection and presence, but also transience and movement, or simply dream and dance. In its psychic dimensions it represents a meeting between forces of momentum and disintegration, and as a plain human symbol it is the relationship between life and death. For the passing of time the stuff all music is made of confronts us in an almost tangible manner with life’s most tragic reality: that time passes inexorably, taking us with it. Bent Sørensen described his STERBENDE GÄRTEN as “decay within a solid framework”, and added “From the moment we are born, there is only one way - a slowly sliding decay. Time eats away at us.”
His mental musical images are like Magritte’s famous pipe: they do not truly exist, they represent only a rare sensitivity to the fundamental processes of life: the mystery of life itself ¬ growth, maturity and death. And they lose themselves again in myths in our collective unconsciousness: clocks, angels, echoes, shadows, tears, mourners, heavenly trumpets, the irredeemable “Märchenzeit”.
Bent Sørensen’s originality, imagination and technical abilities were praised long before his major breakthrough in the mid-80s. And it was not unusual then for the reviewers to express reservations: this music was so full of nostalgia and so sealed shut that there was no room to develop it further. One particular critic, for the most part friendly and positive, wrote of the music’s “odour of mouldy cellars” (which could almost compete with Hanslick’s hearing “music that stinks” in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto). But the critics’ fear that Sørensen would end up re-writing the same piece of music proved to be unfounded. His individual form of expression and personal style were formed at a very early stage; one can already hear in his first string quartet ALMAN from 1984 most of the features charcateristic of his music today. Bent Sørensen has quietly and seemingly without problem enriched and refined his idiom not in leaps and bounds, but gently and methodically, like the growth rings in a tree trunk.
Throughout the string quartets of the 1980s Sørensen developed a self-reflecting canon technique, and quiet, pulsating and vibrating textures, bringing them to fruition in ANGELS MUSIC from 1988. Subsequently Sørensen concentrated on writing for ensembles of various sizes for a few years, resulting in works such as MINNEWATER (1988), SHADOWLAND (1989), and the twin pieces FUNERAL PROCESSION and THE DESERTED CHURCHYARDS (1989-90), in addition to a number of smaller works for solo instruments. It is particularly during these years that the myth of the obscure romantic, concerned with death and symbolism, takes root. But where lesser souls might have been seduced by their own myth, as the shadow overpowers its maker in Andersen’s famous fairytale, Sørensen steadfastly follows his own path. The productive 1990s were dominated by large-scale orchestral works, though the larger format results, characteristically, in simplification of the material, which at times is reduced to one single line of eternal, labyrinthine reflections. A line which, not least following the major vocal work THE ECHOING GARDEN (1992) for soloists, choir and orchestra, unfolds as wandering, weightless melodies in an echo chamber of many different simultaneous tempi.
The Violin Concerto (1993), the Symphony (1996) and the Piano Concerto LA NOTTE (1998) are surrounded by several major ensemble works scored for a variety of forces. The most notable of these works are the string quartet SCHREIE UND MELANCHOLIE (1994) and the enchanting concerto BIRDS AND BELLS for trombone and fourteen instruments (1995) written for Christian Lindberg. After that, “everything”, in the composer’s own words, “has been about opera”.
THE ECHOING GARDEN is a highly symphonic vocal poem about the impossible possibilities of love and the unbearable lightness of death - in more ways than one the offspring of a tradition coming from Berlioz’ “Romeo and Juliet”. The music is still subdued, full of longing and dreaming, the choir and orchestra assuming each other’s colours chameleon-like, never-ending glissandi weaving a kaleidoscopic web of soft and melancholy humming voices. Twilight and longing, yes, but also confidence and certainly not pessimism. For the violin concerto DYING GARDENS (STERBENDE GÄRTEN), Bent Sørensen was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996, and this was his international breakthrough. And his very choice of the concerto genre shows that he certainly cannot just be labelled as a low-voiced melancholic. This is a concerto in the grand tradition, dramatic, graceful, wistful and wild. In the symphony, the confrontation between movement and stagnation is manifested even more clearly, and Sørensen’s colossal instrumental imagination reveals orchestral colours that again and again “remind us of something we have never heard”. One general aspect of his music stands out here with surprising clarity: apart from a few bass notes, the music sounds almost exclusively in the upper register. Which is of course yet another paradox: melancholy and longing expressed in bright, crisp colours.
Despite its classically naturalistic title, the response to Sørensen’s piano concerto LA NOTTE (1998) was noticeably lacking in literary and symbolic interpretations. The masterly envisaged and realised bonding of two otherwise incompatible bedfellows, the piano and the orchestra, creates such a resounding and sunny play of colours that any talk of dusk and death is ruled out. And in the solistic, declamatory finale, in subtle pastels, the solo voice speaks with an intensity and simplicity which, not only a new quality in Sørensen’s music, also provides its listeners with a new and more open space in which to interpret it.
If anybody during the 1980s had coupled Bent Sørensen with opera, quite a few eyebrows would have been raised. Despite small digressions to real or semi-real phenomena, his music at this time was anything but dramatically pictorial. The fact that today he is half-way through his first opera does not seem to be a quantum leap, however. For not only does his music today contain more regularly beating pulses and is inspired by keener winds, it is also more dramaturgically formed. In recent years his music has increasingly begun to take the form of series of miniatures, many short movements, which indicates perhaps the narrative mosaic of events and emotional states in the opera genre. Also, the elementary musical dramaturgy of “near and far” which arises when the musicians are placed around the concert hall, has fascinated him increasingly.
The Danish playwright Peter Asmussen was so taken by the coexistence of the past and the present in Sørensen’s violin concerto that the two decided to collaborate on an opera commission. But one must not believe that Bent Sørensen will attempt to make his music behave like an opera. The only viable possibility is the exact opposite: to make an opera behave like Sørensen’s music. And this required a tailor-made libretto. “The libretto consists of two stories, one from the present and one, fairytale-like, from the past,” says the composer. “The two stories merge together at the end of the work, giving rise to counterpoint between them. The music is the element which binds the two stories together. But the stories do not have different kinds of music, it is the same music which flows and binds together. The characters are not distinguished by individual musical material no leitmotifs or similar techniques. It is in a way the words themselves which convey their music. This is a pianissimo opera which is occasionally subjected to rape”.
During the course of the long process of working on his opera, Sørensen has, with his matter-of-fact attitude to the craft of composition, composed a number of satellite works, all reflecting the technical and musical approaches to the opera. The use of space to give perspective in sound is apparent in THIS NIGHT OF NO MOON, for example, and SINFUL SONGS hints at the use of a dramaturgically motivated offstage orchestra in the opera. In two song cycles, accompanied by piano and violin respectively, he develops melodic material from this eagerly anticipated stage work which has been given the title UNDER THE SKY.
In a short essay on the mysticism and sources of inspiration Bent Sørensen writes: “Ten years ago in Amsterdam I heard a solitary street musician, a violinist. I passed quickly by, and it was not until later that the music he had played began to haunt me. I could not recall it in detail, but the idea of an inexplicable, intense devil’s dance began to form in my mind. I listened through vast amounts of folk music and medieval music to try and find out what it was that I remembered him playing. I was unsuccessful the music remained a dream, and in the course of a number of works became a part of my own music. After all these years, trying to trace the street violinist’s music, it has of course become clear to me that I would probably be deeply disappointed if I were to hear it again. It is perhaps better and more fruitful only to hold on to the dream.”
Karl Aage Rasmussen
August 2001
Bent Sørensens website
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