Danish composer Through his music, the Danish avant-garde composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen manages to create his own distinctive universe, characterised by musical impressions drawn from all over the world. He has always been at loggerheads with 'good taste'. As the son of a sculptor and the grandchild of a painter, there were clearly artistic genes in the family; Gudmundsen-Holmgreen chose music as his form of expression. Around the time that he completed his Academy education, the serialist wave arrived in Denmark and inspired the young composer.  Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was also fascinated by the liberating quality of Samuel Beckett's absurdist humour, as can for example be seen in the choice of instruments for many of his works. He describes his music as a tightrope act; the tightrope walker may well be a clown in outsize boots, as in 'Plateaux pour deux' for cello and two car horns, but the elegance lies in the fact that the clown keeps his balance on the tightrope. During the sixties he moved away from serialism and towards his own style of 'neo-simplicity'. As part of the post-modernist movement, he borrowed material from neo-classicism, baroque, jazz and southern European music, blended with sounds from everyday life; not in the form of quotes, but rather as archetypes which entered into his own space-creating filtering technique called 'filter composition'. Around the 1990s Gudmundsen-Holmgreen grew tired of the media fuss associated with the concert hall and found that string quartets offered a good alternative source of energy. This can be heard in his 'Concerto Grosso' for string quartet and symphonic ensemble. Gudmundsen-Holmgreen has won several musical awards, including the Nordic Council Music Prize for his 1977 composition 'Symfoni, Antifoni' ("Symphony, Antiphony"). Besides his work as a composer, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen has held several other responsibilities; in the period 1967-72, he taught at the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, and he has served as a member of the Danish Arts Foundation on several occasions in the period 1974-97. By Mikkel Hauge Kofoed Photo © Jeppe Gudmundsen-Holmgreen This article is provided in cooperation with DR - www.dr.dk/musik/

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was born 1932 in Copenhagen. The composer is represented by Edition Wilhelm Hansen.  You can also find details about Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen's works in the database of musical works maintained by SNYK.