The new composers

The emancipation of art music
It is always difficult to unequivocally determine when a new artistic movement has really emerged, and has become more than just a ripple on the surface. The overall artistic field is composed of a myriad of diametrically opposed zigzag patterns in a constant state of flux. And today, when originality, individualism and diversity are given pride of place, the concept of an art movement is in general less relevant. If I nonetheless utilise it here, it is because over the past five to ten years, an ever clearer picture has emerged of a collective new departure on the young art music scene in Denmark. A new departure which is founded just as much upon identity and choice of media as on aesthetics and materials. A breaking away from the pervasive view of art music as music (with a capital M) which is written down in scores and performed by classical musicians in a classical concert hall and a classical situation.

The forms and media of art music are now undergoing considerable upheaval and expansion, and the new composers (aged between 25 and 35) are facing far freer choices than those which were available to any previous generation. First and foremost, technological developments have fundamentally altered the space of art, and new possibilities are arising at such a rate that the artist merely needs to open his hands for previously unheard-of possibilities to drop into them. This applies both to the media in which art can be expressed, the means of its dissemination, and the tools with which it is created. At the same time as the range of possibilities has been greatly enhanced by the new electronic and digital tools, the new media have also become more supple and mutually integratable in their process, work and publication. While the Danish art music scene has been characterised for the past thirty years by a relatively sharp division between acoustic and electronic composers, this partition now longer seems relevant. This generation does not ask itself whether it belongs to one category or the other, but rather which tools are at its disposal in order to realise a given artistic idea. Whether these are acoustic or electronic, aural or pictorial is secondary.

From compositional music to art music
With the computer fully integrated in the toolbox, it is possible to be independent of the heavy production apparatus of classical music. All of the artists mentioned in the following have at some time or other expressed themselves via scored music. For some, the score remains a central 'tool', while for others it is now merely a less important part of the process, and others again have abandoned it entirely. The score is in other words no longer a necessity, but a choice – and with the breaking of the monopoly of the score, an entirely new field of possibilities has opened up. For to speak of the score is to speak of classically-schooled musicians, and thereby also classical instruments, classical concert traditions, classical audiences, etc. The score is the foundation of the entire classical music tradition, and once that is questioned – as something that can be chosen or rejected – the entire institution becomes open to question.

The range of alternative routes from idea to audience is being expanded, and the sharply dualistic twentieth-century model, with its creative artists and performing artists, is being challenged by a wealth of alternatives. Several of the new composers now themselves perform on stage, either as musicians or improvisers, or with actual performance art. At the same time, a wide range of hybrids has arisen across the boundaries of sound, music, picture, concert and installation, and various kinds of video, in particular, are seen more and more often in connection with music. In the ‘new’ space which has now become genuinely accessible between installation art and music, audio art has experienced a vigorous expansion.

Success in this alternative arena does not, however, mean that the new composers have entirely abandoned musicians and acoustic instruments. On the contrary, we could almost speak of a revitalisation of the relationship, because it is now entirely voluntary on both sides. Those composers who continue to work with musicians, do so because they find this working method interesting and rewarding, and not merely because they need to use the sounds that these musicians can produce.

The scene
With the breaking down of the established boundary between acoustic, classical instruments and the ever larger palette of electronic instruments, another cultural boundary is at the same time being broken down for most people in the generation of these composers; a generation which has had no direct musical relationship with the classical instrumentarium, and thus can hear it only through a considerable cloud of museality. Or as one member of this generation put it, the majority of them cannot hear a harpsichord without thinking of powdered wigs…

In cultural terms, the new composers have much more in common with experimental contemporary art, literature, film, etc., than with the bourgeois classical music culture. The old masters remain an important part of their cultural legacy, but more indirectly than was previously the case. And whereas previous generations of score composers typically took over and built upon the tradition of classical music, and cultivated disciplines such as instrumentation and movement structure, art music in this generation more closely resembles the experimental and material-independent art scene, where the focus is less upon the specific material and its processing and more on the general philosophical exploration of a question or a message.

Most of these composers aim to actively engage with the world through their music, and the sixties' avant-garde concept of "art for art's sake" has been replaced with a considerable awareness of the audience. Experiments are being created with new forms of concert and musical contexts, and the concert is no longer merely a presentation of works, but a work in itself.

Children of the avant-garde
Art is about investigation, reflection and interpretation of the world – and the world has never undergone such alterations as in the present day. Perhaps that is what we can read into this new departure. Many of the signs and tendencies mentioned here have been seen before in history: performance art, multi-media, electronic music, etc. – but whereas they often used to be applied in a pioneering or innovative spirit, the new media have now come of age in an artistic context. The new media generally begin life in the hands of those fascinated with technology, and it is only later that the focus shifts from the frame to the content.

What can be seen on the art music and audio art scene today (in Denmark) feels almost like an explosion of previously bottled-up creative power – an expression of the liberation of ideas and visions, after decades of confinement in the classical tradition. The computer has seriously broke down the wall between art music and the rest of the world, and from both sides, art is now pouring across the old boundary. Concepts are being established which art can combine and almost seamlessly move between: acoustic/electronic, sound/picture, concert/installation/net art, art music/audio art, action/interaction, etc. The new composers are now freer than ever to allow their ideas to be realised in the optimum material – and as a positive artistic option, rather than the first and invariable possibility.

The spectrum for this introduction has been established with the score as its yardstick; the composers mentioned have all either written or are still writing scores. The point, however, is that from this generation on, this boundary will no longer really make sense. In the same way that painting long ago lost its monopoly in the world of pictorial art, scored music is now merely one of many possible musical paths. With the new composers and the new media, art music has moved out of the relative isolation of the classical concert hall and back onto the artistic and cultural agenda – the children of the avant-garde are coming home…

The sound of being – Martin Stig Andersen
Martin Stig Andersen (b.1973) is one of the 'new composers' who has most emphatically abandoned the written score. After having unconsciously attempted to write electro-acoustic music for acoustic instruments in a number of works, he finally found his way home when, with Shadow Songs for soprano and tape, he turned his back on the score and on purely acoustic music. Since then he has enjoyed fruitful collaboration with musicians and various other artists, but always with electronic sound manipulation as a tool.

Martin Stig Andersen's perfectionism and his radical insistence on the primacy of the tone is reminiscent of Scelsi and his French successors. Dramatic form and structural processing are almost complete absent in his music, which on the other hand lays the way open for exploration of the tone. This results in some extremely atmospheric acoustic spaces and universes which produce an unusual degree of resonance in the heart and ears. In Andersen's music we do not merely observe an object – we are absorbed by it.

The next level – Simon Steen-Andersen
When, in the work Nothing Integrated, Simon Steen-Andersen (b.1977) incorporates the image as a parameter on a par with other, more traditional, musical parameters, this represents an evolutionary expansion of abstract music-making – bringing music another step further – rather than a revolutionary new beginning. Steen-Andersen has a remarkable ability to absorb existing aesthetics, make them his own, and use them to advance the music a step further outward and upward. You rarely have the sense of hearing music from another world, but rather a refinement by a person from another world of the music of this world…

In a number of works, Steen-Andersen breaks down the barriers between the instrument and the listener via extreme amplification. An entirely standardised element of the modern musical world is thereby thematised and advanced: via microphones and (extreme) amplification, the listener is brought almost inside the instrument – and thereby experiences the opening up of a new world of sound. In Re-rendered for grand piano, two assistants and live video, a picture from a primitive CCTV camera is projected onto a screen, so that the audience can simultaneously experience the relatively conventional musician-playing-an-instrument-on-stage situation, and, via the camera, can watch the piano itself – like a fly on the wall during a complicated medical operation. The two assistants' stringent and precisely choreographed movements are also reminiscent of the work of surgeons.

Cogent sounds and choreographic movements are equally important in Steen-Andersen's music, which is about gestures, movement and energy. In the series of works entitled Next to Beside Besides, he brings this development to a radical conclusion; the series consists of a number of choreographic translations of the original work Beside Besides (for cello). The 'translation' relates not just to the notes, as conventional instrumentation would do, but rather to the musician's movements in relation to the instrument's idiomatics. The work thus consists of "a choreography for musician and instrument – with accompanying sound".

Inside your mind – Niels Rønsholdt
The works of Niels Rønsholdt (b.1978) occupy a borderland between the dramatic 'role' and the musical 'voice'. The music manages at one and the same time to utilise the musical elements of beat, repetition, harmony, etc., and the theatrical and psychological dimensions of anxiety, claustrophobia, distance and pain. Often the fictitious role is realised in a 1:1 relationship with the musician, while at other times the musical material is personified by several musicians, or by a pre-recorded tape.

In Die Wanderin (2007), the 'core material' is the sound of a woman walking. Combined with ominous harmony and instrumentation, a disturbing atmosphere is created from the very first beat. At first the woman walks at a gentle pace, but then she suddenly stops – as though startled – and listens. The accompaniment halts and only a high howling note remains … stillness/nothing … and she walks on. The sequence is repeated again and again, but becomes constantly faster, and the beat ever more distinct (hammered by the bass drum), while at one point a wind machine makes the scene almost absurd. On one level this could be the soundtrack of a thriller, but the story is entirely absent. From a theatrical point of view, the action has been pared down to the abstracting role – the psychological core.

It is an extreme version of the fundamental concept of opera, in which the 'role' – or the protagonist, as Rønsholdt calls it – expresses a state of mind through song. Here it is expressed via the body's most basic forms of expression: breathing and walking, sighs, moans, breaths and steps. The music does not describe a state of mind – it is one. And when Rønsholdt's music works best, it engages the listener's instinctive empathy. At the same moment that credibility is present, it becomes very difficult to ignore the human pain that this music expresses. It is hard not to be affected by sounds of strangulation, whipping and pursuit…

Contextual music – Juliana Hodkinson
Strictly speaking, Juliana Hodkinson (b.1971) falls outside the age boundaries of this article. Nonetheless she is included here, because in many ways she marks the beginning of what this article claims is a new departure. Hodkinson's music deals with anything but absolute music; it is about the way we act, as listeners, musicians, and human beings. It is about the context of the music.

These contextual aspects may be manifested in other media, such as video, theatre or film, or they may be located more ambiguously within the music, where silence plays a central role for Hodkinson, who has written a PhD thesis on the subject. On the one hand, the silence is part of the music, while on the other hand it is a contradiction which sharpen the senses towards the sounds. Much of the music takes place in the narrow borderline area between the audible and the inaudible.

While the music can be extremely sensitive and delicate, what the composer is seeking is not the sound itself, but rather the awakening of the senses that can arise in this field. For Hodkinson, the specific aural material is merely sound that "exemplifies" the idea – it is the musician's anxious concentration which is the point, not the perfect reproduction of the score's ideal. In the pieces entitled Some Sounds for LL (1999) and Why Linger You Trembling in Your Shell? (1999), for example, she uses matches and table tennis balls as unpredictable elements which render impossible the practised perfectionism of the classical music tradition. The violinist must follow the rhythm of the bouncing table tennis balls, while the oboist must follow the lighting and burning out of the matches. What we hear is the aura of the attempt to make music, rather than the sound itself. It is all about everything that is happening behind the ears…

The anti-aesthetic project – Kaj Aune
The aesthetic universe of Kaj Aune (b.1978) is built upon failure, rubbish and ruin – a cultural pessimism underlined by the title of one of his video works: For we have brought nothing into the world, and neither can we carry anything out. In the performance "Phantom of the Opera" (in the original version, with the singer Laurette Friis), he acts as a living scrap heap in the role of the Phantom, who is imprisoned during the performance in a colossus of black plastic, from where, using a black rubber glove, he plays upon home-made scrap instruments, mangles a music-box ballerina and lashes out wildly around him with an indefinable instrument…

In other works he plays the tragicomic figure Peder Berntsen, such as in the performance Peder Berntsen underholder med sin musikalske sav i 3/8 takt (Peter Berntsen entertains with his musical saw in 3/8 time). Here an elderly gentleman sits on the stage and, accompanied by scratchy versions of hit tunes from a bygone era, commences to play the saw. He is wearing a suit and a bright red clown's nose, and sits in front of a festive array of coloured balloons – clearly alienated by the performance situation. The picture is absurd on several levels, and you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the sobbing saw and the red nose, the clumsy symbolism, or the heart-rending picture of 'the real' (?) contrasted with the kitsch.

A unifying element in Aune's works is the use of pre-existing music; now and again in distorted or fragmented form, but often as an untouched object. The musical material is usually totally abstracted, and is used in more of a theatrical manner than as an absolute musical element. In the works of Aune, the boundary between music and art has been completely dissolved. He has long ago abandoned the score, and now moves exclusively in the outer field of what could conceivably be classified as music rather than performance art. His aims are humanistic and political, rather than musical.

Art as social behaviour – the Dygong composer ensemble
The Dygong composer ensemble is not bound together by common aesthetic values or by a uniform use of media. The four composers span great mutual differences, from Simon Löfler's (b.1981) uncompromising noise sounds to Regin Petersen's (b.1980) tonal minimalism, Nicolai Worsaae's (b.1980) poetic-dramatic soundscapes and Christian Winther Christensen's (b.1977) late modernist music. What unites the group (as an ensemble), and actually makes it one of the really interesting innovations, is their attitude to the concert form and the audience. In a former church, they have re-established an intimate and near-private concert form in which the distance between the audience, arrangers and musicians is broken down. In so doing, they are helping to illuminate one of the new paths ahead for art music: involving the audience. As a spectator at these concerts, you feel an indispensable part of a unique and intense event. This is the opposite of the elitist alienation which is the common experience of far too many new listeners at conventional art music concerts.

The analogue exception – Jeppe Just Christensen
Jeppe Just Christensen (b.1978) writes absolute, concrete and analogue compositional music for classical musicians, and is thus in many ways an exception from the trend towards multi-media and radical explorations. A central characteristic of his music is the tightness of the material. There are some more or less subtle features here from the Danish version of minimalism, such as neo-simplicity, but the typical well-oiled sewing machine of the minimalists is quite absent here. In Just Christensen's music the cogs are constantly jarring, and although there are a great many repetitions, these exist only in isolated form within the many layers of the music, making the music complex and intense.

He himself describes his music as "energy, concentration, rhythm, repetition, variation and movement" and says that when he composes, "it is first and foremost a question of how the music sounds ..." (interview with Just Christensen in seismograf.org). Consequently, he is a true representative of 'classical' contemporary compositional music, in which the music deals with the material and its processing, and he forms in this respect a contrast to Hodkinson, Rønsholdt and Aune, in particular, with respect to what the music or perhaps rather the art is "about". Just Christensen's music is however far from old-fashioned or "classical" – it is rather proof that compositional music is by no means dead, but has merely become one extreme in a range of new possibilities.

This article has been written for DanishMusic.info. Published in February 2009.