Gunner Berg/Finn Høffding/Tage Nielsen/Jørgen Bentzon: various works (Odeon)
Purchased at the Jerry's Records dollar sale
As the price of records formerly from the Duquesne University collection are often priced at $3, I'll spend a few bucks on things I might not buy otherwise. Even then, I've found I really don't need to buy every CRI issue that comes along. Standards are even lower for the dollar sale (and the final day two for a dollar), and even then I don't need to buy them all.
Why buy this one, which includes works by four composers I don't know at all? One title stood out, the final work listed below. Within a reasonable price range, I'll buy almost any old-school electronic music albums, though I knew that the piece in this case doesn't really qualify. Hopefully that will make sense below.
The composers and works presented:
Gunner Berg: "...pour clarinette et violin" There's some playfulness to this piece. Messiaen would be a lazy comparison, with the music neither especially tonal nor atonal. There are eight movements to this duet, but it plays continuously with only minor breaks.
Finn Høffding: "Kammermusik op. 11" The chamber music in this case is a setting for soprano voice, oboe, and piano in three movements. As the first movement rolls in there's again the tension between tonality and atonality, as the piece sounds less tonally moored at the start, but settles into an almost minor-sounding setting. The notes read that the piece dates as far back as 1927, so it makes sense that the work as a whole takes on a chromaticized tonality.
Tage Nielsen: "Nocturner for klaver" What exactly is a nocturne? A work that evokes the night, yes, but I mean formally? In terms of methods or structure, I can't say nor do I know that there's anything in common with any piece titled "nocturne". This has come up in class, as a piece I've assigned for listening has been Bruno Maderna's "Nocturne" for electronic sounds. Perhaps he had a dark mood that suggested the direction for him; or maybe, the results hinted to him the title. I don't know. The two movements, the two nocturnes as it were, are short and fairly compact. The work dates to 1961, making it the most recent of all the works included, though it comes closer to suggesting pre-WWII methods.
Jørgen Bentzon: "Mikrofoni Nr. 1" And now, the title that made me pick up this LP, and it's absolutely not what I expected. It is, as the notes state, "...composed with special regard to reproduction through a microphone." For the life me of me, I don't understand why. The opening piano phrase sounds more distant than the previous Nielsen piece, so perhaps the composer was thinking that the piece would be performed very quietly? It certainly doesn't suggest Feldman.
Though written in 1939 just as the WWII was breaking out, it sounds like music more commonly written fifty years before. That in itself is a bit of a trap. After all, The sum whole of post-WWII composition is not Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Boulez. Those are only the composers doing the newest and most original music at the time, and many composers of the same period could be tagged as being more traditional. Nonetheless, to my ears this really does evoke the late 19th century.
Ah well, another 20th century composer compilation LP to add to all the others I have.
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