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Axel Borup-Jørgensen

composer
1924
2012
Leif Hesselberg

Axel Borup-Jørgensen trained as a piano teacher and in instrumentation (with Schierbeck and Jersild) at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen in the post-war years, and considers himself a self-taught composer. Borup-Jørgensen was born in Jutland but as a child moved with his family to Sweden, where he grew up. He is influenced by Swedish culture - in particular one finds Swedish poetry and the Swedish landscape in his works. Axel Borup-Jørgensen was one of the first Danes to attend the Darmstadt course, but he has never composed serialist music. He has developed a refined, intuitively musical language with subtle colours and timbres which can gave an impressionistic effect, especially in the works of nature lyricism. His music is often worked through in minute detail, and he has not written many works on the large scale for orchestra. One of his major works is the virtuoso sea evocation MARIN, the gigantic score for which, including 44 individually notated string parts, is a masterpiece of post-war Danish music. Borup-Jørgensen has also composed around 150 chamber and instrumental works, prominent among which are works for percussion and guitar.