Unicorns

The Path to Immediacy

By Niels Rosing-Schow

The Danish composer Axel Borup-Jørgensen (1924-2012) had a special affinity with the guitar. After 1970, when he immersed himself in chamber and solo works, he gave a prominent place to music for guitar, including works for solo and duo as well as the larger guitar ensembles included here.

There are various reasons for the composer’s intense occupation with the instrument, artistic as well as more practical. Whatever the guitar might lack in volume, it can call on a sound world with undreamt of possibilities for nuance, from which sensual and poetic expression can be created. The instrument belongs to the artistic realm which Axel Borup-Jørgensen sought to refine in his compositions in this period, to which most of his works for guitar belong.

Many elements come together here, joined in impact and inspiration, which the composer has integrated into his creative universe at this relatively late stage in his life. Natural lyricism, as in much of Borup-Jørgensen’s music, plays a subtle yet powerful role here. It stems from his upbringing in Sweden (1927-46) where his family bought the island of Björkön in Lake Sommen in southern Sweden in 1942. On walks in the surrounding area, he was absorbed by the unique stillness of this vast landscape. These experiences continued to live on in his music.

Axel Borup-Jørgensen © Leif Hesselberg

He was admitted to the music conservatory in Copenhagen in 1946, and in 1950 passed the music-pedagogic exam on the piano. Apart from brief studies in instrumentation with Poul Schierbeck and Jørgen Jersild, Borup-Jørgensen was self-taught as a composer. Of a traditional character at first, his early compositions soon found a personal style in which relatively reduced material has an atonal, pointillist style which would become the norm in his musical creations.

When Danish musical life opened up to Central Europe around 1960, Borup-Jørgensen was amongst the first to seek out the summer courses in Darmstadt, avant-garde music’s Mecca at the time. His visits in 1959 and 1962 did not significantly alter Borup-Jørgensen’s mode of expression. He never embraced the serial or structuralist compositional principles of the avant-garde, as his music remained fundamentally intuitive in conception.

Instead, inspiration came from others, not least György Ligeti, who was important in providing further nuancing and refinement of his work. This influence unfolded in the substantially increased expressive palette used for the orchestral work Marin, a major piece he worked on between 1963 and 1970. This 25-minute symphonic work runs interwoven harmonic clusters, aleatoric principles and unconventional ways of playing in music that is strongly differentiated, sound-wise, and which describes the sea in suggestive pictures. Its realisation after many years of hard work was carried over to a creative period that was exclusively devoted to the field of chamber music and solo works. Here Borup-Jørgensen explored refined and instrumentally specific expressive possibilities, especially in the more than 20 solo, ensemble and chamber works he wrote involving the guitar.

Through the long period in which he carried out his detailed work, researching the special sound and technical playing characteristics and possibilities of the instruments he was writing for, Borup-Jørgensen worked out his own notation practice, which is remarkable for its beautiful graphic form and calligraphy. The scores are, at the same time, formidably precise and detailed (seen by contemporaries as bordering on the manic) in their instructions for the musicians. This was not because Borup-Jørgensen wanted to wreck the traditional expressive qualities: he sought a synthesis of tradition and innovation, but in a way in which the traditional parameters were to be handled with extreme sensibility.

Borup-Jørgensen’s deep exploration of the guitar’s expressive universe could not have happened without a close collaboration with a number of skilled performers on the instrument. The period during which he composed most of his guitar works was characterised by a shared desire for experiment on the part of composers and musicians who had an interest in new music. This was especially true of the generation of guitarists who, since the 1970s, had contributed to a golden era for Danish guitar music. For the composer, it was decisive that he had a close, trusting relationship with the musicians who presented his music, to be sure that they did so with the necessary dedication to grasp his special expressive universe. In return, they were often rewarded with works dedicated to them.

CRAS during the recording session of Unicorns © CRAS

This was the case with Entrée, featured on this release. The work was written for a guitar festival in 1997, as the opening piece in a portrait-concert of guitar works by Borup-Jørgensen. It is a quintet composed for the concert’s five participating guitarists whose names, a bouquet of guitarists the composer, amongst others, had worked with closely, are inscribed in the score: Karl Petersen, Per Dybro, Leif Hesselberg, Lars H. Jensen and Maria Camitz.

Precisely because the work was composed as an introductory piece for a portrait-concert, the composer chose to integrate quotations from those of his earlier works for guitar which the public would be experiencing later in the concert. This did not make the work a collage: the small citations are handled with great discretion. The character of the music is aphoristic, and the peculiar sound effects and recognisable figures create a clear formal structure through variation and recurrence.

There is a certain material commonality between the two works featured on this release (for example the repeated short figures comprising three or four notes). Enhjørninger (1992) has an even earlier relationship with another work, a guitar duo entitled poésies pour la dame à la licorne [poems for a lady with a unicorn], composed in 1986-88. La dame à la licorne is the title of six well-known Renaissance tapestries depicting a woman surrounded by various animals, amongst which a unicorn clearly has a significant role. The theme of the six illustrative tapestries is the five senses, with a further image that illustrates the motto, À mon seul désir [To my only desire].

The unicorn, which has given the work its title, is a mysterious and elusive creature in the form of a horse, most frequently white, with a twisted horn growing from its forehead. This fabled animal resists capture and has been associated with purity and innocence. Its horn was believed to ward off illness and poisoning by merely touching it. The way Borup-Jørgensen structures the work encourages a comparison with the tapestries, in which one can allow the gaze to wander from one figure to another, or to jump freely between them. The work consists of 11 relatively short sections from which the performers can select, setting them together in a free order. This is why this release includes two versions of the piece: one performance doesn’t do it justice, as it has a clear identity, yet is never quite the same. It was composed for the congress of the European Guitar Teachers Association in 1992 for any number of guitarists. The versions here are for six guitars, but according to the composer’s instructions it can be performed by anything from six to 24 players.

‘We must accept complexity’, said Pierre Boulez, and for Axel Borup-Jørgensen, complexity served as a clear artistic purpose. It is the path towards a compound, fleeting world of unprecedented poetry and refinement – at times on the verge of silence – which can be brought to life under the surface of things, a world which, in its own way, makes space for a spontaneous sensuality: complexity is the path to immediacy.

The intimacy of the guitar, its close connection to the performer’s body, hands and movements, radiates into the music like a gestural presence. For a composer who understands how to ‘play’ on this artistically, the music suddenly engages multiple senses. Besides the heard, one senses the tactile feeling of the fingers (and nails) on the strings, plucking and striking, while the other hand moves over the fretboard. And the visual remains present through the musician’s dynamic and sounding gestures, which are embodied in the coordinated movements of the arms and the body: the sense of hearing awakens and enlivens the sense of touch and sight – even if one is ‘just’ listening. This holistic experience is precisely what Axel Borup-Jørgensen explores and conveys in his works for guitar.

Bringing this aspect of the music to life as well as possible, this recording was made in an entirely wood-panelled room – a continuation of the guitars’ soundboxes – using analogue recording techniques.