A Twilight Song

Of Hard Fought Engagements

By Andrew Mellor

Jesper Koch once recalled that he spent his ‘entire childhood at the piano.’ In youth, music gave free rein to the young Dane’s imagination. In adulthood, that still-uninhibited imagination spurred him to create his own music powered by wild freedoms and shadowy passions.

Koch studied with Hans Abrahamsen and Ib Nørholm at the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus and privately with Karl Aage Rasmussen, Olav Anton Thommesen, Andy Pape and Colin Matthews. He won First Prize at the 1992 International Rostrum of Composers with his work for two accordions and percussion, Ice-Breaking (1991), one of a series of scores the composer would write for accordion.

Koch’s tonal idiom, his regard for instrumental articulation and his strong sense of musical structure soon caught the wind of his regard for storytelling. A series of works inspired by Lewis Carroll includes the wind quintet Down the Rabbit Hole (1997), the tone poem Alice Under Skies (1998) and Memory of a Summer Day (2002) for soprano and orchestra. As the music journalist Jens Cornelius has written, in each of those works Koch ‘takes the listener by the hand’.

The symphony orchestra became a natural medium for Koch’s aesthetic and he has enjoyed strong relationships with the Odense Symphony Orchestra and the Danish Philharmonic Orchestra (Sønderjyllands Symfoniorkester), including a stint as composer-in-residence at the latter ensemble in Sønderborg.

The poetry of Walt Whitman has provided both inspiration and framework for a number of Koch’s orchestral pieces. From 1861 to 1865, the poet worked as a medical orderly during the American Civil War, supporting the forces of the Northern States but tending to wounded soldiers from both sides. Whitman, who had volunteered in New York hospitals in peacetime, found some purpose in his humanitarian work but the conflict’s duration took its toll; an emotional chasm separated the blood-soaked, exhausted days of 1865 from the optimism of the war’s earliest weeks. Some of the poet’s most celebrated verse reflects on that experience.

In writing a horn concerto for Jeppe Solløs Rasmussen, a horn player with the Danish Philharmonic Orchestra, Koch turned to Whitman’s war poems. The horn is a natural instrument to inhabit the world Whitman conjures up in those works. The instrument is associated with the hunt – whether the conquest of wild beast or fellow man, even if its military (and male) connotations are tempered by its coiled structure and frequently mellow sound. The horn is also the most difficult instrument of the orchestra to make sound: negotiating its mechanics and resonance is as treacherous as going into battle.

Koch isn’t the first composer to hear something of the nocturnal and the mythic in the instrument, both characteristics of his concerto (in which the solo horn plays almost continuously), despite its strong narrative footing. Its title borrows that of one of Whitman’s war poems while its final movement refers to another, Whispers of Heavenly Death. Both see the poet looking back at the war in retrospect, an idea ripe for Koch’s music whose own poetic qualities are derived in part from its viewing of the past from the present. The sense of determined journeying through harsh conditions present in Koch’s work also aligns it with another contemporary yet largely tonal horn concerto: Krzysztof Penderecki’s Winterreise , written in 2007.

Koch writes of his piece (referring to the two poems mentioned above): ‘there are two poems in total that I have directly set to music as songs without words (in movements 3 and 5) – the horn sings and the orchestra accompanies – and other poems where I have just been generally inspired by the atmosphere.’ The work’s journey is one ‘from dawn, awakening in the camp, to battle, death, reflection and resurrection.’ Distant timpani set the atmosphere in the introductory movement, its shadowy atmosphere punctuated at one point by the soloist’s sounding of a reveille. The orchestra’s tightly-packed woodwinds are immediately established as the soloist’s most obvious adversaries, partners and foils.

Steely percussion and more present timpani season the second movement, whose mustering atmosphere is created largely by frantic woodwinds rippling up ascendant scales. In the music’s pert chases we hear the horn embodying its traditional role. The concerto’s prevailing melodic ambiguity and restlessness come to the fore in the searching ‘Elegy’ which underlines the horn’s warmth while seeming to channel the spirit of Gustav Mahler, particularly in its melodic contours and writing for harp. Timpani again have a pivotal role in ‘Cortege’, a mourning march whose sense of defiance steadily gains momentum. The final movement mines deeper into the atmosphere established by ‘Elegy’ and is traced directly over Whitman’s own description of a soul’s transition to eternity – heard on the valedictory violin solo – in Whispers of Heavenly Death.
 

Andrew Mellor is the author ofThe Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press)