Voyage into the Golden Screen – Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

by Anders Flodin

Sometimes, it is impossible to say why and how a composition works or affects me. I can listen to a piece of music that fills me with feelings and thoughts, obviously conveyed by the composition, but without being able to connect the feelings and thoughts back to it and say, for example, that the sadness came from the instrumentation or that the longing came from the chord or timbre. A composition that I like so much was composed by the Danish composer Per Nørgård in 1968-69 with the title Voyage into the Golden Screen. 

The composition is divided into two movements with two simple ideas. The first movement is timbrely oriented and the second movement a continuously rhythm but separated, line fission, at different speeds. Static rhythm in the foreground, rough and sketchy and dissolves against a background that widen the melody contour. That’s all, that’s the whole composition. But the composition is magical. It is loaded while being only a composition in two movements – the first timbrely oriented and the second with movement at different speeds. So, what is happening? When I listen to these timbres and movements that are simplified to the point that they more suggest a composition than represent it, I hear the universe, as if the composition wants to reconcile me to the eternal. But in Nørgård’s composition nothing is represented, other than sound, movement, instruments and form. Yet eternity, yet atonement, yet raised by something indivisible and whole. Is it as simple as the timbre leading towards a movement and the form obscuring it? Perhaps, but many have composed with sound, many have composed with form, without achieving what this composition radiates. There is a longing in this composition, a longing to disappear and become one with the world. And that longing to disappear and become one with the world fulfilled the act of composing, I think. That is why this composition is so good, what disappears shows itself in what comes into being, and even if the disappearance ceased for the composer when the composition was finished, it is still represented in the composition, filling us again and again with its emptiness. Sound, that is. Movement and form. Wind instruments, strings, harp, piano and percussion.

References

Nørgård, Per (1970). Voyage into the Golden Screen, Edition Wilhelm Hansen nr. 4197, Copenhagen 

Nørgård, Per. Voyage into the Golden Screen, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Caprice (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc8GvMkjGBc [20230911]