Axel Borup-Jørgensen

Jens Axel Borup-Jørgensen (Hjørring, 1924) is one of the Danish composers of the second half of the twentieth century whose work combines a sensibility inherited from Nordic Romanticism with the techniques of the Central European avant-garde. Born in Denmark, he spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Sweden, to which the family moved in 1927, and there he obtained his secondary school diploma in Linköping in 1944.

After the war he was admitted to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen. In 1950 he passed the examination for music teachers in piano, having studied with Anders Rachlew. His training as a composer was largely self-taught, although he completed studies in orchestration with Schierbeck and Jersild.

His early works, such as Lille serenade op. 1 for string quartet or Marine skitser for piano, follow a Swedish tradition of romance with an Impressionist colouring. Towards the early 1950s his language moved closer to Expressionism, with motoric features recalling Bartók in works such as Music for Percussion and Viola. The influence of the Finland-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling led him to work with increasingly reduced materials, and in the Winter Pieces for piano (1959) he adopted an atonal and pointillist style.

Around 1960, when Danish musical life opened itself to Central European currents, he attended the Darmstadt summer courses in 1959 and 1962. That experience did not bring about a change of style, although his contact with the early orchestral works of Ligeti and with the music of Bo Nilsson left its mark on his output of the 1960s, especially in Marin op. 60, a symphonic suite of about twenty-five minutes that depicts the sea through harmonic clusters and aleatoric procedures. Despite the importance of Central European music for him, he never adopted serial or structuralist principles; his writing is, in essence, intuitive, and he uses avant-garde resources in the service of a great sensitivity to timbre, rhythm and dynamics. From 1970 onwards his forms gain cohesion and his harmony gains depth, as in Sirenernes kyst for seven instruments and tape.

Nature, Nordic light and the seasons are constant sources of his inspiration, and in his works of a natural character he explores the extremes of his expressive universe, from the static lyricism of Nordisk sommerpastorale to the eruptive drama of Musica autumnalis. His legacy lies in having integrated the avant-garde into a personal voice and in having developed a notation of his own, often graphic in basis, which expanded the possibilities of contemporary Danish music.