Karl Aage Rasmussen

Karl Aage Rasmussen (Kolding, 13 December 1947) is one of the most distinguished Danish composers of the generation following Per Nørgård and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and a key figure in the reorientation of post-serial music in Denmark. His career combines composition, teaching and written communication, and his work has shaped the debate on musical meaning in the second half of the twentieth century.

He trained until 1970 at the Jutland Conservatory in Aarhus, where he studied music theory and history and composed under the guidance of Nørgård and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. After qualifying as a music teacher in 1971, he returned to the conservatory as a lecturer, a post he would go on to hold as professor from 1988. In 1975 he founded his own ensemble, the Elsinore Players, and in 1978 he launched the NUMUS Festival in Aarhus, of which he was artistic director from 1978 to 1985 and again from 1987. He also served on the National Music Council (1976–1979) and chaired the music committee of the National Arts Foundation (1987–1990). In 1991 he received the Carl Nielsen Prize and in the same year took on the artistic direction of the Esbjerg Ensemble.

His output departs from the avant-garde demand for absolute originality of materials. Rather than seeking sounds never heard before, as one critic has put it, he seeks "connections never heard before", and he realises this in works that reuse and remodel pre-existing material in order to question the meaning of music. Early examples are Symphony for Young Lovers (1967), which mixes elements of classical music, jazz and beat, and Genklang (1972), built from fragments of the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Berio-Mask (1977) takes as its starting point the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia, while Encore VIII (Fuga) reproduces, note for note, the fugue of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata, though with different tempo relationships between its four voices. In more recent years the exploration of musical time has come to occupy a growing place, as in A Symphony in Time (1982) or in the string quartets Solos and Shadows (1983) and Surrounded by Scales (1985).

The weight of instrumental and, in recent years, chamber music is also evident in large-scale works such as the opera Titanics Undergang (1993) or the Violin Concerto (1996). Rasmussen is also an active writer, the author of portraits of composers such as Cage, Crumb and Feldman and of introductory texts on twentieth-century music. His legacy lies in having shown that quotation and collage can be instruments of reflection on music, and not merely ornament.