“I don’t know where the lyrical element comes from,” the Danish composer Per Nørgård, who has died aged 92, once remarked. “I can’t construct the lyrical element. It is like when you stick your head out of the window on a spring morning and can simply sense the scent of flowers in the air. It can’t be controlled. In a way, the lyrical element is the sensual side of existence, which always comes as a gift.”
One of the most lyrical expressions of that gift among Nørgård’s 400 works was in the finale of his small-orchestral diptych Voyage Into the Golden Screen, composed in 1968. Ironically, its free-flowing melody derived not from chance “scenting of [music] in the air”, but rather the technical dictates of Nørgård’s then newly formulated “infinity series”, where the notes follow mathematically from the proportions of the “golden ratio” and the Fibonacci series: a telling musical counterpart to the prevailing Scandinavian concern, across all the arts at the time, of design-driven expression.
