Pelle gudmundsen-holmgreen 1932-2016

[jayne lee wilson]

• In Memoriam Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen 1932-2016...
  
  Two new Da Capo releases which coincided with the death, on 27 June, of this brilliantly original and entertaining composer.
  His music has pleased me much, so I wanted to mark his passing...
  
  
  
  T
  
  The best works on Incontri are not, perhaps, that 2013 self-named Proms UK Premiere, but Mirror II (1973) and Symphony, Antiphony (1977). Very hard to describe their stylistic mix of - minimalist-like pulse or heartbeat, above which the orchestral invention is sometimes wildly violent, sometimes blatantly primitive and bare, sometimes more expressively chromatic and gratifyingly tonal in its cadences. Musical elements co-exist here, often very simply and without interactions, without any "symphonic" development or thematic relationships.
  Quotations become part of the fabric too, from Stravinsky's Sacre and Ragtime - which leads a variational sequence (weblike elaborations around, rather than variations upon) into the relentless, brutalising climax of Symphony, Antiphony... to the first bars of Beethoven's Fiddle Concerto, which emerge from a rhythmic motif to lead the weirdly offbeat, quiet contemplations of the last section of the Mirror II...
  Occasionally I was reminded of Louis Andriessen's De Snelheid.
  
  The PGH Repriser album has a more hardcore 1960s avantgarde feel, maybe a touch too episodic catalogue-of-instrumental-effects in the title track, Repriser (1965) as 5 groups throw their often primitive, scalic material around without much interaction (though engaging in itself, if intermittently), but Rerepriser [sic!] (1967) mixes crunchy electric/bass guitars, tiptoeing harpsichord, pugnacious trombones and wailing woodwind to exultantly hilarious, & more flowingly (dis)-continuous effect.... and there's also a kind of concerto for a car-door (from a red Skoda) called Traffic, but you only actually hear a carhorn instead (if you can make it out above the rush-hour din) ...
  "Our little creature makes it out of the city alive" as Andrew Mellor's excellent note says..
  
  Both albums are new releases from Da Capo, 24/44.1 for Incontri and 24/88.2 for Repriser. Downloads from Da Capo played as WAVs in JRiver. CDs out later.
  http://www.dacapo-records.dk/en/arti...holmgreen.aspx
  (click on album thumbnails for detailed notes)

[Richard Barrett]

gratifyingly tonal

I will be checking these out despite not finding tonality particularly gratifying in itself. I haven't heard much of PGH's music but what I have heard is certainly the product of a highly individual vision of music and especially of timbre, despite the occasional harmonic obviousness and quotations...

[teamsaint]

Thanks for that Jayne.
I'll definitely give some of his music a listen.

Sad news of his passing.

Edit: enjoyed Re- Repriser (Athelas Sinfonietta on Youtube) very much. Proof it were ever needed too, of the value of a great title.