Aug - AmericanRadioHistory.Com

this: music has outgrown its old confines of traditional harmony
and chord structure, but the fundamental element of
tonality as a prerequisite for all music remains unchallenged.
This is conservatism, of a kind. The new harmonic and
chordal possibilities at first so fascinated this century's cornposers
that most of them avoided and even abandoned as
many features and characteristics of everything that had
gone before as possible. They took to floating around
happily in uncharted oceans of new sounds, rhythms, and
melodic shapes, with a great deal of splashing but usually
without much aim, purpose, or organization.
Carl Nielsen enjoyed the splashing too, but he could not
go along with the attitude of discarding everything old in
favor of everything new, an attitude which, to him, seemed
unnecessarily wasteful. He is said to have remarked repeatedly
that although it is interesting to think up new,
strange harmonies, the real proof of true, musicianly imagination
and craftsmanship still lies in the ability to write
down a perfectly ordinary melodic skip of a third or fifth in
such a way that it sounds as if one had never heard it before.
In his book Levende Musik (Living Music) he wrote:
"We must show the surfeited that a melodic skip of a third
ought to be looked at as a divine gift, a fourth as a revelation,
and a fifth as the greatest joy. Thoughtless gluttony
undermines one's health."
As a result of this attitude, Carl Nielsen's music shows a
wider range of expressive resources than that of almost any
other composer. His melodies range from naïvely simple
tunes, through solidly built, concise themes and extended,
sophisticated melodic passages to the most exotic turns and
contortions. (One of the characteristic stylistic features in
his melodic work is a hovering around a central tone from
which the melody probes into all kinds of intervals, with
particular prominence given to the lowered seventh.)
Equally, his rhythm ranges from the most natural 3/q
waltzes and 4/4 marches to the wildest outbursts of rhythmic
complexity - for example, to the point of having two
tympanists fire freely improvised drum salvos from opposite
corners of the stage into a full orchestra (Fourth Symphony).
Texturally, too, the variety is unusual: Nielsen
produced volumes of beautiful, simple chorale harmonizations,
but at the same time he has hardly an equal in the
overwhelming complexity of contrapuntal pile -ups in some
of his symphonic climaxes, particularly in the first movements
of his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies.
It is perhaps not surprising that his music can (and often
does) mislead the casual listener into thinking that Nielsen
never did more than assemble all sorts of musical gimmicks
and mix them indiscriminately into a sort of stylistic hodgepodge.
But it is not the number and variety of devices
which counts, it is the way and the spirit in which they are
applied. Nielsen's craftsmanship, spontaneity, and sincerity
of expression, and the warmth of the personality which
underlies his music, mark him as far more than a mere
manipulator of tricks and techniques.
ABRIEF GLANCE at Carl Nielsen's youth may shed
some light on the reasons for his exemplary open- mindedness
in matters musical, and his apparent immunity to fads
and fashions. He was born June 9, 1865, in a little village,
AUGUST 1955
the son of a house painter who played the violin at occasional
village gatherings. From him he picked up the rudiments
of fiddling but the thought of pursuing music as a
career apparently did not occur to him. He became an apprentice
in a grocery store. Soon, however, the store went
bankrupt and he lost his job, which caused him no grief at
all. He bought a trumpet, practiced it diligently, and applied
for a position in a military band in the town of
Odense. Although he was only fourteen years old, he was
accepted and stayed with the band for three years. Then he
went to Copenhagen to study violin and piano at the Royal
Conservatory.
At the time, the Conservatory seems to have been soporifically
provincial. When Nielsen graduated, in 1886, he
had reached the age of 21 without ever having been made
seriously aware of the great musical battles of the period.
The Wagner- Bruckner -Brahms controversy never had really
reached Denmark, and neither had the controversial French
trend toward Impressionism. Instead, Denmark's music
lovers lived on a post -Mendelssohnian diet, bland and lukewarm;
the Danes were definitely behind the times. Niel -
sen's divergence from the paths followed by his musical
contemporaries, therefore, must be attributed in part to the
fact that he didn't even know that these paths existed. To
him, everything was new and exciting. And when sophistication
came, it had been preceded by a very keen, self -
evolved taste. When finally he encountered new musical
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Odense, where a composer's career began in a military band.
fashions, he was able to choose and reject among them with
high independence. His guiding principle was, more than
anything else, an appreciation of true craftsmanship and
sincerity in music. Knud Jeppesen, his renowned compatriot,
once observed ( in the German musical magazine
Melos, June 1927) that while the average person generally
takes music for granted, as something which has always
been with us, Carl Nielsen never lost the ability of the child
to wonder.
Jeppesen could have added that Nielsen also was childlike
in his lack of inhibitions about speaking his mind. He
failed thus to endear himself to some of his contemporaries
and elders. In an obituary note (Nielsen died October 3,
1931) J¢rgen Bentzon wrote "A young musician who in
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