Poul Ruders Would You Believe It

WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT – A LOOK BACK By POUL RUDERS First published in Danish by Forlaget Kahrius, March 2019. Updated and re-written in English for non-Danish readers by the author, 2020

Dust jacket, left flap or back: The sub-title A Look Back should leave the reader with a clue to the author´s intention of presenting only what´s worth narrating from a life that was, and not lay on more than what´s necessary and of interest to an innocent public – always an admirable goal for any writer.

The dead are fast riders says an old proverb, so before I disappear and fade away into oblivion, I have, at least I hope so, with Would You Believe It managed to throw a fact sheet backwards over the horse´s tail, for anybody to pick up and read. This was Poul Ruders in his own words.

The origin of the present memoirs saw the light of day more than ten years ago, when I was bestowed with a Knighthood by the Queen of Denmark, an honor which automatically obliges the newly minted Knight(no “shining armor” there though, you get a medal in the mail, and that´s that – the rest is silence) to write and submit to the Royal Archives a short life story. Which I did, and short it was, no more than 30 pages.

However, when my seventieth birthday started looming the horizon, I found that the time was ripe to “go the whole hog” and expand the 30 pages into a proper autobiography, which, at the end of the day, is but A Look Back…

Poul Ruders 2018

Dust jacket, right flap, or back: How does one describe a phenomenon like Poul Ruders? No sooner have you found the mot juste than something in the music clamours to contradict it. He can be gloriously, explosively extrovert one minute – withdrawn, haunted, intently inward looking the next. Super-abundant high spirits alternate with pained, almost expressionistic lyricism, simplicity and directness with astringent irony…

Few composers on the contemporary scene are so versatile, so accomplished, so obviously in command of their tools and materials, and yet the music can give the impression of dancing on the edge of a precipice.

Stephen Johnson

INTRODUCTION

I look at pictures of the fair-haired lad I was and gain no real access to the persona.

William Boyd: The Lion Griefs, 1998

…In the long run we are all dead.

John Maynard Keynes

You´ll catch me at it. In the bathroom. Every morning. I look in the mirror, directly into the eyes of a member of the nastiest group of primates on Earth, the most destructive mammal ever to have roamed the planet: Homo sapiens…

Our species has, from the very start, diligently worked at destroying everything around itself and is, at the same time, zealously orchestrating its own demise. We´ll succeed, supported in our goal by Mother Nature, who hasn´t till now begun noticing this annoying rash, known as mankind. We have only been around for a couple of minutes, seen through the eyes of evolution, for about 150.000 years.

We don´t stand a chance. In the meantime, there´re activities we don´t have to be ashamed of, such as curling and cricket, art and apple pie, mud wrestling and music. Such as classical music!

Which became the ball I chose to dribble, all the way, till finally stopped by the Great Referee in the Sky(or wherever she is…). But classical music…

In an old Danish film, a comedy from 1967, the twisted and snobbish approach to the phenomenon classical music comes in handy – and to the rescue – during a panicky argument between a bunch of regulars, drifters and petty criminals hanging out at a slightly seedy tavern, situated on the Copenhagen

waterfront. A new owner, a supposedly posh lady from the higher echelons of society, has announced, that she´ll stop by later the same day, for a look-see. The group of shifty regulars is now seriously concerned, that the new owner won´t take kindly to their daily holding forth, swigging beer and telling racy stories.

Something has to be done – and done quickly! The leader of the group, a pickpocket in a sharp suit, does some savage thinking, and says: “the solution is…classical music. That´ll make a favorable impression on her, and we can carry on as usual”. So two of the “merry men” set out to buy a record with some classical music, and they return with a piano sonata by somebody called Beethoven(the sales clerk had assured the two customers, that one never goes wrong with Beethoven. Works every time).

Back at the tavern, they put the record on the turn table, that normally plays only light dance music, and begin listening to the Beethoven, while swigging beer out of the bottle, but with faces like undertakers!

Because it´s CLASSICAL MUSIC! When it´s over, one of them turns around, facing the camera, saying: “…let´s have some more beer. One always gets thirsty from listening to that kind of music.”

The approach toward classical music hasn´t changed in any significant way since the old film. The word itself: classical oozes something old and elitist(and it´s always better). There used to be a commercial for a brand of Tuborg Beer, going: “Tuborg Classic – has more of everything!” More thought provoking, bordering on the unfathomable, is the solution chosen several places all over the world, a way of keeping drunks, drug addicts, loitering youngsters, etc. from hanging out at shopping malls, bus depots and – especially in Europe – at entrances to large train stations: you play classical music from loudspeakers placed high up in the ceiling where they can´t be tampered with. Apparently opera is particularly effective at scaring the bums away. And it seems to work, shockingly enough. The most beautiful sound imaginable made by man is being (ab)used to chase people off! I won´t try to analyze the underlying psychology, like I can´t explain why most patrons at classical concerts have stopped by their hairdresser, having had their hair dyed gray or white.

My life became – and still is – devoted to classical music, and, well, I guess you´d say that I, in my capacity as a composer, am keeping the “trade” artificially alive, but so be it. As a young boy I most certainly did not entertain any philosophical ideas about going down that path in my future existence. In fact I dreamed of becoming an archaeologist specializing in Egyptology. But I grew up in a household with a piano and started piano lessons at the age of seven. I wasn´t particularly good at it, was definitely no wunderkind. But the seed was sown - and started to grow.

In the cabin(an old worker´s lunch shack on wheels, placed in the grounds behind my house), where I work, there´re two portraits of me pinned up on the wall, two photos with nearly sixty years between them: in one of them I´m sitting at the piano back in my childhood home and am about 7, 8 years old. It´s a picture taken by my father, a keen amateur photographer, who took photos of all and sundry all the time, but nobody photographed him(which is why I only own a couple of photos with him on the other side of the lens). The second photo, a professional press photo, was taken a few days before my 65th birthday. The similarity between the two versions of the same “model” is virtually non-existent: the fragile, “unfinished” young boy up against the old man with white hair and beard(I started growing a full beard at the age of 37.

Without the beard, I resemble a ping-pong bat in the face. I´m so plain looking, that even my mother had to give me the twice-over whenever I showed up). But it is the same person, or is it? Science tells us that the cells we´re made of are constantly being regenerated, so when comparing the two portraits, of course I know that it´s me as I looked before I was fully grown – it is me – but it´s hard to believe. It´s a bit like the classic paradox: you can´t swim in the same river twice, because the stream constantly brings new water.

Now I do not have those two portraits pinned up on the wall because I can´t live without looking at myself on a daily basis. To be honest, I´d rather not, but that little “exhibition” is a merciless reminder of the brevity of Life, a memento mori, a proof of the inevitable journey from brand new to the scrap yard.

So, from time to time, I contemplate the two portraits, whispering to myself: “…little boy on the wall, little did you know…” I push the rewind button, setting the film strip rattling through 9/11BerlinTjernobylReaganWatergateVietnam1968CubaDallasSputnikHungarySuezKorea27March1949 when I was…

THOSE WERE THE DAYS 1949-1968

…born at a hospital in the small town of Ringsted, an hour´s drive south of Copenhagen. Born furious – and I´m still furious, a white-hot temper sizzles and hisses constantly beneath the threadbare surface, but I´ve learned not to throw things around, not to smash glasses and cups onto the floor or yank stuff out of walls, like I did in my youth, whenever the blood-red curtain descended before my inner eye, blocking the view.

Only occasionally – and luckily with years in between – hidden phials of nitroglycerin explode inside me and with only a split second´s warning – the safety fuse doesn´t blow in time. I yell and scream, completely unhinged, can´t suffer fools, such as incompetent, lazy shop assistants, haughty waiters, inflexible bureaucrats, large stupid men in uniform, large stupid men not in uniform. And should I bump into myself one day, I won´t be held responsible for my actions.

These violent explosions occur only rarely, very rarely, thank goodness. BUT I´M STILL FURIOUS – furious at the fact, that my parents brought me into this world without my permission. But done is done, and when the midwife cried out “Oh my God, it´s Poul Ruders!” I took a pledge, promising myself never to kill anybody, never to set foot in Disney Land, and finally, never to watch a Eurovision Song Contest.

Besides, my Ringsted residency lasted only 2 months, spent in an incubator. The reason behind my slightly awkward “entry” onto this worldly stage was owed to the fact, that I was born two months too early, premature, as it´s called. And a premature birth was no walk in the park back in 1949.

But why at a small regional hospital in Ringsted? My maternal grandfather, Christian Frederiksen, was a big noise surgeon there(and more or less completely autocratic), so it was all hands on deck, trying to save the scrawny thing in the incubator(I don´t envy the staff nurses working under my grandfather through that period…). I also, subsequently, contracted pneumonia, so the combined blessings of having a doctor in the family and access to the in Denmark newly introduced wonder drug penicillin saved my life. Selected colleagues and certain critics may stop reading for a while here, perhaps with a thoughtful expression showing on their faces…

My parents had recently rented a flat in the north eastern part of Copenhagen, on a street called Østerbrogade(literally East-bridge-street), and if one belongs to the school of thought subscribing to the conviction, that the childhood environment plays a significant role in how our future is shaped, there´s stuff abundant for philosophical rumination: one of the side streets was(still is)named after Edvard Grieg, there´s a Bellmansgade(named after a popular late 18th Century Swedish Troubadour), and opposite where we lived, there´s a Carl Nielsen Alley. I´ve always felt righteously offended, that our greatest composer has been fobbed off with a street, which, even though parading under the grand label alley, is just a cul-de-sac leading smack into a disused hospital for venereal diseases.

My father, also with the given name Poul (the cause of a few “interesting” episodes later in my life), ran a flower business farther down Østerbrogade, in the direction toward downtown Copenhagen. My mother, Inge, neé Bodholdt Frederiksen, was 32 when she had me, her child number two. My sister Jette was the living “proof” of my mother´s first marriage. Jette´s father, Torben Seear Jensen worked as an in intern at the Ringsted Hospital, and when my mother, the eldest of grandpa Christian and grandma Emma´s four children, came out the winner in a local beauty competition, a tear-soaked romance between them began it´s inevitable course, and they were married – and had a daughter, my sister Jette, in 1941. And then they were divorced, which wasn´t a “done thing” back then, and definitely not for somebody belonging to a local small-town celebrity household, where not only my grandfather, but also Jesus, both ran a “tight ship”, especially on Sundays, where all sorts of secular fun , even of the more innocent variety, such as the reading of novels, were strictly forbidden.

One manifestation from the religion infested household of my mother´s childhood home, was the crucifix hanging on the wall of mine and my sister´s bedroom. I was deeply fascinated – and terrified – by the sight of this strange apparition, a poor human being, quite obviously nailed to a piece of wood, and the nails ostentatiously penetrating hands as well as feet, cast in bronze. I understood nothing…and shivered.

Not until later in life did it dawn on me, that the ubiquitous symbol of Western culture is…an instrument of torture, the infamous Roman cross .

When staying at hotels in Catholic countries, I always look for a crucifix hanging on the wall. There normally is one, and in most cases over the bed. I refuse to sleep underneath an instrument of torture, so I remove it and hide in in a cupboard or a drawer. Needless to say, I always hang it back where I found it before I leave.

My parents met in 1947 at a dinner party thrown by a renowned portrait photographer, Jens JunckerJensen, married to a sister of my mother´s first husband. How my father came to be invited isn´t quite clear, but legend has it, that Juncker-Jensen had run into my father at some point “on the town”, and that he´d developed an interest in the artistically gifted, but totally unpolished young man. So, the esteemed portrait photographer took it upon himself to “educate” my father. Who ravenously dug into the lavishly laid out table of culture, now opening up to him: art, music, photography, ancient history, the whole canvas of what today is called, slightly condescendingly, high culture. I doubt that my father had ever read a book before meeting Juncker-Jensen, but when Father died in 1980, he left behind a collection of over 2000 volumes, predominantly world history and philosophy.

It was hardly my father´s recently acquired intellectual acumen which made my mother fall in love with him, head over heels. He must have presented a completely irresistible antidote to what she´d known until then. Cheeky and charming. And absolutely unpredictable in his daily behavior. I´ve read somewhere, that a composer must choose his parent with great care. The mother preferably pious and demure – the father a bit of an anarchist – and given to drink. That should secure the perfect genetic balance between introspection and impulsivity in the offspring. And I must say that I hit bull´s eye in my search for the right “casting”(Walt Disney´s Lady and the Tramp springs to mind), and I think they had a wallow of a great time, at least in the beginning. But gradually their marriage began to resemble Salvador Dali´s famous liquid clocks: it looked like something well known, but at the same time completely wrong. They ought to have filed for divorce when I came of age, but neither would(or could), take the final step. My mother was, not surprisingly, extremely conservative politically, with a social approach only slightly to the left of Marie Antoinette. My father hovered somewhere between Djengis Kahn and Winston Churchill. Conservative alright, but with a dash of anarchy.

As mentioned earlier, my mother´s first marriage saw the birth of Jette. Her biological father Torben Seear Jensen(who died in 2015 at the age of 100 in his home in California), moved to America after the divorce and started his own practice, specializing in gynaecology, in Buffalo, New York. Subsequently, back home in Copenhagen, Jette and I shared a room with two bunk beds. She slept in the upper bunk, but one day she was gone, sent away to her father, to America for good. Having finished highschool there, she trained as a school teacher, and at the mature age of 50 she became a registered nurse after a long and demanding stretch of intense study. She has three children, the twins Katy and Kevin, born 1963 and Jennifer, born

1966. Jette eventually became a US-citizen and now lives in the Bay Area, near San Francisco, with her husband Terry.

Needless to, my sister wasn´t “shipped off” to America overnight, but to me it felt like it, at the age of 8 in 1957. The reason behind Jette´s “deportation” was – and still is – a bit of a mystery. Was my father jealous, having to cohabit with the living “proof” of my mother´s previous intimacy with another man? Or was there a moral, maybe legal pressure behind the decision? Those who knew are all dead, and my sister was never told. In any event, I´ll never know, but my mother must have suffered more than I can ever imagine. Jette was still a child, only 16 years old in 1957.

So I was all of a sudden a de facto only child, by now attending primary school, second form, as it was called back then, in a building located opposite my father´s flower shop. When the school day was over, I was told to stand and wait by the curb on the other side of the street, until my father spotted me, and he would then cross the street himself and lead me safely across the heavily trafficked Østerbrogade. Which he dutifully did, but sometimes it took a long time, up to half-and hour, before he had a chance to go and get me, being busy serving customers. And I just stood there, patiently waiting, shifting my school bag from one hand to the other.

Our neighborhood was, in the 1950s, a self-sufficient city-in-the-city. Our block alone housed a pharmacy, a delicatessen, a clock maker, a news agent, a tavern, a baker, a greengrocer and finally a fishmonger and a shoe shop. My mother didn´t have to venture far abroad, getting our basic, daily necessities. Let´s try and step inside some of the shops… ”What can I do for you today?” asks the kind and slightly buxom lady behind the counter inside the Delicatessen, or Chacutteri, as we call it. Thin cuts of salami are sliced, liver paste scooped and weighed, everything wrapped on the spot in thick oily paper(this was long before the insane plastic tyranny. Today you can´t open even a simple pack of cold-cuts without the help of an angle-grinder), and there´s always time for the latest neighborhood gossip over the counter. I always look forward to the trip with my mother to the Charcutteri, because it just might happen, that I´ll have a still warm paper bag with freshly baked pork cracklings pressed into my hand before we leave.

Inside the clock maker´s shop, there´s a constant tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock from all the alarm- and cuckoo clocks put on display. The clock maker himself sits in his white smock, peering through a small magnifying glass strapped to his forehead, deeply concentrated on whatever repair job presently at hand. There´s no idle chit-chat here. The man in the smock never says anything, just looks up briefly, grumbling something.

To be honest, it´s a bit creepy, at the clock maker´s. And there´s this ceaseless tick-tock-tick-tock…

My father was once short-changed by the news agent, whom he then nick-named the “cheat .The shop is, if possible, even more dark and sinister than the clock maker´s. The “cheat”, a gaunt, greyish man with a nervous tick, never stands behind the counter, waiting for customers, but emerges, almost running, from a small room out the back. Obviously there´re no pork cracklings in the offing here, but when the time comes for my body to begin living its own life, there´s on display in the window, a daring magazine for gentlemen called Variety, and the news agent´s window now has my full attention, especially when subsequently another publication joins Variety in the window( and here we´re really entering dangerous waters), a magazine for nudists! Bare breasted women are now observable from a public right of way, and I quickly learn how to take in the whole package without stopping, mortified, that if standing still, ogling the

goodies, I´ll hear the dreaded words coming from behind: “…what are you looking at?” It could be my parents, or worse, somebody they know.

Inside the fishmonger´s shop, the acne troubled fishmonger apprentice stares despondently into a tiled freshwater basin built onto the wall behind the counter. That same morning a live pike has been delivered in a pot and poured into the basin, so that it´ll keep until the customer who´s ordered it turns up later to claim it. The customer has now arrived, slightly impatient, because the young apprentice, armed with a net, dare not go near the basin in order to catch the fish, a huge mean fucker, snapping like the devil, each time the poor youth approaches. Enter the Olde Fishmonger himself! In one fell-swoop he locks his mail-gloved left hand behind the gills, slaps it onto the counter, slices off the head, wraps the pike in a newspaper and hands it over to the customer. “How about some fish mustard on the side, sir?”

Across the street from where we lived, was a store of the kind everybody in the 1950s called a Kolonialhandel (literally a Colonial Store), selling all sorts of goods from the former overseas colonies ruled by ruthless nations such as England, Holland, Portugal, Spain, and Denmark as well, oh yes! Tea, coffee, spices, etc.

The proprietor was called Hilmar Bock, a smile inducing name, and he had in the display window three coffee mills, each with a huge wheel, grinding the whole coffee beans. Inside the store, you could really smell the freshly ground coffee and the various exotic and alluring spices stacked on shelves.

Today most of the shops are gone. The baker is still in business, likewise the Tavern Suhr´s Wine Bar(although in a more up-to-date trendy café guise). If one should wish to get a virtual feel of the lay-out of our apartment on the second floor, above the Wine Bar/Café, which, not surprisingly, is situated on street level, go and take a look inside(151 Østerbrogade). Unfortunately it became increasingly problematic for my father to distinguish between street level and second floor. His drinking escalated in the early 1960s, and my mother and I rarely saw him. Our dinner stood for hours, slow cooking on the range, and more often than not, he´d stagger up the kitchen stairs, which we of course shared with the tavern(a more appropriate name for the dive it was), around two o´clock in the morning. By then, my mother and I had gone to bed, but it sometimes occurred, that he dragged one or two of his drinking buddies with him, so that they could carry on boozing in our apartment. Needless to say, that was not something neither my mother nor I were looking forward to, large, drunken, shouting, strange men, bouncing off the wall in the corridor connecting kitchen and living room, typical of that kind of North European apartments from the beginning of the twentieth century, so that the plaster rattled behind the wall paper. My bedroom was placed closest to the back entrance, so when I heard noisy clambering in a medley of independent rhythmic meters coming up through the kitchen stairwell, I realized that a “guest performance” was imminent.

Occasionally my mother would send me down the same stairs, down into the tavern, where I then would try and beg my father to come up and join us in the apartment. I´m probably not alone in thinking, that she should have done it herself, not her under age son.

So I was lowered down into the “mine shaft” like a canary, and one would assume that these involuntary excursions to the bowel of our apartment building, what with all the shouting, -crab shooting, -pool playing, -waitress-bottom-smacking -and in tobacco fumes shrouded drunken men would have put me off taverns, beer, wine and spirits for life.

But no.

Oh no…

I won´t say that I couldn´t wait till it became my turn, which it did many years later. But nevertheless….and here we go – no beating about the bush – better get it over and done with: that there composer Ruders, say…the word is that he´s an alcoholic, right?

Yes, quite right, but I´m probably the only alcoholic in the world who can make do with 1460 pints of ordinary beer annually, 1464 pints when it´s leap year! ????

It shouldn´t be, it flies in the face of all regulations and rules, but as of the millennium turn, I realized, after having been through long stretches taking antabuse, hospitalized in detoxication wards and what have you, that ordinary beer under 4,7 percent alcohol, didn´t make me slip and start on a bender. So, as mentioned before, it´s hard to believe, but true it is. Every day, between 5 and 7pm I imbibe 4 pints of pilsener, preferably of Czech or German descent AND smoke 2 pipes and 2 cigarettes(menthol). So my daily substance abuse is concentrated inside 2 hours – and you´d better believe it.

But I never exceed the 4 pints. When staying with that, I don´t suffer withdrawal symptoms, don´t need “a hair of the dog”, as we say in the “trade”. In fact, it has become totally repugnant to me, drinking in the middle of the day. But that wasn´t always the case, and it´d no less than a miracle, that I´ve succeeded in keeping addiction and work separate. I´ve never written a note, let alone two, when under the influence.

Which I was more often than not, but not all the time. The many compositions were written while I followed a parallel trail of sobriety. The term dipsomaniac springs to mind. Believe it or not. In this day and age you expect to read about addictions and confession to them in any autobiography, and alcoholism always tops the wish list, and there´s no way I can compete with neither the great confessors of the past nor the living ones. But believe me, I have visited the blackest, bleakest, deepest dungeons, sat inside the diving bell at the very bottom of the Marianas Trench of despair and despondency. But that was back then.

For nearly a quarter of a century I´ve managed to balance reasonably, reasonably risk-free between temptations, which is easier done up here in the light. It´s a long, long time ago I´ve sat in a hotel room, staring longingly at the open window.

So bearing in mind my own genetically inherited alcoholism(not only my father, but his father as well, had a keen eye on the bottle), it´s not surprising that I´m able to look back on my father´s personal downfall, psychologically as well as physically, with more understanding than you´d expect. It´s near unfathomable, that he, all things considered, managed to keep the flower business afloat, and that with only two employees. Regardless of his state of intoxication and regardless of how late he returned home from a bender, he always appeared at the whole-sale flower market at six o´clock in the morning. He´d set out in his Volkswagen van(probably still a bit worse for wear), a so-called “VW-loaf”, shopping for that day´s sale in the shop. And most importantly: he was never violent. He never hit neither Mother nor me. That´s a plus in the book, but only just. The psychological terror we endured broke my mother´s spirit and ruined her life.

I personally fled into a cocoon of denial and self protection.

Looking back today, my father´s modus operandi wasn´t particularly well thought-out, one could say it bordered on the comical. As mentioned earlier, grocer Bock ran his business on the other side of the street, only 200 yards meters to the right, as seen from our apartment.

From our balcony, my mother and I could see who came and went in the shop.

If we set our sight in the direction of the grocer Bock´s around, say, a quarter to six in the evening, we´d get an idea of how the rest of the day would pan out. If we spotted my father´s van parked directly outside the shop entrance, we both knew the “verdict”.

It wasn´t only coffee and tea that was handed over the counter…

In Denmark, back then, the official closing time for all shops was five thirty pm, but Bock(like many others)ran a veritable speak-easy in his storage room, where several of the neighborhood shop keepers sat, chewing the fat, knocking back beer from bottles lifted out of a crate on the floor. Grocer Bock didn´t have a license to serve alcohol on the premises, so it was(and still is), illegal. Which he knew all too well, so when he became wary of the handful of “bandits” swigging beer(the police just might show up on a raid), he threw them out. So, the next stop for my father on his way home was, not surprisingly, Suhr´s Wine Bar. Where coffee wasn´t on the menu either…

Farther down the road, in the direction of downtown, on the same side as our apartment, you´d have found the flower shop itself. I vividly recall the “the old shop”, as it was called later on in the family. The shop, which, apart from the sales room proper with all the cut flowers in their vases, also had an office, a shack-like room-in- the-room, elevated a couple of steps above the floor. It had small-framed windows all around on its three sides, facing the rest of the shop. At the start of the 1950s, my father had more or less taken over the daily run of the business, but the two “oldies”, my grandparents, were hovering in the back ground, so to speak. My grandmother took mostly care of servicing customers, while my grandfather spent most of the time up in the office(preferably with a bottle of beer or two within reach), from where he could follow the comings and goings out on the floor. One day a lady of the more posh variety from the neighborhood arrived, a good customer apparently, because my granddad shot out of his chair pretty damn fast and clambered down the stairs into the shop, in order to personally do this important lady the honors.

Hands were shaken, and my grandfather bowed deeply. What he´d forgotten was, that he´d stuck a half-full bottle of beer into one his trouser pockets, before rushing out into the shop. The law of gravity took over, and no business transaction conducted subsequently.

Well hidden behind the shop, stood my grandparents´ house, my father and his siblings´ childhood home.

The house, a neo-classic monstrosity, always called “the villa”, was surrounded on all four sides by a large garden and a tall wooden fence, intersected in two places by a passageway into the street: the shop back entrance, and in a cul-de-sac, dog-legging on the left side as seen from Østerbrogade, a surprisingly simple wooden gate, the second entrance to the grounds. It was here, in the garden, that I learned how to ride a bicycle, first a three-wheeler, then the more challenging variety.

In 1960 the Local Council bought the whole land-cum-villa-cum-shop from my Grandfather. Everything, the whole lot, had to be demolished and razed, leaving a complete tabula rasa before the construction of a brand new civic center, with shops and apartments. My granddad had proved to be a keen, if not outright shrewd, business man all through his life, so I guess he wangled a lucrative deal with the Council.

They both, the two old timers, moved into an eerily dark and sinister apartment in one of the side streets to Østerbrogade, closer to the center of the city.

My father ran the new shop, placed at the front row of the new civic center, now with two employees, who took over the lease when my parents moved to Mullerup, a small fishing village on the Zealand coast, west of the town of Slagelse. The two employees, a married couple, who took over from my father, ran the shop for some years, before they retired.

Looking back, mine and my contemporaries´ childhood in the 1950s seems almost unfathomably different from today´s far more comfortable reality. And I don´t mean inventions such as internet and cell phones, technological conquests, which young people today are incapable of imagining hasn´t been there – always.

A run-of-the-mill middle class childhood, such as mine and my contemporaries´, was physically more cumbersome than today, but hardly worse than what the grownups had to endure every day, without giving it a thought. It was the days before doors to public institutions and major shops automatically open upon approach. Maybe an insignificant detail, compared to the avalanche of technological triumphs over the last 50-60 years, but in itself a quite ingenious idea – as long as it works… Everyday life in 1950s Copenhagen was first and foremost scruffy. Not that we were outright dirty from dawn to dusk, on the contrary; we were scoured and scrubbed every day – and not just behind the ears – but it took forever, because the water needed to be heated in a kettle. A simple necessity, because until central- and community heating became the norm in town apartments, the ubiquitous heating source was a stove fired by coke. And that solely for warming up the living area.

And coke is one messy affair, what with coke-dust settling all over the place, behind shirt collars, underneath finger nails, up one´s nostrils – in your hair.

And it smells. A curious bitter-pungent smell, which I today clearly “re-smell” – merely by evoking the word coke.

I don´t remember from where we got the coke, but I vividly recall the sight of my mother hauling one heavy bucket after the other up from the coke cellar, where large, purchased quantities of coke were poured down a shaft from the court yard outside.

Frequently it was the task of my house keeping mother to venture down the boiled meat- and cabbage smelling kitchen stair well, with its worn, wooden steps and into the dark and rather creepy basement area, where the coke lay in one huge pile. The coke then had to be shoveled into a bucket, which she lugged up into the apartment and then stoked the one stove we had – heating the entire apartment. I was never myself allowed to go down into the basement alone, because down there one could never be sure, that a child molester wasn´t hiding behind the door.

A child molester… Today the term has been replaced with pedophile, which sounds less ominous. It´s from ancient Greek and means quite literally “one who loves children”. But today the word implies something far, far different.

But child molester – now there was a word that caught our attention, even though we children didn´t quite understand the molestation bit. Parents have always, since time immemorial, been terrified that their little ones end up victims of a crime, and in the 1950s everybody was obsessed with the phenomenon child molester. They were hiding everywhere, at least my parents thought so. Needless to say, bad men did lurk out there, behind trees and down dark dungeons, but hardly in greater numbers than today. However, the ever wagging finger, warning you never to accept candy from strange men or let yourself be taken on a ride in a fancy car, did that we were constantly watchful and vigilant.

And it worked.

Once, I guess I must have been 7 or 8 years old, I was puttering about on my own around the streets behind the flower business.

Absorbed in my own thoughts I passed a doorway in which a shadowy apparition, a man I´d never seen before, materialized.

“Hello there, you seem a really nice boy, would you like a spin in my new car?”

I ran, ran as I´ve never run before. The warnings and horror stories had proved their worth. Selected colleagues and certain critics may again stop reading for a while, possibly with a thoughtful expression showing on their faces.

Shortly after my grandparents had moved into their new apartment closer to the city center(must have been 1960 or 61, the chronological accuracy has become a bit foggy), my parents and I upped sticks and left 151 Østerbrogade for a while, staying with my grandparents in their new place, which had lots of space.

Our own – and less spacious – apartment had to undergo a major renovation, which entailed a thorough remake of kitchen and bathroom. The new hot counter top material formica dominated the kitchen, and here – as well as in the bathroom - the real revolution was the much needed: running hot water. The heat source in both places a gas heater, an oblong tank-like contraption mounted on the wall above the sink as well as bath tub.

Inside the middle of the tank, and visible through an open ledge, burned a pilot flame, proving that the gas was connected and ignited; if not, there was the risk of a gas leak, not a thing you´d want to mess with. Gas ovens and gas ranges were by far the most common cooking utilities in town kitchens of the day(and still are)in old, not yet renovated apartment buildings. The type of gas(which came from the gas works)was(still is) called city gas, and came with an easily recognizable smell, so that the users would know instantly, if there was a gas leak.

There´re two ways gas can kill you: you´re either blown to pieces or you´re being poisoned. In other words, gas is insanely dangerous to have about your house, be it of the community- or the bottled variety. We didn´t give that much thought, though, The mere fact, that we´d now fill up the bath tub with hot water directly from the faucet – not needing to add several helpings of boiling water from a kettle – was sheer bliss.

In our living room the coke-burning stove underwent a transformation so that it could heat using paraffin.

Heating with paraffin became the norm at the beginning of the 1960s and well into the 1980s, mostly in smaller apartments in the old quarters. We got paraffin based heating in connection with the renovation, and now my mother didn´t need to venture down into the darkness at the bottom of the kitchen stairs for us all to stay warm. Now she went down the front stairs and out into the street, to the green grocer, buying one or two jerry-cans of paraffin.

For some reason, the green grocers had cornered the paraffin market. I vividly recall the numerous outings to the green grocer to get my paraffin, when I´d moved and started on my own. We´re talking 2 gallons per can, which is quite a lot to lug all the way up onto a fourth- or fifth floor landing, normally with one can in each hand.

Luckily my father soon realized that this wasn´t a chore he could foist on my mother, so it didn´t take long before the hauling of paraffin was undertaken by a young man, a jack-of-all-trades, helping out in the flower shop(a tragedy unfolded subsequently, concerning this young man, name of Harry, and I sincerely hope that reason behind it wasn´t to be found in the exhausting lugging paraffin for the Ruders family. One day, heavily intoxicated, on an errand in the van, he ran down and killed a young woman. The guilt became too much for Harry. He hanged himself). The paraffin burner/stove was situated in one of our two living rooms, far away from my bedroom next to the kitchen. And it was still the only heating source for the entire apartment, so it was cold in the remaining areas in the winter, very cold. I clearly remember those winter mornings, where I the evening before had hung my clothes on a chair close to the stove(which burned all night). My clothes were now pleasantly warm, and I wasn´t cold in the same tooth rattling way, I would have been in my bed room.

Coke smells and so does paraffin, a really persistent smell. There was always this vague, but never the less invasive fug of paraffin hovering in the apartment. The gas range and the gas heater had to emit a smell, in case something was wrong, but gas leaves a thin, undefinable film of something very, very greasy. Anybody who´s ever tried to clean inside or around a gas ring will know what I mean…

Seen from the rooms on the right side of the long corridor leading towards the kitchen, we had a view of the backyard with the trash cans lined up in a row, next to a bicycle shed, which undoubtedly is the origin of my life long fear of spiders, arachnophobia(merely writing the beginning of the word: spi…gives me the creeps). The inside of the shed was almost totally dark, even in the middle of the day, and I had to venture all the way inside to get my bike. And in there, in the corners – or even worse – above the entrance, where I couldn´t see them, the unmentionable sat in their nets, waiting, with those terrible eight legs…

The courtyard itself formed a shaft of sorts between three apartment house walls and a slightly less tall wooden partition marking the border, as it were, between ours and the neighboring courtyard. The sun never reached the bottom, in whose center stood a rack, used for carpet beating. Vacuum cleaners had been introduced a long time ago into most households, but all the same, carpet beating was still the norm and on a regular basis. You have to have been raised in the 1950s to understand the concept of carpet beating. The house wives threw carpets of virtually all sorts over a long rod placed between two posts. The carpets were then well and truly beaten with a carpet beater, a contraption with a long handle made of rattan and a braided whisk at the end. A muscular way of getting rid of dust and dirt, and an alarmingly noisy one, because the sound was enhanced considerably, the shaft like back yard(ours was only one out of many)acting as a kind of loudspeaker, and the echo ricocheted between the walls, which didn´t make it less of a nuisance. Hence there were strict rules stipulating which days and times carpet beating could take place. Did my mother take part in the carpet beating? I´m quite sure she didn´t. I don´t recall her wielding the carpet beater down in the court yard, but I can vividly call to life the various brands of vacuum cleaners taking over from each other through the 1950s and ´60s.

My mother was, as mentioned, a house wife, like most women of her generation. However, be it out of boredom or because the general household needed a financial lift, she, now in her early forties, enrolled as a student following a course in Business English at the so-called “Translation School”, which was located in a side street off one of main shopping districts in the old part of the city. After having graduated and with her newly acquired diploma in hand, she quickly landed assignments from various companies, translating pamphlets, invoices, etc. from Danish into English. A canned goods factory, name of Plumrose, became a

faithful “customer”.

She subsequently secured a position teaching Business English at the Copenhagen Business School.

My mother now had a day job, so we could therefore – lo and behold – afford a cleaning woman once a week. And visits to a private dentist surgery.

Dentist…

A terrifying word, for all and forever.

The Copenhagen City Council provided free dentist service to everybody enrolled at the public schools(institutions run and paid for by the local government), but my parents never the less wanted me to see the family dentist, who had his surgery in a modern apartment complex, right opposite one of the great city parks, the highly popular “Kongens Have”(The King´s Garden”).

I clearly recall the cold modernist hallway and its resonating stairwell with steps made of polished concrete, and the waiting room, where you could hear the dentist´s drill screeeetching like a grind stone from inside the operation theater itself. The crouching silhouette of the dentist himself, a Mr. Andersen, was vaguely visible through a door made of frosted glass.

Then it was my turn, and I was placed in the dentist´s chair(a cumbersome affair made of cast iron, not today´s business class recliner), and over in the corner the surgery assistant straddled a bicycle-like contraption and started pedaling like crazy. The wheel started to roll, and the drill, made up of parts from a Meccano kit and hitched to the wheel by a long metal chain, began whirring. My mother, who joined us, obviously, took up position behind the chair to which I was strapped with thick leather strops, and started to cry.

The dentist then raised the drill and…

Steady on now, it wasn´t that bad, but today´s virtually painless dental surgery was still a thing of the future. Those were the days, where you only spent money on local anesthesia, if you had the entire “keyboard” pulled out. So it was a simple matter of tightening your buttocks and open your mouth(a not entirely easy combination exercise)and accept what was coming.

I´m sure that Mr. Andersen was a good dentist, and actually a very nice man, so I didn´t end up suffering from fear of dentists following my(not that many)visits. In fact, I continued seeing him till I was well into my twenties.

On our way back home from the dentist, walking towards the tram stop, I probably tried to avoid stepping on the cracks between the side walk flagstones, a classic fixation with children and very young people and a sure sign that the diagnosis OCD(Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)could emerge. I must have suffered from OCD(without having been diagnosed, in fact I´m not sure the term existed in the late fifties), because it escalated: I forced myself, every night after having gone to bed, to say the Lord´s Prayer over and over again, always an odd number of times(there was this ever watchful eye in the high, not least the man up there on the crucifix). I pressed my right hand index finger into the middle of my left inner hand, again in an odd-number sequence. All this before I dared lie down and sleep. I developed a highly disabling stammer, annoying for me and others, couldn´t pronounce words beginning with the consonants B, D and F. It became really hopeless when the same consonants were followed by an R. The combination F plus R was particularly bad. I´m stammer free today, but I always bend over backwards never to have to say refrigerator.

The self-imposed obsessions multiplied. The “time-honored” repetitive hand washing wasn´t, oddly enough, part of my “repertoire”, but there was no shortage of competing “offers”, such as – whenever I had to cross a side street without zebra crossing – I always stopped by the curb and shuffled to the left, following the flagstones(avoiding, needless to say, stepping on the cracks), and always choosing an odd number. Then I stopped, and first then did I cross the street to the opposite side walk.

Eventually my mother started noticing my peculiar behavior, which couldn´t be kept under wraps forever, certainly not the stammer, so she made a doctor´s appointment. Somebody had to examine the kid, who was openly more nervous and pale than was good for him.

“Your son just needs iron”, said the doctor, who, very conveniently, had his surgery right opposite from where we lived.

Doctor Lassen…

Now, there was a real, highly treasured family doctor of the old school, slightly on the rotund side, impeccably dressed in a suit and waist coat underneath the white smock – and sporting a bow tie – not a common neck tie. The fact, that he also emitted a vague fragrance of camphor(or was it port?)only added to the general atmosphere of homeliness. But a vitamin cure to battle OCD? Hardly…

My OCD(or whatever it was)can still be observed way out there on the distant horizon. Not in any alarming guise, more of a fading side show, really. To give an example: I can´t abide bar codes. If I spot a shampoo bottle with the bar code facing me, I immediately turn it around. Same thing when a tube of tooth paste lies with the bar code visible. It irritates me likewise, if I spot a towel on a rack or clothes line, so that the strop is visible. I automatically turn the towel; in fact, I´ve been known to rise in the middle of the night to go to the bath room if I harbor the suspicion, that a towel hangs on the towel heater with the strop showing.

Fading side show?...hm…

As mentioned earlier I became a de facto only child at the age of eight, but how about play mates, was I a lonely, introvert boy preferring his own company? Yes and no, to put it clearly. I mostly kept myself to myself, having company enough in Donald Duck, but I would say, that the boy with whom I shared my class room desk – at both schools – for a good friend and play mate. On my first school day, the inauguration in 1956, I was sat next to an uncommonly nice and friendly boy, name of Torben Andersen, who didn´t threaten to beat me up or pour cold water down the back of my trousers.

We visited each other in our respective homes, where we…well…the nature of our mutual entertainment is lost in the haze of the past, but I think we mostly sat riffling through comic strips, drinking cocoa. There was no outdoor activity as such, but we stuck together all the same and shared the same desk(with only a few exceptions over the years) from prep school and up to and including high school. Like I, Torben enrolled at St. Annæ in 1958. We continued seeing each other on and off after having graduated from high school, but it was predominantly a shared interest in the indoor architecture found at the Copenhagen taverns which kept the friendship going…

Another school mate from the days before high school was Bo Reipurth. Our friendship began somewhat later, in third grade. We were both what you´d call nerds. Bo, who later in life became – and still is – one of our foremost astrophysicists – was from very early on single mindedly focused on astronomy, like I had

nothing but music between the ears, definitely so when my interest in archeology had worn itself out.

Incidentally, music was a shared interest, we both played the piano. Later on, much later, when we had both reached the numerical retirement age, I wrote a short piece for Bo, Shifts – Piano Study no. 3. Bo reciprocated a couple of years later, by securing that an asteroid was named after me. So, way out in space – in the so called asteroid belt – Ruders 5888 is buzzing about and has done so for over four billion years. Bo and I were physically quite similar of stature: a bit on the pale side and thin - I wore spectacles – all together features which didn´t endear us to the other boys from the class. I don´t have to add, that neither of us were looking forward to recess.

As seen from the vantage point of today, I must without doubt have been lonely, or more precisely: alone.

Which is not the same thing, and my ability never to crave the company of others became an advantage later on in my life as a composer.

It´s mandatory for composers and writers to muster the ability to be on their own, must endure, without complaining, their own company for hours on end, not saying anything or craving outside diversion. The work itself – one must presume – is confined to a room designated for that exact purpose, with the necessary tools of the trade within reach. Then, when the pen has been put aside and the computer turned off, there´s no law against changing hats and join the “real” world.

In my school years, I – like everybody else – faced seven weeks´ summer vacation, which had to pass without my being bored. Which I wasn´t, as far as I remember, being good at entertaining myself. But we had to get away, preferably abroad.

And that required a car.

My father loved cars, had cars on the brain, was outright car mad, and dangerously so. It didn´t take much to drive him completely crazy. When there was a traffic jam, he wouldn´t hesitate to drive on the side walk, overtaking the cars in front of him, while my mother and I sat paralyzed. Once he completely lost it in a traffic circle, when an L-marked car veered from side to side in front of him, changing lanes all the time.

My old man floored the accelerator and drove up in front of the tuition vehicle, blocking it and ran towards it, tore open the door where the instructor sat and started abusing him: “How the fuck is it you teach people how to drive? I´m going to fucking…etc. etc.”

Unbelievably embarrassing, again for mother and myself, and insanely illegal and dangerous, stopping in the middle of a traffic circle in broad daylight.

The term road rage wasn´t coined back then, but it was without doubt what you´d call my father´s erratic behavior today.

It can now be safely ascertained, that my own, not entirely controllable temper, is owed through heritage,

and not from strangers. And we must all be grateful, that I personally don´t drive, never has and never will(but I´m master of the universe on my scooter!).

His choice of cars also mirrored his passion for the vehicles. His first car was an MG(Morris Garage)1938 vintage sports car, which he had shipped over from the dealer in England in 1952.

I vividly remember the car, red and with the steering wheel on the right side, but obviously it wasn´t till far later, that began wondering how he, an ordinary florist could afford such extravaganza, and that only a few years after World War 2. I have no idea, and I´ll never know.

The “jewel” in that particular car-craze-crown materialized one day in 1961, a lovely spring day, I seem to remember. My father had returned from the shop(that was before the pub-crawling), and – after having hung up his coat – said, somewhat nonchalantly – “Why not step out onto the balcony and look down?”.

Which we did.

And immediately spotted the pearl gray Jaguar 2.4 liter Mark-1 Mid Size Luxury…

My mother must have gone through some serious inner turmoil, envisaging a tragedy involving the bailiff unfolding at 151 Østerbrogade, second floor to the right(which in the US would have been the third floor. In Denmark the ground floor is “its own”, so to speak. Then comes first floor, second floor, etc.).

It was a used car, alright, but never the less, how the hell could he afford it?

It quickly turned out, that he couldn´t afford to drive it, well, on Sundays only. A Jaguar of that size was a monstrous gasoline guzzler on a level which would be near illegal today. That cost money, a lot of money, so the chariot was more or less permanently parked in the parking lot underneath the new civic center.

But it still bled money, what with the hefty weight duty. In the end he had to let go of the monster, and then, well, then what?

Volkswagen…

That was of course a bit of a ”downer”, but, needless to say, the Jag was an extravaganza, like the Morris Garage. In the years before the Jag, my father drove a Fiat(an ordinary four-seater, which he wasted no time in having souped up to do 90 miles an hour, completely outrageous for a family sedan back then). The following brand, around 1958-59, became his first and only French car, a so-called Simca, from a series of models, which was discontinued a few years later.

At any rate, we now aimed for the far horizon…

We had been to Norway and Sweden before, on short excursions, and twice to Lake Garda in northern Italy, but now was the time for the Grand Adventure.

North Cape.

There´re approximately 1200 miles as the crow flies between Copenhagen and North Cape on the small island marking the end of the Norwegian main land, so the official route up through Sweden, Finland, and then to the “left”, into Norway, adds considerably to the mileage. You will in Scandinavia, in the summer time, north of the Arctic Circle, encounter mosquitoes. A lot of mosquitoes. You can´t join a conversation about mosquitoes, until you´ve tried, wearing shorts, to survive in the Finnish tundra in July, waiving your hands about like crazy, with mouth and eyes squeezed shut.

There´re mosquitoes all over the place. The air really is thick with mosquitoes, and they manage to get in everywhere, sucking blood. They´re resilient bastards.

Then my father hit on a good idea.

Paraffin.

Mosquitoes, all insects, hate the smell of paraffin, so we all three of us doused ourselves in paraffin from a jerry-can we´d brought along for use in the paraffin lamp, the only light source in the tent. The whole body had a thorough rubbing, and likewise a good massage of the scalp. It worked, but I think, that my parents, both of them chain smokers, had to put that particular addiction on stand by for a while.

A plausible reason behind this, from the very start completely hare-brained – and for a normal family exceptional - adventure, was to go and see the midnight sun. Hmm, wait a minute…right…well, my wife now says, that it was quite the rage back then, in the late fifties, for families from all walks of life, to kit out the car and drive to North Cape.

So that´s probably true.

At any rate, it was something my father had been rambling about for ages, so now was the time. The Simca was stuffed with all sorts of camping gear, because, needless to say, we´d sleep in a tent en route.

My father had been a boy scout and loved camping, and so did I, up to a point, especially after we got a tent with a wall-to-wall sewed-on floor.

My mother hated camping, so the many vacations with a tent, including the two times at Lake Garda, where the weather is rather camping friendly, must have been sheer agony for her, such as having to sleep on a rickety folding bed, squeezed inside a confined and uncomfortable sleeping bag. And furthermore, squatting while peeling potatoes and boiling water on a primus stove, not to mention the exotic lavatory conditions you had to endure at the camping sites back then, must have felt like staying at a penal colony.

And toilets and running hot water are far between in the Finnish tundra. In any event, we reached the northern most point of the North Cape, and we did get to see the midnight sun, already on the first night.

Speaking of luck, because a lot of other tourists had been camping for days, waiting for the clouds to spread.

The home bound journey went via Bodø, where we boarded the “Vesterålen”, a car- and passenger carrying steamer operating between Bodø and Bergen, the famous Hurtigruten(literally The Fast Route). I´ll never forget the relief and gratitude showing on my mother´s face, when she entered our private state room and saw…a real bed, with a pillow, sheet and a duvet.

The North Cape adventure also marked the last of the holidays abroad by car. I 1960 my father bought one half of a lot with a lake, near the town of Næstved, 60 miles south of Copenhagen, not far from where I´m living now. The lot came without any building, only grass and some scrub. The remaining part of the landcum-lake was owned by the man who ran the grocery store in the local village Bonderup(literally Farmerville. It doesn´t get more rustic than that), the same man who´d sold the other part to my father.

There was, as mentioned, no house involved in the purchase, but a tent could be pitched. My mother, again, had to suffer under my father´s yearning for the outdoors. Primus stove, folding chairs, camping table, and no running water or toilet! But mosquitoes in droves, so the only difference between the newly acquired “camp site” and the Finnish wilderness, was the short distance back to civilization. All said and done, Copenhagen was only 60 miles away.

But obviously we needed water for outside- and inside use. Luckily our lot lay adjacent to a couple of fields belonging to a small holder, Hans Hansen and his wife Agnes. We obtained permission to use their privy – ie. an outhouse with just a board-cum-hole above a bucket with…

We got our water from a stand pipe in the court yard.

This was 1960-61, so Hans and Agnes must have belonged to the last generation of authentic small holders or crofters in Denmark. They kept cows and heifers in one of the stable wings(there were three in addition to their own living quarters), a horse in another stable, and chickens and ducks. And a dog – the terrier Spot.

And a farm hand, who – believe it or not – slept in a small room at the end of the main house.

Looking back, I was fortunate, as one of the last of the generation brought up in the 1950s – to have had a ring side seat to a now extinct Danish peasant culture.

I´ve seen Agnes Hansen decapitate a chicken, taken part in plucking it – and eat it afterwards. Back then, in the farm communities, you had your hot meal in the middle of the day, and it happened, now and then, that my parents and I were invited to stop by the small holding around noon and get a taste of some really yummy home cooking.

I spent, not surprisingly, most of my time there, where the daily routine differed considerably from the one back home in Copenhagen and with the Copenhagen Boys´ Choir.

One day, when one of the cows was about to calve, I was invited to watch, while Hans Hansen and the farm hand tied a rope around the front legs of the little calf, who had started to show. They pulled, shouting and

cursing, but everything turned out as it should, and it was the real thing, not a re-enactment at the open-air museum.

Today the lake has been drained and filled. Hans´ and Agnes´ house is long gone, as they are themselves.

Agnes Hansen´s final days reveal a touching story: She and Hans had moved into a modern family house in the Næstved outskirts, when they were unable to carry on the hard work on the farm, and they were childless, which meant there was no one to take over. Old Hans was the first to die, and when it became Agnes´ turn, she revealed her big secret. A long life of frugality and putting money aside had made her surprisingly wealthy, and with no family to inherit the fortune, she decided to give the money to one of the two medieval churches in Næstved, the St. Peter´s, on one condition: that it be spent on a new tower clock!

So, the big tower clock at Saint Peter´s Church in Næstved is donated by old Agnes Hansen on her death bed. In no way the bloody State was going to lay its hands the money!

I don´t know if Agnes knew the vicar personally – but I did.

Nielsjohan Frederiksen was my mother´s brother, vicar and later on parish priest at St. Peter´s(the larger of the two old churches, the other one being St. Morten´s).

My uncle applied for and got the post in 1966, and at that time, I´d received organ lessons for two years.

So it wasn´t entirely due to warm family feelings, that I from time found myself on the train from Copenhagen Central, chug-chugging towards Næstved to visit uncle Nielsjohan and Aunt Lisbeth.

Because, over in the church there was – surprise, surprise – a real organ, a big one, with three so called manuals, and a pedal keyboard.

The whole package.

In my high school days I spent several weekends and autumn holidays with the family in Næstved, a town which in the distant future came to play a part in my life, in a way I couldn´t in my wildest dreams have envisaged.

To be continued…

I was almost never driven to school in the car. The tram depot servicing the lines 1 and 14 was located opposite from where we lived, so the daily transportation to school was straight forward enough. Before that, when I attended the local prep school, I was accompanied by my mother. The school was only 10 minutes walk from our door step, but the next institution of learning, The St. Annæ(saint Anne´s) Gymnasium(which in Danish means Highschool, not a sports arena), home of the Copenhagen Boys´Choir, where I enrolled in 1958, was situated in the center of the old city, so it became necessary to use the tram to get there(The Copenhagen Tramways were ultimately discontinued in 1972, in favor of buses, a traffic nuisance and an environmental howler beyond comprehension).

During the first years at St. Annæ, I frequently rode one of the vintage Scandia tram cars dating back from 1912 and 1918.

There were two cars hitched by a cable between them. An engine car towing a trailer car. In the latter smoking was allowed! I didn´t smoke as a boy, obviously, but I always chose to sit in the trailer. The “clientele” here was far more colorful than in the front car, favored by all the “righteous” and well behaved. Here, back in the trailer, there was serious puffing going on, mostly from cigars wagging between the lips of – predominantly large gentlemen in trilbies and – in the winter – enormous gray or brown over coats. Jokes flew between the various characters, regulars who took the trip every day, maybe even worked at the same place. Racy stories were exchanged amidst loud guffawing, coughing and blowing of noses, shooting snot down onto the floor. Colossally unhygienic, especially on hot summer days, when the saliva and snot lay fermenting on the floor. Tobacco chewing was likewise common, a wad of spammed tobacco churned around the gob but good, and what with the juice oozing down the chin, forming the popularly nick-named “111”. Then, when there was no more left to suck, the remainder was spat out down on the floor, joining the other “goodies”. In the winter, the same floor became one obnoxious mess of dirty slush and melt water from the endless stomping of heavy winter boots. But, it was in the winter time, that

the trailer with its jovial “customers” appeared outright cozy and – which is probably wrong – it was as though it was warmer here than in the front car.

Mother came from a home with a piano, my father from one with beatings. The latter didn´t, as mentioned before, follow into our home on Østerbrogade, whereas the piano did. In our living room stood this peculiar excuse for a grand piano, a so called Søren Jensen Butterfly. The more or less official nick-name originated from the shape of the lid. The hinges sat – not on the left side of the instrument - but in the middle, and the lids could be lifted from both sides. When fully opened, the two sections resembled the wings of a butterfly. My mother played the piano nicely and sang with a fine voice. She and her younger sister by two years, Åse, had both received piano lessons from the “hot” young pianist and composer Herman D. Koppel.

Mother didn´t keep up her playing, whereas her sister allegedly showed more than average talent.

But music was a given in my childhood home. The piano was there, and soon after my seventh birthday, my parents payed for a piano teacher, a Mrs. Alsted, to take me on. I remember the first time she came into our living room and spotted the “Butterfly”. It gave her pause for couple of seconds, but she then began the first lesson, of which I remember nothing, absolutely nothing, nor much from the lessons that followed over the next few years. But I learned how to read music and an elementary piano technique, so that I, all things considered, could hammer my way through the easy “numbers” found in a piano primer called “45 Sonatinen”. The title was German, though, and for years I couldn´t stop wondering where it was, that “45 Sonatine”.

Back then, and today as well, boys frequenting second grade classes at schools under the jurisdiction of Copenhagen City Council, were invited to apply for possible further tuition a St. Annæ, thus becoming members of Copenhagen Boys´Choir, which operated under the “umbrella” called Schools united in the Church”. My parents applied on my behalf(I don´t recall being asked what I thought about it), so in the spring of 1958 I showed up for the audition at the school, in daily parlance called the Song School, near Kongens Nytorv(The Kings New Market), where national institutions such as The Royal Theater and Hotel d`Angleterre are prominent features.

I passed and was enrolled, starting on 12 August the same year.

That I passed the audition and was admitted is a bit of an enigma to me today, because I really could not sing, honestly, never could and never will. But maybe I came in useful in another fashion, perhaps filling out space in the alto group, restoring the physical symmetry as seen by the audience.

There´s a lot to be said about the institution, a sinister four storey building squeezed in between two narrow streets. Bad things to be said. It was basically a terrible place, where – to quote a line from the Danish satirist Hans Scherfig from his experience, not from St. Annæ, but from another similar institution: “They had employed a Ph.D. in literature to hit children in the face…”

So, I was now enrolled in what was called 3rd South – parallel to 3rd North, each class with a “population” of thirty plus. The South/North distinction stopped at grade/level seven, when it was decided, whether you were being academically “sound” enough to be upgraded to three years in highschool, or leaving(The Danish education system is vastly different from what´s the known in the US, not to speak of the, for the non-initiated impenetrable British O- and A level system, but as a general rule, the full stretch from prep- or elementary school up to and including highschool – the term I´ll use henceforth - is 12 years).

The building is still in operation, but as a language school for immigrants, and with a done-up, sand blasted façade. Back in “my day” it was grimy and sooty and claustrophobic inside. There were no wash rooms for us boys, only a row of latrines in the court yard, where we spent recess between the lessons.

The whole sorry affair was beyond dismal, and worse: a watchful eye was watching you – constantly! Not Jesus this time, but…the head master!

Every morning, shortly after work had begun in the various class rooms, the temperature dropped below zero, even on hot days in late August, potted plants started to wither, and the care taker´s dog hid, whimpering, under a chair.

Erling Rossing had arrived…

The name alone will make old students of my generation wince, even though Rossing has been dead and gone for years. “Respect is good, but fear is better” seemed to be his favorite motto. He didn´t hit you, I hasten to add – it wasn´t necessary. He just had to show up in the corridor with his flushed, wrinkled and perpetually sour face(his forehead looked like a rusty corrugated tin roof), and total silence ensued.

Everybody looked down or averted their eyes, like in a one-party state, when the police appear in the street.

Rossing, as mentioned, didn´t dole out slappings or canings.

For that he had willing lieutenants, the most diligent and zealous our head teacher Karl Hardass(obviously not his real name, which I´ve changed in order not to embarrass innocent descendants).

If he found a spelling mistake in your exercise book, you were faced with the choice between “cash or check”, ie. either having your cheek slapped or detention. If you chose the former(and if you wore spectacles, you were told to take them off first), Mr.Hardass, a grown man in his forties, a muscular, lantern jawed brute in the 200 pounds bracket, would pull his sweaty right hand all the way back, only to smash it with all his might into the cheek of a small child, 9 or 10 years of age. But only after having stubbed out the perpetually burning cigarette in the ashtray, which he´d placed on his desk at the beginning of each lesson.

Oh, those were the days…

But I mustn´t forget the pointer, which was not only used to point out what was written on the black board, but also turned out handy(literally) in the time honored discipline of caning. The unfortunate, again an underage boy, was told to bend over, so that the trousers squeezed tightly over the buttocks, and the pointer – again wielded by a grown up – would scythe down over the butt of the “culprit”.

Whack!

And, astonishingly enough, it was perfectly legal! Not until 1967 was the so-called caning circular ratified and the corporal punishment of children became unlawful. The new law was followed up by the Highschool Newsletter, promising to bring Karl Hardass´ name a 100 times on the next front page if it transpired, that he wouldn´t let go of his old ways.

He was, by no means, the only “assailant” among the members of faculty. The most fanatic and indefatigable was a gangly locum, a crimson faced specter of a man, a Mr. Poulsen. He was obsessed with smacking cheeks. You could, out of the blue, be summoned to stand to attention by his desk, not being given the choice between “cash or check”, the slap whacked each time and right away. At some point the actual teaching(I don´t remember the subject)was rendered impossible because of the constant smacking of cheeks ex cathedra, so Mr. Poulsen came up with an idea: those who´d planned to wreak havoc anyway, could line up by his desk and be smacked before the lesson started, and they would be left in peace subsequently.

The most hardened of the boys(I wasn´t among them)volunteered immediately, and the contract was mutually honored.

But that wasn´t the end of it. To fine tune the overall discipline, Mr.Poulsen announced that the job as punishment assistant was now up for grabs.. And lo-and-behold, the bait was taken. One of the more unsavory characters, René, a sweaty type with shifty eyes volunteered – and with a smile. He could now cut his teeth in the pointer/caning business. The bizarre Mr.Poulsen mentioned a name, although not from the pool of volunteers, and the unfortunate had to bend over in front of René, who then wielded the pointer.

Whack!

Now it was possible for Mr.Poulsen to carry on teaching without constantly being interrupted, smacking cheeks. That was taken care of beforehand – and the caning was carried out in its own parallel universe.

Oh, those were the days…

Doubtlessly the same Mr.Poulsen had his own inner demons to battle. Once he invited all of us from the class to his own home, for tea and cake. My father took me there in the car, with the intention to pick me up a couple of hours later.

When the tea and cakes had been devoured, Mr.Poulsen asked us, if we´d like to see his rifle!

He was, you see, a member of the Home Guard…

Oh yes, why not, that sounded like fun, so our host fetched the “shooter” and with an arm around the shoulders of one of the fair haired dear little ones, he showed how to disassemble and re-assemble the weapon.

Then the door bell rang…

My father took one look, got hold of me and we drove home. He was surprisingly silent.

The following day Mr.Poulsen didn´t show up at the school. In fact, we never saw him again.

There were additional and alternative means of corporal punishment in the offing at St.Annæ, favored by members of staff, like, say, the doling out of nuts. It was called a nut when a teacher hammered a clenched fist with the middle knuckle protruding, vertically down onto the scull of the victim. An interesting alternative, interesting in the sense, that it wasn´t painful, but surprisingly humiliating, was carried out with great zeal by a Mr.Nissen, who pressed his flat palm into the face of the culprit, letting the hand slide downwards all the way to the chin, or he pressed his thumb onto the nose of the “sinner”, often followed by the endearing words: “…hard times now, for the little jew boys, eh? ”…

Each Tuesday and Friday nights, all members of the boys´ choir had to attend choir practice at one of the larger rooms, the Song Hall, where the choir master /conductor sat on a dais between two rows of choristers, the boys(sopranos and altos)on one side, and the men(tenors and basses)on the other side. In the middle sat the piano, so the pianist(accompanist)could watch the conductor.

So far, so good.

But they were not alone in the room. There were others present, like Karl Hardass and a pal made of the right stuff from staff. Both of them were assigned to uphold law and order during the rehearsals, so they were constantly on the prowl, peering between the rows or jumping up and down with the necks stretched, like meerkats in Kalahari, for better to see what went on in the back rows. It didn´t take much, a remark from one boy whispered into the ear of his neighbor, and Hardass and his “fellow traveler” would immediately plow through and pounce, smacking cheeks during the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Messiah.

In other words, those were busy times at St. Annæ: smacking of cheeks, whacking pointers, knotty knuckles hammered down in the fontanel of minors, sweaty male palms with wedding band slid across winter pale boys´ faces, fat and smelly thumbs pressed onto snouts.

That was the way it was, but compared to what went on at the English boarding schools, probably no worse than light harassment.

In all fairness, the St. Annæ of the present day, has not only moved to another location(in 1972), but is one of our most forward looking and innovative, modern highschools.

But I´d like to wrap up, as it were, and revisit our old friend, robust, broad shouldered head teacher and Master of the Pointer Karl Hardass.

As head teacher he knew, obviously, the social background of each of us, so naturally he was aware of the fact, that my father was a florist, a trade he confused with that of greengrocer, and in his mind, a green grocer languished at the very bottom of society, hence the son of a greengrocer should be not only pitied, but protected.

(Probably the main reason why I never found myself at the receiving end of the pointer wielding or cheek smacking). This compassionate sensitivity peaked one day, when Hardass, with a tender voice, asked me to go home and ask my parents, if they – and myself, of course, would like to come and visit, meet his wife and have a meal, say…next Saturday?

A visit to the home of Mr.Hardass?

A dizzying perspective…

Both my parents agreed to the invitation, so Saturday night we set out to the address given us in one of the southern suburbs. My father parked the car with great panache by the curb, and in the very same moment, Hardass opened his front door, all set to welcome the needy greengrocer family.

Then he spotted the car.

It was the Jag…

The mental gearshift whirring inside Hardass´ - now seriously short circuited brain - resulted in momentary silence, followed by an avalanche of welcome and how lovely and please and…

I don´t know what he´d expected, maybe that we – like the impoverished family Joad of Steinbeck´s The Grapes of Wrath – would show up in a back-firing, sputtering, limping flatbed truck, my mother and I crouching and shivering in the back and my father half dead at the wheel, eyes running.

Not a pearl gray Jaguar of the Mid Size Luxury class.

My father had at that time, around 1960-61, cultivated a so-called handle bar moustache in the style of a Royal Airforce Wing Commander from the Spitfire days, and looked very, very non greengrocer-ish.

Mother, who was now in her mid forties, had expanded a wee bit midships, but had certainly not lost her youthful elegance, and did in no way resemble somebody residing at the darkest bottom of society.

The dinner wobbled ahead, without any overt embarrassment. Everybody kept up appearances, but the visit was, not surprisingly, a one-off, and I kept my mouth shut and said nothing to my class mates about the visit, well knowing, that had it become general knowledge, I would forever have been branded as renegade, and a brown nosing sucker-up.

The greengrocer nostalgia was gone, needless to say, but Hardass couldn´t just begin smacking me as he pleased overnight. I had been a guest in his home after all, but something had to be done, if only to herald the advent of new and more austere times ahead. Shortly after the dinner at the Hardasses´, a ball was arranged at St. Annæ, with girls invited from a nearby school. Hardass was designated to supervise the festivities, and right before the opening dance, Hardass pronounced: “…now listen up, no sucking face and no booze. If I catch any of you boys swigging booze, well…I´ll trash him till I drop. And that goes for you too, Poul!”.

St.Annæ had two school yards, one on each side of the building(a physical- as well as mental divide). The larger one was used entirely by the boys frequenting elementary school, the classes with the South/North destinction. The smaller yard was for the highschool students only. The smaller yard was, compared to the larger one, blissfully quiet and peaceful without the pandemonium and violence rampant in the bigger yard. Bo Reipurth and I could finally show up during recess without being kicked in the groin. And most important and bewitching: There were now girls! (in those days St.Annæ was a boys´ school only, until Highschool, where girls from other schools in Copenhagen joined in).

Girls…

Now, those were the days…

Even though St.Annæ was an old fashioned and austere institution, there´s no denying, that we actually learned something, willingly or not. Students of my generation, who emerged “at the other end”, had no grounds for complaining not having been taught, and throroughly so, the basic skills such as Danish composition, world history, arithmetic and geography etc.

And music as well, which was/is the special offer to all pupils, and not only voice training, but solid tuition in solfége, musical notation and repertoire guidance.

We were now, Torben, Bo and I enrolled as first year Highschool students, and we had new teachers. Apart from a couple of idiots, there was a palpable difference from the violent regime in prep school.

We were now practically grown ups, 15 – 16 years of age, and no longer potential victims. Our most beloved teacher was Evald Munk, who taught English. Humor and reflection took over from caning and snout pressing. In music appreciation I remember with great fondness a newly “minted” Ph.D, Arne Berg, who introduced us to not only the classics, but to iconic pieces from the twentieth century, such as Igor Stravinsky´s incredible ballet score Le Sacre du Printemps and Alban Berg´s Violin Concerto.

Occasionally we had a guest teacher stopping by. Such as the endearing Povl Fledelius. After having passed around a tin with cream fudge drops, the light was dimmed and he put a LP with Tchaikovskij´s spectacularly popular Piano Concerto in B flat minor on the turntable. It begins, as we all know, with a heroic fanfare in the horns bam-bam-bam-BAM and precisely then, at the last note, the door was torn wide open and in goose-stepped Cathedral Organist Magister Artium Mogens Wöldike.

“What is that you´re playing?”

“Well, it´s…”

“We don´t approve of that sort of thing here!”

Mogens Wöldike, the unchallenged sovereign at the institution Copenhagen Boys´ Choir, which he founded back in 1929, was also the most feared judge and executioner rolled into one, when it came to deciding what was acceptable in the fiercely anti-romantic movement at the time, a movement revering Carl Nielsen as House God. A composer like Tchaikovskij was regarded as vulgar, unhealthy and outright seditious.

When Wöldike had left, we picked up listening to the Concerto all the same, the fudge was passed around once more, but I think the volume was lowered a bit.

Science and natural history was taught up on the top floor, in a locale filled with stuffed animals and posters showing exotic plants and animals. A human skeleton loitered over in the corner.

Our science teacher, a Mr. Hops, was mad as a hatter, but in his own charming way, and quite funny.

And drunk as a skunk.

From dawn to dusk.

Mr. Hops(again a slightly edited name)made it clear from the very beginning, that he had no idea who we were as individuals – and never would. So, when he wanted one of us called up to the blackboard, he dropped a pencil onto a list with our names. He read the name and whoever it was, came forward. Mr. Hops looked equally bewildered every time.

The marks were given, following the same modus operandi.

Oh, those were the days…

I can´t overestimate the way the years at St. Annæ influenced me as a composer later on in life. My early obsession with Baroque music(which made up the main repertoire sung by The Copenhagen Boys´ Choir), shows in compositions such as Violin Concerto no.1(based on Vivaldi), “Concerto in Pieces – Purcell Variations” and “Handel Variations”.

In 1964, now 15 years of age, I started taking organ lessons from the legendary Finn Viderø at his own home. And that particular lesson I´ll never forget. Just imagine, a 15 year old school boy, who can play a little piano, grabbing his bike, riding to the northern outskirts of Copenhagen and rings the doorbell of the most famous(and notorious)organ virtuoso in the country. Through one of my father´s acquaintances, the Swedish-Danish pianist and organist Kjell Olsson, a liaison with Viderø was established. Anything for the kid!

Needless to say, I was a basket case from fear and trembling, could hardly stand up and must have presented a sorry sight. But Viderø was nice enough, and I followed him into his living room, where a small organ with two keyboards(the so called manuals)and pedal keyboard plus a large harpsichord took up most of the space. I was placed on the organ bench and the Master showed me the first lesson printed in his own primer “Finn Viderø´s Exercises for Beginners”, and said. “Play this!”.

Which I did, thinking that I´d passed the test, but I didn´t. Needless to say, I used the technique I´d learned playing the piano, where you “just” play one note after the other. When playing the organ, the first thing you have to master is a perfect legato, meaning that there´s not supposed to be any “space” between the notes.

That Viderø taught the entire lesson with a Vic Menthol Inhaler stuffed up one nostril, only added some extra spice to the experience for the young rookie organist…

However, learning to play the organ, it´s necessary having access to a real instrument, and that´s not always easy. We had the piano back home, so why not make do with that? A keyboard is a keyboard anywhere

with black and white keys in the same order, so why bother? Well, to begin with, pianos don´t come with pedal keyboards…

It´s common knowledge, that when playing the organ, hands as well as feet are in full swing, and in order to learn how to play with your feet, you need access to a proper organ.

So, again, our friend Kjell Ollson came to the rescue.

He was resident organist with the Gustav´s Kyrkan, a church serving the Swedish community living in Copenhagen, and he made sure that I could practice on the organ there, as much as I wanted.

The church stands close to St. Annæ and right on the route back to where I lived, so I stopped by, virtually every day, after school, practicing to my heart´s content.

The year before I started lessons with Viderø, I had my confirmation at one of the local churches. After the church service, my parents, I and the invited guests returned to the apartment for the reception party. I led the way, as it were, stepped into our living room, turned right and…saw a…harpsichord!

Oh my!...a harpsichord!

When playing the organ, the harpsichord sort of trots along on the side, almost as a given. My parents´ record collection(78s and later on LP vinyls)presented a complete jumble in taste and repertoire: Vivaldi´s The Four Seasons, Tchaikovskij´s B flat minor Piano Concerto, the Yellow Rose of Texas, Haydn´s The Creation and Rock around the Clock with Tommy Steele.

And a couple of 78s with Domenico Scarlatti´s Sonatas for the Harpsichord, which I listened to all the time alongside the organ LPs I´d started to save up for.

But owning a harpsichord, was of course something I´d never even contemplated.

The cost alone must have set my parents back considerably.

One day, I happened to eavesdrop in on a conversation between my parents.

Mother: “…the boy is happy, but 7000 kroner, can we really afford it?”

Father: “…well, just. It´ll be okay, and as you say, the boy is over the moon.”

7000 kroner in 1963 equals more or less 77.000 kroner in today´s money(approx. 12.000 US dollars), a staggering sum back then for a common florist and teacher paid by the hour.

Speaking of spoiled only child.

My father must have had completely unrealistic expectations for my future in music, and that at a time, when I´d shown no sign of being any better than what you´d expect from a kid, who´d played the piano for a couple of years.

They say, that everybody over 200 years of age can remember exactly what they were doing, the moment they heard, that President Lincoln had been shot. I´ll have to make do with J.F.Kennedy.

Friday 22 Novemeber1963 was a Friday, so I was at evening choir practice at the school. Afterwards, having left the tram stop opposite our home and clambering up the stairs to our front door, I couldn´t wait to sit down at the harpsichord, which I still couldn´t believe was mine, so shortly after my confirmation.

I hung up my coat in the wardrobe and made a bee-line for the harpsichord. There I was met with an unusual sight: my father was home and he appeared to be sober and it was already gone 9pm. He sat on the sofa, looking like the Tollund Man, the famously well-preserved bog-mummy from the Danish iron age, in the face. My mother sat next to him, and she didn´t look too happy either.

The Tollund Man turned towards the lost and found son: “Kennedy is dead”.

My mother joined in. “Yes, this is the end of the world!”.

They´d heard about it on the radio – not seen it on TV. We didn´t have TV till late in the 1960s, which was pretty unusual for a middleclass household like ours. I hope it wasn´t the monthly payments on the harpsichord that stood in the way for the acquisition of a TV set. I guess it boils down to common snobbery.

TV was for the hoi-polloi, ordinary folks who didn´t read books and had no culture. The logic in that particular philosophy changed overnight, when the first foreign detective series, such as the early Miss Marple adaptions with the somewhat robust Margareth Rutherford in the title role were brought. Then my parents upped sticks to my grandparents´ new apartment, where a TV set had been a permanent fixture for several years.

High school now loomed on the horizon, and in August 1965 I found myself enrolled in what was then called 1.G(ymnasium), Modern Languages. Until now, we´d been, as mentioned earlier, only boys, girls didn´t join until high school start(that has changed since then, luckily). I personally had never seen a girl before, except in the movies(my sister didn´t count, obviously), and that went for most of us boys. Total pandemonium ensued in the class room. We could hardly speak from sheer excitement and almost walked on our hands to make ourselves interesting. The newly arrived girls took it all in their stride and with grace, smiling coyly, which of course didn´t render us boys more level headed. That I 30 years later would be married to one of them, Annette Gerlach, now – that´s another story, which I´ll return to.

My organ playing, and budding interest in writing music myself, had taken over my daily life, and the hormonal revolution simmering in my body, had been put on hold. On other words, I was a total geek and completely without any appeal to the girls, who, by and large, were way more mature than we boys(which is often the case). However, I wasn´t the only “professor type” on the team. We were a small clique of likeminded types, of which one came to mean a lot to me and my development, a friendship I´ll enlarge upon in a later chapter.

School was coming to an end, and I graduated, barely, with embarrassingly low marks. All through 3.G(ymnasium) I – out of principle – threw syllabus to the wind and concentrated on the organ instead. One day, I lost myself completely while practicing, just played and played and played, pressing myself into a momentary memory loss. I suffered a total black out, couldn´t remember how I came to be in the church in the first place. That´s not the way to graduate from highschool with flying colors. But graduate I did.

Childhood and boyhood were now both well and truly over.

AFTER SCHOOL St. Annæ was an austere institution for sure, but at least it was democratic. In the lower grades before high school, each of the two parallel classes(North and South) seated 36 pupils. 36 boys recruited from all walks of life. There was no favoritism amongst the teachers, and the school yard bullying probably neither more nor less callous, than at other schools. The wide social-demographic span also reached into high school. In my class there were an heiress to a big pharmaceutical emporium and the son of a construction site worker, hauling brick and mortar. The rest of us ticked the boxed in between, as it were. Oddly enough, none of us had the slightest interest in our individual backgrounds, social status, money – or lack of same.

In other words, there was no snobbery amongst us.

The son of the construction site worker was named John Reuter. In the time before high school, he was one of the “North boys”, I a “Southener”, but at the start of high school, those two classes merged(back then, the three year high school stretch, from 1G to 3G left you with the choice between Modern Languages or Mathematic/Science. John and I were “linguists”, Bo Reipurth chose Math/Sci, not surprisingly, being focused on the astronomy). As mentioned before, my academic endeavor wasn´t exactly impressive, what with my having my nose in musical scores from sunrise to sunset. Organ scores, to be precise. My musical horizon was, in other words, frighteningly limited, but John muscled in and shook me awake. He and 2-3 of the other boys from class had started to go to the so-called “Thursday Concerts” given by what was then called “The Radio Orchestra”(today they call themselves The Danish National Symphony Orchestra”, but the concert series is still called Thursday Concerts), through membership of the long gone service “Music and Youth”. One day John said: “…Poul, you´ve got nothing between your ears than organ, how about coming with us to the next Thursday Concert and listen to something else?”

And it really was something else than Bach and Buxtehude. Mahler´s second Symphony The Resurrection.

For me it also became The Awakening. We had seats in first row on the floor, to the right of the conductor, so I had the full orchestra right smack in the face. That evening marked the beginning of my lifelong hot love affair with the symphony orchestra, and I became a regular guest at the Thursday Concerts, together with John and the other “classicists”

Following graduation from St.Annæ, most of us went our own separate ways, but John and I developed a friendship based on regular conversations about not only music, but life in general. John wasn´t only a good friend, but inspirator and entrepreneur as well. A couple of days after the premiere of Lars von Trier´s shocking film “Dancer in the Dark”, spring of 2000, John sent me an email: “…what a fucking great masterpiece, go and see it!” Which I did, and when staggering out of the movie house, completely shattered after being hauled through that alarmingly emotional wringer, I said to my wife: “There´s only one thing wrong with that film, and that is, that it´s not an opera by me!”

Which it became, a few years later, but I´m far from certain that I´d have seen the film, had John not pushed me. And then there´d be no opera from my hand on that story.

At the premiere, September 2010 at the new Opera building on the Copenhagen waterfront, three of our national broadsheets each dispatched a critic, three stalwart musclemen, who couldn´t wrap their bird brains around the fact, that it wasn´t the film they were about to watch again, but a new opera based on the story from the film. They can now, the three gentlemen, to their chagrin, mull over the uncomfortable fact that Selma Jezková by now has seen three independent productions, two in Germany alone(it must be said, that the commissioner The Danish Royal Opera insisted on holding on to the original film title, in that way cashing in on the fame of the film and thus fill the house. It didn´t take long though, before Kasper Holten, then opera CEO and director of the piece, realized the wisdom in using my original idea for a title, and in that way avoid misunderstanding and confusion: Selma Jesková. The history of opera is more or less made up of operas heralding the name of the main character in the title).

John would have turned 60 in April 2009, but an uncommonly vicious bone cancer killed him a couple of months before. And it´s hardly surprising, that I have had printed in the score: “To the memory of John Reuter – friend and inspirator”.

In the fall of 1968 I enlisted as a musicology student at Copenhagen University, where I was taught counterpoint, music history, etc. by a handful of illustrious teachers. At the time, the music department couldn´t print a fixed address on its stationary, but had to lease rooms at various locations in central Copenhagen, the most bizarre example a dining room belonging to a Masonic Lodge, the Odd Fellow Hall(which actually housed the acoustically best concert hall in the city. Sadly the hall burned to the ground in 1992). When we turned up for Palestrina Counterpoint Monday mornings, the smell from the dinner served the night before still lingered.

Pale-what?

In those days, when studying musicology(in Danish called Musikvidenskab, literally “Music Science”), a part of the training involved a discipline in which you had to write small pieces in the style of the Italian Renaissance choral composer Giovani Palestrina. And not only that, also exercises in fugue writing in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach´s famous two volume ouvre Das Wohltemperierte Klavier( “The Well Tempered Piano, in English merely known as “The 48”). The common denominator in both disciplines is rigid counterpoint, a composition form based on rules stipulating what you can - but mostly – cannot do. (punctus contra punctum means quite simply point against point).

Now it wasn´t the gastronomical reverberations which made me drop out of musicology after only six months. It wasn´t made for me, who´d rather compose and play. I had for some time, starting in 1967, received private tuition from the composer Ib Nørholm, then living in a one-family house north west of Copenhagen. I turned up with my more or less successful “efforts”, but genuine composition lessons never materialized. “…I can´t teach you to compose” said Nørholm, “ but I can teach you how to smoke cigarettes!”. That didn´t happen, though(cigarette smoking, that now so despised means of enjoyment, didn´t cross my path till I was 44 years of age. It´s never too late!), but the lessons with Nørholm(who didn´t charge me at all), were never the less useful. I learned the elementary craft, such as correct musical notation and how to subdivide measures, placing of rests, that sort of thing. I still played the organ and was determined to get an organist´s degree. I now received lessons from Finn Reif. Reiff and Nørholm both taught at the Funen Music Conservatory in Odense, one of our erstwhile four regional music conservatories,

so it was only natural that I follow suit, so to speak. But first I had to stand to attention before a young composer, who taught music theory and music history, one Karl Aage Rasmussen.

“Forget all about it” was the verdict handed down by Karl Aage, who looked intimidatingly at me through a pair of coke bottle bottom spectacles(he looked like a cross between Charlie Brown from Peanuts and Henry Kissinger), only a few minutes into the ”interrogation”, after I´d muttered my feeble idea of wanting to enlist myself as a student of Music Theory- and History alongside the organ studies.

“Enlist with organ as your main subject and composition as second”. No mincing words there, and today, looking in the always well polished rear view mirror, he was right. I´d would never have been able to muster the necessary patience to fulfill such a “bookish” discipline. Pretty sharply diagnosed by him, who was – and still is – only one and a half year older than I. “What a nasty piece of work, that there Rasmussen” I thought, hang dog, afterwards.

So what now? “…have a smoke” said Nørholm, who waited outside in the corridor. “What now?” materialized as my choosing organ as main subject(I could actually play, don´t forget), and composition as second subject. And who else but Karl Aage Rasmussen – God help us all! – turned out to be the one chosen to teach me orchestration! The future didn´t look bright…

A year later we were more or less inseparable, and in the summer of 1970, we set course for Rome in an old VW “Beetle kitted out with not only the usual vacation paraphernalia, but scores as well.

Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, etc., the whole parade of orchestral heroes I´d been introduced to in the orchestration lessons, which called for the use of ears and eyes: record on the turn table – eyes in the score. “Why does this particular combination sound so well?” asked K.Aa., and the answer was found in the score. But the question could also turn out: “Why does this bit sound like shit?”

The score again, and not infrequently Carl Nielsen(!), turned out to be the “culprit”.

Orchestration, ie. the subject dealing with not only how the individual instruments sound, but also how, perhaps, they should sound in the orchestra, so that no-body feels “left out”(especially not the individual players), was back then a more or less unknown discipline for young fledgling composers, and it´s vastly due to Karl Aage Rasmussen and his teacher Bent Lorentzen, that it´s now recognized on the same level as the more “bookish” disciplines, such as counterpoint and analysis.

If, as it´s been implied , here and there, now and then, that yours truly isn´t a complete moron when it comes to writing for the symphony orchestra is true, the reason is of course a natural talent or flair, but I couldn´t have seen the “project” through, if Karl Aage hadn´t shown me the way and the means, the hows and the whys. Our friendship has survived the wear and tear of time, even though we today(2020), rarely meet in the flesh. Internet and email has taken over, but I guess that´s a sign of life too…

My time at the Funen Conservatory was short-lived, only 2 years. In the fall of ´72 I was quite simply thrown out, because I didn´t show up for a written examination. It was a deliberate “move” on my part(I was fully aware of the repercussions). I spent more time with my girlfriend, the pianist Hanne Bramsen, who was also a student at the Funen Conservatory. The institution was housed at a large spacious villa located behind the popular Fairytale Garden. And from there, it was but a short walk to the debaucheries waiting in down-town Odense.

Life as nerd and paragon-of-virtue was now teetering on the brink of collapse following the transition into the 1970s. At the age of twenty, I still hadn´t slept with a girl - and only been drunk once! That wouldn´t do, but as the saying goes: virginity and sobriety, both are curable!”. The Funen Conservatory turned out to be the perfect “clinic”. The girls said “yes”, mostly, and it didn´t need to be a full moon, and the Christmas lunches started up already in October.

It was a right wallow. The 1970 had arrived, and it was a fantastic era at which to be young and irresponsible.

As Hanne mentioned years later: “it was pure anarchy”. But we had a colossally grand old time, we in the “clique”, which apart from Hanne and me, was made up of Karl Aage Rasmussen and the bass baritone Carl Christian Rasmussen(no relation to Karl Aage. Every other Dane is called Rasmussen), with a steady supply of “guest performers”. On a personal level, I spent more time at the legendary Baviarian style Beer Stube(now sadly long gone)Frank A,. than on the organ bench. In fact, the organ lessons themselves moved from the church into the bar room. My teacher, Finn Reiff, wasn´t squeamish either, when it came to being irresponsible and boozing in broad daylight.

We´ve already established that I managed to organize my own eviction, so I was now a “free man” and as such followed Hanne to Århus, where she intended to continue studying piano at the Jutland Conservatory.

It was 1973, the social democrat Anker Jørgensen was prime minister, and the country was allegedly set on a kamikaze course toward the abyss of financial ruin. It didn´t worry me one bit. My irresponsibility and selfishness were both intact, so after having split up with Hanne during the early summer the same year, I moved to Copenhagen, rented a room with a family in a huge apartment on H.C.Andersen ´s Boulevard(the broad thoroughfare running parallel to the Tivoli Gardens), rolled up my sleeves, ran a comb through my hair, all set for the eternal party, now in the nation´s Capital(my stay with the family at the rented room calls for a comment. I stayed there for two years. The apartment was massive, 4 bedrooms, kitchen, 2 bath rooms and a huge dining room and living area. The family belonged to the more laid-back conviction – three children, the oldest, a girl of 18-19 years of age, didn´t think twice about walking around, stark naked, and she wasn´t necessarily about to take a shower. The father´s ancient mother also lived there, and she had the far from endearing habit of never closing the door when she sat on the can. What the family did for a living, I never found out. No one went to work in the morning. It wasn´t a commune in the traditional sense, where at least some the inhabitants usually had a day job in the city somewhere. It was indeed a peculiar set-up, but friendly and almost worryingly relaxed…).

1970s Copenhagen! It was before AIDS, and the girls were munching “The Pill” like candy, so everybody just “went for it”. The spirit was soaring: thick tobacco fumes blocked the view in the taverns. It was way before the howling anti-smoking chorus. You could say whatever you wanted without looking nervously behind you – political correctness wasn´t yet invented. The booze roared out of the bottles, still free of any wagging fingers from the government. As to pot and the like, it was never an option for me and my fellow bandits on the pub crawls. Not out of fear of the local constabulary, it just didn´t have any appeal.

The vigilant reader will by now have wondered how I managed to foot the bill for my uninhibited sybaritic lifestyle, and it´s here my relative “handiness” at the organ comes to the rescue. I was offered the position as prison organist under the umbrella of The Administration for the Copenhagen Penitentiaries. My job description stipulated that I play the organ at services in the Prison Chapel, and on top of that, also to oversee choir practice sessions with the inmates, individuals who´d volunteered for the job, which entailed some free time with coffee and buttered rolls with cheese for everybody at the Prison Chaplain´s office after the service. Never the less, the normally serene and innocent phenomenon choir boy quickly transmogrified into a far more multifaceted option.

Thinking back, it´s no less than astonishing, that it was allowed locking up a 25-year old rookie organist, with horn rimmed glasses and fingers like bread sticks, in the same room with hardened criminals. Because I was locked up with five or six of the genuine inmates who´d volunteered for Church Service. Every Saturday I was supposed to go through the hymns chosen for the following day in a room reserved for the occasion, and in a prison there´s no such thing as an unlocked door, so the key was turned behind me from the outside at the start of each choir practice. An obvious opportunity to take me as hostage in a stand-off demanding release or better conditions, what have you.

The key wasn´t turned in the opposite direction again till I knocked loudly on the door. Needless to say,

there wasn´t any serious choir practice going on, we mostly sat and chatted amicably, whiling away the one hour session. But on one occasion the small hairs on the nape of my neck stood up. One of the “choristers” was openly bragging about what he´d done in order to end up where he was. I recognized the “tale” from the newspapers, a horrific murder. I had him immediately taken off the roster.

But I still hadn´t passed any kind of exam, had no document, no diploma, but one night in the fall of 1974, God appeared before me in a dream and He said: “Get a fucking move on you lazy bastard and take that organist´s degree!!!”.

Yessir! Before long I was enlisted as a private student under the auspices of the Royal Danish Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. I was 25 years of age and acknowledged the wisdom in finally getting a document allowing me to seek employment within a discipline which I not only loved – but mastered reasonably well. However, the actual playing was only half of the syllabus. In 6 months I needed to master all subjects pertaining to the craft, including music history, theory and liturgy. The “operation” was a success, and the “patient” survived. In June 1975 I got my diploma and the following day, my new girlfriend Lise Borch and I flew to Los Angeles, where my sister now lived, after having moved from Chicago a couple of years before. For both of us, Lise and me, it was our first trip to America. I, personally, would return over and over again.

In the years following 1967, when I wrote my “Opus 1”, the piano piece three Letters from the Unknown Soldier up to 1980, my compositional output was embarrassingly wobbly. The lessons with Nørholm at the Conservatory in Odense were slowly “dismantled” through a silent agreement between us. After my voluntary “dismissal” from the Conservatory, the orchestration lessons moved to Karl Aage´s private home, a four-winged former farm house near the small town of Østbirk in eastern Jutland, where the tuition was carried on under less formal conditions, occasionally very less formal…

Apart from a couple of not all too embarrassing pieces, such as Three Letters, Rondeau for 7 players and the string quartet Motet, I don´t look back with pride as a composer in the decennium 1970-80. I was groping in the dark, searching for my own voice. But at the dawn of the 1980s, the“ducks slowly started to align”.

But not before yet a couple of turbulent years in Copenhagen. I´d moved in together with another piano student, Britta Bugge Madsen. Britta was now next in the “parade” of girlfriends. In the meantime I´d landed a position as organist at Søllerød Church, north of Copenhagen, a truly contrasting career move: from the bleak prison chapel to one of the richest and most snobbish parts of Denmark. But it did wonders for the economy. I still hadn´t grown up, though.

At the end of the decade Britta and I split up, and before long I found myself in a rented basement room beneath a large palatial house right on the shore of Lake Søllerød, close to the church. Here I decided to test my abilities, to compose – without piano – a piece, no draft, directly into full score and transposed.

Selected wind instruments, such as the clarinet and the French horn are so called transposing instruments.

That is, the notes you see in front of you don´t sound where they´re written. The horn sounds a fifth below the written note. You see the written note C, but you hear an F, five steps below. The most commonly used clarinet is in Bb, which is the tone we hear when we see a C. Bb is a whole step below the C. The end result, four movements with the not terribly exciting title Four Compositions, became a turning point for me as a composer. I´ve later on named the piece my Opus 1 – No.2.

During a visit to London in 1979 I met the young British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen. Oliver had been a child prodigy. At the age of fourteen he´d conducted his Symphony no. 1 with the London Symphony Orchestra and was now, at the age of 27, an established name on the British music scene. I´d brought with me a recording from a recital in Denmark of my piece Medieval Variations from 1974, and he liked what he heard. So, next time we met, I presented him with a recording from the Danish premiere of Four Compositions. The performance with a Danish ad hoc ensemble was less than satisfactory, even though the

players did their best. “…it´s probably too difficult. No bloody way it can be done” I mused. But Oliver heard “through” the troubled , to say the least, performance. “Fantastic piece. I want to play it with The London Sinfonietta!”.

The London Sinfonietta! I could hardly believe it. A few years before, I´d heard the legendary virtuoso ensemble of 14 players, conducted by Simon Rattle, and I´d never before heard modern music(Stravinsky, Maxwell Davies a.o.)played with such elan and drive. Hearing my own music with the London Sinfonietta was something I could only dream of – which I did, believe me – without much hope, if any. But now, mirabile dictu, I found myself in one of the BBC studios at a so called invitation concert, broadcast live. The hall was packed, and on the stage sat the London Sinfonietta, conductor: Oliver Knussen. I was on cloud nine, and for a good reason. Four Compositions was not only a great success as a piece, but most importantly I now had final proof that it could be performed. It was difficult for sure, but not too difficult.

Everything worked out as it should, all my intensions were met and carried out. And as if that wasn´t enough, the performance brought with it a commission, a new piece written for the great ensemble. Four Dances in one Movement was premiered by the London Sinfonietta in 1985, again with Oliver conducting.

Four Dances is one of my most frequently performed chamber music pieces and has been commercially recorded twice.

This, for a Danish composer spectacular exposure abroad paved the way for my being taken “on” in 1982(a direct result of the Four Compositions boost in London) by the music publishing house Wilhelm Hansen. A few pieces, such as Three Letters from the unknown Soldier was published – printed from a copper plate matrix as, I believe, the last in Denmark – by the now obsolete publishing house Engstrøm & Sødring . The composers´ “own” publisher, the smaller, non-profit institution with the cumbersome name The Society for Publication of Danish Music(in daily jargon “The Society”)was a viable alternative, when you needed distribution and the copying of parts, the individual books the musicians read and play their own instrumental part from. Copying of parts doesn´t come free, obviously, but you´d apply for funds with the Danish Art Foundation. It was normally a formality, but it was troublesome and time consuming. When you´re with a big, commercial publishing house like Wilhelm Hansen, distribution, copying, publicity, you name it, are all being taken care of for the composer, but at a price: 33 percent sliced off your royalties. Fair enough – you only have to focus on composing. Wilhelm Hansen was Danish owned and run, but in 1988, the whole thing was bought by the American publishing giant Music Sales. One can only admire the honesty implied in the name.

In the following years Knussen conducted several high-profile performances of my music, not only in London, but in the US as well. Capriccio pian´ e forte with Philharmonia and Corpus cum Figuris with New York Philharmonic. He was also supposed to have conducted the world premiere of my First Symphony Himmelhoch jauchzend – zum Tode betrübt at a Prom in Royal Albert Hall in London, 3 September 1990, but had to back down for health reasons. A replacement was found, one Michael Schønwandt, who, together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, secured an intoxicating victory for the piece. Standing ovation, panegyric reviews – and in 1991 the Symphony was awarded with The Royal Philharmonic Society´s prize for best large piece performed in London. Unfortunately there was no money tied to the prize, a so-called honorary award. But honor doesn´t pay the bills…

It was, however, a performance of my piece Manhattan Abstraction for symphony orchestra which led to adventures new…

Next stop: Tanglewood, Massachusetts, USA. In January 1978 I set course for America for the second time, destination New York City. It was during this trip that I met my first professional contact in Amerika. Before setting out from Denmark, I was given the phone number of the percussionist Jan Williams by a mutual friend. Mr.Williams didn´t know me from Adam, needless to say, but when I called, completely out of the blue, he immediately invited me to come and visit him and his wife Diane in Buffalo, upstate New York. So before long I found myself standing in line at the Greyhound bus depot at Port Authority and bought a ticket to Buffalo, a full day´s bus ride. I was met at the bus terminal in Buffalo by Jan Williams himself, and was taken to his and Diane´s house in the outskirts of the city. I now came to enjoy first hand the legendary American hospitality in all its heart warming glory. I, a complete stranger was taken in as were I part of the family. The following year, Jan arranged for the performances with the student orchestra affiliated with the music school at SUNY(State University of New York - Buffalo) of two of my then recent pieces Medieval Variations and a now withdrawn Piano Concerto Recitatives and Arias (a truly dreadful piece), commissioned by another newly acquired American friend in music, the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff. That they all went to great lengths to perform music by a composer, who, truth be told, handn´t yet proved anything beyond a certain knack for putting nice sounds together(there was still a couple of years till I came of age with Four Compositions) is no less than miraculous. But it did mark the beginning of my life long relationship with the American music scene.

But back now to my second Transatlantic adventure, New York, January 1978, a brutally cold month, so the famous Manhattan skyline stood as a crystal clear, precisely sculptured backdrop, silhouetted against a blue cloudless sky, as seen from the ferry shuttling between South Ferry and Liberty Island. This extraordinary visual impact started fermenting at the back of my mind, and a few years later, in 1982, I composed the one-movement orchestra piece Manhattan Abstraction. As implied in the title, the music itself doesn´t try to say anything tangible. Music in itself can´t, it´s always “only” itself. You´ll need a text, and opera is of course the most obvious, or the composer can add a “storyline” as a sort of motto or guideline for the listener, a so-called symphonic poem. Which I did myself when writing Thus Saw Saint John, which is structurally based on a quote from the Bible, Revelations.

“Manhattan Abstraction – A Symphonic Skyline” is a vision in sound of the Metropolis´profile as seen from afar and from inside itself. A polyphonic city scape if you wish. The piece was premiered at one of the Thursday Concerts by the The Danish Radio Orchestra in 1985, and was subsequently choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet by Anna Lærkesen. But already a year after the premiere in Copenhagen, the piece was presented at the famous Tanglewood Festival outside the town of Lenox, Massachusetts.

Tanglewood Festival Orchestra and Oliver “Olly” Knussen performed the piece in the packed, semi-open concert hall on the campus grounds. Those who couldn´t get seats inside, had the not entirely unpleasant option of placing themselves in reclining camping chairs outside on the lawn, with a picnic hamper and wine within reach. The majority of the punters had to make do with the hard folding chairs inside – and amongst them sat a young guitarist, conductor and new music aficionado, David Starobin. I didn´t know him, but when the concert was over, he came up to me, over the moon with enthusiasm about my piece and asked if he could perform Four Composition in New York the following year, with the New York “answer” to London Sinfonietta, Speculum Musicae.

The concert took place at Merkin Hall, a part of the famous cultural compound Lincoln Center. David conducted Speculum in yet a spectacularly virtuosic performance of the four “old” pieces. That evening marked the beginning of a friendship, which rapidly came to mean more to me, not only professionally, but personally as well, than anything before. David and his wife Becky had for some years been running a small record label, Bridge Records, specializing in contemporary music. Over the years the label has expanded significantly and has moved from “cottage industry” to the “big league” with separate office space, storage facilities, several employees, and worldwide distribution.

Not long after the New York performance of Four Compositions I was asked by David Starobin if I´d agree to write a piece for guitar and chamber ensemble. He´d hire Speculum Musicae as the “band”, and – needless to say – record the piece for his own label. But the project needed financial support. Fees to the composer, soloist and ensemble, security for renting of venue and advertising. It all cost money, a lot of money, and as we know, in America there´s no public safety net under cultural enterprise, so in most cases you´ll have to apply for help from foundations or private sponsors. In one of the so-called town houses in the more posh end of Greenwich Village lived the widow of a manufacturer of guitar strings. Rose Augustine´s husband had made a fortune by patenting his own brand of guitar strings. In the US, you can become seriously rich by the strangest means. The old lady looked like she´d come straight out of a Woody Allen movie, petite and fragile with walking stick and blue-rinsed hair, stooped, sharp as a razor – and phenomenally wealthy.

And she was also a sponsor, happy to support music, but on one condition: there had to be a guitar involved!

David Starobin had previously relied on financial backing from Mrs. Augustine, so it was only natural for us to approach her – hat in hand – to be frank. “Segovia once stayed for several years with her and her husband” David said, with awe. “And she has a spinet which Bach once played, allegedly!”. I stood to attention and tightened the necktie I´d bought for the occasion.

Mrs. Augustine turned out to be quite forthcoming – as long as we agreed with everything she said. Which we did, anything for the cause. After having sipped politely from the drinks provided, sitting on the edge of the Empire chairs, knees together, the old lady took her handbag and started rummaging (a heady fragrance of lavender now wafted through the room), hauled forth a wad of bank notes and said to me: “…here we go, young man, a little something to get started with. But don´t spend it all at once!” Following yet some small talk and shameless bowing and scraping, I found myself down in the street with a fistful of dollars. I went back to Denmark and started working on Psalmodies.

The six-stringed acoustical guitar is probably one of the trickiest instruments a non-player can choose to compose for. And I couldn´t play(still can´t) the guitar to save my life. You´d think, that as long as you write something resembling an easy right hand passage in a piano piece, then you´re home and dry. But nope.

The placing of the fingers on the so-called fret board has absolutely nothing in common with what you´d do on a keyboard. I´d written for the guitar before, but this time I was rubbing shoulders with one of the “big

boys”, so I drew up a fret board diagram, borrowed a guitar and got started. Psalmodies, which eventually became the title, is a suite, ie. a series of short pieces, all in all 11 autonomous movements straddling a huge emotional span, from the jubilantly extrovert to the extremely introvert. The title has its origin in the ancient Greek word psalmodeia, meaning “singing to the harp”, and from there to psallein. “fingers playing on the strings”. Psalmodies was pre-premiered in 1990, in Philadelphia, but the real world premiere took place at Merkin Hall, New York. Not surprisingly David Starobin played the solo-part, and 9 members of Speculum Musicae were conducted by the ensemble´s regular contrabass player Donald Palma. In June 1992 the piece was CD recorded for Bridge Records – with the same “band” – at the fabulous, but now sadly obsolete Studio A at the RCA/BM-building in New York. That CD marked the beginning of several recordings of my music for and by Bridge Records. By January 2020 the series had reached the number 15.

Other labels have contributed as well, but none with the same impressive regularity and devotion as Bridge Records. But over thirty individual singles are now sitting on a shelf in my office.

Shortly after the recording of Psalmodies, I asked Becky Starobin if she´d want be my US manager – or agent if you wish. The difference is a bit blurry, but Becky had for some years been “anchor woman” for several American composers, most notably George Crumb, but she readily agreed to include me, a foreigner, into her “stable”. Bridge Management has negotiated numerous contracts for me. Commissions and performances for and by the best, such as New York Philharmonic, the piano virtuosos Vassily Primakov and Anne Marie McDermott, Speculum Musicae, Dallas Symphony Orchestra etc. On 26 March, 2009, the day before my 60th birthday, Bridge Records&Management in cooperation with Scandinavia House in New York, arranged a birthday concert for me at Victor Borge Hall, Park Avenue South with an impressive line-up of top-musicians performing a selection of my chamber pieces. That Becky and David Starobin would “branch out” as librettists in an opera of mine, 10 years into the future, is another story, which I´ll return to in a later chapter.

At the start of December 1991, I sold most of my already then considerably reduced earthly belongings in Copenhagen and moved to London. The reason for my going into exile must be found several years before.

During my time as organist at the church in Søllerød I met my first wife, Helene Wanscher. She was a member of the church choir and we quickly fell in love. That she was(is)11 years older than I, played no importance at all, and I left my lodgings beneath the villa by the lake and moved into her house in Virum, only a couple of miles away. There was, however, a minor issue which needed sorting out. She was married – and the husband – Torben R. still lived in the house. This sounds like a recipe for a drama of Wagnerian proportion, but the “triangle set-up” worked out nicely and to everybody´s satisfaction. Helene´s marriage had over the years slowly become a pragmatic “house-sharing” arrangement, a deal which only changed numerically. Her husband set up “shop” in the basement, and I moved into the bedroom together with Helene(and the dachshund Emil). Her two sons, Lars and Jens, carried on as usual in their own separate rooms on the first floor.

Even though the domestic peace was secured, it wasn´t, needless to say, a set-up that could go on forever.

Torben found another place to stay, and he and Helene divorced not long after, so that she and I could get married. Which we did at the registrar´s office at the borough Town Hall in Lyngby on 24 October 1984.

Not even that relationship, my first with a marriage certificate and all the legal paperwork in place, could I manage and keep on the road, so in 1987 I was again “out and about”. After having free-lanced as organist for a couple of years(I gave notice at Søllerød in 1981), I applied for – and got – a new position as organist at a church(Mariendal Church)in the part of the capital called Frederiksberg(an autonomous borough inside Copenhagen with its own City Hall and mayor). My marriage to Helene was already at that time, only a year after our wedding, on the road towards dissolution. That I, shortly after my inauguration as organist in Frederiksberg, again gave in to the allure of adventures new, didn´t do much good for the domestic “bliss” in Virum. A new lady, D., had fallen in love with me and I willingly followed suit, eying pleasures aplenty looming on the horizon. D. wanted, not unreasonably, that I divorce Helene, but I was incapable of rising to

the occasion, being somewhat afraid of Helene. “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned” as Shakespeare has it. D., it must be said, was no slouch herself at scaring the living daylight out of me, so in the fall of 1987, I hauled my now even more depleted personal belongings up to the fifth floor of an apartment on Burmeistergade, a building in the part of Copenhagen called Christianshavn, right opposite the famous “free-city” of Christiania. My good friend, the composer Hans Abrahamsen had also had to “abandon” home and hearth a couple of months before and moved into an attic apartment on the same street. He´d spotted, that a similar apartment a couple of doors down was up for sale, so I bought it and moved in as fast as I could.

I was still holding the position as organist at the church, but didn´t enjoy it at all, becoming more and more sick and tired of the Danish State Church(Lutheran-Evangelical, the official national denomination). The message of “peace on Earth and love to all of Mankind” wasn´t necessarily honored in the “front office”. I applied for 6 months leave – got it – and set sail for New York, where my publisher´s local office found an apartment I could rent for the period. It was in Brooklyn, in the “Heights, a colorful and lively neighborhood on the east River, close to the famous bridge. The main purpose for my stay(apart from getting away from the mayhem back home)was in all its simplicity to have complete peace and quiet while composing my percussion concerto Monodrama, commissioned by the Danish percussion virtuoso Gert Sørensen and the Radio Symphony Orchestra. I sat at my desk, working, and only a few pre-arranged excursions took me away, but for short periods, one to Tokyo and one to Yale University, on an invitation to the latter by the late composer and professor Jacob Druckman to give a presentation of my music. While devouring a hefty helping of curly fries and burger down the local diner, Druckman wanted me to come back for a semester as visiting professor of composition, a unique opportunity to, yet again, get away from Denmark, so naturally I agreed on the spot. I applied for a second leave from the church and it was granted.

Yale University lords it over the city of New Haven in Connecticut, like a Medieval Castle, elevated above the humble village at its foot. At the time, spring of 1991, New Haven was one of the most dangerous and violent cities in the US, in spite of its modest size. The combination of the rich Ivy League university with all the rich kids on one side, and the humble population down in the “village” made for a lethal social cocktail, which led to all sorts of calamities, murder even. I stayed at a house a couple of miles away from downtown, but I could never the less hear the shootings and the whee!-wheee!-whee! of the police car sirens. New Haven wasn´t a nice place, back then, in spite of the name.

Needless to say, I taught the full semester, and in the spring recess in March, I could finally “cash in” on a standing invitation from my old school mate, the astronomer Bo Reipurth, to come and visit him in Santiago, Chile, where he worked at ESO– European Southern Observatory. Bo packed his four-wheeler and we drove south on the Pan American Highway, ending up in the breathtakingly beautiful Lake District.

However, I had to go back to Yale – and from there back to Denmark.

I was still married to Helene, and in a desperate attempt to salvage what was left of the marriage, I moved into an apartment in a terrace house, only a couple of streets away from a similar house, where Helene had bought a small apartment for herself. That this pathetic “patch-up” didn´t work at all, is hardly surprising.

Something radical had to be done, so I quit my position as organist at the Mariendal Church, sold almost everything from my now seriously decimated earthly belongings – and moved to London, leaving behind two unsold apartments – and a wife.

´

J LONDON CALLING

Like New York, London had become a second home to me. It was there, in London, I had my international break-through, and several subsequent performances of my music paved the way for my career, in fact, I once read in one of the London papers, that I was regarded more as an English- than a Danish composer.

So, choosing London was obvious, and infinitely easier than had I opted for New York. If so, I´d have had to apply for a special visa, permission to work, and doubtless a green card(I´m writing this, after the UK left the European Union as a result of the disastrous Brexit). But back in 1991, if you were an EU citizen, you´d just move in and settle as you pleased. Nobody asked to see papers, passport, etc., not even when registering with a GP, and the British “taxman”, the Inland Revenue treated you as a “native. Those days are over. Sadly enough.

But I needed to find a place to live, and – not surprisingly – I relied on my friends in the London music circles to help me.

My first address turned out to be a lunatic asylum.

The pianist Rolf Hind had performed – and recorded – my piece for piano and brass ensemble Break Dance a couple of years before. Rolf and his partner Ray Rowden lived in Tooting Bec in South London together with their two mongrels “French & Saunders”(named after a popular comic TV double act). Ray, a trained psychiatric nurse, held the position as administrative director of Tooting Bec Hospital, a Victorian monstrosity with its numerous eccentric turrets, mysterious side buildings, wrought iron gates and strange nooks and crannies. Straight out of Dickens. The hospital, which was run by the NHS(National Health Service), was in the process of being closed down, and it was Ray´s job to ensure, that the process was seen through, if not with haste, then at least with dignity. When Ray learned that I was looking for a place to stay, he said “…as a matter of fact, on the floor above the offices, there´s an empty ward available, containing two rooms with access to kitchen(hotel size), 2 shower stalls and 10(!) toilets. You can have the whole lot for 50 pounds a month, electricity and heating included.” Now, that was an offer I couldn´t refuse. But it was at the same time one hell of a weird address to add to my calling card: c/o Tooting Bec Hospital, G(eriatic)Ward, Church Lane, London SW(there were only elderly people with psychiatric disorders left). Before long, rumors circulated, that I´d gone mad and had been sectioned and stowed away together with other incurable lunatics. The “market value” of that rumor is hard to estimate, but it´s hardly done any damage. In fact, it became the source of a couple of funny episodes, for instance, like one day, when I was supposed to meet the British born, Australia based journalist Andrew Ford, for an interview he planned to include in a book on contemporary composers he was working on. Ford showed up at the agreed time, but I´d forgotten all about it and was to be found nowhere. Ford then started to investigate on his own, as it were. Later, in the published interview, Ford describes the surreal search for the Danish composer Poul Ruders: “The Swedish gentleman upstairs?” a lady down in the office exclaimed. “…no, I

haven´t seen him today.” Ford then went down to ground level and ventured into the hospital courtyard. It was summer and most of the patients pottered about in the open, absorbed in their own thoughts, some of them shuffling in circles, others tip-toing carefully in meticulously measured quadrants. Ford began to make enquiries, but soon realized, that there was something eerily wrong unfolding around him. Instead of getting a sensible answer to his questions about yours truly, he was met with the question: “…do you have a light?”. Ford, who now had become a tad uncomfortable, especially after having been asked repeatedly by the same man: “…do you have a light?” - began to suspect that he´d been set up, a victim of a special Danish form of practical joke. The idea is obvious – and fantastic. Just imagine that I – not wanting to be interviewed – had dispatched Ford on a wild goose chase among a bunch of mad men in lunatic asylum somewhere in the sinister South London. What a brilliant idea! Maybe I´d try it some day with a really, really annoying journalist…

But not with “my” old hospital as venue, it´s been demolished years ago. But Tooting Bec is really, far, far away from the classic tourist London. And south of the river Thames, a fact which still will make conservative Londoners of a certain age wince. There´re still stalwart types of the same conviction, who´ll proudly proclaim never to have set foot south of the river.

It´s not done.

Because that´s where the working classes live. Likewise, members of the same faith wouldn´t dream of visiting places in the East End, or the far western suburbs, such as Hounslow. But they´ll have to pass by it, riding the Paddington Express to Heathrow Airport, where they most likely will board a plane taking them south of the river…).

Tooting Bec Underground Station(tube station)sits on the southern stretch of the Northern Line branch, only a couple of stops before the end station Morden. Northern Line was for years the most neglected and scruffy of all London´s underground lines, the Misery Line, as the public wit had it. It became my regular line, and a ride into, let´s say Leicester Square, took about 40 minutes, but first I had to walk or take a bus from the hospital in order to get to the tube station, over a mile down the road.

So it was quite an expedition Ford had undertaken, and I can´t blame him for feeling bereft, when I apparently wasn´t to be found anywhere and nobody had heard of me. In the meantime I´d gone out shopping and had forgotten about the meeting, and luckily Ford hadn´t returned to his hotel north of the river, when I sauntered up the gravel path with my shopping bags. Following some theatrical slapping of my forehead and a humble show of honest contrition, we clambered up the stairs to the apartment with its hotel size kitchen, two shower stalls and ten toilets. I got the coffee going and we started on the interview.

I was forgiven.

And before long, finally divorced from Helene. On 12 May 1992 I showed up at the Danish Embassy in Sloane Street and signed the papers. Helene was now rid of me – and I of her, a “free” man again.

As previously mentioned the hospital was now in the process of being closed down and ultimately demolished, so I was forced to look for a new place to stay. As a result, in the spring of 1993, I moved to the part of London called Camberwell, into a house where I rented the top floor with access to kitchen and bathroom – and a “nice” view of of the railroad running past at the end of the garden. I was now a Camberwell “native” - and still south of the river…

A distant but persistent reminder rumbling at the far recesses of my mind, that June 1993 would mark the 25 year anniversary of my and my class mates´ graduation from highschool, now came closer. And lo and behold, one day a letter with Danish stamps dropped in through the letter box. The sender, one Annette Gerlach wrote, that she´d be hosting a reunion party in Copenhagen on 5 June, and would I please call her?

I remembered Annette from class, needless to say, but we hardly ever spoke. She had her eyes trained on the older boys in the grade one year ahead of us – and went to rock concerts. Which I didn´t…

But that was irrelevant, so I called the number provided and confirmed my participation in the festivities. I showed up on the address, 108 Strandboulevarden(literally The Beach Boulevard)on the day, which also coincided with our nation´s constitution day, which that year was lovely, balmy and sunny. I set out from a flat I´d borrowed from a friend, looking forward to the whole thing. When talking to Annette on the phone, I immediately warmed to the sound of her voice, sweet and clear, so everything augured well. Most of the class had turned up, and It didn´t take long for us all to get in the right mood, helped along by a steady supply of liquid “assistance”. I didn´t leave till 3 in the morning, staggering back to my borrowed apartment, thinking “…what a lovely woman, that Annette. I definitely MUST see her again! Which I did, but things didn´t get really serious till much later. Annette worked as a lab technician at one of the big teaching hospitals, and furthermore, her twin daughters, Charlotte and Elisabeth, 19 years old, still lived with their mother, who´d divorced the twins´ father years before.

Back in London the house in Camberwell had been put on the market, so I had to find a new place. Yet again…

What happened was, that I put my few belongings into storage – and travelled around the world – with a tent! One of London´s numerous travel agents(the so called bucket shops)offered to dispatch me into the blue yonder for only 978 pounds! That was affordable, even for 1993, and having recently finished my 2nd Cello Concerto Anima for Heinrich Schiff and Northern Sinfonia, I was free to do as I pleased.

You haven´t lived, if you at least not once in your life have tried squatting at 6 in the morning in 80 degrees Fahrenheit on a beach in Tahiti, watching the sun rise, sipping coffee made on your portable stove, dressed in loin cloth an cheroot! What arrogant drivel, I know, but it´s never the less recommendable! And needless to say, I hadn´t forgotten about Annette, so a post card or two wouldn´t be amiss. One from Moorea and one from Singapore. In the latter I´d added, that I´d drop by next time I came to Copenhagen.

The rest is, as they say, “history” – and it´s here that Susie enters the picture!

Susie?

Without suspecting anything, I was put to a test. How would I react to the presence of Susie in the apartment? Would I jump out of the chair, shouting “yuck!”, when she jumped onto my lap? I passed with flying colors, because I´m a completely unashamed dog lover, and the black short haired dachshund Susie was later to take on the responsibility for my moving in. I haven´t yet brought up the subject of the dogs in my life. My turbulent life prior to meeting Annette wasn´t made of the stuff allowing dog keeping. But when my parents moved to the country side around 1967, they quickly acquired a dog, wire haired dachshund Anna, then a Dobermann(!), Anders, then yet another wire haired dachs, Søren. Whoof! During my London days, I had great fun with two “reserve canines”, Rolf and Ray´s two mongrels French and Saunders. And before that, in the Virum house with Helene, a wire haired dachshund, Emil – my first own dog. Now, when writing this in 2020, I have one ear trained on the garden, where I can hear Gimmer sniffing about. Do I need to say he´s a dachshund?

There´re two kinds of people, those who like dogs – and those who don´t. Well, that´s maybe a bit radical, but of course it´s true – at the end of the day. A life without a dog is not worth living. Charm, sweetness – and unconditional love. They´re occasionally troublesome, wreaking havoc if they can get away with it – and they smell. But that goes for us humans as well, so that´s probably why man and dog have been so closely bonded in an unbreakable friendship and mutual dependence for thousands of years. And by the way, Gimmer sleeps in the bed, like all his predecessors. So, now that´s settled.

But I´m getting ahead of myself. In December 1993 I returned to London from my trip around the world, which took me to French Polynesia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia, and – again, had to look for a place to stay. This time I moved north of the river, into a split-level apartment, 89A Roman Road near Bethnal Green tube station in the East End. Now, for the first time, I had an apartment in London all by myself.

I spent Christmas 1992, not in London, but in Denmark, in Jutland, at Ørsted Kloster, a former monastery, now a refuge for people who want to get away from the daily stress and general mayhem, if only for a week or two. My good friend and editor with Edition WH, Michael Rehder, had recommended the ancient and dignified place, so I called and booked a room for Christmas and New Year´s Eve. I´ve never been comfortable with the commercial Christmas hysteria, definitely not in London, when the whole city goes murderously mad, already from the start of December. Ørslev came to the rescue. I liked it a lot, so I made reservation for the following year, Christmas 1993. The “Holy Night” I spent in solitude in my white washed “cell”, but a week later, New Year´s Eve, Annette sat opposite me at the desk – and we toasted in champagne after a nice meal of smoked pork and spinach.

On 26 May, 1994, a moving van from the Danish Company ADAM pulled over at 89A Roman Road.

BACK IN DENMARK

“Dear oh dear, what a dull place” sighed the man sitting opposite me on the train. We were pulling into Næstved Station. “Indeed” I replied. “But of course, I live here”. Almost, but not quite. About six miles from Næstved, in a north westerly direction, past the Herlufsholm Boarding School, sits the hamlet Ladby – and even further out Ladby Fields, to where farmhouses were moved from the village proper in the late 18th century. Our home, originally a humble, quite dilapidated crofter´s cottage from 1775, was purchased by Annette´s parents in 1970 as a weekend retreat, but was thoroughly renovated and a new wing added, when we moved from Copenhagen to stay in the country side permanently in 2003. Before that, I spent a lot of time at the cottage, which with its completely isolated location and bucolic peace and quiet became the perfect place for me to compose. My wife still worked at the hospital in Copenhagen, but came down in the weekends, joining me, who normally settled there a couple of days before.

Annette´s two lovely daughters were still living with us in the Copenhagen apartment for some years, while they both studied civil engineering(chemistry) at the Danish Polytechnic University. Soon, however, they moved out, each finding an apartment of their own. Subsequently, they both topped up their academic training in the UK. Charlotte at Durham University, Elisabeth chose York University. They´re both married now, each occupying “high-voltage” jobs as consultants and analysts in major pharmaceutical companies, Charlotte in Denmark, and Elisabeth – who stayed on the UK – in London. Charlotte and her husband Hans Christian(also a civil engineer)live together with their three children in a spacious converted former farmhouse north of Copenhagen. Elisabeth, her two boys and husband Tim, live in the rural community of Knebworth, an hour´s drive north of London.

Annette still worked as a lab technician at the hospital in Copenhagen, specializing in nuclear medicine. A couple of years later she applied for and won a similar position at the hospital in Næstved, supplementing her education with a bachelor from Copenhagen University. With Annette working in Næstved it became easier for us both to spend time in Ladby, but soon the atmosphere at the Næstved hospital became insufferable, so she returned to Copenhagen, working for a private laboratory. In the meantime we´d had the cottage in Ladby Fields renovated and the new wing added, so we gave up the Copenhagen apartment and moved permanently in 2003 to the country side. Annette still worked for the laboratory in Copenhagen, but when the daily commute became too much of a burden, she – again – applied for a position near our home. This time she became leader of the hospital laboratory in the town of Slagelse, only 20 miles from our house. But, alas, the new work place turned out to be a true viper´s nest, so in

December 2008 she took early retirement, and we all, the twins, their husbands and kids, flew to Rome, celebrating her 60th birthday.

CONCERTO IN PIECES A lot has been said and written about the cabin sitting in the grounds next to my house. Apparently it makes an indelible impression on some, that I can compose big pieces, operas and symphonies, squeezed in on only a few square feet. And with no window! The window there was when I bought the disused cabin back in 1995 was boarded up right away, and in 2011, I single handedly(yes, I´m an ardent DIY man! Would you believe it…)added a small front office, and out the back a bigger room, with two bunk beds, armchair, book cases - and now a window(reclaimed, vintage, leaded), so I´ve upgraded myself from 12 to 36 square feet!

In my narrative so far, I´ve written in detail about two pieces only, the “little” Guitar Concerto Psalmodies and the orchestral piece Manhattan Abstraction. It´s no secret, that I´ve composed a hell of a lot of music over the years, and it would obviously be outside the nature of the present publication to comment on every piece. Instead I´ll focus on the genesis of two compositions, pieces which became “hits” in their own right. But let me begin by training the binoculars on the guy with the baton in front, the conductor…

Jumping-Jack, Sheriff, Skipper, etc. – fulfill the list as you please. Whatever nick-name you pick, it´ll probably be one which isn´t too loving. It´s virtually a law of nature, that a chief conductor after only a couple of years into his contract has made himself so unpopular with the “enlisted men and women” in the orchestra, that they´re are fed up with him, and the tone between them has become…let´s say formal. And there are indeed conductors, among them not infrequently so-called maestros, whose behavior and attitude beggars belief.

All occupations, trades if you wish, boast an arsenal of jokes about itself and the daily routine on the “floor”. The symphony orchestra is no exception and it´s often the conductors who find themselves at the receiving end. Here´s my favorite conductor joke: There´s been an accident, a man has been run over and now lies dead on the road. The offensive vehicle and its driver are gone – a hit´n run job in other words. A police cruiser pulls up and two officers get out. One of them takes a good look around and then says to his colleague: “You know what? I´m sure our dead friend here was a symphony conductor!”

“Why´s that?” asks the other officer.

“Look at the tarmac. There´re no skid marks!”

It would be quite understandable if somebody who´s never before seen a conductor in full swing - be it live or on TV - came in from the street , right in the middle of a concert, after 30 seconds or so, would begin

harboring the suspicion, that something very, very wrong was going on. A grown man, by all accounts, dressed like an old- fashioned head waiter in tails and white tie stands, while waiving both arms frantically , before a group of musicians, likewise dressed up like butlers and matrons in the Downton Abbey TV series.

Nobody looks at the wildly gesticulating man, instead they have their eyes focused on some pieces of paper on a rack in front of them.

“It can´t be long” our friend from the street muses, “before some men in white coats appear and cart that lunatic off the premises, so that they can play in peace.”

It´s self evident, that with 60-100 individuals playing together(literally “in concert”), you´ll need somebody to ensure that everybody start and end at the same time. The legendary(not to say notorious)British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham(1879-1961)is credited with once having said, that what goes on between those two points is irrelevant. Said with great irony, because, needless to say, it´s entirely and only what happens between start and finish that counts. But the conductor, he – or she( fortunately that most male dominated of all positions is now becoming increasingly gender-neutral) is indispensable. And old, hackneyed joke says, that “…it´s difficult with, but it´s impossible without.”

They appear in all shapes and forms, the conductors, from sheer geniuses to infantile frauds. And I´ve certainly dealt with both types over the years, but mainly the first category, such as Leif Segerstam, Oliver Knussen, Thomas Søndergaard, David Zinman, Andreas Delfs, Andrew Davis, Thomas Adès, Chris Austin and others.

One day in the fall of 1994, not long after I´d moved back to Denmark. I had a fax from the BBC, who wanted to commission a piece from me. BBC had done that before, but this time the commission came more “earmarked” than usual. As a general rule, the composer is just told the approximate length of the proposed piece and for what instruments or ensemble. Wind Quintet or standard symphony orchestra, both are fixed entities, and the composer only has to write the music. Only this time the BBC Symphony Orchestra wanted me – a foreigner! – to write a piece commemorating two of England´s most “holy cows”, the composers Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. 1995 marked the 300th anniversary of Purcell´s death, and Benjamin Britten´s famous educational piece “Young person´s Guide to the Orchestra” would turn 50.

The stipulations were, that the new piece use as starting point a theme by Purcell, like Britten in “Young Persons´ Guide” – and – as a successor to Britten´s piece, I was supposed to “sneak” in a pedagogical angle in my piece. The whole thing was scheduled for “lift off” in the fall of 1995, with BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of chief conductor Andrew Davis in Birmingham. BBC intended to launch a massive panBritish concert week, broadcasting virtually everything from the wondrous world of music from all the Nation´s major cities under the caption: BBC LIVE – NINETY FIVE. After having recuperated from being bestowed with this unheard of honor – I, a Dane! – chosen for such a British project! – I immediately realized, that the only Purcell-theme not to pick as starting point, was the same Britten had used: “The Moor´s Pavane” from the incidental music composed for the play “Balthazar´s Feast”. I could just as well have chosen to jump out of the nearest window. The “Moor´s Pavane” is a backstiffening, gloriously ascending theme(which you´ll never forget, and that´s perhaps the only thing wrong with “Yong Persons´s Guide), so I had to conduct my search in the opposite direction. The Wiches´ Chorus from Purcell´s opera “Dido and Aeneas” proved to be exactly what I was looking for. Festive, cackling, feisty, with endless possibilities for variation. I started on “Concerto in Pieces – Purcell Variations”. Then the phone rang.

Rosemary Johnson, who represented my music in the UK at Chester Music, Wilhelm Hansen´s erstwhile sister-company in London(now part the Music Sales Emporium), had come up with the idea, that my new piece would fit in nicely with a book publication with an inlaid CD about to be launched by the children´s

book publishing giant Dorling Kindersley. Initially DK had landed a contract with the composer Richard Rodney Bennet, but he back-pedaled from the agreement in the eleventh hour. If I would like to step in?

Yes Ma´am! The Dorling Kindersley editor Sue Unstead bought the idea right away. Following the premiere in Birmingham, the piece was recorded at the BBC studios in Maida Vale, London, and shortly after came the release of the book “Young Person´s guide to Music”. Hm…no beating about the bush there, but well, anything for the cause…

The book, with the CD and an “easy reader” text about the instruments of the orchestra, was subsequently translated into multiple languages : Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Chinese, Greek, a.m.o. On 14 September 1995, Andrew Davis conducted “Concerto in Pieces” at the “Last Night at the Proms” in Royal Albert Hall, broadcast on live TV to the rest of the world, and later in the year, 14 November, Andrew Davis performed the American Premiere with The New York Philharmonic.

”Concerto in Pieces” isn´t necessarily my best workd, but it´s my one-and-only real best-seller. It´s been performed – still is – by a medley of orchestras – “premiere league” as well as the more modest, big city as well as regional and youth – orchestras. Once, in London , a business tycoon hired the entire youth orchestra The Britten-Pears Orchestra to perform the piece at his daughter´s wedding! “Concerto in Pieces” has also been choreographed at least three times. As a concert piece it can be performed in two ways: with spoken comments between the movements – and without. I´ve personally taken on the part as narrator in Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Aldeburgh and Beijing(where my lines, read aloud in English, were translated into Chinese by a local actor – that made it a true Concerto in Pieces…). The performance in Beijing with The Chinese National Film Symphony Orchestra is beyond the shadow of doubt the weirdest I´ve ever encountered anywhere with any orchestra.

One day a fax rolled in from my publisher, who´d been contacted by the Beijing Concert Hall, where they wanted Concerto in Pieces performed at a concert for children and their parents, a family event in other words. They also wanted the presence of the composer. Travel and lodging paid for. Now, there was an offer I couldn´t refuse, so, shortly after having obtained the required visa at the Chinese Embassy in Copenhagen, I set out.

Immediately upon my arrival at the hotel in Beijing, I was picked up by an official chauffeur and taken to the first rehearsal at the concert hall, which is situated near Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City, both places I intended to visit. But first the rehearsal. A first rehearsal, regardless of what and where, is always a nerve-racking experience, so I put all habitual expectations on stand-by. The conductor entered the podium, knocked on the edge with his baton – gave the down beat – and the sound track from the disaster movie The Zoo Is Burning! began. Never before had I heard such howling, wailing, squealing and frantic blowing and hooting, everything was wrong – complete pandemonium. I then took a closer look at the individual members of the orchestra and estimated the average age to be between 50-55 years, which meant that they´d probably been exposed to the rigors of the infamous Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, denied access to play their “decadent, imperialist” oboes, clarinets and violins, and instead being handed a shovel, ordered to dig, by a brain washed, party maxim screaming red guard. Not exactly a process finetuned to improve your playing technique later on in life. However, mirabile dictu, as the rehearsal progressed, the better it sounded, and I began to recognize my own music.

The following day it was my turn to “perform”. As mentioned earlier. “Concerto in Pieces” may be performed with- or without narration. In Beijing they´d opted for the version with narration between the movements, and not surprisingly, it was I whom they wanted to do the “deed” on the stage, standing to the

left of the conductor, as seen from the house. I´m a tall man, 6 feet in my shoes. The average Chinese isn´t that tall, so the microphone placed in front of me was set way down on the stand, so I had to bend over considerably in order to get even near the mike. After having raised the mike, so that it sat right in front of my own mouth, the rehearsal started, this time with me narrating.

Because most Chinese don´t understand English, the Concert Hall administration had hired an interpreter, who repeated in Chinese what I´d just said in English. Fair enough, the rehearsal went well, so we all felt well prepared for the “real thing” the same evening. Where I sauntered on stage together with the conductor and my interpreter to the accompaniment of roaring applause from a large audience made up of proud parents and their excited kids.

I then saw, that in the interim between rehearsal and concert, a stage hand had lowered the mike down to where it originally sat(he´d probably been a bit puzzled, seeing it raised so high up– no one can reach that…). I signaled to the conductor, who just brushed me off, gave the down beat and the music started.

With the text printed in the score between the movements, I was supposed to hold it with both hands, following the music and occasionally narrate with some authority. I couldn´t raise the mike without placing the score on the floor, which would have looked wrong, and with the music now pounding away at full throttle, there was nothing for me to do than to bend over with my “head in the sand”, like any old ostrich while narrating – at the same time trying to appear important and dignified. The piece performed after the intermission was, not surprisingly, Prokofiev´s “Peter and the Wolf”, also with narration, and this time in Chinese only, and with a Chinese actor. And now the mike fit perfectly…

Finally, next day, I was free to visit The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

Generally speaking, performances of my music outside Denmark follow the same predictable urbane routine, be it for symphony orchestra or chamber ensemble. I arrive at the airport, where I´m met by a chauffeur(often a for the occasion hand-picked driver or somebody from the orchestra/ensemble/opera office)with a card board sign(or as of late, an iPad)with my name on it. Then off to the hotel, where a folder with practical information, such as rehearsal times, plus a map of the city, are being handed over to me at the front desk. But once in a while, as in Beijing, the text book routine is being laced with some extra curricular spice.

Dallas, Texas, January 2011 The world premiere and three subsequent performances of my Fourth Symphony “An Organ Symphony”, a co-commission between Dallas Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Odense Symphony Orchestra, took place at the Meyerson Concert Hall, Dallas, in January 2011. Symphony Halls boasting a concert organ of their own, often employ an in-house organist, a so-called curator, whose primary task is to keep the instrument in pristine- and well tuned shape. The colossal instrument at The Meyerson Hall, built by the firm C.B.Fisk, was then looked after by the organist Mary Preston, who also performed the solo-part in my new piece. When the composer is present, he or she is expected to run up onto the stage when the performance is over, to thank the musicians and bow and scrape to the audience.

The Dallas performances followed this time honored routine, also on the last evening.

At least I thought so.

After having nodded politely to Mary Preston(one always greets the soloist first), who stood up on the organ loft above the orchestra, waiving to me, and then – after having shaken hand, with the conductor, Brazilian Roberto Minczuk – it was the concert master´s turn. Instead of shaking my outstretched hand, he reached under his seat, hauled forth a cowboy hat, and smacked it right on top of my head. Wham!

This was Texas, and the audience, a packed house, about 2000 people, went crazy. Shouting, screaming and bravo-ing. Well, there I stood, on stage, and what could I do but bow, doff the hat, bow again, doff the hat, bow again…

It´s easy to lose one´s bearings when dealing with the concept cowboy hat. It must not be confused with a

Stetson or a Ten Gallon. A classic cowboy hat has a slightly curved brim with an oblong dent on each side of the dome. Think of former President Lyndon Johnson or J.R. from the 1970s TV series Dallas, and you have it. Mine is a JUSTIN from Authentic Western Headwear.

But I never wear it in public. The guffawing would be audible over several parishes. But it just may happen, that you´ll find me, on a hot sunny summer´s day, wearing it, slouching in a recliner in my own garden, behind the hedge.

Aspen, Colorado, summer of 2003 The small town of Aspen, high up in the Colorado Rockies, is widely known as a posh skiing resort for the international jetset. However, every summer Aspen is host to a four-week long festival with classical music performed by top soloists- and ensembles. The town sits high up in the Rocky Mountains, and the view, regardless of where you are, is breathtaking, literally so. The air is thin, not on any alarming level, but enough to make you stop to catch your breath, more than you would at sea level. Which really means something to wind players! In the summer of 2003 I was invited as composer-in-residence by my American colleague, the late Christopher Rouse, who had been organizing performances of contemporary music and classes for young composers from all over the world. My task was to tutor one half of the students, in the class room as well as to give individual guidance, a so-called one-on-one set up. I arrived late one evening, via London and Denver, was picked up as per usual at Aspen Airport and put up at a ground floor luxury apartment, with several bed rooms, 2 bath rooms, a huge lounge, a jacuzzy and what have you. That wasn´t to be sniffed at, and I was looking forward to presenting this glorious arrangement to Annette, who would be joining me the following week. I was handed a set of keys by my friendly driver- and festival jack of all trades. Before leaving the apartment, he turned around and said to me in a casual tone “…by the way, remember always to keep the street door closed and locked – never ajar. The bears may walk straight in, even if you´re at home.” !!!

Now, that´s what I´d call an introduction to catch your attention! I had heard, that bears(the slightly smaller black bears, not the big grizzlies) could be seen rummaging through the trash cans in towns scattered around the the Rockies, but not that it had become a daily occurrence, bumping into a bear on your way to the super market. “If you see a bear coming towards you, just give it a wide berth and carry on as usual.” was the advice I was given by one of my neighbors the following morning. I quickly developed a fixation, imagined I saw bears everywhere, got bears on the brain. The local paper almost daily brought a piece about somebody returning home after a night on the town, only to find a bear sitting in the sofa, snuggled up with a drink and a bag of pop-corn. In most cases, the residents, often out-of-state visitors, had forgotten to roll down the garage door and lock the door leading from the garage into the house. A habit the bears had figured out long ago.

As mentioned earlier, my allotted apartment was situated on ground level and furthermore boasted a private patio. The chance of a bear coming to visit was enhanced considerably, the patio deck running only a foot above the surrounding lawn with direct access to the forest and a small creek…

I´d been told that my predecessor as composer-in-residence the previous year woke up one morning and then stared directly into the face of a bear lurking outside on the patio, which fortunately ran on the other side of a wall made of armored glass and with a sliding door. “Well, he probably forgot to shut the patio gate leading out to the yard. Make sure that gate is closed at all times, then you´ll be okay.”

Now, that gate was only about three or four feet tall, nothing that would deter a bear, one would assume.

Not surprisingly there was a set of chairs and a table placed on the patio, perfect for the residents to sit and enjoy a sun downer, enjoying the peace and quiet, with their eyes peeled in the direction of the gate…

During my four weeks at Aspen I didn´t see any bears at all. Not one, but I heard about them all the time.

Time primarily spent on teaching and going to concerts. A few miles outside Aspen you´ll find the concert hall proper, a tent-like construction with the audience sitting under a huge dome. There´re were concerts each day, and one of them had on the program my orchestral piece Fairytale, to be performed by the Aspen Festival 0rchestra under the baton of American conductor David Zinman.

Who always brought his dog, the King Poodle Zippi with him everywhere, but never onto the stage, it has to be said. Five minutes before the concert was about to begin, we – that is Zinman, the Concert Master and yours truly –popped into Zinman´s dressing room, where Zippi was lying on the couch, with water and a bowl of dog biscuits within reach. Zinman wanted to reassure that the dog was comfortable and wanting for nothing while he was performing out in the hall. So the dog was stroked and talked to in soothing voices. As an unashamed dog lover myself, I was fully “on board” with that, and so was the smiling Concert Master . So, minutes went with “ooh!” and “there, there” and “be good”, etc., until a panicky stage hand stood in the door: “ You must come now, it´s almost ten minutes past!”

My piece was the first on the program and I was supposed to introduce it before the performance, so we, all three of us, marched in from the back stage, Zinman leading. He then explained and apologized for the delay to the by now impatient and mumbling audience. Who started laughing and clapping – everything was forgiven.

Järvenpää , Finland, 8 December 1990

I was visiting the home town of Jean Sibelius, where, needless to say, the 125th anniversary of the great composer was being celebrated big time. The previous day the Helsinki Philharmonic had premiered a piece by me – “Tundra” – commissioned for that special occasion. So far, so good, all went well, everybody was happy, the audience relaxed and in a festive mood. Champagne aplenty. Needless to say, I was dressed up in a dark suit - and neck tie! The following day the whole orchestra with the conductor Sergio Comissiona and yours truly set out in two hired buses for Jäärvenpää, where the program from the previous night was to be repeated at the local concert hall at 4 pm – a so-called mattiné. We arrived well ahead of time, so I figured out that I could easily visit Ainola, Sibelius´ grand old house out in the outskirts of the town, a house which is now a museum. So, right upon arrival at the concert hall, I flagged down a taxi and said to the driver : “Ainola!”, trusting that was enough – and it was. After about ten minutes we pulled up at the place, I paid, got out of the car and had hardly shut the door behind me, when the taxi roared back at full throttle.

But I had to get back, preferably with some time to spare before the concert! I looked around, but there was no taxi rank in sight, let alone passing taxis in the street, which was completely deserted – and it had started to rain buckets. Well, I´d come to see Ainola(named after the composer´s wife), but soon realized that it was closed to the public in the winter. I knew, however, that Sibelius´ grave lay somewhere in the park-sized garden surrounding the house, so I shuffled through the driving rain towards what looked like two burning torches, placed on each side of an oblong slab. That had to be it, and so it was. The composer´s epitaph with inscription. But I found it somewhat disrespectful, that the torches were stood down in two cans from ESSO. Something else didn´t feel quite right – I was completely alone, not another soul in sight.

Even though it was pouring down, I´d thought that I´d be part of a veritable migration of “worshippers”, Sibelius still being revered as national hero in Finland. But as I said before: no one but me, who had to return to Järvenpää to make the concert.

I walked all the way, in relentless rain, but I made it, and well ahead of time, so well ahead, that I could sit in the foyer, watching the guests who´d begun to show up. They were all, men as well as women, dressed

in somber black. As if that wasn´t enough, the general mood in the foyer became increasingly oppressed, the more people in black appeared. Nobody was smiling, they all looked as if they´d just returned from the mortuary, after having identified a close relative. The night before, in Helsinki, tall reception tables with filled champagne flutes were scattered all over the foyer. There were tall reception tables here in Järvenpää, but instead of glasses brimming with sparkling champagne – there was only orange juice to be had. It was the local temperance society that had bought up tickets for the afternoon concert. And Finnish teetotalers clad in black are not to be found among the great stand-up comedians of this world. I suddenly realized, that I had forgotten to change, was still in jeans and sweater, swallowed once and rushed down to the Comissiona´s dressing room, asking him not to call me up on the stage after the performance of Tundra.

I didn´t find I was properly dressed for that particular occasion.

New York, July 2011

The Royal Danish Opera is on tour to New York City with my opera Selma Jezková. Annette and I are on our way to the premiere at The Rose Theater on Broadway, right opposite Columbus Circle. All of a sudden, it begins to rain relentlessly, a proper monsoon, and within seconds my thin summer suit is completely. drenched . Needless to say, I hand over the one umbrella we´ve brought with us to Annette. My cloths, the trousers in particular, are now so thoroughly soaked, that I realize that I can´t possibly sit through the opera, even though it´s short, only 70 minutes, without catching a cold, maybe pneumonia. So what now?

There´re only 15 minutes to the show begins, but fortunately there´s a mens´clothing shop right next to the theater. I grab in panic a pair of exorbitantly expensive trousers from Hugo Boss(there´s not time to choose discerningly), pay, get into the new trousers keeping them in place with both hands – they´re too wide at the waist – and then we rush toward the theater. We make it in the nick of time, the performance begins and everything proceeds beautifully, until…

In the last scene, where Selma is hanged, the tenor Gert Henning Jensen(who´s state attorney and executioner rolled-into-one)is supposed to pull the lever releasing the mechanism that causes the gallows ramp with Selma( sung by Swedish soprano Ylva Kielberg)on it to drop, ensuring that the free-fall will have Selma swinging in the noose(there´s a harness with a rope attached underneath Selma´s dress, not a real noose, obviously, but from the house it looks like the real thing). Gert Henning Jensen pulls the lever, but nothing happens. Complete silence in the auditorium. It adds considerably to the nail-biting, that the gallows ramp is almost 30 feet up, close to the ceiling. Oh dear…

I sit next to Kasper Holten, the director of the opera. We immediately realize that something is terribly wrong, whereas the audience around us is blissfully unaware of a crisis building up. Gert pulls the lever again, but to no avail. Silence from the pit, we all hold our breath and wait, and wait. We can now hear the stage manager shouting from the wings. “Push her”! We both, Kasper and I, fear that a sublimely performed show will now end in tears, Selma must hang, so Kasper shouts at the top of his lungs: “PUSH

HER FOR FUCK´S SAKE!” What Gert does. Selma is properly hanged, and only a few in the auditorium has had an inkling that a major crisis has just been averted. Now applause and Kasper and I are now supposed to go up on the stage, joining the cast for the curtain call and bow to the audience. I stand up from my chair – and the new trousers immediately drop, joining my shoes. I´ve forgotten that the waist line is too wide. I have no belt, I don´t use it with my old trousers, that are lying folded into a plastic bag shoved under my seat. What to do?

I can´t stand up on the stage, with one arm around Ylva Kielberg´s shoulder and the other hand keeping up the trousers. “Kasper, give me your belt, just for now, please!” I inform him about the present predicament we walk onstage, I was saved from embarrassment by the director´s belt.

Amsterdam. The Netherlands, summer of 2016 The Holland Festival, a major annual cultural festival, had programmed my massive 70 minutes long SOLAR TRILOGY(Gong-Zenith-Corona)with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra under the baton of German Markus Stenz, at the famous Concertgebouw. The performance for a full house was spectacular, enthusiastic applause, yelling and screaming. Afterwards, when my wife and I walked towards the exit, we were met by a smiling woman and a young girl, the daughter obviously. The mother introduced us to her daughter and told that she, the daughter, was a huge fan of my music and had all my CDs back home. That she also had Down´s Syndrome was obvious, but completely immaterial. The joy and excitement radiating in her eyes when we shook hands(she didn´t say anything, the mother translated from my English), was and will remain the greatest and most touching experience I´ve ever had following a performance. It can never be bettered! I immediately gave her the flowers given to me by the stage manager when I took my bow after the performance.

New York, June 2004

In my youth I was afraid of the conductors, who – for obvious reasons – were always older than me. Today it´s the other way round. I won´t say that the conductors are now afraid of me(I should hope not), well, on second thoughts, just a little afraid won´t hurt...

However, I still remember how I kept a low profile, shrank to Hobbit size, meeting conductors, when I was young and inexperienced. When I turned 60, things started to change, including the way I was treated by the orchestra CEOs. I started to notice the change, when I met with a newly appointed orchestra artistic manager. When we shook hands, he bowed deeply and clicked his heels! I thought “..what the hell ! Is he drunk or cheeky?” Neither – he was just about 20 years younger…

But, but, but…there´ll always be those older than yourself, still, before The Grim Reaper wields the scythe.

In the early summer of 2004 I was in New York for the premiere with three successive erformances of a piece commissioned by The New York Philharmonic, Final Nightshade(the third and last “instalment” in the Nightshade Trilogy). Conductor, the legendary Lorin Maazel, the orchestra´s “chief whip”!

Maazel, then 74 years of age, had a reputation as completely impossible, condescending, vicious from dawn to dusk. He was rumored always to wear tailor made suits and silk shirts, and that he once had advertised in Time Magazine for Rolex watches!

Now I was afraid…

Very afraid…

I didn´t sleep a wink the night before the first rehearsal, where I would meet the “monster” for the first time.

Legend had it, that he insisted on being addressed as maestro, and when talking to him, it was important to observe the following rules: no eye contact, look down – no sudden moves. Needless to say, I showed up at The Philharmonic way before the scheduled time, sat in his front office with his secretary, sweating feverishly in a suit and white shirt with a necktie. My whole life passed before me…then all of a sudden, an old man with unkempt hair, in a track-suit and sneakers without laces stumbled in through the door.

Maestro Lorin Maazel.

Indeed, there was not much übermensch or Rolex about him. In fact, he looked more like one of those old men, who disappear from the old peoples´ home in a confused state, only to be found wandering despondently about on the motorway in their pajamas. Anyway, we got along right away and he impressed me already at the first rehearsal, choosing a tempo quite a bit slower than what I´d written in the score, the so-called metronome marking. He was right in sensing, that the music would benefit from being slowed down.

It´s never too late to grow wiser. But because the printed program had the duration down as 20 minutes, and the real time now was ten minutes more, the only critic present took offence, and the piece – well, the whole concert(my piece, Prokofiev´s Violin Concerto No 2 and Schumann´s Third Symphony)was hammered in the press the next day). But I didn´t budge and changed the metronome marking, which has been the norm at subsequent performances.

THE HANDMAID´S TALE

15 August 1993 saw the 150th anniversary of The Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and to mark that occasion the Tivoli Symphony Orchestra(now renamed The Copenhagen Philharmonic)had commissioned a piece from me, Zenith( which would later make up the middle movement of the massive Solar Trilogy), to be premiered on the birthday proper. I was still living in Camberwell, but was now in Copenhagen to attend rehearsals and hear the concert. During a visit to my Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen(they still held on to the old family name), the managing director Tine Birger Christensen told me, that she´d had a note from the newly appointed head of The Royal Danish Opera, English Elaine Padmore, who wished to meet me at her office at the opera. So we set up a time for the meeting and I showed up at the theater(the so-called old Stage, where the three art forms, opera, play and ballet, were “billeted” under the same roof. In 2005, the opera had its own house, built right on the Copenhagen waterfront).

It would be a creative approach to the concept of honest truth, if I claim to have been in deep inner harmony of body and soul that day. The previous night I´d participated in an animated dinner with a couple of “bandits”, including my faithful copyist Ole Thilo. We had a colossally grand old time, booze and smoke aplenty, and at some point, a woodstove landed on my foot. The following day, on my way to the opera, I didn´t feel particularly elated, so after having been shown into Elaine Padmore´s office, I threw myself on the guest sofa and growled: “What do you want?”. “ I want an opera” said Elaine. So that was why I´d been summoned, and I wasn´t surprised, I didn´t want to write a bloody opera for anybody. “I can´t stand opera” I said, assuming that would settle the matter. My first opera(and by then the only one)Tycho from 1987 was no success. The “plot” – an argument between the Danish 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe and the German scientist and mathematician Johannes Kepler, an argument about whether it was it the Sun orbiting the Earth or vice versa – wasn´t xactly what would keep an audience panting with excitement, and the libretto by the poet Henrik Bjelke packed the same dramatic punch as a versification of the phone directory. The reviews showed no mercy, and worse, colleagues, among them old friends, didn´t speak to me for years. People recognizing me in street walked

across to the opposite sidewalk, so it was hardly surprising that I was somewhat sensitive when the conversation touched upon the topic of opera. Opera! Give me a break…

But Elaine wasn´t thrown off the scent. “Think it over, all the same.” She said. Which I did, for needless to say, my own not insignificant level of personal ambition had been teased. A couple of months before the mundane exchange of words at The Royal Danish Opera, I´d read Canadian writer Margaret Atwood´s novel The Handmaid´s Tale, a so-called dystopian story– a pessimistic futuristic vision of how wrong things can go. The Handmaid´s Tale is the story about Christian fundamentalists having taken over the USA through a military coup. America is now called Gilead, after a story and a place in the Old Testament, and it´s primarily women who find themselves at the receiving end of the new agenda. Divorced women having already given birth, are now kept as slaves(Handmaids)by families high up on the social ladder in the new regime. Childless families, to be precise.

Several catastrophic melt downs at the nation´s nuclear power plants, and the subsequent radioactive contamination, have rendered the major part of the male population sterile. And it´s here women of the right birth giving age enter the picture. Deprived completely of their civil rights, their duty is to copulate with the master of the household, the Commander, thus ensuring the survival of mankind. But with the majority of the Commanders also being sterile through radioactive contamination, the result is mainly stillborn or deformed babies, a gruesome reality which is being kept strictly secret. If the Handmaid in question doesn´t succeed in becoming pregnant at the third attempt, they´re being deported to clear up radioactive waste at the disaster stricken power plants. Or they are offered the choice of ending their days, doing “service” at the secret brothel Jezebel´s.

The protagonist in The Handmaid´s Tale is the nameless Handmaid Offred. The Handmaids are stripped of their names from the “Time before” and are now the property of their Commander, whose first name now becomes that of the Handmaid in question, advertising the “ownership”. Offred has thus become: Of-Fred.

The Commander´s wife is the former gospel singer Serena Joy. Gradually a bizarre, almost friendly relationship(with sexual connotations)develop between Fred and his Handmaid. It is paramount, though, that Serena never gets wind of it, because she´s not one you´d want to mess with, believe you me.

The novel´s title is The Handmaid´s Tale. At some point in the distant future, during a seminar at Cambridge University exploring the time of Gilead – the former USA – one of the presenters play a series of cassette tapes recorded while in hiding by one of the referred to Handmaid´s. The lecturer, a professor Pieixoto, pushes the play-button on the tape recorder, looks at the audience, pauses a little, and then says: “Behold our Handmaid”. The Handmaid´s Tale has begun…

Pretty soon after having read the novel, did it dawn on me, that should it happen, that at some point I´d be asked to write another opera, it would have to be on the story in The Handmaid´s Tale, Margaret Atwood´s fantastic – and fantastically prophetic novel. It has it all: forbidden love, punishable sex, lies and deceit, hypocrisy, despair, hope, ceremonial processions in primary colors, public executions. A mighty tale about the folly of Mankind.

I called Elaine Padmore…

Who hadn´t read the novel, but immediately went and bought a copy, read it in one sitting – and then she called me. “ You got it! “ she cried enthusiastically. So now I could get started.

The repercussions following in the wake of Tycho had taught me one thing: if I were to write another opera, it was I – and I only – who´d decide which story to use(Tycho had been more or less pulled down over my head). And the librettist – the person writing the text(libretto) – for the soloists to sing, had to be a professional. Libretto writing is not an art – it´s a theater craft. Several months now went by, and I was out on my tour around the world. Shortly after my return, and only after a couple of days after I´d moved into the apartment on Roman Road, Elaine called and said: “I think we´ve got him!”. Paul Bentley and she were

old “buddies” from when they both studied Eng Lit and Drama at the University of Birmingham. Elaine then called Bentley, presented him with the project and could now tell the following amazing story: Bentley had absolutely no idea who I was, but no more than a few days before Elaine´s call to him, one of his friends had lent him a CD with my music. The CD sat in the player when she called him, asking if he´d consider writing the libretto for an opera by the Danish composer Poul Ruders…

Before long Paul Bentley showed up on the address 89A Roman Road, bringing a well-thumbed and margin scribbled copy of Atwood´s novel – and a fine Italian cheese(this encounter, and the entire run leading up to the premiere in March 200, has been written down in the form of a diary by Bentley and published by Edition Wilhelm Hansen as A Handmaid´s Diary). Bentley, who hadn´t previously written a libretto, but done adaptions for the stage, won my confidence by being able to read music – and sing. In 1994 Bentley´s main source of income was as a musical starlet – that is to say performing with a finely trained tenor voice in musicals by Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber in the London West End theater district. In short: Paul was a theater professional – knew the business from the inside, and that was exactly what I needed.

A long time waited ahead before the writing of the libretto in earnest could begin and I could start composing. A minor, but not in significant legal matter reared its head on the horizon. Copyright…

In October 1994 – I´d now been settled in Denmark for some months – Margaret Atwood came to Copenhagen en route to Gothenburg. She was in Copenhagen for meetings with her Danish publisher, and my publisher, Tine Birger Christensen had arranged a meeting between the three of us at the Hotel Fønix, where Atwood stayed. So, on 25 October, I sat opposite the famous writer, seconded by Tine. Atwood was completely on board with the idea, as long as she didn´t need to have anything to do with it! Fair enough, and completely understandable. But she gave us fax- and phone numbers of her various agents around the world, so that I and my publisher could negotiate percentages and distribution of royalties. To whom, when and where. The main player in that exercise was a certain NN at Atwood´s English publisher. Atwood was as mentioned extremely forthcoming – the agent a fool, who understood nothing and who protracted the whole, not particularly difficult, process for months on end. But eventually we succeded.

Bentley had in the meantime started on the libretto, and we communicated daily via phone and fax, discussing the text, bouncing ideas off each other. Needless to say, I didn´t agree with everything, but by and large we thought along the same lines dramatically. Following two weeks vacation in Mexico with Annette, I began composing the opera The Handmaid´s Tale in December 1996. But now, whom to choose for the enormously demanding role as Offred? Before committing pen to paper, I´d decided to have Offred sung by a mezzo soprano, a voice character between soprano and contralto. Offred is no heroic coloratura type, rather an introvert women but with an inner strength and courage. It has to be Marianne Rørholm, I thought, Marianne, her wonderful voice apart, looked like the Offred I´d conjured up in my imagination while reading the novel and writing the opera. And she was a well known and sought after opera singer, locally as well as in Germany and Switzerland. It so happened, that Marianne had just returned home from having lived in Switzerland for some years, so my wish wasn´t too farfetched. Elaine Padmore was happy with my choice of protagonist, and before long I met up with Marianne. She took with her a copy of the piano score for perusal – and agreed!

The premiere at The Royal Danish Opera on 6 March 2000 was a colossal success, with audience and press alike, in fact it created a near sensation in the operatic world, was mentioned in unlikely places such as Time Magazine. But then…

There´s always a serpent lurking in Paradise. When the Copenhagen production, by Phyllida Lloyd and Peter Macintosh came to the English National Opera in March 2003, the entire press, including those who´d heralded the piece as something close to the second coming in 2000, now turned on a dime. The “new” reaction was spectacularly vicious. One critic wrote, that it was a sure proof of something being “rotten in the State of Denmark”, that such an opera had been written. And so on and so on. You could literally sense

the tears of anger between the lines. These gentlemen of the sour press, can now gnash their teeth with chagrin, ruminating the fact, that the opera was almost instantly vindicated in Minneapolis and Toronto.

And then after 14 years in “hibernation”, the opera had its Australian premiere in Melbourne and in May 2019, the second production in the USA , this time by Anne Bogart, with the incomparable Jennifer Johnson Cano as Offred and the whole thing expertly and enthusiastically led by David Angus at the Boston Lyric Opera, set at the Lavietes Pavillion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an iconic basket ball arena, similar to the one used as the infamous Red Center in the novel. Incidentally, the entire story of The Handmaid´s Tale unfolds in Cambridge, Mass…

I´m writing this revision of - and translation from - the original Danish autobiography at the height of the dreadful Covid-19 pandemic, which brought the entire world to its knees at the beginning of the year. It means that a string of further productions of The Handmaid´s Tale has been cancelled or postponed.

There´s always a serpent lurking…

…..

T

.

A LITTLE MORE ABOUT MY GRANDPARENTS AND PARENTS Truth be told, my name could easily have been not Ruders, but Christoffersen! Both my paternal grandparents were born in 1886, and my grandfather - son of Margrethe and Julius Christoffersen, a common laborer in the small town of Hvidding in Northern Jutland, later proprietor of an inn with a licence to distill snaps(!) – was baptized Jens Ruder Christoffersen. I can only hazard a guess as to the origin of the Ruder, possibly my grandmother´s maiden name. What I do know is, that when my grandfather became engaged to my grandmother in 1913, he was asked by his betrothed to drop the Christoffersen. She was herself baptized Christine Methea Hansen - daughter of Karen and Julius Hansen, sexton and cemetery inspector with the Church in the town of Thisted, sitting right on the Limfjord in the north western part of the Jutland peninsula – and she didn´t fancy marrying into yet a sen-name( the -sen is the equivalent of the English –son, but was in Denmark considered by snobs as too “common”. Still is, by the way. It´s amusing to notice how many of those with a “fancy” middle name seem the “forget” and never mention the embarrassing Hansen, Nielsen or Jensen , as soon as they´ve reached a certain elevated position in society).

So, my grandfather applied for a name change to only Jens Ruder with the authorities, but was turned down on the grounds, that the name was already taken and patented(which really doesn´t make sense to me. He´d already “inherited”the name at his christening). At any rate, how about Jens Ruders? No problem, so he obtained official permission to add the –s on 4 June in 1913. My grandmother´s wish was granted, and I´m called Ruders today. The name Ruders has a German ring to it, even more so with the added –s. As the saying goes, if you scratch the surface of a Dane, sooner or later a German will appear. Maybe, maybe not, but my great-grandfather, my grandmother´s father Julius, was born in Hannover, Germany in 1862, and immigrated together with his father Martin Hansen, a skilled bricklayer, to Denmark, when Julius was only a toddler. They had to flee back to Hannover though, in 1864, when Denmark lost a huge part of southern Jutland to Otto von Bismark. Germans were not welcome in Denmark after that blow to the national pride. But they did return, Martin and Julius and settled in Thisted. I´ve never been able to ferret out who my great-great grandmother, Martin´s wife, Julius´ mother was. My guess is, that she´d probably died back in Hannover, and Martin Hansen was left with a child and maybe saw a brighter future in the small country north of the border, where modern methods of industrial brick-laying was still in its infancy.

That his surname was the Danish sounding Hansen, could also indicate a – to me – unkown tie to Denmark.

My paternal grandfather was not an educated man. He probably only attended school(of the alphabetcalculus- bible-thumping –clip-behind-the-ears variety) for the required 7 years. But he must have had drive and focus, because not long after he and my grandmother had moved to Copenhagen, he started a thriving gardening business, bought a large villa with a flower shop on the grounds(the same shop which my father was later to take over). They both, Jens and Thea had 6 children, my father Poul, born 1919, number four in the “series”. The stories handed down to me over the years about what went on in my father´s childhood

home don´t paint a rosy picture: everybody hating each other in a hardboiled, soulless business environment, drinking, beatings and selfserving materialism.

I´m not so sure, though. But for obvious reasons I only remember my grandparents as they appeared in their life´s autumn, which quickly became winter. Two lovely endearing oldies, who always pampered me, when I showed up at the villa. My childhood home was only 4 blocks away, so no wonder that I spent as much time as I could there. In fact, it was Grandpa who took me to the opera for the first time! He loved Puccini and Verdi. The first ever opera I saw must have been La Bohéme, and I can´t have been more than 10 years old. A couple of years´ later he brought me to see Aida. Jens and Thea spent, as mentioned earlier, the rest of their lives in a spacious apartment closer to the city center. They both died with a short interval in the mid 1960s.

My father, a highly intelligent, but restless and in many ways unpolished man, showed early on a talent for drawing and painting. He qualified as a draftsman from the Arts and Crafts Academy in Copenhagen, and before long landed a position teaching drawing classes in the city of Esberg, on the far west coast of Denmark. Where in Esberg and why? Search me, and of causes unknown, he returned to Copenhagen, where he became increasingly involved in the flower business. The artist aspirations were now shattered, and my father always blamed his parents, his mother in particular. “…I was never allowed” he used to say, but I´m afraid that he didn´t have the courage to pursue his dream all the way. Maybe the talent wasn´t sufficient enough, what do I know. But we shouldn´t forget, that the War and the Nazi occupation of Denmark was in full swing, and that at a time in his life, when my father – in a better world – would have been able to pursue his inner needs and dreams.

He died on New Year´s Eve, 1980, only 61 years of age, ruined by hard work, booze, excessive smoking and, well…shattered hopes. The shop in Copenhagen changed owners in 1967, and both my parents moved permanently to the country side. He bought a ramshackle cottage sitting right on the beach of Storebælt(the Great Belt, the stretch of sea separating the two main Danish islands of Zealand and Funen), only half a mile from the fishing village of Mullerup. My father, a natural handy-man, restored the house from the bottom up, and they both, Poul and Inge, began a new and hopefully more harmonious life, away from the noise and temptations of Copenhagen; he also began painting again, predominantly water colors with local motifs. He even managed to arrange an exhibition with the best of his work. He just – and only just – revisited in a short glimpse – the zeal and drive from his days as a young man. But seen from his own inner self, it was too late.

My maternal grandparents were also born within the same year, 1890 and in the same town, Brabrand in Jutland. My mother Inge was born in 1916, at Randers, an hour´s drive to the north-west of Århus, the Jutland Capital. Her father Christian Frederiksen was the son of a thatcher, that is born into a social sphere in which there was only a slim chance, if any, of pursuing an academic career. So, when my Grandfather ended up as a top surgeon and near owner of a small regional hospital in the town of Ringsted, he must have been extraordinarily bright and focused. The stories handed down over the years, tales of hunger and deprivation suffered by him when studying medicine at Copenhagen University in the years leading up to World war 1, are legendary. Christian met his Emma, neé Bodholdt, shortly after having secured a position as an intern at the local hospital at Randers, where Emma´s parents eked out a modest living as herring merchants. Legend has it, that Grandmother Emma´s father hit jack-pot in the National Lottery and was able to start a hard ware business.

Grandma Emma died of cancer in 1950, so unfortunately I have no recollection of her at all. But luckily I´ve had access to some privately filmed footage – now transferred to DVD – from life as it was lived at the massive family house in Ringsted during the 1940s. Here I saw for the first time my Grandmother, full of life, laughing and smiling. A great and hugely emotional experience for me. I can vaguely recall my

Grandfather´s countenance, but he died in 1954, when I was only five, so I can´t claim to have known him.

Sadly enough.

The word sadly also springs to mind, on and off, when reminiscing about my mother´s life in general. She and her three siblings(two girls and a boy)were all brought up inside a cocoon of privilege and as such cushioned from the harsher realities of life. My mother was without any doubt completely unprepared for what lay in wait for her, out there in the world. Like so many women of her generation, she had no education( but had a short stab at studying medicine, which quickly came to nothing). Not until 1956, when she turned 40, did she(as mentioned earlier)get a diploma as a qualified translator, translating pamphlets from Danish into English from various companies, working from home. I vividly recall the persistent clattering from the Erica Typewriter, a noise which became increasingly softer, the more carbon-copy sheets she put into the roller. One error – and she had to start all over again. Imagine she´d had Microsoft Word! A couple of years later she was offered permanent employment in Business English at Copenhagen Business School. She also, after she and my father had moved to the cottage by the sea, obtained a similar position with the Business Highschool in the nearby city of Slagelse.

Mother died in 1987 of breast cancer, and I can´t help feeling sorry for the poor, hapless woman. It could have turned out so, so well, but we´re all molded by the times we´re born into, and for women of her generation, it makes no sense talking of free will. Her will as a young woman was dictated from above, by her parents, first husband, and then my father.

When mother passed away at Slagelse General, following a horrible, protracted illness, during which Jette came over from LA providing invaluable and much needed support and help, I couldn´t help crying out to myself “…but I didn´t really know her!!!”

Sadly enough.

COMPOSER

If you sit long enough down by the riverside, sooner or later the corpses of the critics will come floating by. (variation on an ancient Chinese proverb).

Composers of classical(for want of a better word) music today, can in no way compete with the rock- and pop industry, and that was never the idea to begin with. So if you wish to become rich and famous fast, I can´t emphasize strongly enough that composing fully notated scores for acoustic instruments is not – and I repeat - not the way.

But when did it dawn on me, that I´d pursue a career as a classical composer? There´s no highlighted entry of the date in any calendar, but the urge, the wish to write music of my own, must have been lying dormant, germinating in my subconscious early on, including the years when I was interested in archeology.

The piano- and organ lessons also made for a solid foundation underpinning my primitive greenhorn compositional efforts: I could read musical notation, a not insignificant advantage in that particular “trade”.

As mentioned earlier classical music was taught rigorously at St. Annæ. During the three highschool years we had one weekly lesson in music appreciation, and it wasn´t only the old “warhorses” we were exposed

to, but radical master pieces from the 20th century, such as Igor Stravinsky´s iconic ballet score Le Sacre du Printemps and Alban Berg´s Violin Concerto from 1935. And a tiny seed began growing, ever so slowly.

I had a cousin, the only son of my mother´s two year younger sister Åse , who´d married into the family name of Krasilnikoff. Arthur, born 1941, the same year as my sister Jette, had a the end of the 1960s begun to make a name for himself as a writer, with his debut work Skyggehunde(literally Shadow Dogs), a collection of courageous avant-garde short stories, quite provocative in their experimental modernism. But Arthur also loved music, all sorts of music, with a slight leaning towards jazz. However, one day, when I went to see him(probably around 1966-7), he said: “…listen to this record I´ve just bought. A fantastic piece by a Polish composer by the name of Kryztoff Penderecki: Trenody for the Victims of Hiroshima.”

I couldn`t believe what I was hearing, I´d never before heard anything like that(and so had nobody else).

The piece is written for string orchestra, no winds, no percussion, only violins, violas, cellos and basses, composed 1960. It quickly became an iconic work from the then Polish school of emotional high-voltage modernism, addressing the listener head-on, like a expressionist painting. The title itself is a clue to what´s coming, a sound-world of horror, despair and screaming - imagine Edvard Munck´s The Scream as music.

There´s no “old fashioned” notation in the score, rather clues to which notes each of the individual string instruments plays in relation to its partner at the desk – always half a tone in between – the result being a screen of concentrated sound, a ”decibel wall” of extreme intensity. Not surprisingly I was bitterly disappointed, when I later on learned, that the title “Trenody for the Victims of Hiroshima” was a publicity stunt cooked up by Penderecki´s publisher, who thought the original title 7 minutes for string orchestra too pedestrian. But the music was still the same “knock-out”.

And it was precisely the sort of music I fervently wished to write at the age of 17. That´s always the way it begins: young people have idols they want to emulate. That´s only natural, nothing comes from nothing, one has to start somewhere. There was, however, a minor detail of not insignificant importance standing in the way for me and my ambitions. I knew nothing about contemporary notation, hadn´t the slightest idea of how the individual instruments of the orchestra worked. I needed a teacher.

Ib Nørholm, 37 years of age in 1966, was – as mentioned earlier – part of the most noted and talked about composer troika in Denmark at the time, those to whom you paid attention, but between them their music stood astonishingly apart. They all three had day jobs. Nørgård tought composition at The Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen, but moved on to teach at The Jutland Music Conservatory in Århus. Holmgren occasionally worked as a light operator at The Royal Danish Theater and later on as composition tutor at the same Århus institution as Nørgård, in a sort of parallel “race”. Ib Nørholm held a position as organist at the Bethlehem Church in Copenhagen and taught music theory at the Funen Music Conservatory in Odense.

I didn´t know any of the three gentlemen personally, but succeeded in establishing contact with Nørholm through a go-between, and Nørholm agreed to have a look at the insecure young man´s fragile efforts.

Three Letters From The Unknown Soldier, 1967, was , needless to say, inspired(the title says it all), or better, kick-started by my encounter with Penderecki´s Trenody. But for piano, well: Grand Piano. The old instrument back in the Copenhagen apartment, the Søren Jensen “Butterfly”, had been replaced by a more conventional instrument, a Hornung &Møller grand piano, with a lid that opened and closed in the traditional way, ie. hinged to the left edge(as seen from the piano bench) of the instrument, not folded out, as it were, in two wings from a set of hinges in the middle.

And here we go: at that time, the late sixties, playing on the strings with your fingers, inside the instrument while bowing over the keyboard, was all the rage(for obvious reasons only a Grand Piano, not an upright, would do). It called for the lid to be lifted or even better, completely removed, to give the player total space in which to move about.

The lessons with Nørholm, which he gave free of charge, focused mostly on the technical, i.e. how to place the notes correctly on the staff, placement of rests, bar lines, etc. In other words the basics, chapter one, line one in the “primer”. Without the technique in place, you can´t move.

Outright tuition in composition never materialized. I wasn´t arrogant enough then(but am today)to acknowledge the truth of the dictum “…if you´re a natural born composer, you don´t need anybody to teach you. It´ll all come naturally”. What is all important, though, is to get to know – from the very start – as much music as possible, and with your nose in the scores, predominantly contemporary scores, so that you know what you´re “up against”. It´s here the “master teacher” enters the picture, an older, more experienced composer to guide you. The majority of composers have at some point studied with a big “name” abroad, and in many cases they return as clones of the master. Unless they actually possess what it takes, talent of course, but also a strong personality and an iron will to be themselves. It´s of equal importance to join in – preferably heated – debates long into the small hours with your contemporaries. It´s here friendships and future connections are formed.

I stayed put and it took a long, long time finding my persona as a composer. I had no master teacher rammed down my throat, courtesy of a third party or myself. I´ve written about the early years previously in this present tale, the restless search for my own “tone” as it were, so there´s no need to elaborate on that. But it took time. A long, long time(my first really important piece, the chamber work Four Compositions was written when I was 31, the age Schubert was when he died. That gives you a healthy sense of proportion and perspective…).

For whom do I write? It would be obvious to say: “…for those who´ve asked for it, ie. commissioned a piece from me”. But I´m my own first audience – and critic. I write basically to satisfy my own curiosity in putting to the test all the ideas and visions constantly swirling around inside my head. The “real” audience, the concert hall listeners don´t enter the equation till much later. In the 1970s the Danish contemporary music scene was soaked in gloom and doom on behalf of the art form. Who needs it? became the mantra, not only among the composers themselves, but equally with intellectuals and theorists. It became trendy to quote the American avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt “…who cares who listens?”(an understandable reaction to a life long struggle against lack of interest from a bigoted conservative music establishment).

Today, in Denmark and everywhere else, total chaos rules when it comes to mutually agreed stylistic consensus. Which is not a bad thing. It would be awfully tiresome if everybody wrote the same music(as was the case in the 18th century. Even the most erudite musicologist will have a hard time pin-pointing a short passage as by Bach or Handel or Telemann, aging Haydn or early Beethoven ).

When I set sail as a composer in the early 70s, the leading composers internationally were the two “ayatollahs” of dogmatic thinking, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, style- and taste “dictators” completely without self-deprecation and deaf and blind to any alternative to their own ways. I´m not blaming the two gentlemen as composers, both have written fantastic pieces, but their influence gave rise to the most unlovely sort of intellectual arrogance and condescendence permeating the art form.

Intolerance resembling religious fundamentalism reared its ugly head – and still does here and there – from

those raging against composers writing music not similar to their own. Once, in the mid-nineties, at an annual festival in the rural Welsh location Vale of Glamorgan, a festival dedicated to contemporary minimalism of the more inward looking variety, music by composers such as John Tavener, Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, was disrupted by furious “modernists”, who in their loathing for the music being played, stood up, tearing the written program to pieces whenever a tonal passage occurred. I won´t comment on such behavior…it speaks for itself. I can add, though, that the following year, the festival organizers had the program printed on fabric impossible to rip apart.

Back home in Denmark, in the 1970s, the approach towards modern composition was quite laid-back. Karl Aage Rasmussen “discovered” the classic American mavericks, such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell and was instrumental in bringing the music of the brilliant sound-inventor George Crumb to Danish concert halls. Peter Maxwell Davies´ shocking monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King was an instant “jaw-dropper” with the audience. The Dutchman Louis Andriessen visited Denmark and swept the floor(where I was sitting)with his one-hour long, rhythmically and harmonically mesmerizing cantata De Staat. The Danish composers Hans Abrahamsen and Ole Buck formed a movement called “New Simplicity” – a very Danish reaction to the central European cold-sweat-inducing complex modernism. This rather “recalcitrant” domestic approach to the whole thing was colossally refreshing, but at the same time hugely confusing, not least for young fledgling composers. But there was only one way forward: stop whining and get on with it.

Which I did…

So let´s push the forward button to the here and now, where my compositional motto “…to entertain, enrich – and disturb” hopefully tells what I´m about, namely to create a musical and emotional impression through expression.”

Musical modernism, i.e. the compositional ideology seeking a continuous renewal of the material, was almost non-existent in Denmark in the period I´ve just described above(but seems to have made a foothold over the last few years). In the 70s, many of us dappled in what I – for want of a better word – call “style-collage”(Karl Aage Rasmussen coined the term Music-on-Music). Personally I drew on music from the Middle Ages(not entirely without inspiration from Maxwell Davies). Later on, at the start of the 80s, I chucked out the “hand-me-down” experiments, and…

I have to pull the emergency brake here, pointing to Per Erland Rasmussen´s monography on my music Acoustical Canvases(published in English), analyzing each work from the early years up to and including the opera The Handmaid´s Tale. But I will announce, without shame, and that in the clear voice of an innocent child – I am not a modernist!

What then am I? The label post modernist is hopeless, in most cases it´s synonymous with a bungling amateur, and I have no mercy on myself – and others – when it comes to lack of economy and timing in music. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross has pigeon-holed me as “…one of contemporary music´s free agents”, which I take as a compliment. I know of only two kinds of music: good and bad, I judge a piece entirely by its autonomous quality: does it grip me? Is it technically superior? Is something unique afoot? etc. I´m not – as a composer – in the least interested in pursuing novelty for novelty´s sake(which I was in the early days, I´ll readily admit. It wasn´t until later, that I realized that there was more than one path to choose).

Some composers like to see themselves as researchers. That´s perfectly okay, iconic and radical pieces have been created under that “umbrella”; it´s just not for me. Had I chosen research as my future vocation in life, you´d have found me at the Niels Bohr Institute as a young man – not at the music academy.

I was “old”, at the tail-end of my thirties, when it dawned on me, that contemporary music, well, classical music in general, occupies the back-seat, compared with literature, film and the visual arts. Which, again, needless to say, also caters to a limited “market”, as opposed to popular culture. There´s no mystery in that, it´s always been the case. There must be something for everybody. But classical music still drags along way behind the other arts forms in the public eye and ear. Most people from the so-called educated

segment(a terrible term), know their Picasso and Chagall to a tee, but when confronted with names such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Messiaen, the eyes start to wander and the answer is twisting in the wind. And why is that?

One plausible explanation could be the very simple one, that music isn´t about anything but itself(Igor Stravinsky “flogged that horse” relentlessly, but´s definitely not his patent). Anybody can interpret her- or himself into an abstract, non-figurative painting(“…this strange blue line there at the top right corner reminds me of…). Even the most difficult, experimental and provocative literature is made up of letters, which again forms an event, however mysterious and hard to get a grip on. But music, especially the kind parading under the bewildering label absolute music, is made up entirely of tones in a succession where they´re moving up or down – or are being repeated(well, all music is),so in a Bach fugue, say, from “Das Wohltemperierte Klavier”(a much used example, almost tiresomely so, and therefore the best), it´s only the interaction between the individual, autonomous voices that counts. The music can be heard, even enjoyed on several levels. Professionals, such as musicians, composers, musicologists, can hear effortlessly(up to a point), what goes on in the so-called contrapuntal play between the voices. That´s fine, but not necessarily an advantage.The lay-person, our friend “the man in the street”, is obviously barred from listening on the same level, but will all the same get an experience of great beauty – a sense of peace and order in the world.

The cliché “Bach´s music is universal and timeless” is true, after all(which is often the case with clichés).

And a fugue by Bach is tonal – it sounds “well” – and what is that supposed to mean? What we already know and feel comfortable with is good for us, and tonal music, it being in major- or minor keys, has dominated Western culture since the Renaissance(where the tonal system wasn´t quite the same as it became in the 18th. Century, but the way was paved). All evergreens – from Green Sleeves to Don´t cry for me, Argentina – are tonal, they´re ear worms. Arnold Schönberg, the composer being credited with having invented the twelve tone method – was convinced, that street urchins would hum excerpts from his atonal music, even in his own lifetime. It didn´t happen.Tonality had “won the battle” and it still rules, in fact there´s never been written as much tonal music as today(predominantly popular music, needless to say).

But it´s all due to education and habitual influence, nurture – not nature. In the 1930s, a group of anthropologists conducted an experiment in New Guinea. They visited a tribe of so-called savages, playing Beethoven for them on a portable gramophone, wanting to study their reaction to the music. There was no reaction. The “savages” didn´t notice that they were being exposed to something “different” from what they were used to. It was just sound, like the parrots squawking in the jungle. And their reaction(or lack of it), would have been exactly the same, had the anthropologists played one of the Western atonal compositions of the day on the gramophone.

Music is also a plague. You´ll have to venture very, very far into wilderness in order not to hear music. And not only the run-of-the-mill irritants, such as elevator- and other sorts of muzak, as we know it from shops, restaurants(only the most expensive restaurants are music-free!), or on the airplane while boarding(in one of a series of small vignettes by the Danish cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen, 1882 – 1949, a man is sitting, having his supper at a restaurant. Above the table where he´s sitting, there´s an advertisement pinned onto the wall: “Every Day: No Music!”).

Music is primarily a plague because one cannot shut one´s ears, so to speak. I´ve tried out all sorts of ear protection, ear plugs as well as head-phones, but nothing really works. Music is therefore a unique source of irritation and harassment. A jackhammer is worse, no argument there, but music is culture, right? – and as such acceptable.

Numerous are the TV documentaries watched by me, sitting with the remote control set on mute. Even the best programs are soaked in music, not a second without, and I don´t understand why. And my dog Gimmer hates it too, in fact Gimmer hates all music. He howls when it starts , like a wolf at the full moon – at times we howl together!

One could of course claim, that it´s only the likes of me, who´re bothered by the ubiquitous stream of music

in the public sphere, the majority of the population doesn´t care one way or other. Except for the unwanted elements, such as drug addicts and other misfits, who are scared off public places by recorded classical music, used as acoustic repellent(one could also turn the topic upside down and say, that if you want to keep the likes of me from loitering without intent in a doorway, you´d only have to play loud popmusic from speakers).

Summa summarum: if you want to save the world, write a book or make a film. Music in itself is useless without a text telling a story. And this is where opera enters the picture - speaking of opera…

THE THIRTEENTH CHILD

This chapter takes off, as it were, from the last one in the original autobiography, written in Danish and published March 2019. However, in the present edition it´s been thoroughly rewritten. In the first version my opera The Thirteenth Child was still unperformed – it didn´t premiere till later on in the year – more precisely on 27 July at The Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. Which means, that I now can tell the story after the fact, so to speak.

With The Thirteenth Child I´d done exactly what I´ve always told young composers not to do – never to write an opera without it being commissioned by a professional company and a string of performances secured. In the summer of 2017 I said – in a short video interview – that there´re no limits to how low I´d stoop to get what I want in my music” – said a bit “tongue in cheek”, needless to say, but it´s basically true.

I have absolutely no shame when writing opera, am a real pig. Because that´s what works – and opera must work, must make a massive emotional impact on the audience, play on the entire musical and emotional keyboard without any prudish reservation and bowing to what´s known as polite behavior. But that´s all to no avail, if there´s no discipline in the writing, no form and no timing. Law and order must prevail.

Following the premiere of my fourth opera Selma Jezková in 2010, I was convinced that it would also be my last. Opera is colossally time consuming with hard work at piano and desk, page after page after page piling up, there´s no end to it, and I don´t get any younger or prettier, but… I love it! So, I couldn´t help sniffing around for a suitable subject, preferably different from the previous three, the period piece Tycho, the dystopian Handmaid, the black farce Kafka´s Trial and then Selma, a tragedy if there ever was one. So, what now?

When I told my US manager and Bridge Records CEO Becky Starobin about my predicament, she said: a fairytale opera of course, a fantasy where good conquers evil after much suffering and self-sacrifice – and where the love between the damsel in distress and the knight in shining armor triumphs at the end.

Everybody(the good only, of course)lives forever happily and the bad guys get their comeuppance. I began my search deep inside the dark enchanted forest, where the Brothers Grimm hide…

The Twelve Brothers isn´t as well known as Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, but I never the less kept going back to that particular fairytale, it having all the classic “once upon a time” qualities I was looking for.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, nobody had asked me to write another opera, but what the hell…I just wanted to do it, but without a libretto – no opera. After having mulled over whom to approach as librettist, Becky Starobin(who´d written short stories for children in her youth), said that if I´d let her work on(as in improve)my original story synopsis, she´d have a go at the libretto herself. In the new synopsis she´d completely turned the(my)original synopsis inside out, and it was now far more adaptable for the stage. So Becky started on the libretto, soon to be joined by her husband David. The end result, after some, but not that many drafts, turned out beyond brilliant - perfect balance between prose and poetry, short, clear sentences that “sit well” on the tongue.

The full synopsis is available on www.the13thchild.com I began composing in 2016, finishing the full score the following year. That was all very well, but we still hadn´t found an opera company prepared to pick up the piece. Then David Starobin hit on the most audacious idea: “let´s record the whole thing on our own label. That´ll make the perfect calling card for the opera!”

To make a long – and occasionally tortuous story short, The Thirteenth Child was released by Bridge Records in the summer of 2019. And not just any release! The orchestra part was recorded in Denmark with the Odense Symphony Orchestra(an unforeseen logistic hick-up resulted in Israeli conductor Benjamin Shwarz conducting the first act only, and David Starobin, a more than accomplished conductor, then stepped in and led the second act), and the entire vocal side – soloists and chorus – subsequently recorded in New York, using click-track, to be finally “hitched” digitally with the orchestra. The end result is spectacular, starring Sarah Shafer as Princess Lyra, Tamara Mumford as Queen Gertrude and Ashraf Sewailam singing the part of the villain Drokan.

But at the start of the recording process, we still hadn´t found anybody willing to produce the opera itself.

That was extremely frustrating, also for me, who – in my endless self-aggrandizement – saw myself as a not exactly unknown opera composer. But then, via many twists and turns, the Santa Fe Opera announced that they´d be happy to produce and premiere the piece at their 2019 season.

On 27 July 2019 the Thirteenth Child opened at the breathtakingly beautiful, semi open stage at Santa Fe, sitting in the middle of the “wide screen” New Mexico desert. The cast chosen by the Santa Fe Opera wasn´t the same as on the CD, except for the phenomenal Tamara Mumford as the Queen. But the premiere and the subsequent four runs went very well indeed under the baton of British Paul Daniel.

We, that is the team Becky and David Starobin and yours truly, had succeeded.

Will there be a sixth opera from my hand? I´m almost certain that there will not.. but…on the other hand…as the saying goes…one never knows….

So, this is it, the story of my life. I´m now 71 and I still haven´t killed anybody, sat foot in Disneyland or watched a Eurovision Song Contest, so there´s still hope…

Poul Ruders Ladby Fields July 2020

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