# Finding correspondences between composers



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Hello talkclassical crew. I'm wondering where on the internet or perhaps in real life (library related most likely) should I look to find correspondences between composers? I'm particularly interested in reading Nielsen and Sibelius, Nielsen and Busoni(I know that they wrote back and forth for life after they met, and they may partly have connected over their both backward and forward looking ambivalence to much of 19th century music), Nielsen and Mahler(it's rumored to exist), Nielsen and Janacek(ditto to Mahler, I think), and maybe Nielsen and Strauss. There may be other big names he had written with, or maybe like Mozart and almost everyone else, he wrote letters to someone close to him that revealed more about his thinking. Maybe there is just a collection of Nielsen correspondences somewhere. All these composers had some very interesting and strange thoughts brewing in their minds, but I have been most passionate about Nielsen's music in the last year and would like to understand how he may have related to his most musically related contemporaries.


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## Johnnie Burgess (Aug 30, 2015)

clavichorder said:


> Hello talkclassical crew. I'm wondering where on the internet or perhaps in real life (library related most likely) should I look to find correspondences between composers? I'm particularly interested in reading Nielsen and Sibelius, Nielsen and Busoni(I know that they wrote back and forth for life after they met, and they may partly have connected over their both backward and forward looking ambivalence to much of 19th century music), Nielsen and Mahler(it's rumored to exist), Nielsen and Janacek(ditto to Mahler, I think), and maybe Nielsen and Strauss. There may be other big names he had written with, or maybe like Mozart and almost everyone else, he wrote letters to someone close to him that revealed more about his thinking. Maybe there is just a collection of Nielsen correspondences somewhere. All these composers had some very interesting and strange thoughts brewing in their minds, but I have been most passionate about Nielsen's music in the last year and would like to understand how he may have related to his most musically related contemporaries.


Here is a site with Nielsen correspondences:

http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/tema/fokus/cnielsen.html

From the national library of Denmark.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

The correspondences look to be in Danish and, which I can't read, and maybe not really available online, just advertised? At any rate, that sight is a good resource.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

clavichorder said:


> The correspondences look to be in Danish and, which I can't read, and maybe not really available online, just advertised? At any rate, that sight is a good resource.


Greetings Clavichorder: Go to Google books (books.google) and use search "Nielsen correspondence in English." Carl Nielsen Studies: Volume V. I am on my phone so I can't zoom in, etc., but I think it might give you something more if you log in before me.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

clavichorder said:


> Hello talkclassical crew. I'm wondering where on the internet or perhaps in real life (library related most likely) should I look to find correspondences between composers? I'm particularly interested in reading Nielsen and Sibelius, Nielsen and Busoni(I know that they wrote back and forth for life after they met, and they may partly have connected over their both backward and forward looking ambivalence to much of 19th century music), Nielsen and Mahler(it's rumored to exist), Nielsen and Janacek(ditto to Mahler, I think), and maybe Nielsen and Strauss. There may be other big names he had written with, or maybe like Mozart and almost everyone else, he wrote letters to someone close to him that revealed more about his thinking. Maybe there is just a collection of Nielsen correspond somewhere. All these composers had some very interesting and strange thoughts brewing in their minds, but I have been most passionate about Nielsen's music i n the last year and would like to understand how he may have related to his most musically related contemporaries.


On Questia.org I found the following article. I have the text of the full article. It discusses the status of Nielsen scholarship: everything from publication of most of Nielsen's music to a bibliography of important materials written about N and his music--not just correspondence but his diary, lectures, essays. I think many people would find this article interesting so I am willing to post it on TC since it will not be accessible to many. Where do you suggest I post all this info it is lengthy but reasonably so in comparison to many medium-length threads? Articles, this thread, Composer Guestbooks.

In the meantime I will post the excerpt that talks specifically when translations of his correspondence will be available in one location: others have translated correspondence and you can see those sources in the footnotes of the first text I posted here, and in many of the texts sited in the bibliography of the article below.

Notes. Vol.71 No. 4, 2015
2015 Anne Marie Reynolds

"Carl Nielson at 150"

ABSTRACT 
Both research and performance of Carl Nielsen's music have taken off in the past two decades, thanks to a flurry of publications that make crucial primary source materials readily available for the very first time, many of them online, with critical commentary in English as well as Danish. These include editions of his collected works, prose writings, and voluminous correspondence, as well as a comprehensive works catalog. After more than half a century of celebrating Nielsen as an isolated, self-made genius, the Danes have thrown open the door of inquiry and beckoned foreign scholars in. The result has been a new assessment of the composer, the man, and his music in the context of his European contemporaries, and Nielsen has fared well in the comparison. The application of an array of analytical techniques has yielded insight into Nielsen's treatment of harmonic, rhythmic, and formal ambiguity to dramatic ends, and the common ground between his two favored but stylistically opposed genres, symphony and song, has been explored. Perhaps most gratifying of all is that the high quality of the collected edition has spurred a spate of performances and new recordings worldwide, some of compositions that had languished since Nielsen's death in unpublished obscurity. There is a sense that finally, at the ripe old age of 150, Nielsen has come into his own.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Compendium of Nielsen's Correspondence from article cited in previous post:

In 2002, John Fellow and the editorial board of the Carl Nielsen Edition launched a related project, which is reaching completion just this year: the publication of Nielsen's more than 3,000 letters, written between 1886 and 1931. (10) Until now, only a very selective sampling of his correspondence had been published, heavily edited by Nielsen's daughter Irmelin Eggert-Moller, and first biographer, Torben Meyer. (11) The twelve volumes include letters both to and from Nielsen--for a grand total of 6,000--and, with annotations and indices, are a particularly significant contribution to Nielsen research. Even though these letters do not form a conventional narrative, they provide a more vivid, nuanced view of the man and the composer, his music, family, and friends than the one handed down over the years, especially as concerns his tumultuous relationship with his wife Anne Marie. David Fanning is in the process of translating selected letters, which the Royal Library will publish in two volumes some time in the next two years. (12) In the meantime, the prefaces are available online, albeit only in Danish.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Full article is really worth reading. I'm willing to post it, just let me know where.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

You could even post it here, couldn't you JosefinaHW?


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Hah! My musicologist friend is currently doing this with Glazunov! She told me only a tiny fraction of letters of his were published. I had always gotten the impression that he disliked writing (he disliked essay writing anyhow), but my friend said with letter writing it was far from that case. I can only hope she compiles anything and everything she finds in the St. Petersburg Archives (she was there last week), and publishes them. With her permission, I will get them translated to English. Correspondences generally with other Russian-born artists, but also with a few English musicians as far as I know (such as C.V. Stanford), and probably some others elsewhere in Europe.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (June 2015):
_ Questia.org_ p. 611+ Web. 18 Aug 2016

I did not convert the end-notes to footnotes. To read the end-notes as you read the article, open a new window and open TC on there also. Divide your screen so that you can see both windows at the same time. In the window on the right, start out at the first page of end-notes.

#1.

*INTRODUCTION
*
When you approach the Royal Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek) in Copenhagen, you cannot help being struck by the incongruent juxtaposition of the original building and the new extension. The traditional facade of the former is made of impenetrable red brick and mortar, while the ultramodern "Black Diamond" addition is comprised primarily of glass, allowing you to see not only into but through the building. For the purpose of assessing the state of research and performance of Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) on the 150th anniversary of his birth, this stark disjunction of the two halves of the Royal Library may serve as a visual metaphor. The hybrid structure represents both the Janus-faced nature of Denmark's most famous composer, and the sudden ease of access to the sources related to his life and works offered Nielsen scholars, performers, and enthusiasts in recent years, after decades of limitations. In this new era of openness, the possibilities for future research are as boundless as the vistas from the catwalks that crisscross the transparent building's interior.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes Vol. 71 No. 4 (June 2015): Questia.org
p.611+ Web. 18 Aug 2016.
__
#2.

_Nielsen's contradictory visages depend on the perspective of the viewer. From abroad he is considered one of the foremost symphonists of the twentieth century, while in Denmark he is equally heralded as a paragon of vocal music, a repertoire little known elsewhere, despite comprising nearly 300 songs, two operas, and numerous choral works-no less than half his total oeuvre-and spanning his entire creative production. Nielsen's approach to the different genres naturally varied with the audience his music was to serve, and, as a result, a stylistic dichotomy gradually emerged in his works. This dichotomy reflects the plight of the fin-de-siècle composer outside the continental mainstream who found himself in the service of two masters: on the one hand, Nielsen sought to win international recognition by aspiring to an advanced, cosmopolitan style; and on the other, he felt a responsibility to sustain his native music tradition by writing compositions in a more directly accessible idiom. This resulted in a gradual divergence between the character of his abstract instrumental music, and most of his vocal music, particularly the songs. While the former grew increasingly complex over the years, the latter became simpler in inverse proportion, so that at the peak of his compositional prowess, Nielsen was writing both his most complex symphonies and his most folk-like songs. His reputation thus grew in two seemingly opposed directions: on the one hand, he was considered a gifted melodist, capable of creating simple, popular tunes of the utmost simplicity and grace; and on the other, he was recognized for his advanced harmonic language and innovative approach to form.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#3.

*NIELSEN RESEARCH*

One of the difficulties in studying Nielsen's music has been that research has progressed by fits and starts over the years since his death. Considering his status as a national hero, the number of recordings, and steady stream of performances of his music worldwide,*1* Nielsen has received disproportionately little scholarly attention until recently. The biggest obstacle to progress was that, for the better part of the twentieth century, basic research tools were lacking. The good news is that, beginning in the 1990s, this state of affairs has changed rapidly and drastically, with a number of crucial projects involving primary sources running simultaneously, as though to make up for lost time.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
Questia.org. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#4.

The first and most fundamental of these is the collected, critical edition of Nielsen's works, delayed until the 1990s for various reasons.*2* Given Denmark's limited resources, and the daunting commitment of time and funding involved, it was not an easy project to launch. The task was complicated because many works exist only in manuscript, or were published in turn-of-the-century editions, often in single folios. Further, despite known discrepancies between manuscript and published versions, clarification was problematic because Nielsen's teaching and performing activities were known to have prompted him to revise, often after publication. To make matters worse, his proofreading was sometimes careless, and he occasionally allowed students and colleagues to make corrections.*3* Finally, for some years the scholarly community deferred the responsibility to Torben Schousboe, once considered the pre-eminent Danish scholar on Nielsen, and on friendly terms with the composer's daughter Irmelin Eggert-Møller, but he ultimately made little headway toward realizing the edition on his own.*4*

By the early 1990s, Nielsen's reputation worldwide had grown, and the requests for performing editions multiplied to the point that the need for a collected edition could no longer be ignored. The proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" was a performance of the opera _Maskarade_ in Germany. Despite being arguably the most prized Danish opera of all time, it was still unpublished nearly a century after its premiere, and the performers complained about having to work from worn copies of their parts, handwritten and scrawled over with corrections by Nielsen himself-a national humiliation amplified in the Danish press. Given the ensuing public outcry, the minister of culture, Jytte Hilden, felt compelled to step in and demand of the Royal Library administration that the long-overdue collected edition project commence at once. As Niels Krabbe observed, this sequence was highly unusual; "Normally it is scholars or research institutions who ask the public sector for funding to start up major research projects; in this case it was the Danish State (represented by the Minister of Culture) that charged the research milieu with the task, with related pledges of funding."*5*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org._ p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#5.

Led initially by Niels Martin Jensen, and after 2000 by Niels Krabbe, a committee of nine scholars stepped in and divided up the task, organizing the compositions into three series: Stage Music, Instrumental Music and Vocal Music.*6* From the outset they agreed that the edition should serve the needs of both scholars and performers, requiring that a single, clean urtext of each composition be printed-with alterations, variations, and sketches confined to the critical editorial commentary at the back of each volume. In addition to the scores and commentary, each of the thirty-two volumes includes a detailed preface, describing the compositional process and reception, and are thus a tremendously valuable resource for scholars and performers alike. To benefit the broadest audience possible, the editors decided to present the commentary in both Danish and English, including performable translations of the works with text. This edition makes available several major compositions (including _Maskarade_) never before published, some which have not been heard since Nielsen's death, and has already inspired numerous performances and recordings.*7* The Royal Library generously offers both the scores and commentary for download from its Web site (www.kb.dk). No single publication in the past fifteen years is more crucial to the future of Nielsen research and performance.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_ Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#6.

In conjunction with the _Carl Nielsen Edition_, the composer's prose writings were also collected and edited by John Fellow, and published in three volumes in 1999.*8* Though many of these essays, interviews, and lectures were already available, others were scattered throughout obscure journals and newspapers making them difficult to access, especially for a foreign scholar, or were not published elsewhere. Furthermore, because much of the literature on Nielsen has been based on secondary literature-sometimes creating a chain of misinformation-it is not only useful but critical that the primary sources have been brought to light. For his part, Fellow has proved that less is more by keeping editorial commentary to a minimum, and arranging the writings in chronological order so as to allow Nielsen to speak for himself and scholars to come to their own conclusions. This straightforward organization is frequently illuminating, as in the case of the essays included in _Levende musik (Living Music_), published as a collection in 1925, but actually written at various times between 1906 and 1925.

While these writings do not address compositional issues in specific detail, they present Nielsen's views on life and art, and thus have an indirect bearing on his music. Reading these essays, one is impressed with how well-spoken Nielsen was; depending on the context, he was alternately a poet, teacher, historian, and philosopher, in each guise focused intently on communicating his ideas and values. His unpretentious and good-humored nature comes across, punctuated by occasional frank expressions of frustration and disillusionment.*9*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org._ p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#7.

In 2002, John Fellow and the editorial board of the _Carl Nielsen Edition_ launched a related project, which is reaching completion just this year: the publication of Nielsen's more than 3,000 letters, written between 1886 and 1931.*10* Until now, only a very selective sampling of his correspondence had been published, heavily edited by Nielsen's daughter Irmelin Eggert-Møller, and first biographer, Torben Meyer.*11* The twelve volumes include letters both to and from Nielsen-for a grand total of 6,000-and, with annotations and indices, are a particularly significant contribution to Nielsen research. Even though these letters do not form a conventional narrative, they provide a more vivid, nuanced view of the man and the composer, his music, family, and friends than the one handed down over the years, especially as concerns his tumultuous relationship with his wife Anne Marie. David Fanning is in the process of translating selected letters, which the Royal Library will publish in two volumes sometime in the next two years.*12* In the meantime, the prefaces are available online, albeit only in Danish.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#8.

These two publications owe a debt to Torben Schousboe's 1983 edition of Nielsen's diaries and correspondence with his wife, Anne Marie.*13* Yet like Eggert-Møller and Meyer before him, Schousboe was highly selective, leaving out much of the material from the seven years that Nielsen and his wife were estranged. In fact, following Eggert-Møller's death in 1974, Schousboe was put in charge of the entire family estate and, by his own admission, "burn[ed] what was appropriate," before passing the materials on to the Royal Library.*14* Fortunately, this sort of censorship is a thing of the past; since the 1990s the Danes are determined to correct the protective practices of years past, and have entered a progressive, new age in Nielsen research.

Along with the other research tools recently published, an online catalog of Carl Nielsen's works has just been created, under the auspices of The Danish Centre for Music Publication, an organization established upon the completion of _The Nielsen Edition_ in 2009, in order to capitalize on the expertise and knowledge culled from that project.*15* This catalog owes a debt to Birgit Bjørnum and Klaus Møllerhøj's 1992 catalog of Nielsen's music manuscripts housed in the Royal Library's Carl Nielsen Archive,*16* and Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe's 1965 bibliography before that.*17 * The online catalog, along with the reorganization of and greater access to the manuscripts themselves within the Royal Library's new annex, the "Black Diamond," makes working with these documents, especially for foreign scholars, far easier than ever before. Now only a single envelope of materials (purportedly related to the Nielsen's marital problems) remains closed to the public, at the request of Eggert-Møller, until 2026.*18*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#9.

A wealth of additional Nielsen resources are now available online through the Royal Library's Web site, including select manuscripts, a bibliography of publications about Nielsen written between 1985 and 2011, the _Carl Nielsen Studies_ journal, a song registry, an image gallery, a searchable database of books by and about the composer, letters, and concert programs, as well as Torben Schousboe's collection.*19

**CRITICAL STUDIES IN DENMARK
*
Without the basic research tools in place, it was difficult in the early years for Danish scholars to produce critical studies of Nielsen's music. As Daniel Grimley observed, "it is as though there [were] a tacit assumption that . . . historical 'spadework' must be done before aesthetic contemplation [and analysis] of Nielsen's music can begin."*20* Nielsen's reputation as Denmark's greatest composer, though a less quantifiable factor, appears to have been equally inhibiting. The purpose of many Danish publications initially was to introduce foreign audiences to Nielsen, and to interest them in his music, so that the authors apparently were reluctant to say anything negative or to delve deeply into their subject. The progress achieved in making the basic source materials available and Nielsen's music better known worldwide through the recent spate of recordings is already beginning to have an impact on scholarship in the form of new critical and contextual studies of the composer and his music.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#10.

In the past, publications on Nielsen appeared only sporadically, typically triggered by a particular event or anniversary, the first wave in the decades immediately preceding and following the composer's death. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, two complete issues of the most prominent Danish music journals were devoted to Nielsen and his music, _Musik: Tidsskrift for tonekunst_ (June 1925) and Dansk _musiktidsskrift_ (October 1926), as was the latter journal's January 1932 issue, three months after he died. These publications included brief surveys of Nielsen's compositions by genre, as well as reminiscences by the composer's closest friends, colleagues, and students. The first two and, until recently, the only Nielsen biographies were written during the 1940s. These were concerned primarily with documenting Nielsen's life and works, as well as describing the general characteristics of his musical style. Despite some inaccuracies and subjective judgments, these works are still valuable for their level of detail, relative contemporaneity with Nielsen's lifetime, and the fact that the authors had access then (through Nielsen's eldest daughter) to a few primary sources that scholars now do not.*21*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#11.

The next wave of Danish scholarship did not occur until 1965, the centenary of Nielsen's birth. In this year, the Fog-Schousboe catalog of Nielsen's compositions and two collections of essays appeared. One of the latter was also translated into English in a belated first attempt to introduce an international audience to Denmark's most famous composer.*22* This was largely in response to a show of interest on the part of the British during the 1950s, after hearing Nielsen's music for the first time in performance and on record.*23* Soon after this burst of activity, the focus of musicological endeavor in Denmark shifted toward more recent composers (especially Per Nørgaard) and compositional techniques, as though in a deliberate attempt to break free from the hegemony of the Nielsen tradition.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#12.

Finally, at the end of the century, a third wave of Nielsen research in Denmark began to swell that shows no sign of cresting yet. Significant publications in recent years include Finn Mathiassen's _Livet, musiken og samfundet: En bog om Carl Nielsen_ (_Life, Music and Society: A Book About Carl Nielsen_); Jørgen Jensen's _Carl Nielsen: Danskeren (Carl Nielsen: The Dane_); and Steen Christian _Steensen's Musik er Liv: En biografi om Carl Nielsen (Music is Life: A Biography of Carl Nielsen_).*24 * These studies are broad in scope, considering Nielsen within his social and cultural milieu.

*THE ANALYSES*

In the decades following Nielsen's death, analyses of Nielsen's music suffered from the lack of a penetrating and systematic method, the reliance on and perpetuation of certain vague and sometimes contradictory assumptions about Nielsen's music, and the failure to consider him within an international context. Description substituted for discovery, labels for interpretation. Discussion of the music in most studies was cursory; instead, the authors typically focused on the circumstances of composition and performance, and included a few descriptive remarks about the characteristics and relative merits of a particular work.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#13.

Nielsen's style was typically characterized by a few equivocal catchwords that were bandied about from study to study. For example, his music was often described as "organic," vaguely meaning that it unfolds in a manner analogous to the growth of a living organism-a characteristic, it would seem, of everything from rhythm to form. More often than not, this trait in Nielsen's music was attributed to his peasant roots and basic affinity for nature.*25* Counterpoint was also mentioned as a prominent feature of his music, even by the composer himself, who describes his realization of its importance as a revelation:

When as a youth I went from harmony to counterpoint lessons, Fux's two-voiced exercises (first species) always left an infinitely flat taste in my mouth and I could not understand what the many empty octaves and fifths should mean; I thought they were hollow and childish. Finally, I realized it was the voice leading in both parts that was the most important thing, and now I understood everything, and octaves, fifths, and unisons no longer seemed flat and childish to me, because my gaze was now directed towards the lines' paths and not toward a harmonic cluster or vertical chords.*26*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#14.

In the literature, counterpoint is typically assumed to be a phenomenon of the surface texture of Nielsen's music, when in fact it extends to all levels of the structure. Finally, his music was described as having a distinctively "Danish sound," some writers going so far as to suggest that this very quality might be the obstacle to Nielsen's appreciation worldwide.*27* Even Nielsen himself observed that:

We [Danes] often seem to sense the scent of Danish landscapes and landscape pictures through our songs and [instrumental] compositions. But it is clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our nature, our painters and poets or our history in the same intimate way as we ourselves, will not grasp in the least that which enables us to listen and quiver with understanding.*28

*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#15.

Nationality is certainly the composer's most distinguishing feature in Jørgen I. Jensen's book, _Carl Nielsen: Danskeren (Carl Nielsen: the Dane_), in which "there is virtually no page . . . on which the word 'Dane' does not appear."*29* Yet this "Danish tone" appears to elude definition, and has therefore been invoked rather indiscriminately over the years. Nielsen cautioned against contriving to imbue music with it, facetiously describing the recipe for "the national element" this way: "Take one part Andantino in 6/8 time, one part minor, and one part Danish pear compote that has stood out all night; stir the whole thing together well, set it over a slow fire, and let it cook for around twenty minutes."*30* Later he described it as "a simple intensity, a quiet warmth, and a certain poetic scent that is difficult for foreigners to understand."*31* But his ambivalence on the subject is apparent later in the very same article, as he goes on to question whether a distinctly Danish tone can even exist when the musical histories of Denmark and Germany are inextricably entwined. He further warns of the potential harm in branding a composer's music with this label, citing Schumann's public enthusiasm for Gade's nordic sound as an example, but surely with his own situation in mind:

[Schumann] no doubt damaged [Gade's] development by emphasizing and praising the so-called "Danish tone" far too profusely. For it cannot be denied that when the national element is cultivated too strongly, something more artistically meaningful may easily be lost, and art stagnates. It is said of a famous French painter [Slagmaler], that anything he was incapable of rendering-for example, galloping horse legs and carriages in motion-he simply enveloped in gun smoke; that's how it was handled. The "national tone" can easily become such a smoke screen.*32*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#16.

Elsewhere Nielsen was even more pointed: "There is nothing that destroys art more than nationalism. . . . Patriotism is the villain's last resort, and it is impossible to write national music on command. If one tries, he is not an artist but a patch tailor."*33*

Remarkably, this question of "Danishness" remains a sensitive and contentious issue to this day in Denmark, not only in reference to music but also in the broader social and political arena, because of the tensions caused by the recent influx of Middle-Eastern immigrants. It is surely no coincidence that there have recently been both spirited public debate and a rash of publications on national identity, and that in 2006 the prime minister felt compelled to establish a Danish cultural canon.*34* "Danishness becomes the mirror image of what it excludes," observed Torben Bech Dyrberg in his study, _The Circular Structure of Power: Politics, Identity, Community_.*35* Against this social and political backdrop, it is not surprising that Karen Vestergård and Ida-Marie Vorre's recent thesis on Danishness in Nielsen's folk-like songs caused such a stir, since the authors conclude that there is actually nothing inherently Danish about the music.*36* In making this claim, they go against the conventional wisdom handed down from generation to generation by Danish writers seeking to create a sense of Nielsen's _folkelige_ songs as stylistically unique.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#17.

The early commentators typically dealt with Nielsen's expressed aim of a _Schein des Bekannten_ (appearance of familiarity) by qualifying the songs' "seemingly familiar" nature, making it a relative and exclusive feature meaningful only to a close community of listeners who share "an instinctive popular understanding."*37* In other words, in their view, the limits of this familiarity were Denmark's borders, and the songs' character was strictly a national phenomenon. But the specific musical patterns they went on to cite as examples of _Schein des Bekannten_ in Nielsen's music- balanced phrases, step-wise melodic motion, a pickup of a fourth, etc.- are features common not just to Danish folk melodies but to those of the entire western world. Even the horn fifths, flatted sevenths, and falling-fifth motives that Vestergård and Vorre use as their litmus test for musical Danishness may be found in Germanic music throughout history.*38* As Carl Dahlhaus noted, "_nstead of belonging to a nation, meaning a people with a common language, folk songs quite often bear traits from specific regions or professional classes; thanks to their dissemination by wandering minstrels, they could even be internation__al." *39*

Ironically, then, European folk song may be a distillation of basic features that the different countries share rather than a means of distinguishing between their musical styles. Similarly, when diatonic music written by European composers is stripped down to its essentials, it will likely have more, not less, in common. The music in folk-like songs, by itself, is not distinctly nationalistic._


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#18.

For a long time, Danish authors writing about Nielsen cultivated the view of him as an "individualist," whose achievements were born of his genius, national heritage, and study of the great masters-in any case, virtually untainted by contemporary foreign influences. David Fanning's explanation for this is that since most chroniclers outside of Denmark left Nielsen completely out of the picture when describing the major musical developments of his day, his countrymen compensated by going to the opposite extreme, "declaring that he stood above all trends and -isms, as a model for a direction that history might have, even should have taken."*40* Nielsen's own words belie this romanticized image, as when in 1905 he reflected on the future of music:

I believe that music has a long way to go before exhausting its potential to express human feelings and moods; but in which direction developments are headed is impossible to say at the moment. This much is clear to me, however: that an enormous number of possibilities remain in the harmonic and modulatory realms, and I should be greatly mistaken if the future does not discard our modern keys, minor and major, as inadequate to express a modern person's thoughts and feelings. Experiments with quartertones, as are happening in Germany, appeal to me greatly, and I have several times- including one spot in my first symphony-distinctly felt the lack of a more finely-tuned tonal system.*41*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_ Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#19.

Whatever the reason, writers who overemphasized the singularity of Nielsen's talent did him a disservice; he stands up well, in fact, to comparison with the early-twentieth-century composers of international repute.

Nielsen has much in common both personally and musically, for instance, with Mahler and Ives.*42* He, as well as they, had a modest, unpolished childhood, ensconced in natural surroundings and a small community of family and friends-humble beginnings that he later credited with shaping his attitudes toward life and art. Leaving the rural island of Funen for Copenhagen as a young adult, Nielsen's ideas met with opposition for the first time. He made no value judgment between the popular music of his youth and the art music he studied at the conservatory, despite the dim view his teachers took of the former. And, like Ives and Mahler, he intentionally included both in his compositions, as a means of reflecting the disparity and spontaneity of life, as well as his belief in the interconnectedness of one's experiences and creative endeavors.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#20.

Themes with a distinctly folk-song-like character are common among his symphonies, their simplicity typically in direct contrast to the complexity of the contrapuntal and harmonic setting, as though, rather than to integrate them into the symphonic context, Nielsen chose expressly to heighten their incongruity. For this very feature his symphonies have been subjected to the same criticism as Ives's and Mahler's: that they suffer from "unresolved stylistic dichotomies" and "naïvetés."*43* In Nielsen's case, as perhaps also in Ives's and Mahler's, such stylistically incompatible melodies came to play an additional, if equally subtle, role as the musical language of his symphonies grew in complexity: they acted as welcome guideposts within an increasingly unfamiliar landscape, providing a _Schein des Bekannten_ to music which in other respects was difficult for the generally conservative audience of his day to accept.

Nielsen shared a fundamentally robust and optimistic outlook on life with Ives, if less with Mahler-a view upheld despite the hardships all three composers encountered in trying to establish themselves as composers, despite their having to take on a second career in order to make ends meet, and despite composing in the isolation born of anti-Semitism in Mahler's case, of geographic remove and provincialism in Ives's and Nielsen's cases, and of only much-belated validation in all three. Whether inborn or necessitated by circumstance, self-reliance is clearly a trait they had in common.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#21.

Finally, Nielsen also respected experience over education, substance over manner, and inquiry above all else. The vitality, homespun good sense, and even the muscular quality of Ives's prose matches that of Nielsen's writing. Both men preferred rough but energetic performances of their compositions to precise, refined renditions. And, it is evident in their lives as in their music that both Nielsen and Ives valued the common person's ideas and experiences at least as highly as those of the more cultured members of society.

At best, the catchwords used to describe Nielsen's music are elusive; more often they are misleading and, when used together, sometimes even contradictory. The source of the problem may in fact be the composer himself. Though Nielsen was a voluminous writer of letters, reviews, essays, and memoirs, as Fellow's two editions attest, when it came to describing either aspects of specific works or his compositional methods, he typically spoke indirectly, in broad, if poetic, metaphors and philosophical rhapsodies. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that, before Fellow's collections were published, most of Nielsen's diverse writings were not readily available, so that the same few phrases from _Levende musik (Living Music_) and _Min fynske barndom (My Childhood on Funen_) were quoted uncritically in study after study, and in the process elevated to the level of gospel. There is a grandiloquent tone to some of these, as in this oft-quoted example: "One must show the overindulgent that a melodic leap of a third should be considered a gift from God, a fourth an experience, and a fifth the greatest happiness."*44*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#22.

Further, when describing the creative process, time and again Nielsen downplayed his own involvement, as though composing were an out-of-body experience:

When I have done my best and strongest work . . . it is as though my personal will is gone or is so relaxed that the material takes hold of me to the point that I (i.e., the person I am) am dissolved and as though tossed in the air and floating over everything. . . . [W]hen I worked on _Maskarade_, now and then I had the sense that I was like a large drainpipe through which a stream flowed, that I had no control over.*45*

Fortunately, thanks to Fellow's efforts, it is now possible to bring together and study extraneous comments Nielsen made over the course of his life on a particular subject, observations that by themselves may not yield much information, but together provide insight into the composer's ideas and music.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#23.

*CRITICAL STUDIES ABROAD*

Beyond the borders of Denmark, scholarship on Nielsen has been concentrated in Britain and the United States. For over forty years, Robert Simpson's book on the symphonies went unchallenged as the definitive study of his music in any language other than Danish.*46* Meanwhile, American and English universities have turned out a number of dissertations on Nielsen over the years; these deal almost exclusively with the symphonies and concertos. Then in 1987, the American pianist Mina Miller attempted to spark international scholarly interest in Nielsen, first with her annotated bibliography, _Carl Nielsen: A Guide to Research_, and a few years later, in celebration of the 125th anniversary of Nielsen's birth, with her collection of essays by diverse authors, _The Nielsen Companion_.*47* The latter marked a significant development in Nielsen research, as it was the first time that scholars drawn primarily from outside a small circle of Nielsen specialists turned a critical eye toward both the composer and the music, considering them within the context of Nielsen's contemporaries on the continent and the musical trends of his day. It was also the first time that the broad spectrum of Nielsen's music was analyzed in any meaningful depth, using systematic approaches that gauged his position along the continuum of tradition and innovation. And yet, the preponderance of analysts new to Nielsen was this collection's weakness as well as its strength. The discovery that Nielsen had something to offer occurred rather too often in a volume intended to represent the current state of research on a major composer. Ideally, the Nielsen scholar and the analyst should be one and the same person.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#24.

David Fanning's 1997 study of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony demonstrated that this indeed was possible.*48 * Fanning has been interested in Nielsen for the past forty years, when he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the symphonies.*49* His analysis, using a Schenkerian approach, was consistent and thorough, well-supported by research, making this a significant contribution both to the understanding of this symphony in particular and to Nielsen's music in general. Published the same year as Fanning's study, the first full-length biography of Nielsen in English was an attempt to fill a fundamental lacuna.*50* Yet for the most part the author, Jack Lawson, simply relayed the account of Nielsen's life and works found in the older Danish sources, perpetuating many of the generalizations about the man and his music, and introducing inaccuracies of his own into the story. The line between fact and fiction was blurred by the lack of source citations. On the other hand, considering that so little was available in English on Nielsen at the time, his book was not without value. Meanwhile, biographies were published in France and Germany during the 1990s as well.*51*


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#25.

Daniel Grimley is the most prolific international scholar on Nielsen in recent years, beginning with his 1998 Cambridge dissertation, _Nielsen, Nationalism and Danish Musical Style_, and including numerous articles as well as a book entitled _Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism_ published in 2010.*52* Grimley has approached one genre after another of Nielsen's music, analyzing it within the ideological, artistic, and literary contexts of his day, and comparing Nielsen favorably to his European contemporaries wrestling with some of the same compositional issues. The first monograph on Nielsen's songs was also published in 2010, entitled _Carl Nielsen's Voice: The Songs in Context_, by Anne-Marie Reynolds.*53* The author sought to draw together the two sides of Nielsen's compositional persona by demonstrating through detailed analyses that Nielsen relied on precisely the same musical techniques and structures, whether writing song or symphony, thereby challenging the conventional belief that Nielsen's favored genres are stylistically opposed.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#26.

The most striking feature of both Nielsen's songs and symphonies is a kind of shifting diatonicism, creating what Daniel Grimley has described as a "fractured musical surface."*54* In other words, even when Nielsen's melodies are not terribly chromatic, typically they are harmonically adventurous to the extent that consecutive phrases may be in different keys, almost like shifting tectonic plates, the tonal motion accomplished surreptitiously through step-wise voice-leading and enharmonicism. Studying his music, one never doubts that Nielsen was thinking diatonically, but he did so in an unanchored sort of way. He considered tonal context to be a fluctuating phenomenon, a given key sometimes holding sway for but a few measures, so that, for example, the functional relationship between the same two harmonies might change from phrase to phrase, and a song's tonic might serve as little more than a frame. Nielsen alluded to this propensity once in a letter to a student: "We should try for once to get away from [the notion of] keys and yet still write in a convincingly diatonic fashion. That's the point; and here I feel in me a yearning for freedom."*55

* It is provocative to consider this musical feature in light of Nielsen's biography. Such harmonic restlessness may be viewed as a metaphor for his attempts to break free from the strictures of propriety imposed on him by his countrymen, to assert his individuality, musically as personally, within the narrowly-defined niches of common-practice harmony and the conservative Danish society of his day, respectively. Nielsen believed that while the other arts can depict life, music is the actual will to live made manifest, the compulsion to move forward toward a goal despite encountering obstacles.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#27.
*
INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION*

A positive development in recent years is the number of Nielsen symposia that have taken place in England and Denmark, drawing together Nielsen scholars from around the world (in 1999, 2001, 2009, and 2011). These symposia led to the creation of the _Carl Nielsen Studies_ journal in 2003, a series intended to capitalize on the "internationalization of Carl Nielsen research," with honorary board members from Denmark, England, Germany, and the United States.*56* With each successive volume of the journal, approaches to Nielsen's music have broadened to include different types of analysis (whether rhythmic, neo-Riemannian or Schenkerian), styles of music (e.g., interfaces between Nielsen's music and jazz or folk music), contemporaries (Nielsen compared to Sibelius, Janácek, and Jeppesen), compositions seldom analyzed (including the Flute Concerto, Saul and David, organ preludes, and the Clarinet Concerto), and nonmusical influences (whether artistic, literary, ideological, cultural, philosophical, or geographical).*57* Clearly, the focus has shifted from the early days, when Nielsen was treated in isolation as though he were a "self-made Danish genius" to evaluating his place within the context of his international contemporaries. Nielsen stands up well to the comparison. The recent reactivation of dormant Carl Nielsen societies in Denmark, Britain, and the United States is another sign of interest in international collaboration. Knud Ketting is the chair of the most well established of the three, the Danish Carl Nielsen Society, and maintains a useful and frequently updated Web site (www.carlnielsen.dk).


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#28.

*150TH ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATION*

In retrospect, the publication of the crucial research tools and fostering of a vibrant international community of Nielsen scholars appear to have been building to the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. This coming year, the former will serve the latter when, from New York City to Perth, performances, conferences, exhibitions, lectures, book launches, radio broadcasts, recordings, and competitions will take place in seemingly endless succession. The Danes have taken charge of compiling and publicizing the festivities at an elaborate Carl Nielsen 150 Years Web site (www.carlnielsen.org) that offers background on the composer, a timeline of his life, audio samples of his compositions, a calendar of events worldwide, and a quick overview of the major "milestones" of the upcoming year, in both English and Danish.*58* Highlights include the revival of Nielsen's first opera, _Saul and David_, which has not been performed in the Danish Royal Theatre for nearly thirty years (since 1986), the Carl Nielsen International Chamber Music Competition, an international conference at Oxford University called Music and the Nordic Breakthrough: Sibelius, Nielsen and Glazuov (all of whom were born the same year), and The Nielsen Project.

Much like Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s, Alan Gilbert, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is one of Nielsen's most ardent champions in the United States, and his enthusiasm has proved infectious. Through performances, recordings, interviews, and videos in the lead-up to the 150th anniversary year, he has successfully generated widespread public enthusiasm for Nielsen's music. Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic began the Nielsen Project in the 2010-11 season, playing all of the composer's six symphonies and three concertos over the succeeding four years, until the series culminates in 2015 with the performance of the Clarinet Concerto. Meanwhile, the orchestra has recorded all nine works (on the DaCapo label), the first time the New York Philharmonic has made a complete recording of Nielsen symphonies and concertos. While individual compact discs are already available for purchase, the complete box set will be released with fanfare on Nielsen's actual birthday, 9 June 2015.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#29.

Taking the long view of the past twenty-five years, the steady crescendo of activity is an encouraging development. With each surge of interest in Nielsen's music, one is hopeful that the enthusiasm will have staying power. The unprecedented length of the present wave, the publication in the last decade of the crucial research tools, and the Royal Library's new policy to accommodate foreign scholars in every way possible, give rise to optimism that the future will be bright for Carl Nielsen research and performance.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#30.

ENDNOTES

1. For example, at present, over 350 recordings of Nielsen's music are available for purchase
at ArkivMusic.com.

2. Carl Nielsen, _Værker_ = _Works_, udgivet af Carl Nielsen udgaven, det Kongelige Bibliotek (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, 199, known as the _Carl Nielsen Edition_. Only the piano works had earlier received critical attention, in _The Complete Solo Piano Music of Carl Nielsen_, a critical rev. ed. by Mina F. Miller (Copenhagen; New York: Wilhelm Hansen, 1982), including a listing of sources (pp. 200-202), and critical commentary (pp. 203-80).

3. See the prefaces to the volumes of the _Carl Nielsen Edition_.

4. Schousboe's most useful publication is the edition of Nielsen's diaries and correspondence with his wife: Carl Nielsen, _Dagbøger og brevveksling med Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen_, ed. TorbenSchousboe, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1983).

5. Niels Krabbe, "The Carl Nielsen Edition," _Carl Nielsen Studies_ 4 (2009): 89.

6. Anne Ørbæk Jensen, "Two Great Danish Editions in Progress: Niels W. Gade and CarlNielsen," 
_Fontes Artis Musicae_ 42, no. 1 ( January-March 1995): 85-90.

7. Krabbe, "The Carl Nielsen Edition," 103.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#31.

8. _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid: Artikler, foredrag, interview, presseindlæg, værknoter ogmanuskripter_, ed. John Fellow, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1999). Daniel Grimley wrote an informative review of this set, in the J_ournal of the Royal Musical Association_ 126, no. 1 (January 2001): 107-117. The two collections of Nielsen's writings published during his lifetime were _Levende Musik_ (Copenhagen: Martin, 1925 [various reprints], whose essays may be found individually within the chronological ordering of Fellow's collection); and _Min fynske barndom_ (Copenhagen: Martin, 1927 [various reprints]). Both are available in English trans. by Reginald Spink: _Living Music_ (Copenhagen: Hansen; London: Hutchinson, 1953); _My Childhood on Funen_ (Copenhagen: Hansen; London: Hutchinson, 1953). A new critical edition of the latter is due out in 2015.

9. Examples of the latter include "5. Symfoni Skandalen i Stockholm" (Fifth Symphony Scandal in Stockholm), interview with "Frib." in _Politiken_, 23 January 1924; and "Kunstens trange Vej"("Art's Difficult Path"), interview with Axel Kjerulf in _Politiken_, 11 November 1925; both reprinted in _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 1:307-8 and 1:359-61, respectively.

10. Carl Nielsen, _Brevudgaven_, ed. John Fellow, 12 vols. (Copenhagen: Multivers, 2005-15).

11. _Carl Nielsens Breve_, ed. Irmelin Eggert-Moller and Torben Meyer (Copenhagen: Gyldendal,1954). Alan Swanson translated a number of these in The Nielsen Companion, ed. Mina Miller(Portland, OR Amadeus, 1995), 599-640.

12. I am grateful to Niels Krabbe, head of the Carl Nielsen Edition, for this information.

13. Nielsen, _Dagbøger_.

14. Torben Schousboe, " . . . du skal blot gjøre store og blanke, selvstændige Arbejder . . . ," _Danskmusiktidsskrift_ 58 (1983/84): 6.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#32.

15. _CNW: Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works_, http://www.kb.dk/dcm/cnw/preface.xq (accessed 25 February 2015).

16. _Carl Nielsens Samling: Katalog over komponistens musikhåndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek_ = _The Carl Nielsen Collection: A Catalogue of the Composer's Musical Manuscripts in the Royal Library_, ed. Birgit Bjørnum and Klaus Møllerhøj, _Danish Humanist Texts and Studies_, 4 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 1992). It was later revised and updated by Knud Ketting for the _CD-ROM Carl Nielsen: Mennesket og musikken_ = _The Man and his Music_ (Copenhagen: AM Production Multimedia, 1998).

17. Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe, _Carl Nielsen Kompositioner: En Bibliografi_ (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag/Arnold Busck, 1965).

18. I am grateful to Niels Krabbe for this information.

19. "Carl Nielsen," Det Kongelige Bibliotek,
http://www.kb.dk/da/nb/samling/ma/fokus/cnielsen.html (accessed 25 February 2015).

20. Grimley, review of _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 107.

21. Torben Meyer and Frede Schandorf Petersen, _Carl Nielsen: Kunstneren og Mennesket_, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk, 1947-48); and Ludvig Dolleris, _Carl Nielsen: En musikografi_ (Odense: Viggo Madsen, 1949).

22. _Carl Nielsen: Centenary Essays_, ed. Jürgen Balzer (London: Dobson, 1966); trans. of _Carl Nielsen: Et hundred år for hans fødsel_ (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag/Arnold Busck, 1965); and _Oplevelser og studier omkring Carl Nielsen_, ed. Max Brod, et al. (Copenhagen: D.B.K, 1966).


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#33.

23. This British enthusiasm was sparked chiefly by Erik Tuxen's recording of the Third Symphony in the 1940s (reissued: Dutton Laboratories CDK 1207 [1999, CD)] and his 1950 performance of the Fifth Symphony at the Edinburgh Festival (see Robert Layton, "Nielsen and the Gramophone," in _The Nielsen Companion_, 119); and fanned by Simpson's book on the symphonies published in 1952 (discussed below).

24. Finn Mathiassen, _Livet, musiken og samfundet: En bog om Carl Nielsen_ (Århus: PubliMus, 1986); Jørgen Jensen, _Carl Nielsen: Danskeren_ (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1991); and Steen Chr. Steensen, _Musik er Liv: En biografi om Carl Nielsen_ (Frederiksberg: Fisker & Schou, 1999).

25. Kai A. Bruun, "Omkring Carl Nielsen," _Danmar_k 10 (1940): 330.

26. Quoted in Jensen, _Carl Nielsen: Danskeren_, 98. The emphasis is mine.

27. Jürgen Balzer, "Contemporary Danish Music," _Music News_ 44 (1952): 11.

28. "Svensk Musikfest: Et dansk Forslag" (Swedish Music Festival: A Danish Proposal), in _Politiken_, 14 June 1906; quoted in _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 1:87-91, at 88.

29. John Fellow, in an interview with Anders Beyer, "Kulturkritikken der blev aflivet," _Dansk musiktidsskrift_ 75, no. 8 (June 1999/2000): 256.

30. "Svensk Musikfest: Et dansk Forslag," 89.

31. "Dansk musik," in _Politiken_, 14 November 1926; reprinted in _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 2:406-8, at 407.

32. Ibid., 408.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#34.

33. "60 Aar," interview with Josef Petersen in _Social-Demokraten_, 9 June 1925; quoted in _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 1:350-55, at 354.

34. For a description of the cultural canon, see the Web site of the Danish Kulturministeriet (Ministry of Cultural Affairs) at http://.kum.dk (accessed 25 February 2015).

35. _Phronesis_ (London; New York: Verso, 1997), 122.

36. "Den danske sang: En undersøgelse af danskheden i Carl Nielsens sange" (thesis, Aalborg Universitet, 2005), 95.

37. Tage Mortensen, " 'Schein des Bekannten' i Carl Nielsens sange," in _Oplevelser og studier omkring Carl Nielsen_, 92.

38. Vestergård and Vorre draw their criteria for testing the Danishness in thirty-five of Nielsen's folk-like songs from Daniel Grimley, in "Horn Calls and Flattened Sevenths: Nielsen and Danish Musical Style," in _Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture_ _1800-1945_, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy, 123-41 (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001); and Jensen, _Carl Nielsen: Danskeren_.

39. Carl Dahlhaus, _Nineteenth-Century Music_, trans. by J. Bradford Robinson of _Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, California Studies in 19th Century Music_, 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 111.

40. David Fanning, _Nielsen: Symphony No. 5_, _Cambridge Music Handbooks_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12.

41. "Selvbiografi" (autobiography), from 1905, printed in _Nielsen in sin samtid_, 1:50-51.

42. Recently he has also convincingly been compared to Reger. See Daniel Grimley, "Tonality, Clarity, Strength: Gesture, Form and Nordic Identity in Carl Nielsen's Piano Music," _Music and Letters_ 86, no. 2 (May 2005): 220-22.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#35.

43. John Waterhouse, "Nielsen Reconsidered," _Musical Times_ 106 (1965): 426 and 516.

44. "Musikalske Problemer" (musical issues), in _Levende Musik_, and in _Tilskueren_, August 1922, reprinted in _Carl Nielsen til sin samtid_, 1:262-72, at 265.

45. Letter to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, 10 July 1914, in _Dagbøger og brevveksling med Anne Marie Carl Nielsen_, 2:387.

46. Robert Simpson, _Carl Nielsen: Symphonist 1865-1931_ (London: Dent, 1952; reprint, Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1979; rev. ed. with additional chapter, London: Kahn & Averill, 1979).

47. Mina F. Miller, _Carl Nielsen: A Guide to Research_, _Garland Composer Resource Manuals_, 6 (New York: Garland, 1987); and T_he Nielsen Companion_. Kirsten Flensborg Petersen has created a supplement to Miller's research guide that includes bibliographic citations from 1985 to 2005 (see the Royal Library's Web site). In_ The Nielsen Companion_, mine is the only essay that deals with the songs, and is entitled "The Early Song Collections: Carl Nielsen Finds His Voice," 399-453.

48. Fanning, Nielsen: Symphony no. 5.

49. David Fanning, "The Symphonies of Carl Nielsen" (B.M. thesis, Manchester University, 1977).

50. Jack Lawson, Carl Nielsen, 20th-Century Composers (London: Phaidon, 1997).


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#36.

51. Jean-Luc Caron, _Carl Nielsen: Vie et oeuvre_ (_Lausanne: Editions l'Age d'homme_, 1990); and Mogens Rafn Mogensen, _Carl Nielsen: Der dänische Tondichter: Biographischer Dokumentationsbericht_, 5 vols. (Arbon: Eurotext, 1992). The latter consists primarily of illustrations and translations of Nielsen's diaries and letters. It was withdrawn soon after publication due to a copyright dispute.

52. Daniel Grimley, _Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernis_m (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2010).

53. _Danish Humanist Texts and Studies_, 37 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010).

54. Daniel Grimley, "Organicism, Form and Structural Decay: Nielsen's Second Violin Sonata," _Music Analysis_ 21, no. 2 ( July 2003): 178.

55. Letter to Henrik Knudsen, 19 August 1918, in _Carl Nielsens Breve_, 133.

56. Volumes 1-5 published to date (Copenhagen: Royal Library 2003-); ed. by David Fanning, Daniel Grimley and Niels Krabbe; and, since 2013, Michael Fjeldsøe and Peter Hauge.

57. ****Once again, in keeping with the Royal Library's new open attitude, the full text of the Carl Nielsen Studies volumes are available online.****

58. http://www.carlnielsen.org/en (accessed 25 February 2015).


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

Reynolds, Anne-Marie. "Carl Nielsen at Age 150." _Notes_ Vol. 71 No. 4 (1 June 2015)
_Questia.org_. p. 611+ Web. 18 August 2016.

#37. Last post re/ this article.

Anne-Marie Reynolds is an associate professor of music at the State University of New York. For the past twenty years she has published widely on Nielsen's music, including the first-ever monograph on his songs, entitled _Carl Nielsen's Voice: The Songs in Context_ (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010). Beginning in the fall of 2015, she will be on the faculty of The Juilliard School.

_Notes

_The quarterly journal of the Music Library Association provides articles and reviews in the areas of music librarianship, music bibliography and discography, the music trade and aspects of the music history.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

JosefinaHW said:


> Greetings Clavichorder: Go to Google books (books.google) and use search "Nielsen correspondence in English." Carl Nielsen Studies: Volume V. I am on my phone so I can't zoom in, etc., but I think it might give you something more if you log in before me.


As you will see below, you can read all volumes of the _Carl Nielsen Studies_ for free. The only requirement is to create an account with the library. The following is the link to that page. After you complete the registration form they will send you a code to use to access the journal and many other materials. Happy Hunting!

http://rex.kb.dk/primo_library/libw...rue&&vid=KGL&vid=KGL&backFromPreferences=true


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

To answer the first part of your question, regarding composer's correspondence in general, there was a paperback book series that published some of these. I have the Wagner Liszt volume somewhere, and it lists others in the series in it.


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