"I asked Frode, ‘How does it sound when this accordion is crying? Can you make tears come out of it?"

“I think art is a way to create dreams which are eternal,” Bent Sørensen says. “I don’t mean that the music I write will be eternal, but when you sit down to write a concerto, you are free to dream that you’re going to live forever. Art is a way to deal with death.”

“To sit down in front of a new piece of paper is to start a new life, really,” he adds. “The music becomes like a diary and is infected with the things that happen around me.” Although Sørensen, the Composer in Residence at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, may be the only person able to link each of his works to specific memories from the time he wrote them, his music has the power to cast a similar spell upon the rest of us. His soundworld is one of shadows and uncertainty, where microtonal shifts and delicate glissandi evoke a range of emotional states and where fragmentary melodies blur and decay like a series of half-remembered associations.

“For me to write a piece, there has to be some links which meld together without really having anything to do with each other,” he says. “That’s like living, as well: living is very much by accident and you can’t really control what’s happening. But then you think, ‘Why am I here right now?’ and it’s down to a lot of small coincidences and accidents, that certain things came together, and I’m always looking for that in my work.”

The opening concert of hcmf// 2011 features the first UK performance of Sørensen’s new work, It is pain flowing down slowly on a white wall, performed by accordionist Frode Haltli and the Trondheim Soloists. It’s the second piece that Sørensen has written for Haltli, after Looking on Darkness, composed for Haltli’s professional debut in 2000. In this case, the “small coincidence” which birthed the piece was a chance encounter when Sørensen was a guest of the Arcus Temporum festival in Hungary in 2008. A woman approached him and gave him a slip of paper with what would become the title of the piece written on it. “She said it was from a poem by a Hungarian writer, and that it reminded her very much of my music. I thought it was a very beautiful sentence, so I put it in my pocket.  I knew that was the title. I have to get the title before I write a piece. It’s like naming a child: even if you name a child Brian and he grows up and you think he looks more like a Steven, you don’t change the name.”

Sørensen is unafraid to put emotion at the forefront of his work and It is pain... explores sorrow, a theme chosen from a story he was told by a friend, “about a girl who wanted to become an accordion player and was very talented, only she couldn’t play in the end because of problems with her back. I had this feeling of tears flowing down onto an accordion.” In Haltli, he feels that he has found a musician who can take his ideas from the page to the audience in the most direct way. “I asked Frode, ‘How does it sound when this accordion is crying? Can you make tears come out of it?’” he says.

“It’s the most clearly melodic piece I have written. But then I wanted everything to gradually disappear, because of this feeling of someone who couldn’t play the accordion anymore. Halfway through the piece, all the strings disappear, but then the orchestra start to sing and play on the melodica, so you have 16 melodicas and they drown the accordion. And as with many of my pieces, there’s a spatial idea to it. Frode is sitting in the back; he’s almost hidden in a way.  There is one violin player at the other end of the hall, and there’s a kind of dialogue, a musical love story between the violin and the accordion.”

There’s a twist to the story, or as Sørensen might see it, an accident which reveals something else about his art: “The funny thing was that I went back to the same festival in Hungary this year and I met the same woman. I told her that I’d used the title for a piece and she was very happy. I asked her if she would find the poem for me and she said that she would translate it into English. The next day she came to me and she said, ‘I’m sorry, but it was actually not a white wall, but a red wall.’ And I said, ‘I don’t mind, because your line is better than the one in the poem.’ That’s very close to what creating art is about, because you have an idea and then it changes in the memory and becomes something different.”

As a young composer, Sørensen studied with fellow Danes Ib Nørholm  and Per Nørgård, the latter known for deriving music from mathematical sequences through his ‘infinity series’. Earlier Sørensen works such as Sterbende Gärten (alternately The Echoing Garden or The Decaying Garden), Shadowland and Minnewater, with its subtitle, Thousands of Canons, explored repeating cells and proportions in ways that gave the works almost fractal-like qualities; but the composer says that such structures do not interest him so much now. He sees the creation of his first opera, 2004’s Under The Sky, as a turning point in his approach: “In the late ‘80s and the first half of the ‘90s, I was working with very strict form and rhythm. Then since the end of the ‘90s, when I started to work with music theatre and worked with text and dramatic forms, the timing became different, and I also started to think much more about spatial things.”

“I think I realised that all of my music up to my opera had some hidden film scripts, or theatre scripts or poetry in it. I don’t mind saying that my music is telling stories; it’s just that I don’t always remember what stories they are telling. Sometimes the best thing in music is that you have the freedom that you don’t always know what the story is about, but you know how you should tell it. You are speaking with a language which you may not completely understand yourself, but you are creating a story which is true.”

The Sørensen works programmed at hcmf// 2011 highlight this storytelling in space as well as time. Aside from the arrangement of the musicians in It is pain..., there’s Shadowplay, a concert in which Sørensen revisits three relatively recent trios for different combinations of instruments – Schattenlinie (2010) for viola, clarinet and piano; Phantasmagoria (2007) for violin, cello and piano, and Gondole (2010) for violin, viola and cello – and recasts them as one 15-movement work in Huddersfield Town Hall. Cikada Ensemble, Ensemble SCENATET and Trio Aristos will perform the piece, with one trio onstage, one in the middle of the audience and one on the balcony. “I always dreamed that one day I could put these three trios together in one concert,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s going to work. It’s a spatial piece, and it’s like a destruction, because they are three independent trios with five movements each, and by melding them together differently, you are destroying the original form. But I think the music should be good enough to survive that.”

Huddersfield also plays host to Snowbells, a new version of Den hvide skov (The White Forest), an installation by Sørensen and Katrine Wiedemann (who also directed the first performances of Under the Sky), which brought an unexpectedly wintry glade of snowy white trees and the sounds of church bells to a summer forest in Jutland. This time the forest is staying put – “In November, a white wood in Yorkshire is just ridiculous compared to summertime in Denmark,” Sørensen remarks, and judging by the freezing temperatures during last year’s hcmf//, he has a point – instead, his sounds will manifest themselves mysteriously from speakers hidden around one of Bates Mill’s industrial yards, a further move in time and space from the original source recordings.

The installation Den hvide skov marked Sørensen’s first use of prerecorded sound in his music: the second is Saudades Inocentes, a work developed in collaboration with Anna Berit Asp Christensen, artistic director of Copenhagen’s SPOR festival. “Anna Berit’s my experimental playmate, in a way,” Sørensen says. “We recorded her in a lot of situations – she’s always humming, so we recorded that, and her steps when she was walking – and other females’ voices, all the female sounds we could find in Copenhagen, basically.” These voices form a diffuse cloud which emanates from loudspeakers under the audience’s feet, whilst onstage, three generations of male singers: a grandfather, a father and a son, sing texts developed from the recordings.  “It’s a lot about longing: they are singing to each other, but in a way they are in two different rooms.”

Sørensen credits his collaborations with encouraging him to expand his music into these new fields. “All the way up to the end of the ‘90s, I was basically working on music on paper. I love the loneliness, to lock myself in for days and months and work. And then when I started to work on Under the Sky, I suddenly started to collaborate with other people.” He adds, “When you need people from other artforms, you get inspired by them. But you’re also inspired by their artform. When I work with Katrine, I get inspired by theatrical elements. When I work with Anna Berit, a very strong curator who can put things together, I get inspired to work with different elements in new ways.”

Audiences can look forward to more collaborations and experimentation from Sørensen in the future. Whilst his immediate work plans still include several more traditional commissions for concertos, this year he has cut back on his teaching duties in order to have more time for projects such as the ‘backyard operas’ he has been developing with Asp Christensen, site-specific performances in unlikely locations using simple electronics, ghetto blasters and elements of text and movement.  “I felt that if I continued with so much teaching I would only have time to write all those quite posh commissions, like the concertos. But I also want to work in a more experimental, underground way, which is what we’re doing with the backyard operas. We’re also doing some indoors concerts at the Bergen festival where we go into some famous people’s houses and change them into one big sound installation.”

He considers: “So that’s what I’m doing at the moment, a combination of classical and much more conceptual music. But of course, I want the classical music to be conceptual and the conceptual music to be classical. I can’t divide myself into different kinds of music; they have to be under the same umbrella.”

Click here for more details of Bent Sørensen events at hcmf// 2011 and to buy tickets:

Snowbells, Friday 18 November then throughout the festival

Trondheim Soloists + Frode Haltli, Friday 18 November

Dokumentary Koncert #1, Saturday 19 November

Cikada Point 4: Improvisations on Bent Sørensen’s Funeral Processions, Monday 21 November

Shadowplay, Tuesday 22 November

Sørensen/Nono/Haas, Sunday 27 November

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