Peter Bruun: Two Scenes with Skylark

Peter Bruun was born in Århus, Denmark in 1968 where his first musical influences were British pop-rock groups like Duran Duran, Simple Minds and Spandau Ballet. Even though music was still an avocation at this time, the young Bruun took an interest in composition, writing his first choral work when he was 20. Bruun attended Århus University from 1989 to 1991, majoring in philosophy all the while his musical interests continued to grow. After taking private lessons in theory and composition with Niels Marthinsen, he later attended the Royal Academy of Music in Århus where he studied with Karl Aage Rasmussen, Per Nørgård, Hans Abrahamsen and Bent Lorentzen.

Early on, Bruun distinguished himself as one of his generation’s most promising composers, receiving the Wilhelm Hansen’s Composer Prize in 2000. The eclectic nature of Bruun’s music characterizes the experiences of many ”forty-some-things”, where the influences of popular culture jostle and take their place along- side classical concert music. This stylistic fluidity defines much of Bruun’s work, whether in terms of direct stylistic quotation, as in his early composition from 1993, 4 Pieces in 3 Stages, which utilizes typical Danish schlager as its point of departure, or as it is often the case, creative collaborations with other artists and musicians. Bruun has composed in many genres, including orchestral works, concerti, chamber and solo pieces and a considerable amount of choral music in addition to three highly successful music theater production, including his collaboration with poet and writer Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Miki Alone for which Bruun received the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2008.

For the Victorian poet-priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins birds, especially song-birds, were a life-long fascination. Many of his best-known poems and sonnets refer to birds, their music, movement or strength. Rising above the earth and soaring through the skies, Hopkins’ birds are metaphors for the soul, supreme symbols as the natural order and harbingers of transcendence, leading mortals to contemplate supernatural realms that lie beyond ordinary experience. From this corpus of work, Bruun has selected two of Hopkins’ “skylark”-poems.

The first poem, The Sea and the Skylark, opens with a series of over-lapping pentatonic melodies, invoking the primal power of the sea. No sooner has this image been established in our minds, the rhapsodic song of the skylark appe- ars, its rippling arpeggios and bright appoggiaturas providing gentle dissonan- ces, creating an ecstatic song. As the poet’s mediation turns to humanity’s lack when confronting nature’s beauty, Bruun’s textures become more dissonant, eventually contracting to an extended pedal point on the note “D” that continu- es through to the song’s concluding measure.

Bruun’s setting of Hopkins’ sombre, sorrowful image of man’s futility, The Caged Skylark, opens in close harmony, accompanied by the breathy, human tessitura of the tenor recorder. Stuttering rhythms, and fragmented textures depict the caged bird’s / soul’s plight. Another pentatonic passage on the words “Not that the sweetest song fowl needs to rest...” returns us to a harmonious vision of nature over another pedal point, this time on the note “A”, before coming to rest on an unresolved major ninth chord.