CD/BOOK: Per Nørgård, ‘Titanic’

Artist: Per Nørgård, composer

Released on Edition wilhelm hansen, 2012

To celebrate the 80th birthday of Denmark’s great composer Per Nørgård, Edition Wilhelm Hansen commissioned me to design the release of his work Titanic, written and first performed in 1962. The music publisher gave me a rich supply of beautiful scores, old newspaper articles, notes and essays – not to mention Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig’s poem about the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner. His text describes the experiences of the people on-board during the sinking of the great symbol of modernity. It is recited over a background of Nørgård’s recorded fragments of evocative sounds and music.

I used photographs by the Irish priest, Frank Browne, who was actually on-board the Titanic in 1912 as it sailed from Southampton to Cobh in Ireland, before it took off across the Atlantic to meet its fate. The photographs had been lost for many years and rediscovered in 1985. Alongside Browne’s original photographs, I incorporated scans of Nørgård’s original score (made of fantastic collages of clippings, drawings, timelines, text and notes), a newspaper article from 1962 featuring a review of the original performance and the original transcript of an emergency call from the Titanic

CD/Book: Per Nørgård, ‘Titanic’

Artist: Per nørgård, composer

Released on edition wilhelm hansen

To celebrate the 80th birthday of Denmark’s great composer Per Nørgård, Edition Wilhelm Hansen commissioned me to design the release of his work Titanic, in a limited edition, hard-bound book. The music publisher gave me a rich supply of beautiful scores, old newspaper articles, notes and essays – not to mention Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig’s poem about the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner.

I also used photographs by the Irish priest, Frank Browne, who was actually on-board the Titanic in 1912 as it sailed from Southampton to Cobh in Ireland, before it took off across the Atlantic to meet its fate. The photographs had been lost for many years and rediscovered in 1985.