UNM (Ung Nordisk Musik) festival can now, at 75 years old, count itself as one of the oldest festivals of contemporary music in Europe. For comparison: Donaueschingen (Germany) turns 100 this year, Darmstadt (Germany) is also 75, Warsaw Autumn (Poland) is 65, Huddersfield (UK) is 43, and Ultima (Norway) has just reached 30. An interesting paradox for a festival that, by definition, is focused on youth. I have attended and reviewed the festival several times, and 2021 will be my last year, as I have finally aged out of consideration.



Each year I am struck by similar questions: What does UNM represent for young composers? How does this multi-committee, multinational structure manage to create a coherent festival? Is there any point in trying to divine the future from what happens at UNM, or is it just a random assortment of pieces haphazardly glued together?

I don’t particularly want better Danish music criticism. I particularly want an economic system that doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable while squandering the potential of millions of people through violence and drudgery. This is not to say that Danish music criticism isn’t largely dull, elitist, inconsequential consumer advice or factoid lists. It is, but this doesn’t make Danish music criticism special. It makes Danish music criticism like most music and cultural criticism around the world. But given the occasion to desire better music criticism, I’d like to make the case for the genre’s potential.

In August 2018, guitarist Mikkel Schou returned to his native Zealand, enrolling in the Royal Danish Academy of Music’s Soloist’s Class after a stretch studying in Aarhus. ‘I made a conscious decision to completely change what I was doing,’ says Schou of his move to Copenhagen. Anyone who has seen him in action over the last couple of years will have an idea what that means. Anyone who hasn’t can get a taste of it from his Debut Concert, live-streamed in two parts on the evening of 15 March. Schou isn’t even sticking to the guitar. He will set out his stall as a creative musician and improviser, producer and facilitator. Two thirds of the material has been specially written for the concert and the one ‘old’ piece on the programme dates from 2012. The online audience is likely to be more composers from the Academy than its guitar students. ‘I am friends with some of them,’ Schou says of the latter. ‘Of about 20, there’s only one who plays new music fairly often.’ And the others? ‘Let’s just say, we don’t have the same aspirations at all.’

The much talked about pseudo-scientific acronym ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – is said to be an anomalous trigger for what loosely relates to a certain type of visual and auditory-tactile synaesthesia bonding. ASMR allusions first emerged in online chat rooms in 2008 and were initiated by Jennifer Allen, who has significantly shaped ASMR’s thought and practice. Exchanges in these chatrooms developed around discussions of sparkly, wave-like, comfortable tingling sensations that start at the crown of your head and can spread through the neck and limbs to induce a luminous and calm environment in the person experiencing it.

It was David Harrington, leader of the Kronos Quartet, who introduced me to Inuit throat singing. Specifically, to katajjaq – an animalistic, rhythmic form of antiphonal vocalizing native to the Arctic land mass northwest of the Hudson Bay in Canada. ‘Tanya Tagaq is the only artist alive who can follow Kimmo Pohjonen,’ said Harrington of the leading international exponent of the art, a musician who has made katajjaq into a solo pursuit, ‘and Kimmo Pohjonen is what you get when you cross James Brown and Jimi Hendrix,’ he added for good measure about the accordion player from Finland.

‘I read the procedures. I multi-task. I work well at any altitude.’ Mathias Monrad Møller knows how to sell himself as a graduate singer-composer at a time when a global pandemic has changed all the rules and the culture sector’s centre of gravity has all but evaporated. In the second half of his graduation diptych The Combat (Takkelloftet, 7-8 October), Møller adopted the motionless stance of an astronaut experiencing the ultimate in self-isolation aboard a space station. He repeated those words as a mantra. Slowly but surely, the universe compressed itself into his view of things just as his mind lost any sense of a standard gravitational pull. ‘Love is useless ballast,’ he concluded.

It’s a Monday evening in September 2019, the supporters of KFC Uerdingen and SV Waldhof Mannheim have occupied their respective stands at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf and the floodlights are gleaming – the perfect scene for a great, casual football night to start the week. But there’s something wrong with the atmosphere. The people around me, usually supporting their club with chants, choruses and shouting in every match – the epicentre of the acoustic atmosphere – remain silent. All I am hearing is restrained chatter from the crowd and the strident commands of the 22 guys we came to watch on the pitch. I’m holding an Olympus field recorder in my right hand. Luckily, if held at waist level, this device is small enough not to strike anyone’s attention. So I’m listening not only with my ears in real-time – my recorder is also alert, saving its perception for the future. Truth be told, I’m at work.

‘I honestly don’t really know what is going to happen. But I believe I will feel, while doing it, kind of similar to what I go through now.’ On 30 and 31 May, for fifteen and a half hours straight, the German pianist Igor Levit played the entire Vexations (1893) by Erik Satie – the iconic piece in which a single theme is to be played 840 times – at the recording studio B-Sharp in Berlin. Before the marathon performance, which was live-streamed on Twitter, Levit spoke to The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. ‘There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be devastation, there will joy, there will be literal pain,’ he continued. ‘Just this monotonic repetition of just the same thing, of a piece which in a way has no apparent musical content – just this staring at a wall, waiting, waiting. At some point, you lose the perspective of time – like now. You lose the perspective of an end – like now. I think at some point I will lose the hope that this will ever end – like now. Maybe I won’t make it. It’s just about surviving. Like now.’

Right about now, Christian Winther Christensen should have been standing in front of a room full of people, introducing this year’s edition of the ‘avant-garde music festival’ Klang. Then 2020 happened. Klang has been commuted to November, when it will take a more modest, domestic form. Very little about this spring feels normal and that includes my meeting with Christensen. We walk hesitantly into a café near his studio in Nørrebro and order food and coffee, which are dutifully delivered to a table. It’s the first day in more than two months such decadence has been permitted in Denmark. Every small element of pleasure involved in the process is magnified.

Normally when I cover a festival, I have to at least try and maintain a certain degree of professional critical distance. In this case, it is simply not realistic. It is probably not possible to be closer to the Pulsar festival than I currently am without being directly in it myself. I am a recent graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where I studied for four years, which meant four years of having my works played at Pulsar. I know all the teachers and the majority of the students personally. I know how this festival works behind the scenes. I am even working for the festival’s education outreach project – going into gymnasiums with the student composers, and moderating presentations of their works – which means I have some insider knowledge of the pieces beforehand.