Composer in Interview: Per Nørgård Recent and Early
Martin Anderson · Tempo · 2002
PN: We talked about fractals in connexion with the infinity row–this way of letting music grow in what you could call open hierarchic layers. It's not a director and a slave; it's an interdependent way of producing music. If you choose a scale — for instance, the chromatic scale — it contains itself an infinite number of times; my Second Symphony is based on realizing this characteristic. But if instead of letting it move in this expansive way, where you get wider and wider waves, you then construct it in the opposite way, you get a figure where it never gets out of itself. But it creates still a fractal rhythmic figure, which was very inspiring for me in all my percussion music from the 1970s. I discovered that feature in the beginning of the 70s when I composed the Third Symphony. I found the infinity row at the end of the 50s, but it was not until I had composed the Third Symphony and some works before it that I realized it contained its dark side, which is just as rhythmic and just as hierarchic. In my Third Symphony it comes out like an inevitable development. If you imagine the place in the beginning where it gets up to a very high trill, it comes in lower at half-tempo, and then again more slowly further down. It contains itself, like a Russian doll or a Chinese box.