Right now, as of Monday the 17'th of October 2011, it can sound like this:

However how it sounds is, as I will try to uncover little by little below, not at the core of my understanding of music. Music, for me, is about creating form, emotional form, using any material I find inspiring. A clock-time art.

From 1986 until about 2000 it was contemporary music, and the critique had comments like this to my findings:

"... a particular remarkable surprise (during the festival) was the one hour long piano cycle by Michael Nyvang, played eminently by Erik Kaltoft ... Via abstract sketches of melancholy and a skeleton-like reduction a sort of sensual negative virtuosity seemed to have been composed ... "

Giesela Nauk, editor of the German music magazine Positionen, on Movements to a monument over the loneliness of our world (1986-93) performed by Erik Kaltoft.

The entire piano cycle is available on CD from DACAPO

You can now listen to
the 6'th movement, Reduction. and
the 7'th movement, Decomposition.

The creation of the work Alien picnic - lecture notes from Denmark for 8 loudspeakers in 1999 was a revelation. The composition combined words, musical instruments and randomly recorded sounds from lunch breaks and other small talk, rather than working with conventional eletronic sounds and aesthetics. The composition became an intermediare between a dramatic piece, a play or a poem, and music, portraying the expression and vocalisations of a lecturer trying to talk about contemorary art, but never getting beyond "Erh, first thing!, mmm, wait, mmm, erh" and so on. He is overcome by fear of exposing himself getting things wrong, and thus he do get it wrong; and right - as what he says become absurdly expressive, and right in the sence that it become as messy a lecture as the contemporary art is in itself. His fucking up become an emotional exposure, a performance, a music.

The idea of a composition in mixed materials, using any kind of "stuff" to construct form, came into my mind. I understod that a personal musical felt form can be created with anything you chose to combine, that there were literally no difference for me between the feeling, or form, in my string trio Origin II from 1989, and what I had found in Alien picnic. I pondered upon this, and realized that then sound was not the primary material for a composer, but time and emotion.

Try to listen to these two works:
Origin II for string trio - played by Ensemble S:I.C and
Alien picnic - Lecture notes from Denmark (In Danish) in a stereo mix down. This work was first performed at Glyptoteket in Copenhagen.

After 2000 the concept of a particular narrow confine called contemporary music was discarded, and the attention turned towards composing forms, emotional form, a feeling, clock-time art, using any materials from sound, over words to narrative or images. The only common denominator being time and a personal choice founded in ethical and aesthetical roots: What is good? What is right? What do I believe in? All being at the foundation of choice, of chosing materials, chosing melodic lines, chosing details and entire works, making up your mind and creating form.

A short mission statement on clock-time art (Danish and English) [PDF] (2005)

The music should and could touch, be emotional, felt, the symphony Klukkan (The bell) finds its way into my mind, and a first version is produced with electronics in 2008. Strugling with the work I maintain that I want to make the orchestra sound like my music, and not be tempted to use learned techniques and complex textures. If a simple line is what I hear, then this is how it should be.

.... (on music, from a note in my diary the 10'th of July 2009, later send and edited in an email to friends)

The mere moment a composer dare to try to unleash a felt emotional music, or endeavor into the realms of the apparently superficial, he challenges an inherent fear of the establishment, as we all learned during our studies to reject anything which did not look technically complicated, and could be analyzed using mathematical set theories, deep philosophical pondering or acoustic physics. But what is more complicated, than capturing in notation an emotion, maybe just in a simple drawn line or theme? A feeling which touch in ways that can only be explained by the fact that you have managed to keep it in your imagination long enough for you to just step these few step out of the inspiration to write a description clear enough to reproduce it again. Even when this line of melody or emotional texture, is ever as simple, and do not need any mathematics to be written down, just a fine musical sense of time, loudness, phrasing and sonority. This is to master your instrument, even when this instrument is nothing but your imagination and the discipline to have just enough conscious distance to it to be able describe it before you move on in life, and don't feel this any more, but now something else.

Is this not the highest craft of composing, of music? Should this not be what was respected and valued?

(Here used to be a reference to video and music excerpts from The orchestrator. The piece is currently [2011, springtime] under development, so these files are temporarily disabled)

Now the door was open to my curiosity, liberated!. I could use anything, and enjoy any inspiration, nothing was too banale, or commercial. It has no meaning to me, only my choice on how to create the best composition from what ever base I chose is significant. Thus the Mick Nye project was started in 2007, compositions with the popular, jazz/rock or electronic music's materials and codes.

Listen to Chick track:

From here more attention came to the words, the text, a narrative or the inherent music in the words, thoughts on plays and a collection of poetry which developed more in the direction of a intermedia between a contrapunctual novel and a collection of poetry. The composition in mixed materials - this idea take form, stronger and stronger, with the first of a series of screenplays for short movies sketched up, composing screenplays instead of operas, inspiration is plentyful!

...(on movies, continued from my note the 10'th of July 2009)

Apropos writing music down, I made a little sidestep (again) to "Le fleuve", I am sure I make a lot of mistakes movie wise, but it is really fascinating to work with this. To work towards an expression in which all aspects of a feeling is written down in a more or less "artificial" or abstract play. By recording the text in the script myself and listening to it, I understood, that you should never put thoughts, ideas, poetic or descriptive language, or in general: messages you, the writer, desire to communicate to the audience, into dialogues. It seem always to come out as fake. You should create real characters, which with their existence, carriers of moral values and aesthetics, in the fictional world make the audience feel your message, and thus perceive the form. In fact I believe, in music as well as other expressions, that form is a feeling; or a development/deconstruction of a feeling (maybe here you could call a feeling for a set of emotional developments in time) (I said this once during a speech, and a musicologist was very interested in this and pointed my attention to a book by Susanne Langer "Form and feeling", I have yet to read it though, but it sounds interesting).

However, characters, I said to myself, how do I then do this? I do not want to create real characters, talking everyday language telling a naturalistic everyday story, this is not the musical expression I am interested in. I am interested in creating a poem in sound, music, narration and poetry and so on (also in that sense that the lines can be used as musical themes, be repeated and varied, just as you would do with a melody, I don't want it to sound real). So what could I think about this?

I said then: but as I try to use the metaphor: composing and orchestrating a music in time for something, then the characters, the persons in the movie, are not people: they are instruments. I should define the characters in some way, and then orchestrate the feeling for them to play, just like I learned about violins, and know their particularity, and can orchestra a melody or a sonic texture for them. I also want to develop the scripts as a score, in the sense that the score is the finished work, in which all aspects of my imagination has been described as detailed as possible, so that it then could be produced as a movie, but also - as well - as a music theater or mixed media play, or even just a radio drama (movies for the blind? with a so descriptive, imaginative sonic dimension that you can see it with your ears?) without images.

I would not look upon the movie as the work, this would just be one performance of my score. Then as such I have the idea to write something like ten of these short movie things, in the hope that this activity little by little will train my ability to fixate my imagination, visual, narrative, poetic as well as musical in some sort of document. Of cause there is then the question of notation, as a movie script should traditionally look in a certain way and follow very formalized rules. In particular, if I want to train my imagination and sense of timing by detailing exactly how long a phrase takes, how it should be said, how loud, and what timing there should be in the cutting of the images, movement of the camera and so on and so forth, then it would be completely impossible for anyone to use during a conventional production procedure, the director would be annoyed about too much information and too little freedom for his creative influence on it, the actors would go crazy about having to count to 4 and whisper in a certain particular way, and the guy filming would shake his head over my inexperienced lame ideas for framing, zooming and travelings and so on and so forth.

Anyway, as I said, I took a little sidestep and experimented a bit with writing the beginning of "Le fleuve" into a score after the same principle as you would do with an opera. And boy that was complicated, and interesting! Like, writing say 10 scenes with dialogues once the inspiration is there is pretty fast work, you just type the lines down, and add some hints like (silent voice) (at a side) (whispering) etc. here and there and you are done, and can give it to the actors and the director. But now, in a musical score we have an extremely fine tuned instrument of notation, the composer an extremely fine tuned imagination linked to this tool, and the musicians a fine tuned knowledge about how to read this and reproduce every single fine nuance as described. So just writing a sketch down of the first 10 seconds of "Le fleuve", detailing and thinking about how long the first image should be, how it should shiver and shake, what should happen in the sound precisely, how long it should take to fade in, and then - in particular - writing down the voice saying "le fleuve, le fleuve, ..." going from whispering to normal voice gradually, and having 3 echos of this in a rhythm developing behind the primary voice" It took HOURS of work, and I'm not sure I got it right either. But this is how an opera is written! So what happens also, is that I see the movie as a precisely defined temporal development, and structure my expression while doing it, and thus developing the work as such further, than can be done in the script alone.

Now I think I should do it simpler (there is not much point in writing the cuts and details of imaging down with musical notes I believe, its a bit pretentious), but I also think that the idea of actually writing down and developing second by second the time aspect, is possible and interesting for the work as such, because it make you go deeper into the development of the work as a author, you train your imagination and ability to see and hear things within your inner ear and eye. If a composer do this when writing operas, then why not when writing scripts for shorts or plays as well? After all, the strength in an expression is in the form, the art of composing is to master the art of creating emotional form.

Michael Nyvang 2009