Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

The Natural World of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

Dacapo Records, 2010

Unfamiliar contours

This cover had a hard birth. But, despite that – or maybe because of it – it’s always been one of my favourites. Paul Hillier had suggested that this release of choral works should be called The Natural World of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, which I thought was great. Often, new music releases are given rather boring, generic titles but in this case there was a possibility to create an interesting friction between text and image. Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen wasn’t terribly keen on the title at the start though, he found it rather personal.

We had a conversation about the six different pieces on this album and Pelle explained ideas of rituals, patterns and madrigals (a type of secular song) as ‘sound pictures’. For one work, 4 Madrigals from the Natural World, he has the singers making the sounds of elephants and cattle egrets. For another, 3 Stages, he has the choir swearing and making bird noises. Pelle is known, amongst many other things, for his ‘New Simplicity’ style – a particular form of Danish minimalism – and his sense of humour when it comes to playing with the unexpected.

Pelle suggested the animal theme as a starting point, so I set to work with that in mind. In the meantime, he had found some photographs he had taken of the gentle, green hills around his summer house – he felt the contours really captured the essence of his music. He wanted to use the pictures, but the combination of the green hills and the title didn’t create the sense of mystery I was after.

I tried placing the hills upside down on the cover. Pelle hated it – ‘too demonstrative!’ In the end I hit upon reversing the colour of the hills so that they suggested a simple yet magical landscape. This satisfied Pelle much more: ‘I really like it. It also has something diabolic and depressive about it, which suits the content I think (hope).’