Symphony No. 3 (1972-1975) by Per Nørgård. Per Nørgård's third symphony commissioned by The Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra (conductor Herbert Blomstedt) was premiered in Copenhagen in 1976 and received wide attention. The work gives comprehensive expression to a new realm of musical experience which the composer began to explore toward the end of the 1960s. While the first period in Nørgårds production in the 1050s represents his personal interpretation of the Nordic music tradition – evidenced for example in his “Piano Sonata No. 2” (1957) and“Constellations” for chamber orchestra (1958) – and the second period in the 1960s saw him working with serial techniques musical collage and a new sound-palette - especially in the orchestral works “Iris” (196-67) and “Luna” (1967) – with “Voyage into the Golden Screen” (1968) Nørgård arrived at a new compositional technique based on the use of a special form of a so-called “infinity series” a principle of musical motion to be applied to all kinds of scales (chromatic diatonic et cetera). It is characteristic that that Nørgård in the 1970s chose to cultivate diatonic infinity series already evident in the mythological opera “Gilgamesh” (1971-72). Thus the Symphony No. 3 begun directly after the opera combines the infinity series major and minor scales the partial series of natural harmonics and “sub-harmonics” (Nørgårds terminology) with rhythmic patterns based on the Golden Section (the Golden Mean) in a nexus of synchronous yet disparate elements which serve the composers vision of musical coherence.. The works which followed the symphony – the operas “Siddharta” (1975-79) and “The Divine Circus” (1981-82) and Symphony No. 4 (1981) – usher a new
