Recently, one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive composers turned 80. There may not have been international celebrations to mark the birthday of Ole Buck, but the uninitiated should take the milestone as an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the music of a composer who knows himself, and the purpose of his art, like few others.

Buck could be described as Denmark’s purest minimalist, though it might better to see him as the nearest thing this most rational nation has to a compositional mystic – a figure associated with the ‘new simplicity’ of Hans Abrahamsen and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen but who has held more stringently than both those figures to the idea of a search for simple beauty, while using it as a conduit for something bordering on the spiritual. That much of Buck’s later music is recognisably his might be connected to the fact that a great deal of it uses only five notes. Repetition is a tool for purification, not complication. There is a dispassionate, balanced, calm state to a great deal of his work.

Buck was born in Copenhagen, where as a teenager he heard a performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms which led him to delve deep into the Russian composer’s oeuvre and join the collective Det Unge Tonekunstnerselskab (the Young Sound Artists’ Association). He became absorbed in the Danish new music scene and in the work of the aphoristic Italian composer Castiglioni (Italy would remain a strong influence, notably the Italian Baroque). Per Nørgård privately tutored Buck in advance of entrance exams for the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, but the young composer was refused entry. That act had a seismic residual effect on Danish musical life: it prompted Nørgård’s resignation from the academy, leading to his move, with all his pupils, to the Jutland Conservatory of Music in Aarhus and the creation of what would be known as the Aarhus school.

Buck duly joined Nørgård’s class in Aarhus in 1965, having written his breakthrough work Calligraphy for soprano and orchestra the year before. Calligraphy is intriguing for its combination of accepted elements of the European avant-garde with the hints of what was to come from Buck, including the repeated figurations and evolving patterns associated with minimalism.

In Aarhus in 1966, Buck co-founded Aarhus Unge Tonekunstere (Aarhus Young Sound Artists) with, among others, the composer Karl Aage Rasmussen. He travelled to Darmstadt, where he studied with Ligeti, Pousseur and Earle Brown. Back in Denmark at the time, the new simplicity movement was taking root – a sonic answer to the country’s functionalist design movement which decreed that the structure of any work of music should be clearly audible. While the likes of Abrahamsen used that idea to create music in which mechanics were clear but integral, Buck erred towards something more focused and, indeed, minimal. The orchestral work Punctuations (1968) is an early example, though in its use of fast, repeating figures it might seem crude next to more refined efforts from later on (the work was taken up by Lutosławski).

Masques came in 1969, and two years later Buck wrote the score for Felix luna, Flemming Flindt’s ballet performed by the Royal Danish Ballet in 1973. Masques, for six percussionists, introduced elements of Far Eastern music that would become central to his work, whether technically or idealistically. Its three original movements, ‘Bali’, ‘Tibet’ and ‘China’, conjure up imaginary rituals from these countries, and in 1996 Buck added two further movements: ‘Japan’ and ‘Java’. Felix luna applied some of the same aesthetics to the ballet stage and caused something of a succès de scandale in Copenhagen while proving that its creator’s musical principles were capable of channelling strong drama.

Something had been seeded, however, in a work that predated both of those and was dwarfed by them, namely Buck’s Summer Trio (1968) for flute, guitar and cello, which was pivotal in adumbrating the direction in which he would head. It’s a piece which, according to the artistic director of Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen Jesper Lützhøft, ‘amiably and precisely questioned the whole modernist project with its simple repeated figures and small scale runs’. The work’s tight schematic organisation links it to Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Tricolore IV (1969) and to Henning Christiansen’s Perceptive Constructions (1964, the latter often cited as kick-starting new simplicity in Denmark), while its motoric repetitions would chug their way through many successors, perhaps most notably Buck’s Flos flórum (1985) for two pianos.

In the 1970s, Buck left Copenhagen for Lolland, an island south of Zealand in the Kattegat sea known for its tranquillity but not much visited by Denmark’s bourgeoisie. A new era began in both his life and his work, one characterised by spaciousness, peace, freedom and the idea of time, and shaped by the distinctive landscapes around his home. He became deeply interested in Buddhism and the 13th-century Zen master D¯ogen. His interest in Feldman, dating back to the 1960s, seemed to take on extra import in this new, less complicated but more intense existence, particularly when considering Buck’s reported rating of his American counterpart as ‘a guarantor of modern music’s true meaning as esoteric art, an art that addresses the spiritual in man’.

Buck was now interested in the inner truth of his existence, which is precisely what comes across in one of his most remarkable series of works, the four pieces titled Landscapes I-IV (1992-95), for large ensemble. These scores chart the changing of the seasons around the composer’s home on Lolland but in the introverted manner of Chinese landscape painting. ‘You may hear detailed and clearly outlined landscapes,’ writes the composer in his own programme note, ‘but also landscapes that are blurred, shrouded in mist and fog, in which contours are faint and dissolving.’ Some of the music’s meditative character is derived from a conscious means of strictly delimiting the notes and rhythmic patterns available to each piece. ‘It may be that the limited array of notes and rhythms has to do with a wish to go beyond everyday reality … in order to see the landscape – not as the multitude of details that of course also is – but as an entity, as oneness, as one landscape,’ writes Buck.

If Buck’s Landscapes were as much of the mind as of Lolland, his internalising of external stimuli would go one step further in the pivotal Flower Ornament Music (2001), whose title originates in the Sanskrit word avatamsaka. The piece was supposed to be a miniature written for an American new music group until its flute solo began to take on a life of its own and in each of the composer’s attempts to end the piece lay an obvious new beginning. Rarely in new music is the concept of entwined time and patience so apparent: the idea of an appointed time determined by the content of a gesture and the ordinance of its context, all seen through textures that adapt surely but patiently.

The recording of Flower Ornament Music by Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen places it in excellent company, including Fiori di ghiaccio (1999), a homage to Castiglioni (who had died three years previously), a work whose cleanliness, craft, elegance and very idea of coolness concealing some degree of joy or playfulness is emblematic of Buck. The work was written in response to a dream in which the composer drew back the curtains of a window to be confronted by a landscape shrouded in the pure white of snow. It could be described as a sibling work to Flower Ornament Music, only the flowers here are iced-up. Abrahamsen would approve.

Recommended Recordings

‘Sinfonietta Works’

Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen / Jesper Nordin

Dacapo (A/16)

This album comprises [Untitled] (2010), Flower Ornament Music (2001), Fiori di ghiaccio (1999), and A Tree (1996), the last a work that says much about Buck and his voice as it presents a meditation on the tree as both an object and a growth concept. Hypnotic performances all round.

‘Landscapes’

Danish Chamber Players / Svend Aaquist Johansen

Dacapo

This 1995 recording of Buck’s Lolland ‘four seasons’, aka Landscapes I-IV, holds up well. These pieces are inextricable from the composer’s retreat into rural life from the 1970s which had a profound effect on his music.

Estampie

Wood’N’Flutes

Dacapo

Set down in 2006 as part of an album of previously unrecorded recorder repertoire, Buck’s mesmerising Estampie (2005) reworks music found in the English keyboard source the Robertsbridge Codex (1360), culminating in a third movement that dances itself into a trance, as if to evoke the effect that compulsive, perpetual rhythm can have on a person.