Niels Rosing-Schow

Niels Rosing-Schow found his voice in France after schooling in Denmark. His sensual, suggestive music is rooted in his belief that ‘harmony and sonority are the same thing’, rendered with a distinctly Danish clear-headedness and a wider Nordic allegiance to nature’s guidelines.

He studied at Copenhagen University and the Royal Danish Academy of Music. But it was on a study scholarship in France that Rosing-Schow had his musical epiphany. Under the influence of Iannis Xenakis, he started to develop a spectral style in which instrumental timbre and colour would carry as much structural import as traditional harmony.

Rather than trample on his lyrical instincts, his new thinking transformed them. He developed a more exploitative view of his own material and started to look to nature as a guide. He honed a process-based technique that lends many of his scores the feeling of unfolding sculptures or blossoming plants, viewed with a certain objectivity but leaving a distinct residue.

The same concept led the composer into a fascination with time and metamorphosis, apparent in the series Ritus (1990) and the trilogy Spectre du temps (2004), Empreintes du temps (2006) and Peinture du temps (2004), dedicated to Gérard Grisey. Beauty and clarity remain overwhelming characteristics of Rosing-Schow’s music, even when it homes-in on a technical objective.