AX on Music Theory Print

Axel Borup-Jørgensen

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Axel Borup-Jørgensen (22 November 1924 – 15 October 2012) was a Danish composer. He was born in Hjørring in Denmark, but grew up in Sweden. He died in Birkerød. He studied piano at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. As a composer, apart from studies in instrumentation with Poul Schierbeck and Jørgen Jersild, he is self-taught. He emerged on the international spotlight when his Nordisk Sommerpastorale, Op. 51 (Nordic Summer Pastoral, 1964) won first prize in the competition for a short orchestral work held by Denmarks Radio in 1965. Borup-Jørgensen was one of the first Danish composers to go to the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (1959 and 1962), but he never composed serial music. While the avant-garde of the sixties exerted a strong influence on his sound world, he always followed his own intuition and obeyed his extraordinary sense of organizing sound combined with a passionate, almost mystical regard for nature. Nevertheless, his encounter with Ligeti’s early orchestral works and the works of the Swedish composer Bo Nilsson left traces in his output from the 1960s, primarily in the orchestral work Marin (‘Marine’) op.60 (1963–70), a large symphonic suite that includes 44 i

Axel Christensen

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Axel Waldemar Christensen (March 23, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was an American composer, arranger, publisher, pianist and music instructor. He was the founder of the Christensen School of Popular Music, under which he published various instruction books about the playing of syncopated music. The school enrolled upwards of 500,000 students in its numerous branches across the United States, making it one of the first and most successful examples of standardizing the instruction of popular music. The school also published the music magazine ‘Christensen Ragtime Review’. His formal attire and preference for grand pianos gave him the vaudeville title ‘Czar of Ragtime’. Life and career Axel Christensen was born in 1881 in Chicago, Illinois to Danish parents Charles and Mary Christensen. Playing classical music from an early age, he would first delve into the popular ragtime music in his teenage years. He would marry Reine Annette Swanson in 1903, a marriage that would last until his death. They had one child, Carle Christensen, in 1909. In 1902, Christensen made his first publication, a ragtime arrangement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. The following year, he opened the Christensen