Dansere Om Jupiter - Score

Per Nørgård DANCERS AROUND JUPITER. Saxophone quartet: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones.

I: 'Shadow Dancer', dedicated to Axel Borup-Jørgensen, as my birthday greeting on the composer's 70th birthday22.11.94

II: 'Jupiter Waves', dedicated to Dr. Jeffrey D. Thompson

III: 'Day Dancer', dedicated to the dancer and choreographer Marie Lalander, as a homage: Marie wrote the line which inspired me for the title:'Woman, oh you day dancer'.

The title of the whole work is immediately intelligible if one compares the individual titles of the outer movements with the title of the middle movement.

Axel Borup-Jørgensen andMarieLalander could be said to be in rotation around Jupiter in the following sense:

Axel's music has a 'shadow dancing' side, which can most clearly be heard in his works for harpsichord and double-bass - or in his workfor organ. But his music has also a light side, which can be heard in 'Marin' or in 'Nordic Summer Pastorale'.

Marie's dance and choreography contain both ecstatic forces of light and expressions of the suppressed and dark.

The music of the middle movement on the other hand is in all ways inspired by the actual acoustic ion waves, that constantly arise through the collision of the sun wind with Jupiter's magnet field (registered by VoyagerII, 1989). This movement is dedicated to Dr Jeffrey D. Thompson who made these NASA registrations publicly available in the CD-series

'NASA Voyager Space Sounds'.

Per Nørgård