Hans Abrahamsen

Hans Abrahamsen (born December 23, 1952) is a Danish composer.

Born in Copenhagen, Abrahamsen first got to know music through playing the French horn at school. He went on to study music theory at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.Anders Beyer, "Abrahamsen, Hans", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001). His music is inspired by his mentors Per Nørgård and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, who were two of his composition teachers, and in the 1980s he became close both personally and stylistically (partly through another period of study) to György Ligeti.

Abrahamsen is considered to have been part of a trend called the "New Simplicity", which arose in the mid-1960s as a reaction against the complexity and perceived aridity of the Central European avant-garde. Abrahamsen’s first works conformed to the tenets of this movement, which was a Danish reaction against the complexity emanating from central Europe, particularly the circle around the Darmstadt School. For Abrahamsen this meant adopting an almost naive simplicity of expression, as in his orchestral piece Skum ("Foam", 1970). His style soon altered and developed, at first through a personal dialogue with Romanticism (audible in...
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