Karl Clausen

Karl Søren Clausen (15 August 1904 - 5 December 1972) was a Danish musicologist, pianist, conductor and composer. As a young, talented pianist, he studied piano with Roger Henrichsen. In 1928, he took an MA degree from the University of Copenhagen, with German as major and Music and later Danish as minors. He worked as a high school teacher, first at Rungsted Statsskole 1928-35 and then at Østre Borgerdyd Gymnasium 1935-63. Along with teaching, he studied music theory with Hakon Andersen, and was music teacher and choir conductor at Danmarks Lærerhøjskole 1941-63. In 1963, he became a lecturer with the Musicological Department at Aarhus University, where he led the archive Sanghistorisk Arkiv.^[1]

Composer

As a composer, he was inspired by the New Objectivity of the 1920s. In 1938, he received a scholarship, Det anckerske Legat, and spent the following year in Paris, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud.

Notable works

• Klokken (1934) (school opera)
• Tema med Variationer (1936) (for orchestra)
• Vor sol er bleven kold (1937?) (song with lyrics by Johannes V. Jensen)
• Blæserkvintet (1939) (wind quintet)
• Fløjtekoncert (1940) (flute concert)
• De mørke fugle fløj (1943) (song with lyrics by Otto Gelsted)

Musicologist

His main achievement, however, was his musicological work with song history. He established a large collection of song books, Karl Clausens sanghistoriske Samling, consisting of close to 10,000 volumes and today located at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. In the 1950s and 60s, he made extensive collections on tape recorder of folk singing in south and west Jutland. Many of these recordings are available on the internet.^[2] Based on the recordings, he made a series of radio broadcasts, and published several articles about folk singing, as well as his principal work Dansk folkesang gennem 150 år,^[3] from 1958. During his years at Rungsted Statsskole, Karl Clausen had Faroese students, who introduced him to Faroese folk singing. During the 1950s he took several choirs on tours to the Faroe Islands, where he quickly became a very popular choir conductor and got to know several of the islands’ important folk singers. He was fascinated by the vigorous folk singing tradition of the Faroese, and 1967-72 went on several collection trips to the islands, where he collected several hundred examples of religious spiritual singing and Kingo-singing. After his death, his daughter Marianne Clausen (1947-2014) continued his work: in 1975 she published the volume Åndelig visesang på Færøerne,^[4] and in 2006, as part of her five-volume magnum opus on Faroese folk singing, the volume Andlig Vísuløg í Føroyum / Spiritual Songs in the Faroes,^[5] with music transcriptions of more than 200 of her father’s recordings.

References

• This article was initially translated from the Danish Wikipedia.