Music like hans abrahamsen

Hans Abrahamsen (born 23 December 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. 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, 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 works such as the orchestral Nacht und Trompeten -"Night and Trumpets", 1981)), and later—after a hiatus of around a decade in which he composed little and released nothing—into something entirely personal, combining a modernist stringency and economy into a larger individual musical universe. Notable works since his return to composition include a piano concerto written for his wife Anne-Marie Abildskov, and the extended chamber work Schnee ("Snow"), where the paring-down of material appears to reach a new extreme. Schnee has also received attention for its construction from both arch-shaped and straight-line processes that unfold over the work's duration, and for innovative details such as its inline, composed retuning intervals.