Da jeg var barn (2026)
(When I was a Child)

The work moves between memory and play, between something immediately recognisable and something rooted in the distant past. In the music, familiar and lesser-known Danish children’s songs and singing games are interwoven with traces of Renaissance vocal polyphony. The juxtaposition of the title When I Was a Child and this very old music is intended with a touch of humour, but it also points to something more fundamental: that children’s imagination, play and ways of thinking reach across time.

Although times change, something in the world of the child remains recognisable. In play, chants, repetition, role reversal and sudden shifts between seriousness and freedom, one finds a mode of thought that is perhaps not so far removed from that encountered in early music. The work revolves around this affinity – between the children’s song and polyphonic writing, between the familiar and the historical, between the childlike and the rigorously structured.

Phillip Faber, 2026