Jan Maegaard has had a dual career in Danish music: on the one hand a composer, on the other a professor of musicology. As a musicologist Maegaard enjoys international respect for his work on Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music. As a composer, inspired by the same music, he provoked the Danish musical establishment by being among the first to break with the imitation of Carl Nielsen. Maegaard attacked the inhibiting myths of Danish musical life and worked as a teacher, author and organizer for an understanding of the Modernism of the Vienna and Darmstadt schools. In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote his own twelve-tone and serialist works. In recent years his has developed a personal type of tonality, and musical idioms related to those of Late Romanticism. Jan Maegaard is an exquisite orchestrator, and among his more recent orchestral works we can mention a cello concerto and the violin concerto “Triptykon”. He has however mainly concentrated on chamber music as well as choral works, for example the large-scale work for male choir “Konkyliens Sang” (The Song of the Seashell).
