Gunnar Berg’s Gaffky’s consists of 10 movements, each consisting of 10 smaller parts. The piece represents the climax in Gunnar Berg’s endeavours to create music in which structure and content is one and the same.
When the piece was performed by Béatrice Berg in 1964, the Danish newspaper Politiken wrote: “That 100 pieces that are so ascetic and so much alike in terms of style and timbre manages to keep the unabated attention of the audience for two hours is an absolute rarity. The work of a master.”
Find more information about the performance 14 August in Edinburgh here >>
Bacteria and music
The title of the piece holds a rather unusual reference. Gunnar Berg named the piece after the German bacteriologist Georg Theodor August Gaffky (1859-1918) the man behind the Gaffky scale - a numeric rating for the classification of bacteria. The idea of microscopic germs unfolding in various categories is a basic thought behind the ten movements of Gaffky’s.
Gaffky's in poetry
The Danish poet Jørgen Wassilefsky recently published a collection of poems directly inspired by Gunnar Berg's Gaffky's. The book received a great review by the magazine Publimus >>