A new edition of the book “The Ecstatic Outsider” has been published by Engstrøm & Sødring. The book is about the legendary composer Rued Langgaard, his life and music.
The book looks at Rued Langgaard as one of the 20th century’s most distinctive and significant Danish artists. It is a journey through an eminently bright musician’s life, whose tragic course was unfolded on the basis of the Copenhagen music scene he grew up in and the artistic wars that influenced society at the time. The book analyses Langgaard’s own considerations concerning his art and his role as a composer as well as identifying the many contexts and paradoxes in the composer’s life’s work.
The author, Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, is originally a music librarian and has worked in the music publishing business and with the communication of Danish music both nationally and internationally for many years. Today he works as a consultant at the Danish Arts Agency under the Ministry of Culture. In 1991 he published a comprehensive list of Langgaard’s works and two years later, the first biography about the composer. The past 12 years he has worked as the general editor of the great collective series of Rued Langgaard’s works, the Rued Langgaard Edition.
If you are interested in knowing more about Rued Langgaard before you buy the book, please go to our feature about the Rued Langgaard Edition or read a shorter version of his biography here.