A fall from the perfect ground (2004-7), is an extraordinarily delicate piece of music which is perhaps most of all about beautiful musical sounds and sparkling effects composed over the surfaces of the sounds.
The music is in fact not all that easy to get a handle on. What is happening is extremely detailed, and as a whole the music offers a rather unmanageable amount of innovative, impressive, fascinating sounds. The music doesn’t have so many melodies, rhythms or harmonic progressions in the normal sense, nor does the form reveal itself in the course of the first few listenings.
Instead the music proceeds as series of sonorous eruptions; at first very cautious and flickering – almost reserved – then more rhythmically, only to reach a new, almost static low point. The ending, on the other hand, is very striking, with a little, extremely telling clarinet theme, and is in fact quite distinctive in the context. As the only example in the piece the characteristic passage is repeated eight times with complete regularity before the music stops.
The detail has been lovingly cultivated to an extent that makes the music unreadable for the layman. Everywhere Winther Christensen varies the modes of playing and assaults the otherwise normal instruments with new technical ideas. If the acoustic sound was not so distinct and warm-blooded one might be misled into thinking that this was a piece of electronically manipulated music.
Despite all this it must not be thought that this is difficult music. Although one’s mind can easily sense thatA fall from the perfect ground is hard to play and has taken a very long time to compose, the music is sensual and simple with the many beautiful sounds that well forth one after another.
Text by Henrik Friis