One of the pleasures of this late summer has been spending quite a few evenings with friends at Cinemateket’s Music Film Festival in Copenhagen. And, without really planning it, I seem to have ended up watching a small history of the music that formed me. David Byrne’s American Utopia, filmed by Spike Lee, captures Byrne’s extraordinary Broadway production: Talking Heads songs, his solo work and a group of musicians moving freely around an almost empty stage. It is both concert and choreography, intellectually constructed and irresistibly physical. One Hand Clapping is something quite different: Paul McCartney and Wings in Abbey Road Studios in 1974, shortly after Band on the Run, rehearsing and performing while cameras happen to be present. There is something wonderfully unpolished about seeing McCartney simply working as a musician. One of the first LPs I owned was by Paul McCartney and Wings, so some of this music reaches rather far back into my own biography. Then there was Amazing Grace. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin returned to the gospel music of her childhood and recorded the album live over two nights in a church in Los Angeles, accompanied by Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir. Sydney Pollack filmed it, but technical problems meant that the footage remained unseen for decades. It is almost overwhelming. Franklin does not merely perform gospel. For 90 minutes one understands where a very large part of soul, R&B and rock came from. And there, rather wonderfully, is Mick Jagger in the audience, with Charlie Watts, completely absorbed by what he is hearing. The Brazilian double bill reached even further back and sideways. Pierre Barouh’s remarkable Saravah, filmed in Rio in 1969, wanders almost casually through Brazilian musical culture with Baden Powell as a guide, encountering figures including Pixinguinha, João da Baiana, Maria Bethânia and Paulinho da Viola. It is particularly fascinating in the way it makes the African foundations of samba and Brazilian popular music visible and audible. Ana Rieper’s Nothing Like Before – The Music of Clube da Esquina moves forward a few years to one of my favourite musical worlds: Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Beto Guedes, Toninho Horta, Wagner Tiso and the extraordinary 1972 album Clube da Esquina. Milton Nascimento’s voice is the soundtrack to a considerable part of my late teenage years. What struck me after seeing all these films is how misleading our musical categories can be. The young musicians around Clube da Esquina adored the Beatles. Lô Borges and Beto Guedes were genuine Beatlemaniacs. Yet their music combined that influence with bossa nova, jazz, Brazilian traditions and the African and Latin American currents running through Nascimento’s music. David Byrne and Talking Heads travelled the other way across many of the same bridges. Talking Heads drew heavily on African polyrhythms and Fela Kuti, while Byrne became an obsessive champion of Brazilian music. When he later founded Luaka Bop and compiled his Brazil Classics collections, Milton Nascimento was naturally among the artists he included. And behind much of it lies the immense African musical diaspora: in Brazilian samba and MPB, in Fela’s Afrobeat, in American blues, soul and gospel. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones absorbed Black American music; Brazilian musicians absorbed the Beatles; Byrne absorbed both Brazil and Africa. And in Amazing Grace, Mick Jagger is suddenly standing in a Los Angeles church in 1972, listening spellbound to Aretha Franklin take the music back towards one of its sources. When I first heard all this music as a teenager, these were separate records sitting in different parts of the collection. Half a century later, the connections between them seem almost more interesting than the differences. Perhaps genres are mostly something we invented to organise record shops. Music itself has always been rather less obedient.

09/14/2026 10:51:04

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• One of the pleasures of this late summer has been spending quite a few evenings with friends at Cinemateket’s Music Film Festival in Copenhagen. And, without really planning it, I seem to have ended up watching a small history of the music that formed me. David Byrne’s American Utopia, filmed by Spike Lee, captures Byrne’s extraordinary Broadway production: Talking Heads songs, his solo work and a group of musicians moving freely around an almost empty stage. It is both concert and choreography, intellectually constructed and irresistibly physical. One Hand Clapping is something quite different: Paul McCartney and Wings in Abbey Road Studios in 1974, shortly after Band on the Run, rehearsing and performing while cameras happen to be present. There is something wonderfully unpolished about seeing McCartney simply working as a musician. One of the first LPs I owned was by Paul McCartney and Wings, so some of this music reaches rather far back into my own biography. Then there was Amazing Grace. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin returned to the gospel music of her childhood and recorded the album live over two nights in a church in Los Angeles, accompanied by Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir. Sydney Pollack filmed it, but technical problems meant that the footage remained unseen for decades. It is almost overwhelming. Franklin does not merely perform gospel. For 90 minutes one understands where a very large part of soul, R&B and rock came from. And there, rather wonderfully, is Mick Jagger in the audience, with Charlie Watts, completely absorbed by what he is hearing. The Brazilian double bill reached even further back and sideways. Pierre Barouh’s remarkable Saravah, filmed in Rio in 1969, wanders almost casually through Brazilian musical culture with Baden Powell as a guide, encountering figures including Pixinguinha, João da Baiana, Maria Bethânia and Paulinho da Viola. It is particularly fascinating in the way it makes the African foundations of samba and Brazilian popular music visible and audible. Ana Rieper’s Nothing Like Before – The Music of Clube da Esquina moves forward a few years to one of my favourite musical worlds: Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Beto Guedes, Toninho Horta, Wagner Tiso and the extraordinary 1972 album Clube da Esquina. Milton Nascimento’s voice is the soundtrack to a considerable part of my late teenage years. What struck me after seeing all these films is how misleading our musical categories can be. The young musicians around Clube da Esquina adored the Beatles. Lô Borges and Beto Guedes were genuine Beatlemaniacs. Yet their music combined that influence with bossa nova, jazz, Brazilian traditions and the African and Latin American currents running through Nascimento’s music. David Byrne and Talking Heads travelled the other way across many of the same bridges. Talking Heads drew heavily on African polyrhythms and Fela Kuti, while Byrne became an obsessive champion of Brazilian music. When he later founded Luaka Bop and compiled his Brazil Classics collections, Milton Nascimento was naturally among the artists he included. And behind much of it lies the immense African musical diaspora: in Brazilian samba and MPB, in Fela’s Afrobeat, in American blues, soul and gospel. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones absorbed Black American music; Brazilian musicians absorbed the Beatles; Byrne absorbed both Brazil and Africa. And in Amazing Grace, Mick Jagger is suddenly standing in a Los Angeles church in 1972, listening spellbound to Aretha Franklin take the music back towards one of its sources. When I first heard all this music as a teenager, these were separate records sitting in different parts of the collection. Half a century later, the connections between them seem almost more interesting than the differences. Perhaps genres are mostly something we invented to organise record shops. Music itself has always been rather less obedient. (09/14/2026 10:51:04)
• Last week I went to AFUK on Vesterbro to see Copenhagen Opera Festival’s The Ring – Forever Hot. I went in very much disposed to like it. I am, like so many others, a great admirer of Wagner’s operas. But certainly not because I think they should be preserved under glass. Quite the opposite. Der Ring des Nibelungen is one of those inexhaustible works that each generation should be allowed to drag into its own time. Power, greed, love, betrayal, family, law, nature and the corruption that comes with the pursuit of absolute power hardly became obsolete with the 19th century. The great modern productions of the Ring have demonstrated exactly this. Patrice Chéreau’s famous centenary production in Bayreuth in 1976 is perhaps the obvious example: a radical reinterpretation can reveal things in a classic rather than diminish it. But there is also such a thing as too much interpretation. The Ring – Forever Hot threw almost everything into the pot: circus, audience participation, inflatable fantasy creatures, sausages and sauerkraut, schlager, rock, electronic soundscapes and a general determination not to leave too many theatrical devices unused. Some of it was amusing. Some of it was clever. Collectively, however, it became too much for me. My objection was not that it was irreverent. Wagner can survive irreverence perfectly well. The problem was that the production seemed to confuse freedom with accumulation. At some point I felt that The Ring itself was disappearing behind all the ideas about what one might do with The Ring. There is a difference between opening up a classic and dismantling it until almost anything can be projected onto the remaining fragments. The singing was another matter. The principal voices were genuinely impressive, and there was very little I could find fault with vocally. At moments they cut through all the surrounding theatrical mayhem and reminded me why I had come. Interestingly, the critics were sharply divided. Some shared something close to my exhaustion; others absolutely loved the anarchic total-theatre approach. And perhaps that disagreement tells us something important about the production. Wagner made the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, central to his artistic programme. The paradox for me was that this particular attempt at totality ended up as accumulation: so much was added that too little space remained for Wagner. How far can one reinterpret a great work before the interpretation itself becomes the main event? (08/25/2026 09:51:16)
• Saturday evening turned into a rather wonderful Spanish detour through Copenhagen. Jeanne was fully occupied with running Fluid Festival, so Vilhelm was “forced” to take her place and accompany me. There are, admittedly, harder duties for a son. We began at Hauser Bar & Vin at Hauser Plads, where Amir Kuckovic from Botiga had organised a small vermouth pop-up. Botiga specialises in bringing Catalan wines, vermouth and other products to Denmark, and among the vermouths we tasted was De Muller Iris from Reus. Iris belongs to the old tradition of Vermut de Reus and is made from an infusion of a remarkable number of Mediterranean herbs, roots and aromatic plants. It was a useful reminder that vermouth deserves to be treated as a drink in its own right rather than merely as something sacrificed anonymously to a cocktail shaker. From there we continued to Refshaleøen for a preview dinner at the new Spanish restaurant Hostia, organised as a Hostia × Noma Projects Taste Buds event. The menu was unmistakably Spanish, but without feeling like an exercise in culinary nostalgia. We began with salmorejo, followed by a gilda of anchovy, piparra and olive, then cecina, pan con tomate, sobrasada with honey and a tomato salad with yeast vinaigrette. Then came potatoes with smoked fish, grilled portobello mushrooms with spiced butter sauce and perhaps the most emphatically Spanish dish of the evening: chuleta from an eight-year-old Rubia Gallega cow. And then came a small detail that tied the evening together rather beautifully. The first dessert was melon with vermouth, and the vermouth was the very same De Muller Iris that Amir had served us at the Botiga pop-up earlier in the evening. First in the glass at Hauser Bar & Vin, a few hours later returning on the plate at Hostia. We finished with tocino de cielo, served with egg-yolk custard, cream and truffle. The wines were equally memorable. Among them was a 2004 Viña Ardanza Reserva from La Rioja Alta, followed towards the end by Matusalem VORS from González Byass, an extraordinary old Cream Sherry aged for more than 30 years. What I particularly liked about the evening was the relationship between tradition and experimentation. The dishes were built around very recognisable Spanish ingredients and culinary ideas: salmorejo, gilda, cecina, sobrasada, Rubia Gallega, vermouth and sherry. Yet the meal never seemed concerned with simply recreating Spain in Copenhagen. Instead, Spanish tradition became material for interpretation. Perhaps that is one reason why Spanish cooking fits so well into Copenhagen’s contemporary restaurant culture. Both take ingredients and traditions seriously, but neither needs to treat tradition as something frozen in time. And there are considerably worse ways of spending an evening with one’s son than drinking vermouth, eating Spanish food and sharing an old Rioja. (08/17/2026 18:42:34)
• There are not many reasons to look forward to the end of the summer holidays. But one of them is that, as August moves into its second half, Copenhagen’s galleries begin to wake up again. Today I just managed to make it to the opening of Gianna Surangkanjanajai’s new exhibition at Christian Andersen Gallery. It runs from 14 August to 19 September. Surangkanjanajai was born in Cologne in 1991 and now lives in New York. Her practice is mainly sculptural, but more broadly she seems interested in what happens when material, space and physical action are allowed to determine the form of a work, rather than simply execute an image already conceived by the artist. In recent exhibitions, liquids, industrial paint, acrylic structures, gravity and movement have all played important roles. What caught me today, however, were the images on the walls. At first glance, they are almost uneventful: surfaces, spaces, traces, bits of architecture or material. But something seems to have disappeared from them. They look less like photographs of something than photographs of where something has been. The result is strangely ghostlike. There is an obvious temptation with photography to think that its essential function is to preserve presence: this person was here, this building existed, this happened. Surangkanjanajai’s images seem to turn that logic around. What becomes visible is absence itself. You start looking for the missing object, event or person, even though you cannot know whether anything was ever really there. That impression fits rather well with Surangkanjanajai’s wider practice. Her work repeatedly treats form as something provisional, produced by actions and forces and capable of changing again. One of her recent works is, quite literally, titled *Removed*. Perhaps that is why these apparently very quiet images stay in the mind. They offer remarkably little, yet make you search for something that is no longer there. A good beginning to the autumn gallery season. (08/14/2026 20:47:39)
• Jeanne and I spent part of today at Ingolfs Kaffebar on Amager celebrating the publication of a new book by a member of our extended family, Julia Maria Gieysztor Bertelsen. Her new novel, Det Store År (The Great Year), has just been published by Tredje September. The novel centres on Nikola, a young woman living with her husband in an old Copenhagen apartment who finds herself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to keep pace with the great ticking clock of the world. She retreats into books, hides in a wardrobe and even seeks refuge in the sewers. But the novel does not remain there. Another strand follows Nikola’s uncle to an isolated sanatorium in the Polish mountains, where he is recovering from an illness called “Verdenssygen”, the sickness of the world. And in another time, an elderly writer appears almost as a ghost from the future. The publisher describes the book as a modern Bildungsroman about being a woman in the 2020s: about love and difficult relationships, family histories, privilege, patriarchy, capitalism and, ultimately, the difficult business of escaping oneself. I was very taken with Julia’s first novel, Koktebel, published in 2020. It was an unusual and experimental book, dealing among other things with tourism, exoticism and relations of power. So I was particularly curious when I encountered an excerpt from the new work in the literary journal Trappe Tusind last year. Trappe Tusind is one of those valuable small literary journals where established and emerging writers can appear next to criticism, translation and literary scholarship. Now the fragment has become a book. There is something rather satisfying about first encountering a text while it is still on its way into the world, and then, some time later, standing with the completed book in your hands. And even better when the author happens to be family. I am looking forward to seeing what happened between the fragment I read and the finished novel. And, as the photograph shows, Julia was already at work turning copies into individual objects through the ancient analogue technology known as handwriting. (08/14/2026 20:27:24)
• A week on Bornholm turned out to contain rather more than sea, rocks and long walks. Jeanne and I spent a wonderfully slow week on Denmark’s “Sunshine Island” in the second half of July, visiting friends in different parts of Bornholm and spending as much time as possible outdoors. Bornholm remains one of those rather extraordinary parts of Denmark where the landscape seems to have forgotten that Denmark is supposed to be flat. Granite cliffs, forests and the Baltic Sea make it feel quite unlike almost anywhere else in the country. One of our walks took us to Randkløve Skår, one of Bornholm’s most remarkable geological formations: a narrow fissure cutting some 14 metres down through the granite towards the sea. It is an impressive place, but also strangely peaceful once you have climbed around the rocks and simply sit looking out over the Baltic. And then there was the music. At Gæstgiveren in Allinge we managed to catch APHACA in concert. Apparently, they are currently one of Denmark’s most successful young bands, with a sold-out Parken concert ahead of them later this year. This information had somehow completely escaped me. I may actually have been the only person at Gæstgiveren who had never knowingly heard an APHACA song before, let alone knew who they were. The rest of the audience certainly seemed considerably better informed. There is something rather enjoyable about discovering music that way. No reviews, no Spotify recommendation, no algorithm telling you that because you listened to X, you will probably enjoy Y. You simply stand in a crowded garden on Bornholm while four young musicians start playing and discover for yourself why everybody else appears to know the words. I liked them. Perhaps ignorance is occasionally an underrated way of discovering things. (08/09/2026 21:08:41)
• Returning to Ribe after a few years also meant returning to some of the people who, in very different ways, have become part of the city. One is Hans Adolph Brorson, one of the great Danish hymn writers. Brorson had deep ties to Ribe. He had attended Ribe Cathedral School as a young man, returned to the city in 1737 as cathedral provost, and became Bishop of Ribe in 1741, remaining so until his death in 1764. During his years in Ribe he lived for a period at Taarnborg in Puggaardsgade, a remarkable Renaissance house that today serves as a centre for literature and cultural history. Brorson belongs, with Kingo and Grundtvig, to that extraordinary Danish tradition in which theology, poetry and communal singing became almost inseparable. His hymns were deeply marked by Pietism, but many have long since escaped their original theological context and become part of a wider Danish cultural memory. He was not, strictly speaking, a professional poet. He was a clergyman who used poetry for preaching, contemplation and devotion. When I was last in Ribe a couple of years ago, we visited several places connected with Brorson. This time Taarnborg had acquired another inhabitant. In the courtyard now stands a two-metre-high bronze portrait of the writer and art historian Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, created by the sculptor Hein Heinsen, who also made the striking Ansgar monument beside Ribe Cathedral. The statue has had a slightly complicated history, appropriately enough for a monument to Hans Edvard. Nørregård-Nielsen himself was apparently far from enthusiastic when Hein Heinsen first proposed making a statue of him. He thought such things should be left to posterity and reportedly disliked the prospect of encountering a “stone-dead” version of himself in public. He did, however, see a preliminary version before his death in 2023 and seems to have become somewhat more reconciled to the idea. There was another obstacle after his death. Esbjerg Municipality declined to erect the statue in public space. Taarnborg therefore took matters into its own hands and placed it in the courtyard, where Nørregård-Nielsen had often sat, smoked and thought. It was unveiled there in September 2024. I rather like that solution. Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen was, of course, one of Denmark’s most important art historians, for many years the central figure at the Ny Carlsberg Foundation, and an enormously prolific writer on Danish art and cultural history. But that is not primarily how I remember him. To me he was one of my parents’ friends. And later, as I grew older, he also became the author of a series of books that I have greatly enjoyed reading: Mands minde (1999), Riber ret (2001), Noget nær (2004) and Som sagt (2008). He called them not so much memoirs as “portraits of a time”. They move between childhood and provincial Denmark, Ribe, family, education, friendship, art and the peculiar accidents through which a life takes shape. Riber ret has a special connection to this place. It deals with his years at Ribe Cathedral School and helped bring him a much wider readership. Perhaps that is why the statue seems particularly at home here. Taarnborg now connects two writers separated by almost three centuries: Brorson, whose words became part of Denmark’s collective memory through hymns sung by generations, and Nørregård-Nielsen, who spent so much of his life recovering the people, places, paintings and memories from which Danish cultural history is made. Monuments are strange things. They freeze people into bronze just as memory does almost the opposite: it keeps changing them. For me, the bronze figure in Taarnborg will therefore never primarily be the former director of the Ny Carlsberg Foundation or the celebrated art historian. It will still be Hans Edvard, my parents’ friend, whose books I later came to know in an entirely different way. And perhaps that is not such a bad form of monument after all. (08/07/2026 18:49:46)
• I have a surprisingly close connection to Ribe, considering how rarely I have actually been there. I think I have visited the city perhaps five or six times in my life. Yet part of my family history is quite literally buried there. At the cemetery by Ribe Cathedral lie my grandparents, Esther and Martin Villiam Grønbæk, and my uncle Vilhelm Hincheli Grønbæk. My grandfather, Martin Villiam Grønbæk, was a theologian and scholar of the psychology of religion. He served as stiftsprovst in Ribe from 1944 and as domprovst of Ribe Cathedral from 1958 until 1966. I was named after him. Beside my grandparents lies their son, my uncle Vilhelm Hincheli Grønbæk. Born in 1928, he entered military aviation and died in Canada in August 1952 during flight training. He was only 24 years old. My eldest son is named Vilhelm after him. There is something peculiar about names passed down through a family. As a child, a name is simply your name. Only much later do you begin to understand that it may carry stories, expectations, losses and people you never had the chance to know. Standing at these graves in Ribe, I was therefore looking at more than family history. There was a line running from Martin to Martin, and from Vilhelm to Vilhelm, across generations that almost never met. The inscriptions on the graves make the people behind the names feel strangely present. On my grandfather’s grave is a verse from Isaiah 54:10: “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken.” The Danish inscription reads: “Om også bjergene viger, om også højene rokkes, min kærlighed viger ej fra dig.” It is a striking choice for a grave. The verse speaks of constancy precisely in the face of what seems impossible: even mountains may move, but love remains. On Vilhelm’s grave are words spoken by Jesus before Pontius Pilate in John 18:37: “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” In Danish: “Hver den, som er af sandheden, hører min røst.” Standing there, the two verses almost seem to speak across the graves. One is about love surviving what appears immovable; the other about truth and the obligation to listen for it. Whether they were chosen deliberately to sum up something about the lives of the two men, or simply as expressions of faith, they have now become part of how they are remembered. And perhaps that is also what names do. We tend to think of identity as something we create ourselves. Much of it undoubtedly is. But we also inherit names, places, stories and losses long before we are old enough to understand them. Martin to Martin. Vilhelm to Vilhelm. I rarely come to Ribe. Yet perhaps this is one of those places to which one belongs without ever really having lived there. Sometimes geography, like names, is inherited. (08/07/2026 18:12:28)
• A long weekend can contain more geography than the calendar suggests. Jeanne and I took a short trip to Southern Jutland and the south-western corner of Denmark. We went to look at a property in Ribe, visit some friends at their summer house on Fanø, and along the way managed to spend time in both Tønder and Sønderborg. I also got to do something that has increasingly become one of my favourite ways of getting to know a place: running through it. In Sønderborg, I ran 8.19 kilometres, much of it along the water. In Tønder, almost exactly eight kilometres through the town and out towards the open landscape around it. Runkeeper can tell me the distance, the time, the pace and the exact route. What it cannot record is the sea air, the silence, the transition from town to countryside, or the particular sense of place that only emerges when you are not looking at it through a car window, but moving through it step by step. Tønder, Ribe, Sønderborg and Fanø are very different places. Yet they share a strong sense of geography. The water, the wind, the open spaces, the old town centres and the proximity to the border are not just background. They have helped shape these places and the rhythm of life in them. Seen from Copenhagen, Denmark can sometimes feel like a very small country. But once you move through it, you are reminded how large the differences really are. Not necessarily in kilometres, but in history, architecture, landscape and pace. We went there to look at a property and visit friends. But as so often with small journeys, the places in between gave the trip much of its character: an old street, a ferry, a conversation, a view across the water and a couple of good runs. The digital map shows where I have been. But it is only when you run the route that the place really begins to reveal itself. (08/07/2026 17:49:56)
• From Copenhagen to Berlin. The other day, Jeanne, Vilhelm and I said goodbye to Jens before he left Copenhagen for Berlin. He moved away from home about six months ago, so this is not quite the classic parental moment of a child leaving the nest. That particular transition has already happened. This time, the move is from one city and one independent life to another. Jens will spend the autumn and spring semesters at Bard College Berlin, where he is starting the first year of their BA in Economics, Politics and Social Thought. It sounds like a fascinating combination of subjects, and Berlin is surely one of the better European cities in which to study the complicated relationship between economics, politics, ideas and society. It will be exciting to follow his life there from Copenhagen. Although perhaps not entirely from Copenhagen: Berlin is conveniently close, so Jeanne, Vilhelm and I will obviously have to visit him a couple of times before next summer. Purely to monitor his academic progress, naturally. :-) (08/07/2026 17:36:08)

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