Although Utah has a relatively rich music scene, Mogens Mogensen feels that there is something lacking — a significant presence of Scandinavian music.
There's a Carl Nielsen Society in Great Britain, and a similar organization in France, but in Utah, most people don't even know who Carl Nielsen is.
If Mogensen had his way, all that would change.
Mogensen knows and has a deep love for Scandinavian music, particularly that of composer Carl Nielsen. Perhaps it stems from sharing the lovely Danish isle of Funen as a birthplace with Nielsen — and Hans Christian Andersen, too.
"Usually, I say that we are three similar guys coming from the same area," said Mogensen, "but I'm the only one not getting into the headlines."
Mogensen grew up listening to his father as he traveled around the region playing folk music — which was also how Nielsen grew up. "That kind of folk music, which I grew up with, was actually unchanged from the time of Carl Nielsen's youth, 75 years before. So much of what he brings into his music touches my heart."
When Mogensen was 10, his piano teacher gave him a book of Nielsen's childhood memories. "Many, many years later, as we lived in Switzerland, I found that Carl Nielsen book and I began reading it. Several times I was crying, and I thought — hey, these are good memories from my own childhood."
He wanted his own children to read the book, but since the family had moved to German-speaking Switzerland when the children were young, they could not read the Danish text. So he began translating the book into German.
"That was actually the beginning," Mogensen said, "because as I finished that work, I couldn't just leave it that way, not knowing what happened to Carl Nielsen after he left the military and went to study music in Copenhagen." So he began to research Nielsen's life.
Mogensen spent seven years and a great deal of money, traveling more than 250,000 miles throughout Europe, to collect historic documents and pictures and getting as much information as possible to eventually publish a seven-volume biography of the composer. "I had to put in a lot of money, and I didn't get it back by publishing the books, but that was not the purpose, either.
"But my effort to make Carl Nielsen a little more known in the world was to start somewhere, and that was with the German-produced biography of him."
Mogensen literally published the work himself in 1992, thanks to a print shop he owned at the time.
Nine years ago, Mogensen found a like-minded friend in Dorrit Matson, when a mutual friend arranged an informal meeting between the two during Mogensen's layover at JFK Airport in New York. At the time, Matson was struggling to get the New York Scandia Symphony off the ground. "We talked about her struggles with promoting Scandinavian music (in New York).
"At that time, she absolutely didn't have any economic background, so she had to deal with amateur musicians and try to find the best in New York."
Now, he says, the Scandia Symphony has a cultural presence in New York and is recognized as an institution of importance, with sponsors, including the city of New York. Mogensen himself serves on the symphony's board of directors.
Although Mogensen loves all Scandinavian music, he has a particular affinity for Nielsen's music, and as such has centered most of his efforts around specifically promoting that. He said that although some of Nielsen's music may seem dry on the surface, the more one listens to it, the more one discovers in it. "I know that some musicologists, world-known, that have put his music beside J.S. Bach and Mozart, (Nielsen) being the third one in that row," said Mogensen.
A printer by trade, Mogensen himself has long been an avid music-lover. In October 1993, Mogensen and his wife, Heidi, sold everything they had in Switzerland — which included two homes and two businesses — to move to Utah so that they could audition for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
After nine years with the choir, they have retired but remain active with two Salt Lake print shops they own, Printing Impressions and Printxpress.
Although Mogensen has made efforts of his own to promote Scandinavian music in Salt Lake City, he feels his efforts have been largely frustrated. He said that when he has approached local musical groups about performing Nielsen's works, "mostly the doors have been closed very fast."
Mogensen has, however, had the opportunity of lecturing about Nielsen at Brigham Young University and Abravanel Hall (in conjunction with a Utah Symphony performance of Nielsen's Symphony No. 4).
What it comes down to, he says, is people being willing to see outside the box, musically speaking. "Until 200 years ago," Mogensen said, "people in Europe thought there was only their world, and they could not imagine how it would be outside their community. They married a girl in their community and didn't go from one parish to another, because they were a strange people over there, and you never knew how they were. It is actually the same with music."
He said that he considers people like that to be, in one sense, poor. "They don't know anything else and just accept where they are standing."
E-mail: rcline@desnews.com