Berg, Gunnar (Johnsen)

Berg, Gunnar (Johnsen), Danish composer; b. St. Gallen (of Danish parents), Jan. 11, 1909; d. Bern, Aug. 25, 1989. He was taken to Denmark when he was 12 and began piano lessons. In 1936 he became a student in counterpoint of Jeppesen at the Copenhagen Cons. He later received training in piano from Koppel and Elisabeth Jürgens, and in theory from Herbert Rosenberg. In 1948 he went to Paris to study composition with Honegger at the École Normale de Musique, and he also received training in analysis from Messiaen. Upon his return to Denmark in 1958, he became active in avant-garde circles. Although he was awarded an annual grant by the Danish government in 1965 to pursue creative work, he became frustrated by the lack of acceptance of his music in Denmark and in 1980 he returned to Switzerland. Berg was the first Danish composer to write a serial composition in 1950 with his Suite for Cello. After 1958, he employed a sui generis serial technique in which each theme was a “cell” consisting of five to ten notes, a model suggested by the experiments in cellular biology of the German bacteriologist Georg Gaffky (1850–1918).