korenveld met kraaien

program notes:
Korenveld met kraaien (Wheat field with crows) was one of the last works Vincent van Gogh painted. He wrote that he had made a point of expressing sadness, later adding "extreme loneliness" (de la solitude extrême). I tried to capture the scene, his state of mind, the creative frenzy.

two pigeons trying to write a requiem

program notes:
This piece is about the work of Henk Cornelissen, graphic designer, teacher and autonomous artist. His fascination with numbers, smells, structures and coincidence has determined an iron work rhythm, bordering on manic.
The title usefully refers to one of his works, two pigeons trying to build a nest.

ghoti ii (fish fingers)

program notes:
I took an older piece for violin and prepared piano, ghoti, out of the fridge. I took the best parts and made something new with it.

es dröhnt

program notes:
I intended to make a piece for harpsichord and live electronics, where the electronic part of the music would be generated real-time from what was played on the harpsichord. Unfortunately, the amount of processing needed to transform the sound of this baroque instrument into some sort of techno resulted (at the time) in too much latency (the time the computer needs to process it all, which results in some delay of the sound).
Because timing is sort of important I opted for the second best thing: real-time when possible, pre-mixed sounds when needed.
But no noise generators, no synthesizers, no samples. The result is 100% harpsichord, with and without processing.

Watch it on YouTube

I am a strange loop

program notes:
Composed for Orlando and his custom built keyboard microtonal percussion instrument: the ORPH. It consists of nine aluminum bars, microtonally tuned to 660, 680, 707, 1123, 1152, 1184, 1288, 1402 & 1447 Hz, and three gongs of different sizes. The aim was to explore the possibilities of this rather limited material in combination with some nice polyrhythms.
The (realtime) video was made with TouchDesigner.

Watch it on YouTube

MASS

program notes:
MASS is a mass for physics, a tribute to Iannis Xenakis, who was born 100 years ago in 2022. At the same time, the piece can also be seen as a piece about Bruckner and a counterweight to Bruckner 4, which will be played after the break at the premiere of MASS.
Each of the six parts of the mass is "replaced" by a physical quantity or unit and this physical concept is translated into music. However, B is not really used much as a quantity or unit in physics, so Benedict can simply remain Benedict. It is also a nice metaphor for the Missing Knowledge.

MASS
Kyrie: K (Kelvin (temperature)/ but also Boltzmann's constant)
Gloria: G (gravity)
Credo: c (speed of light)
Sanctus: S (entropy)
Benedictus: Benedictus
Agnus Dei: a (acceleration)

Besides the "physical" mass, I also wanted to give the piece a dramatic charge by having the piano function as Anton Bruckner himself, and the orchestra as his demons. A kind of biophony, so to speak. Bruckner suffered from insecurity and depression, and was said to be compulsive about counting (so the piano takes on a minimal character). A strangely pious child of Phrygian Gates and Keqrops. The faithful Bruckner with his cathedrals of sound and the sound masses of Xenakis: MASS.

tar pit

new work

pulse code modulation

program notes:
As soon as I learned that the air pressure of each pipe of some of the organs in the Orgelpark could be controlled individually, I just had to do something with this. Each pipe is out of tune and slowly an otherworldy sound emerges.

koi dust

program notes:
I wrote this piece right after Mirovoi, which, at the time, had almost the same instrumentation. So in Koi Dust (an anagram of Studio K) I tried to take the music in a different direction.

Watch it on YouTube

mesoproterozoïcum

program notes:
In Mesoproterozoic I summarize about 600,000,000 years in just over 20 minutes. It was a busy time then: the supercontinent Columbia broke up, the new supercontinent Rodinia was formed and evolution encountered something new: sexual reproduction. That must have been a bit awkward, those first years.
Antimetric figures unfold slowly and inhospitably.

mirovoi

program notes:
Once you create a supercontinent (which is usually not that often), all the land is stuck together. The logical consequence is that that land is surrounded by one large super ocean. In the case of Rodinia it was the super ocean Mirovoi. The piece Mirovoi was written for trio Rodinia.
It is a time-lapse of the eternal cycle of creation and destruction that shaped our planet. I revised it for Nieuw Amsterdams Peil.

devoon

ghoti

program notes:
Some tricky harmonics.
And things in the piano.

la tendre indifférence du monde

program notes:
The title comes from L'Etranger by Albert Camus but has nothing to do with the music, the animal needs a name and I thought it was a beautiful and appropriate title.

A harpsichord is a fairly difficult instrument to write for: you press a key, a string is plucked and you release the key. How hard or softly you press the key does not matter much, you only get more percussive "sound" if you really play hard, but the dynamics of the plucked string remains the same. So if you want to make the music a little louder, you basically just have to play more notes at the same time. There are also several layers of strings that can be turned on or off and can therefore also be combined. That is why the harpsichord also has two keyboards (manuals).

So what can you do with an instrument that you can only press and release?
You can play notes one after the other, then you get a melody, but I don't like that. So I went for several lines at the same time that I cut into vertical slices, as it were, and each chord is a slice of the musical sausage.

Furthermore, you can also leave a certain degree of freedom to the performer and this is done through tempo because time is the most fundamental aspect. When does the note start and when does it stop? As a result, the piece has a rather undulating character. Each wave the piece becomes more and more difficult to play, more and more viscous, it becomes more and more of a struggle for the performer to get through the notes.

hout karton papier en verf

program notes:
wood, cardboard, paper and paint is about the work and life of Jan Schoonhoven. Schoonhoven became known for his white reliefs: panels with regular surfaces and boxes, in endless variations. The piece is also about dance. The harpsichord, historically ideally suited as an instrument for dance music, also resembles a synthesizer. By stacking sounds (a primitive additive synthesis) you get - with some imagination - a sawtooth sound, especially with references to go by Moby and no good (start the dance) by the prodigy.

distortion

program notes:
For the concept of the piece, designer Florian de Visser and composer Janco Verduin looked at the family tree of the Hammond organ. Originally, it was developed as a cheap alternative to the pipe organ. Many registrations of the pipe organ refer to wind and brass instruments and in some organs even strings and percussion. In dɪstɔːʃən, the family tree got extended into the digital domain by adding a synthesizer which mimics the hammond organ. Throughout the piece the two Hammond organs circle around the ensemble, both in tuning as in timing, creating an abstract meta Leslie speaker (the traditional companion of the Hammond). The fabric of textures and sounds get torn apart by phase shifting and detuning, overtones grind: distortion.

In this piece the two Hammond organs circle around the ensemble, both in tuning as in timing, creating an abstract meta Leslie speaker (the traditional companion of the Hammond). The ensemble tries to stay on course while these two forces engulf them like gravitational waves. The fabric of textures and sounds get torn apart by phase shifting and detuning, overtones grind: distortion.

subspace anomaly

ZENTRALFLUGHAFEN

hout, papier en karton op paneel

program notes:
In 2015, Janco Verduin's "muurverf, papier en karton op paneel" won the international composition competition that reed quintet Calefax organizes every year. The theme of the competition was ‘Easy Pieces’. Muurverf, papier en karton op paneel was inspired by the monochromatic work of the Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven. The notes form chords that pass by in different constellations. This creates subtle color shifts and variations within the recurring chords. The composition is accompanied by a 3D animation made by Verduin himself: shapes that slowly transform, casting new shadows, creating an abstract play of shades.. It has become a mild piece for him, says Verduin: 'I wondered for whom it should be simple. For me, for the musicians, for the audience? I have opted for a limited number of notes. Every time I see a Schoonhoven in the Haags Gemeentemuseum, I am impressed again. It is simplicity without frills, the play of shadows falling over reliefs. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than it is.’

Jupiter's Pimple

program notes:
This was one of those pieces where I quickly had an idea of what it should be about: the red spot of the planet Jupiter. I have no idea why, but as soon as it occurred to me I knew I could do something with it. The piece starts slowly, calmly and openly, as if in space. Gradually you are drawn towards the planet by gravity and after descent you are crushed by the turbulence of the atmosphere under the great pressure. Not really a pleasant theme, but fascinating nonetheless. One of the preconditions for this assignment was that it had to include an element of improvisation. And although there are also moments in which musicians can simply do their thing (because they are fantastic improvisers), I also wanted to create circumstances that introduced a certain uncertainty into the structure of the composition itself. For example, in the first minutes the tempo is very vaguely defined: each bar the tempo changes thanks to indirect indications such as slower, a little slower, a lot slower, a little faster, etc. In this way the tempo wanders further and further from the initial value and the context changes of the parties.

hikikomori

program notes:
Hikikomori is total withdrawal from society and seeking extreme degrees of social isolation and confinement.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

program notes:
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is a 1768 oil-on-canvas painting by Joseph Wright of Derby. The painting depicts a natural philosopher, a forerunner of the modern scientist, recreating one of Robert Boyle's air pump experiments, in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. The group exhibits a variety of reactions, but for most of the audience scientific curiosity overcomes concern for the bird. The central figure looks out of the picture as if inviting the viewer's participation in the outcome.

kaleidophonia II

program notes:
Heleen Hulst and Gerard Bouwhuis asked me and Reza Namavar to jointly develop a plan for a program for their ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil. We were allowed to think about which instruments we would use, what the rest of the program would be and what we would take as the theme of the project. Because neither of us really like extra-musical principles, we decided to focus on an instrument. We briefly considered taking a cimbalom, but we soon decided on the barrel organ. In retrospect, not really a practical choice (an organ like that is very heavy, 1500 kg, and you can't just wheel it onto a stage, and the mood and even the tempo also fluctuated a bit), but it turned out to be a good choice because a barrel organ on a adding an ensemble simultaneously offered a lot of musical possibilities. If you look at what can be done with it, it turns out to actually be just a mechanical synthesizer. In my piece kaleidophonia II I contrast the organ with its mechanical perfection but also its strictness with the breathing, human and flexible ensemble. There is also a second theme: because the program was part of the AAA series of the Concertgebouw and the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ with the theme of Folk Music, I incorporated stylistic features from contemporary dance music (the folk music of the moment) in an abstract manner.

bokeh

program notes:
Bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image, caused by circles of confusion. In the piece each musician has four parts. One to be performed live, the others are prerecorded.
Each pair is situated in its own acoustical space and (pseudo)location, emulating depth of field and playing with blur.

88|11

program notes:
Bij niemand heul of bijstand vindt;
'k Zoek hen vergeefs, 'k moet eenzaam wenen;
Al mijn bekenden zijn verdwenen.>

spin|orbit

program notes:
Inspired by subatomic structures, I wrote this piece with extreme difficult polyrhythms for Orlando, just the way he liked it.

Ostinatosti.

program notes:
ostinato: a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch, from the Italian word for stubborn
tosti: a grilled ham cheese sandwich
In this piece I explore stubbornness

string quartet No.2

program notes:
In this piece for harp and percussion, parts where the musicians play together get alternated with parts where the musicians play ‘only’ at the same time. By means of antimetric patterns different tempos get suggested with subtle polyrhythmic layers as a result.

How to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away.

program notes:
Eight kenongs, slendro and pelog mixed.

alaskazalm

program notes:
There are pieces that, at the time of their premiere, feel unfinished. This was the case with both Branding and Syzygy. I already rewrote Branding once in 2010, but when the Utrecht Wind Ensemble approached me in early 2012 to perform it, I thought it was time to tackle the piece again. I put some scissors to it, added some new notes and adjusted the shape. I had already rewritten the Syzygy piece once and a segment that no longer fit in at the time now found its place in the revised Branding. The total now feels better balanced (although there is still something itchy, so who knows?). The title no longer felt appropriate so I called the new version Alaska Salmon. So, what is Alaska salmon? It's part Branding, part Syzygy and part New Notes. And it's not about Alaskan salmon. It's not really about anything. At least, not about anything other than music, about themselves. About finding a balance in rhythms, harmonies, form, timbres. The original version of Branding was written on behalf of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management.

kaleidophonia I

program notes:
A pattern of four notes that is repeated and slowly epands. Stacked multiple times, pulled through different harmonies and colours that swirl all around.

The dead hand of Plato

program notes:
A rabbit is a rabbit. At least, that's what we assume. According to Plato, a rabbit is only a shadow of the perfect idea rabbit. However, this essentialism conflicts quite a bit with our evolutionary ideas about rabbits (and other species). Rabbits were once less rabbit-esque than current generations of long-eared ones, and one day they will be again (provided we give them the chance to develop further). So when is a rabbit really a rabbit? How far back or forward do we have to go to tip the balance and give the animals an identity crisis? In his book 'The greatest show on earth' Richard Dawkins calls this The dead hand of Plato. When I read this I immediately had the title for my piece and an idea of what it should be about. Something that has fascinated me for some time is the question of what a composition is: the score or the sounding result? Does the beauty lie in the instructions for the players or in the experience of the listener? In my piece I confront the defined with the undefined, music as patterns of discrete sounds versus music as continuous sound. Idea versus reality.

onze

program notes:
As often with my music, I sketch around, looking for a way into a piece. And I mean a piece because beforehand conceptions of the music almost always get abandoned. When I found it, quite some work was deleted and the character of the music changed dramatically. With this change, the interpretation of the text changed as well. What would happen if the order of the twelve pieces got changed, but the texts stayed in the original order?

onhandig bloesemend

program notes:
Three pieces on poems by Ramsey Nasr.

like spinning plates

program notes:
A lot of trombones.
Watch it on YouTube

de meerval ontraadseld

program notes:
After many ideas, sketches, try-outs and mostly, after throwing away a lot, I found the entrance for this piece: a 20 voiced, rhythmical canon where each repeat is a minor second higher as the previous one. Swiftly such a mass of notes will result in a thick, upwards trail, starting in the lowest registers of the harmonium and the cello and ending high in the violins. This is the blueprint for the first six minutes of de meerval ontraadseld (the catfish unravelled), and indirectly, for the whole piece. The second half of the piece, patterns from the first half are recycled by the methods of granular synthesis. Slowly the music streams upwards, sidestepping from time to time, patterns are tasted again, sometimes partly, sometimes in different compounds, details get emphasized or tucked away.

three hypotheses concerning topology in Hilbert spaces

program notes:
Slowly changing patterns in pitch, articulation and rhythm form the basis of this trio. My first plan was to make a dynamic piece full of multiphonics and other extended techniques. As usual, it went in a completely different direction, for the best result I did not have to stick to rigid coalition agreements.

Toccatississimo & Hyperfugue

program notes:
Toccatississimo & Hyperfugue is a diptych for player/computer and computer. While the second part is the same in every performance (it should be, the premiere did not go as planned), the first part, Toccatississimo, is much more unpredictable in nature. The player alternates between two chords, where the chords are always free choices from a pattern of fingerings. Because one finger always remains stationary, the chords 'run' across the manual according to graphically indicated paths. Unfortunately we don't get to hear all the chords, the computer checks the registers and gradually lets some sounds through. The basis of Hyperfugue is a self-generating sequence where an element is the sum of the previous three intervals. This sequence is recursive: it repeats after 331 elements. Because it was written for the Fokker organ and there are 31 notes in an octave, if the sum exceeds 31, 31 is subtracted (modulo 31). The length of each note is the value of the interval with the next note, in eighths, at a tempo of quarters = 555. This string of notes is made into a cluster of 12 layers, with each line one fifth tone higher. Each layer starts a little later but is slightly compressed so also ends earlier. The ratios are 458:457:456:455:454:453:452:451:450:449:448:447. A quadruple canon was then made from this cluster string. This thick sausage of notes is then cut in half vertically in various places, with the registers changing or all notes being kept short.

ine weitere Äußerung von eine weitere Äußerung von eine kleine Übung in Erscheinungsformen und Zusammenhang

program notes:
This is a further elaboration of the string quartet 'Eine weitere Äußerung von eine kleine Übung in Erscheinungsformen und Zusammenhang', which in turn is an elaboration of the violin solo 'A small Übung in Erscheinungsformen und Zusammenhang'. It is a collection of miniatures, each in its own style but with a lot of connections.

4°K

program notes:
Originally written for clarinet quartet, this piece is essentially an exploration of harmony. The new coloring is in great contrast to the original version, which is much more homogeneous in composition. In the more active parts, a kind of musical chairs takes place: material for four instruments is alternated in different ways with five instruments. At first I always thought that the background noise of the universe was four degrees Kelvin, but then it turned out that it was even lower. Those four degrees are closer to the boiling point of Helium. Also fine.

nieuwBlauw

program notes:
To compose a piece that refers to blues learns one that there isn't one blues. Crossovers with all sorts of styles have already been made, chord progressions and licks have been turned inside out and upside down. So I went looking for the earliest blues recordings I could find and then I found the work Alan Lomax had done. His field recordings of hollers and prison songs, the so called chaing-gang songs, immediately caught my attention. Funny enough, the almost synchronous hits of axes and hammers influenced my piece as much as the sung parts in between them. Through the empty spaces that are marked by stubborn rattles in the low register, slow constructions drift by.

die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus

program notes:
I just like the title.

portret

program notes:
In Portret I made a musical portret of Rembrandt for the occasion of his 400th birthyear. But how does one translate fine arts into music? Because I direct, one-to-one translation is not possible I tried to transform several of Rembrandts painting techniques into composition techniques. The piece starts of with clear, sharp lines that slowly transform to free, rough gestures, a parallel with Rembrandts style. And just like he tried to give depth to his paintings I tried to create the illusion of depth by changing focus on different layers. These concepts do not determine the piece though, it is a fine point of departure but eventually the laws of music take over and follow their own logic. In the end a painting does not only say something about the object or person that is being portrayed, but also about the one is does the painting. So maybe this portret has become a self-portrait.

on time dilation and synchronicity I

program notes:
For the quartet Fc Jongbloed I was asked to write a piece with the subject time. I decided to reread Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality and so I found my focus: density and simultaneousness. The core of the piece are some contrapunctual lines, hidden in the harpsichord part (bars 37-38). The other parts are (rhythmical) retrogrades of different parts of phrases, each with different length, from the left and right hand part. Each voice goes through a harmonic scheme, everyone’s material is constantly in each other’s neighbourhood but hardly ever at the same time. Until here this was one of my most strict pieces I had ever written. But then I decided this little machine too had to be disrupted. Some bars or parts of bars were repeated or taken out. Often musicians are inclined to synchronise their parts and in this light, this piece is an obstacle course. Because of the rather complex rhythmical notation (in fact a sort of written out ritenuti and accelerandi) it is diffucult to find a common pulse. Sforzato’s pop up that often, but not always, sound at the same time. The musicians find each other around the middle of the piece but let go of the newfound synchronisation again. Roughly taken, the density decreases throughout the piece, spacetime keeps dilating. But also: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in sound.

hammer smashed phase

program notes:
What would it have sounded like if Morton Feldman had played in the American death metal band Cannibal Corpse? No idea, but it might have had similarities with Hammer Smashed Phase (after the big hit by Cannibal Corpse Hammer Smashed Face). The piece jumps around between stilled, diffuse textures and brutal thrashing. Canon based harmonies and references to several playing techniques from the heavy metal genre try to tie the blocks together.

pale

program notes:
Pale is an intro to another, now forgotten piece that got out of hand. Slow, empty and pale it is the basic material and at times one of my most melodic pieces

ei, a chamber opera

program notes:
A little opera about a women with an egg in a waiting chamber.
libretto by Simone de Jong

refraction

program notes:
'Refraction' was written for the Iordens viooldagen 2010. Although I was asked to write for the A category (children from 10-12) I also included a more difficult version for more advanced violin players. The easier version carries the subtitle Unbroken, the more difficult one Broken. The title refers to the fact that light (or more general, waves of any sort) changes speed when it passes from one medium to another. Think of how a stick looks broken when held in water. Both versions are written in a whole tone scale, but the more difficult one is transposed every beat a bit up or down by a certain pattern.

concerto for orchestra

program notes:
For this piece I decided to work with an 'archaic' composition technique called metre. I also aimed to write a piece that addressed all members of the orchestra, hence the subtitle. The form though, is not concerto like. Here I made hard cuts between different sections, like watching only the deleted scenes from a movie. The sections are related but information is sparse: the listener has to construct (or reconstruct) the underlying flow.
Second prize and audience prize at some Gaudeamus thingy.

pull the plug

program notes:
An arranged marriage between early music and new music. Different habits, different customs, a different language. What I certainly did not want to make was a piece pseudo-baroque. I happened to live a few centuries later and the music from the baroque era is further away from me than Leeuwarden from Anna. But when no love is in play, a marriage of convenience can certainly work, because deep in the notes of my piece there's a strong connection with Händels 'Nel petto sento un certo ardor'. From this passage I made a three part-reduction and of this passage a sevenfold canon, so in total 21 voices. To spice up this soup I've put Orpheus' theme through the mincer and added this. Ah, and off course the organ's lament. We keep hearing it dying again and again when we pull the plug.

eine kleine Übung in Erscheinungsformen und Zusammenhang

program notes:
Violin player Maartje Kraan asked me to write a piece for her Masters exam. For me, to write a solopiece is one of the more difficult things to compose and - because it was meant for her exams - I decided to make it a bit difficult for Maartje too. I did not want to write a nice long melody but something that I thought would better match (my idea of) her character. When I was writing sketches for the piece a group of notes kept pressing themselves on the foreground (those of the Vorspiel). Because I still did not have a clear idea of the form I decided to make a couple of variations of the Vorspiel and along the way I tried to explore the border of still being a variation. This has become the parts called Zwischenspiel. Each Zwischenspiel is connected by variations of a variation of the Vorspiel. The end result is a chain of different appearances where the listener is invited to look for the (different kinds of) connections.

this godless endeavour

program notes:
How to compose two opposing forces when one is static, rough and harsh like the surface of a concrete wall, while the other is organic, delicate and developing? And how to handle an off-balance form? Can I balance such a form in new ways without using the old techniques? And how to handle a subject as rhythm when music almost always has rhythm as a parameter? I was searching for several ways to focus on different interpretations of rhythm and see if I could avoid the modern-music-cliché of just writing parallel patterns of different lengths (five against seven against nine etc) or making it so complex that the details get lost in the blur.

the canary and the crow

program notes:
This was written during the Vocal-lab project during my first year on the conservatoire.

fysica voor dichters

program notes:
On a poem by René Huigen. It won the VSB prize for beginning composers :)