Shortly after the turn of the millennium, around 2001, two experiences in my life collided so violently that it radically changed me as a composer. The music I have written since then bears the mark of this. I will tell you the story and give a few striking examples.
Starting on the outside
I was a young and inexperienced pianist and drummer who improvised in small jazz ensembles. In addition, in the late 1970s, while studying musicology, I immediately immersed myself in the fiery world of what was then known as ‘new music’ and became involved in the rapidly developing landscape of ‘ensembles for new music’ in the Netherlands. Of course, I had always played classical repertoire, but mainly from the (very) late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. I had neglected classical chamber music. I was surrounded by pop musicians and jazz musicians—no violinists or cellists.
What my children taught me
Years later, my young children, both highly talented musicians, were intensively involved in classical chamber music. Listening to them, thinking along with them, and initially playing along a little, I became deeply involved in the active practice of chamber music from Haydn to, say, Dvorak and Brahms. I experienced what I had previously only experienced at the best moments of the best jazz musicians. An intense communication in the music, a joint search for musical interpretation and how to convey that to the audience.
Here, they “spoke” in tones and melodies. The music called for an individual voice with a personal sound; at the same time, it was possible to create a group drama in tones with this small group that transcended the individual members.
Everything about this music-making was pretty much the opposite of what I’d heard all those years in composed “new music,” which I’d taught as a specialised teacher at the conservatory—and which I’d intuitively struggled with as a composer.
The new way of composing for new ensembles had once given me drive, idealism, and new musical intellectual challenges. Yet suddenly it all seemed futile and impersonal, especially because that music (certainly much of the post-war ‘avant-garde’) often turned (and often still turns) precisely against what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had produced in terms of formal sense and performance practice.
What new music once forgot (and often still forgets)
Instead of being reprehensible, that period of history seemed truly essential to me. What the ‘vanguard’ of new music had left behind, or forgotten, was still very much present in the music of Mozart and Mendelssohn, right up to Debussy and Ravel: an intimate and deeply considered connection with what I call ‘musical vernacular’, the spoken languages of music (with all the regional dialects that go with it). Put simply, anyone who knows what a song is can understand much of Beethoven’s symphonies.
I suddenly realised how much all this older music is stylised singing and, in most cases, stylised dancing. It suddenly became painfully clear to me how systematically these skills had been excluded from the latest art music and that I was now helping my children develop talents and sensibilities that I had always suppressed in myself.
A big void
The void I suddenly experienced was enormous. Not only the musical void, but also, to use a big word, the spiritual void. High and low culture, but above all spiritual and religious culture, had always made sacred and poetic thoughts singable, not only for lonely singers and their listening audience, but precisely for singing together by like-minded people; the rhythms of the dances at the courts and farmsteads had been the rhythms of secular melodies and lyrics that had wandered through the centuries, through the homes and the minds of many, many people in search of beauty and entertainment…
I had often sought inspiration in my own contemporary culture of song and dance: pop music and jazz, but these suddenly seemed to me to be merely the tip of a cultural iceberg that had sunk into the increasingly lukewarm waters of the late twentieth century.
They also lacked the spiritual power (I can’t think of a better term) and the spiritual charge of all that music that had been sung in the liturgy for centuries, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, and which had inspired and fascinated composers for centuries.
The break with those origins suddenly felt overwhelming.
Grafting new beauty onto old
Filling that void, even slightly, did not seem like a task I could accomplish on my own. I therefore decided to seek support and embrace what I had missed so much: that enormous melodic heritage from which European art music originally sprang.
The idea seemed simple: graft compositions directly onto historical melodic examples as an audible part of the composition. I would then be able to teach myself the possibilities of this art form that was lost to me, and perhaps musicians and listeners would also benefit from it.
I did not look for historical examples in already composed polyphonic music, but in what composers such as Machaut, Sweelinck, Josquin, Clemens non Papa, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Martin, and all the others had already used—the (vocal) melodies that were readily available in folk music or other popular songs and in liturgical music: Gregorian chant and the hymns of the Reformation.
The first piece I composed in this way (in 2002) was a short, two-part piano quintet, the Tandernaken quintet, for the young musicians of the Margess International summer course and masterclass in Zuoz, Switzerland. I took as my starting points the beautiful melodies of T’ Andernaken op den Rhijn (from the Antwerp Songbook, written around 1440), Sweelinck’s melody Ich fuer mich ueber Rheine (around 1600), and the Ecce Pulchra, a prose from St. Gallen from around 900. To these three completely different modes, I added my own, again very different melodies.
That quintet proved to be a new beginning, the source of a quest for melodic new music in which classical forms and old melodies always play a role.
Melodies and their histories
The melodies for this piano quintet had a tangible beauty for me (the Ecce Pulchra, with lyrics Da nobis eterna regina florida, ubi cantemus omnes Alleluia, still brings tears to my eyes), but they also fit into a simple travel story: that I, as a Lowlander, had travelled to Switzerland for this piece.
That’s how I discovered that, in addition to the personal aspect, the historical story behind a melody can also serve as musical inspiration for a piece.
I later wrote the string quartet Moravian Souls (2015) for the Škampa Quartet; a ‘Moravian’ piece—not based on the Moravian folk music they had often used in previous projects, but on that of the Moravian or Hernhutter church. As a child, I visited the Hernhutters’ church with my parents – they are descended from the very first Protestants from Moravia, inspired by Jan Hus. Moravian Souls begins with the first hymn of that community from 1457 and, via a melody attributed to Jan Hus, moves on to an 18th-century song by Count von Zinzendorf (who brought the Hernhutters to the Netherlands) in an Afro-Caribbean style (in keeping with the spread of the Moravians throughout the then-colonised world).
The violin sonata Deep River (2013) has a completely different history. This spiritual is well known in Henry Thacker Burleigh’s 1917 version, but the first version dates back to before 1877 and appeared in a publication by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the choir of the first African American university. In the history of African American culture, this is a kind of ‘old music’. A disputed theory even dates it earlier, around 1820. In any case, my piece is one big variation on motifs from that oldest melody, with the totally different rhythmic final episode as an important element of the last movement. I couldn’t resist the temptation to commemorate that connection with a hint of more recent African-American jazz.
Melodies and their religious significance
The historical story behind these two pieces also has a very strong religious aspect.
Moravian Souls opens with a Moravian hymn from 1457 that sings of the solemn joy of gathering in church. At the time, this was accompanied by great social strife (the early Reformation). Nevertheless, the title of the first movement, Battaglia, does not refer to that struggle but to the spiritual theme of the other hymn that recurs throughout that movement (Hernhutter melody 130, from 1566): the struggle between body and spirit.
The quartet is pretty much my instrumental, symbolic version of what the Hernhutters called a Singstunde, a religious gathering where people sing songs around a theme instead of listening to a sermon.
In the spiritual Deep River, every Christian believer will recognise the desire to reach the promised land after a deep earthly valley of tears—that gospel feast … where all is peace. The four-movement Deep River sonata for violin and piano (2016) elaborates that feeling of longing instrumentally for every fragment of the melody, reflecting on it in the manner of the classical sonata, but with the means of the twenty-first century.
An example where the text plays an important role is Seven Divine Meditations for SATB choir. […] Seven of John Donne’s Divine Sonnets are each paired with a melody from the rhymed penitential psalms of the Geneva Psalter. This creates a kind of religious madrigal which, in a multitude of styles, gives voice to the poignant theology captured in Donne’s poetry, always literally against the backdrop of the psalm melodies that are so familiar and inevitably meaningful to Protestants.
The greatest purely instrumental example of ‘grafting’ onto religious music and musically ‘thinking through’ its religious meaning is the Super Suite (2016) for clarinet and string quartet. Each of the seven movements is grafted onto one or more hymns from both the Gregorian and Protestant traditions—sometimes, where the powerful and meaningful Gregorian melody was adopted by the Reformation, they coincide. Thus, movement II of the Super Suite: Super ‘Mitten wir im Leben sind’ is a paraphrase of or about Martin Luther’s famous hymn, which is itself based on the 11th-century antiphon Media vita in morte sumus.
The Super Suite is an almost encyclopaedic piece due to the many ways in which melodies are composed ‘upon’ and ‘out of’ and freely fantasised upon. This explains the word ‘Super’ in the title, which not only stands for the modern superlative but also has the original meaning of the word ‘upon’ – both ‘upon the music’ and ‘upon the religious meaning’.
Why use old music? – I the religious experience
For me, the great beauty of the oldest religious music is inextricably linked to the religious experience, in the Christian sense.
I don’t really know of any recent music that has been able to take on that spiritual function, classical or otherwise. Often, music that sounds spiritual only takes on the appearance of holiness. (I consider spiritual and gospel music to be exceptions to this, even though they do not originate from the ‘old’ church.)
Christian spirituality itself has also virtually disappeared from our public life. The cultural heritage of the church is no longer widely shared. For me as a Christian, using that heritage creatively is one of the most personal ways to publicly express and bear witness to the religious urge and emotions I attach to this music and to the need I feel to keep alive and give new meaning to the connection with the historical church and its heritage in the arts.
In this way, I try to connect composing, which in non-ritual/concert music is a purely subjective aesthetic activity, to the religious experience that the Christian heritage gives me—and thus add my own two cents to the soli Deo gloria.
Why use old music? – II the historical experience
Just as an old melody with religious lyrics evokes a religious experience in me, so too can an old melody, when I hear, read, or sing it, give me something that I would call (after Johan Huizinga) a “historical experience.” It is the feeling that I am ‘here’ and that, while the melody is actually ‘there’, part of a bygone world, of ‘another time’, I can still participate in it by singing that melody – that is, by experiencing it physically. The historical experience is precisely a physical experience in music.
As Johan Huizinga says: “This contact with the past, accompanied by a complete conviction of authenticity and truth, can be evoked by a line from a charter or a chronicle, by a coloured ink drawing, a few notes from an old song…”(Johan Huizinga, De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis, Verzamelde Werken 7 pp. 71-72)
Such an ‘old melody’ contains frozen heritage, tangible history. In church music, it is the lyrics, the theology, the ritual; in secular music, it is the poetry, the dance movements, and the festive rituals that once belonged to it. The singers were nobles, peasants, merchants, or sailors—and their music bears their physical stamp, is a tangible expression of their amorous mores, their love of ornament or, conversely, of directness.
A largely vanished world of ideas seems to become tangible in it….
Is such a historical, physical experience based solely on extensive historical knowledge?
That is highly questionable.
For me (and I suspect for most listeners), the historical experience of old melodies lies precisely in what is musically most superficial and at the same time artistically most profound and most useful. Call it ‘the melody itself’, or the ‘form’, ‘structure’, ‘syntax’, ‘language’ or ‘style’ of a melody.
The Gregorian chant from the 9th century sounds, and sings, completely ‘different’ from music from the 21st century. The musical language of the trouvères is different from that of Coldplay or Taylor Swift. 1000 years of history, 1000 years of difference in human experiences have contributed to this.
Is this “historical experience” inevitable? That depends on the listener and their musical sensitivity.
Huizinga says about this: “The reader meets the writer halfway; it is his response to the writer’s call.”
Historical experience and historical perspective
Huizinga’s ‘historical experience’ motivated his description of the past. In doing so, I believe the historian describes what he ‘experiences historically’ inevitably from his own contemporary perspective – from everything he wonders about and thinks he knows that stands between him and that ‘other time’.
My situation as a composer is very similar.
When I sing a melody and imagine the ‘content’ or ‘meaning’ of that melody, and all the information surrounding it, I am inevitably confronted with the present—in which that story and all those meanings are ‘past tense.’ That ‘perceived distance’ is essential to the historical experience.
Historical experience therefore definitely does not consist of the feeling (the imagination) of ‘being back’ in history.
In my compositions, I seek connections with other periods through all the music that lies in between—and which I experience as ‘different.’ With musical experiences from the present as an indispensable starting point, a kind of ‘historical perspective’ emerges, consisting of elements from intervening musical styles.
The form of that perspective, the choice of those elements, is artistic and entirely subjective.
Historical experience, historical confrontation, historical association
Sometimes confrontational associations arise.
In the Super Suite, David’s lament in the Geneva version of Psalm 13 becomes a blues-like, Duke Ellington-esque piece (part V – Planctus super ‘Jusques à quand’ (Ps. 13). The ‘intro’ to this blues is the opening of the Geneva Psalm 13; the blues itself is played on a baroque, ostinato, chromatic ‘lamento’ bass. That ‘blues perspective’ is historically far-fetched, but understandable given the lament. It is more difficult to understand why the hymn Ave Maris Stella in part II-Super Stella initially has almost klezmer-like features (although I now suddenly see the Guiding Star in the light of the Pillar of Fire that the Jewish people followed for so long…).
The musical associations and confrontations in Songs of War and Peace (2020) for recorder and string quartet are based on well-known historical facts, using traditional melodies that originate from or are related to the Thirty Years’ War. The first movement, Battaglia, draws on ‘Merck toch hoe sterck’ from the harmony of the Folia d’Espagna and the 17th-century song Es geht wohl zu der Sommerzeit; while the middle section draws on the centuries-old history of the war, using the ancient Bohemian Rorate coeli and a Hussite hymn from the 15th century.
These two medieval melodies also reappear in the fifth movement, the Elegia. Here you can hear the 19th-century retrospective on the Thirty Years’ War, expressed in the form of echoes of music by Dvorak and, quite literally, in the harmony of Brahms’ setting of O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf.
The instrumental line-up of this game of historical associations is in itself a rather rare confrontation: the recorder, an instrument from the period of the Thirty Years’ War, meets the string quartet, the ensemble of the 19th-century retrospective, full of melancholy and idealisation.
The ‘Classical style’: how to fill a barrel full of differences
The above may explain why, since writing the Tandernaken Quintet, I have always used ‘classical’ forms and stylistic principles as a guide. By this I mean forms with recognizable thematic and harmonic connections (as in the classical ‘sonata’ form), in which clearly recognizable motifs (phrases, themes, melodies) are used in a concertante (dialogical) and dramatic manner.
There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, I am looking for a ‘large’ (larger) form that transcends the single, monophonic melody of the historical example and expands it into a larger, polyphonic whole.
Secondly, a ‘historical perspective’ may result in stark contrasts (arising from my own associations or from an underlying historical narrative). Contrast arises in any case when you incorporate a short monophonic song, contrary to its nature, into (or into) a polyphonic work of much greater length. The clash of styles and stylistic periods is inherent in this type of composition.
The Classical style that emerged in the mid-18th century seems designed to highlight contrasts and play with them in two ways: the contrasts become part of a larger, dramatic narrative (the connection between comic opera and the Classical style has often been pointed out) and, on a smaller scale, they give shape to the polyphonic interplay of melody and accompaniment.
This shape resembles a house that accommodates various styles and contrasts across different periods while maintaining a dramatic cohesion.
I am not particularly interested in the classical form because of its historical character. I do not feel the need to strictly apply the ‘sonata form’ or to revive the associated harmonic structures. However, it is the most convincing historical example of what I am looking for: the melodic and harmonic clarity with which musical ‘vernacular’ is handled in instrumental music, so that the ‘old melody’ is done justice.
The not-so-classic time travel
In the Tandernaken quintet, this immediately sounded less than ‘classical’, but what unfolds is very recognisable.In the Tandernaken quintet, this immediately sounded less than ‘classical’, but what unfolds is very recognisable.
A short, rhythmically lively opening theme (a slightly ironic nod to the classical ‘sonata style’) is followed by a contrasting lyrical theme. Then comes a ‘development’ in which the 17th-century song T’Andernaken op den Rhijn appears. The driving, syncopated triplets that emerged in the opening theme are transformed here into a funk-like accompaniment. Eventually, the rhythmic drive, and with it the stylistic contrast, gradually dissolves as the lyrical theme and the old song gain the upper hand in the struggle, but at the same time increasingly exhibit a late-Romantic kind of floating rhythm with accompanying chromatic harmony. In short, a sonata-like stylistic contrast is immediately undone instead of being ‘developed’ further, nor is it repeated in a ‘reprise’ as in the classical sonata.
The second part is rondo-like. It opens with a contrasting three-part episode: a gentle melody (with a softly pulsating, gently percussive accompaniment), followed by a hymn-like, solemn Gregorian motif from the Sankt Gallen (ca. 900) Ecce pulchra (with the characteristic ‘floating’ alternation of two- and three-part rhythms without a strong pulse, but with sometimes powerful, ‘modern’ accents), which forms a prelude to a nuevo tango-like version of Sweelinck’s melody Ich fuer mich ueber Rheine. This episode with three totally different themes (a-b-c) frames a kind of development (D), in which the funk-like tango rhythm evokes ever-new motifs from the lyrical, rhythmically supple Sankt Gallen chant. A mirrored and shortened return of the first episode (c-b-a) creates a kind of symmetrical rondo (abc-D-c’b’a’) or ‘bridge form’, clearly recognisable by the contrast, the blending, and the return of stylistic episodes.
It strikes me (only now) that instead of ‘classical’ symmetry, I often allow the ‘old melody’ to gradually take up more space or, after fragments of it, suddenly appear in its entirety. Sometimes this is subtle—those unfamiliar with the Gregorian chant Ecce pulchra will not notice the introduction of new phrases in the second movement of the quintet. The displacement of rhythm by lyricism in the first movement, on the other hand, is very clear.
In its most extreme form, such a piece develops toward its historical starting point—toward the “old melody,” which was both the starting point and the ultimate goal. Such an “asymmetrical” form is not very “classical” (although the development toward the dénouement must be clear, and the effect of such a historical catharsis is “classical” in a broader sense).
An example is Super Stella, part 2 of the Super Suite. The syncopated and funky klezmer-like music increasingly takes on lyrical forms and returns to them, until finally the hymn sounds like a clearly recognizable source of what has gone before.
Another typical example is La Volta, the second of the three Dance Capriccios. It uses the 13th-century troubadour song Volez vous que je vous chant, embedded in the 6/8 meter of the old leap dance, the volta. The perspective on the volta rhythm shifts continuously from 20th-century tango-like to 19th-century waltz-like, back to that of the 17th-century volta, but as a whole the melody gradually moves towards the even older ‘old song’ (which also has descent as its subject: the strange young lady, adorned with flowers, leaves, and fur, claims to be descended from the nightingale – ‘Li rossignous est mon père‘).
In this way, the historical character of the styles and borrowings used determines the course of the piece—its form.
Historical experiences as musical ideas
It is probably thanks to comic opera and the theory of affects (thank you, Baroque!) that we can think of ‘musical characters’. Since then, we have been able to hear people and their feelings in music – they can talk to each other, disagree and change their minds. Entanglements between them are conceivable – and then the mythos emerges, the ‘plot’, a story of encounters, development and climax, leading to a dénouement and perhaps ‘catharsis’.
That was what I heard in classical and romantic chamber music—which came to me indirectly because my children were studying it—and that was what I missed in the music at the end of the last millennium, however exciting the waterfalls of sound and theatrical sonic gestures may have seemed at first. Detached from the melodic tradition, they lacked the essence of musical sound, that of tones that always transcend their own sound, their source, their medium. Thus, they lacked the melodic coherence that I consider crucial for a memorable musical drama. It is striking that the more recent minimalist music that does use ‘tones’ does not remind me of a melodic tradition either, nor does it evoke a dramatic story (both of which are probably deliberate omissions). One style (sonic art, avant-garde) feels like an almost visual theatre of separate moments, the other (minimalism, neoclassical) feels like an atmospheric experience of time standing still.
Digging and searching in the history of melody, I came across the importance of the Classical style. Hopefully, this text makes it clear that I interpret this broadly. This style is dramatically important and, as I said, is for me the most convincing example of melodic and harmonic comprehensibility.
The mythos (plot) of opera, and, probably following in its footsteps, of classical and romantic chamber music and much symphonic music, often points toward psychology—toward a story in music with and about human “characters” who thus determine the musical idea.
While digging for melodic beauty, I found musical ‘historical characters’, stylistic examples that evoke a typical historical experience, are often part of a historical narrative, and therefore carry a burden of meaning. The ‘historical perspective’, the choice of those historical stylistic elements, the relationship between them and how they are arranged in time determines the musical idea – the artistic play with selected musical ‘historical experiences’.
But behind this, of course, lies a psychology—a guess as to the feelings and values from that vast and often frightening European history that have been enshrined in melodic heritage.
‘Classic’ also means ‘according to an ideal’. So please note: ‘historical experience’ is not the experience of an (old, lost) ideal, but of a historical reality. My ideal is not to ‘go back’ to (or bring back) history, but to look around in it, discover historical lines and meanings, ask myself how my musical present relates to it, and let each work be a record of that.
Perhaps new forms can be found for such historical stories—dramatically clear and using musical “vernaculars”—as they are, were, or will be.
(Met dank aan de (soms zeer jonge) musici voor wie deze stukken geschreven werden: het Škampa Kwartet, het Bennewitz Kwartet en Harry Imre Dijkstra, het Ruysdael Kwartet en Peter Holtslag, Rosanne Philippens, Merel Junge, Mei-Ing Nieuwland, Geneviève Verhagen, Yuri van Nieuwkerk, die ooit het Tandernaken Kwintet vormden, en het voormalige duo Rosanne Philippens en Yuri van Nieuwkerk)
