Time turns back for a moment – traditional and historical melodies in new music

Shortly after the turn of the century, around 2001, two experiences in my life collided in such a way as to change me profoundly as a composer.

Starting from the outside

As a young and inexperienced jazz pianist and drummer, I had been improvising in small jazz settings. Then (in addition to my musicology studies) I immediately plunged into the furnace of ‘new music’ and entered the rapidly developing landscape of ‘ensembles for new music’ in the Netherlands. Of course, I had always played the classical repertoire, but with a large part of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. I had neglected classical chamber music. I was surrounded by pop musicians, and jazz musicians – not violinists and cellists.

What my children taught me

Many years later. My young children, both very talented musicians, played chamber music intensively. Listening, thinking and, at first, sometimes playing along with them, I came into deep contact with the active practice of chamber music from Haydn to, say, Dvorak and Brahms. I experienced what I had only experienced in jazz musicians’ best moments. An intense communication in the music, a common search for conviction and how to convey it to the audience.

Here was ‘talking’ in the tones and melodies. The music demanded an individual voice with a personal sound; at the same time, with this small ensemble, it was possible to create a group drama in sound that transcended the individual members.

Everything about this music-making was almost diametrically opposed to what I had heard all those years in the ‘new music’ I had taught as a specialist teacher – and which I had intuitively struggled with as a composer.

New composing for new ensembles had certainly given me drive, idealism and new musical-intellectual challenges. But these suddenly seemed futile and impersonal, especially as this music (certainly that of much of the post-war ‘avant-garde’) often turned precisely against everything that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had produced in terms of sense of form and performance practice.

What new music once forgot (and often still forgets)

Far from being reprehensible, this period of history seemed essential to me. What the ‘avant-garde’ of new music had left behind or forgotten, the music of Mozart and Mendelssohn through to Debussy and Ravel certainly still possessed: an intimate and profound connection with what I call ‘everyday music’, the vernacular (with all its idioms). Put simply, if you know what a song is, you can understand many of Beethoven’s symphonies.

I suddenly became aware of the truism that all this early music is stylised singing and, more often than not, stylised dancing. It suddenly became painfully clear to me how these very skills had been systematically excluded from the latest art music, and that I was now helping my children to develop talents and sensibilities that I had all along put in the shade with myself.

A huge void

The void I suddenly experienced was huge. Not only the musical void but also, to use a big word, the spiritual void. High and low culture, but above all spiritual, religious culture, had always made thoughts singable in words, not only for solitary singers and their audiences but also for the communal singing of like-minded people; the rhythms of the dances in courts and farmsteads had been the rhythms of melodies and lyrics that had wandered through the centuries, through the homes and minds of many, many people in search of beauty and entertainment…

I had often sought inspiration from my own contemporary sung and danced culture: pop music and jazz. Still, these suddenly seemed to me to be at best the tip of a cultural iceberg sinking in the increasingly tepid waters of the late 20th century.

Moreover, they lacked the spiritual power (I can think of no better term) and spiritual charge of all the music sung in the liturgy for centuries, both Roman and Protestant, that had inspired and fascinated (and provided work for) composers throughout those centuries.

Liturgical monophonic music had sprouted into polyphony and thus became the material of every fibre of Western art music, not only of the voices but also of the counter-voices that formed their social environment, their partner and counterpart in the symbolic game of what is sometimes very one-sidedly called ‘tonal’ music, a word for what is, creatively speaking, a special case of all conceivable music that is memorable, singable and danceable.

The break with these origins was suddenly overwhelming.

Not being original: grafting new beauty onto old

Filling this gap did not seem like a task I could accomplish alone. So I decided to seek support and to embrace what I had missed so much: the vast melodic heritage from which European art music originally sprang.

The idea was simple: to graft compositions directly onto historical melodic examples as an audible part of the composition. I could then teach myself about the possibilities of this art that had been lost to me, and perhaps musicians and listeners would benefit as well.

I was not looking for these historical examples in existing polyphonic music, but in what composers like Machaut, Sweelinck, Josquin, Clemens non Papa, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Martin and all the others were already using – the melodies that were available in folk music or other popular songs, and in liturgical music: Gregorian chant and the hymns of the Protestant movement.

This choice immediately broke a crippling taboo of ‘new’ music that had always been mine too: not to be original.

Inspiration, confrontation

Such ‘grafting’ is definitely not imitation or stylistic composition.

I look to early music for inspiration. I look for ways to connect with it, and often for ways to confront it. In this way, early music can have a place in a new work in a myriad of ways.

The first piece I composed in this way (in 2002) was a short two-movement piano quintet for young participants in the Margess International summer course and masterclass in Zuoz, Switzerland. As starting points I chose the beautiful melodies of T’Andernaken op den Rhijn (from the Antwerp Liedboeck, written around 1440), Sweelinck’s melody Ich fuer mich ueber Rheine (around 1600) and an Ecce Pulchra from Sankt Gallen from around 900. These melodies are already very different, and I have added my own, again very different melodies. In the first movement, a rhythmic, ‘classical’ opening theme and a lyrical second theme; in the second movement, a gentle melody remotely inspired by the Egyptian singer Oum Khaltoum. The accompanying rhythms are radically different from early music, ranging from funk and ska to nuevo tango.

The combination of all these different types of music speaks for itself – even if you don’t know the tunes and don’t know anything about their historical background or their lyrics.

Still, I think that historical information is very important.

Stories from history

I chose the melodies for this piano quintet because of their great beauty (the Ecce Pulchra with the lyrics ‘Da nobis eterna regina florida, ubi cantemus omnes Alleluia’ still brings tears to my eyes) and because of a simple travel story: as a lowlander, I went to Switzerland to write this piece.

But a piece can also harbour a non-personal history. For the Skampa Quartet, I wrote the string quartet Moravian Souls; a ‘Moravian’ piece – not with the Moravian folk music they have included in previous projects, but from my own experience of the Moravian or Hernhutter church. As a child, my parents and I attended the Hernhut congregation – descendants of the very first Moravian Protestants inspired by Jan Hus. The piece begins with the first hymn of that congregation, from 1457, and moves through a melody attributed to Jan Hus to an eighteenth-century song by Count Zinzendorf (who brought the Hernhutters to the Netherlands) in an Afro-Caribbean vein (reflecting the dispersal of Moravians throughout the then-colonised world).

A very different story lies behind the violin sonata Deep River. This spiritual is known in Henry Thacker Burleigh’s 1917 version, but the first version dates back to before 1877, when it appeared in an edition by the Fisk Jubilee Singers – the choir of the first Afro-American university. In the history of Afro-American culture, this is a kind of ‘old music’. A controversial theory dates it even earlier – around 1820. Anyway, my piece is one big variation on motifs of this oldest melody, with the completely different rhythmic last episode being a key element of the last movement. Furthermore, the first movement is modelled on that of Beethoven’s Sonata in A op. 47 – originally dedicated by him, not to Rudolphe Kreutzer, but to the Barbados-born Afro-European violinist-composer George Bridgetower (‘Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico’, as the first dedication seems to have sounded).

Religious stories

Moravian Souls (2015) and the sonata Deep River (2013) have a religious story as well as a historical one. In the quartet, the opening hymn from 1457 sings of the solemn joy of coming together in church. At the time, this was accompanied by great social struggles (the early Reformation). Yet the title of the first movement, Battaglia, does not refer to that struggle but to the spiritual theme of the other hymn (Hernhutter tune 130, from 1566) that cuts through that movement throughout: the struggle between body and spirit.

Thus, the quartet is an instrumental elaboration of what the Hernhutters called a Singstunde, a religious gathering where people sing songs around a theme, and instead of a ‘sermon’.

The spiritual Deep River is, of course, much better known. And every believer will recognise the longing to reach the promised land after a deep earthly vale of tears – that gospel feast …where all is peace.

For each piece of melody, the sonata elaborates that feeling instrumentally, thinking it through in the manner of the classical sonata, but with the means of the twenty-first century.

The greatest example of ‘thinking through’ on a religious basis is the Super Suite (2016) for clarinet and string quartet. Each of the seven movements is inspired by one or more hymns from the Gregorian or Protestant tradition – sometimes, where the powerful and meaningful Gregorian melody was adopted by the Reformation, they coincide. The piece is a small, ecumenical cosmos that builds on those melodies. Sometimes by making confrontational associations. That David’s lament in Psalm 13 became a blues-like, Ellingtonian piece I can understand – but that Ave Maris Stella took on almost klezmer-like traits is harder to understand (though now I suddenly see the guiding Star in the light of the Pillar of Fire that the Jewish people went after…). Either way, it’s an almost encyclopaedic piece because of the many ways of composing ‘over’ and ‘out’ of a melody and fantasising freely ‘on’ it. That explains from the Super in the title both the superlative and the meaning of ‘over’.

It seemed like a simple idea…

As I said, I hoped to learn from this lost art. But will players and listeners benefit?

Whether it has become beautiful music is up to them.

But do they need to know the early music?

Oh no. Seasoned Catholics or Protestants and other ‘insiders’ have the advantage of being connoisseurs – just as jazz lovers recognise a quotation in a solo. But the ordinary listener can ‘just enjoy’.

Nor will the historical stories associated with the music will be known to most. So do they matter?

This is the well-known and thorny problem of all ‘programme music’ – music with a story.

…and it is

The texts and the historical narrative are important mainly because they are important to me: such a ‘programme’ gives me ideas.

So you could see them as part of the personal history of the creator, belonging to the sparse ‘context’ that concert music has to surround itself with nowadays – explanatory notes, textbooks and the like.

I just think that there are two other, very simple and objective ways in which these old melodies carry their historical character and give these pieces more than just being a postmodern stylistic hotchpotch sprung from a subjective perspective.

Unlike a poetic, invented programme, the historical text and context are real.

The stories and connections are not there to be taken in the music, but the music and the narrative I offer to accompany it (text, explanatory notes and the like) can, as art does, give you ideas worth thinking about.

But the most superficial historical character of the music, the musically deepest and most useful for a composer, lies in these melodies themselves – in their form and ‘structure’ – they sound different from contemporary music.

They once included words and dance movements; rituals and celebrations; amorous and religious emotions; a love of ornamentation or, on the contrary, directness; the singers were nobles or peasants, merchants or shipbuilders – I think that this music bears the stamp of these things (and that is why I seek it out), and I also think that the difference from contemporary musical styles is clearly audible because of this.

Just as they are a challenge to me as a composer, they are also a challenge to the contemporary ear through the contrast with other contemporary music, and certainly with the mostly rhythmic musical environments that I create for them. This, I think, creates a historical depth that a listener can involuntarily experience even without knowing the text and historical background.

High and low culture, but especially spiritual, religious culture, has always made thoughts singable in words. By building on this singing, I am not trying to be original, but rather to return to the musical origins of Western classical music.