I look o'er Yander | Willem Wander van Nieuwkerk

2016c

two recorder quintets (SATTB - ATTB,GB) and optional alto recorder soloist

Written for the Lyme Regis Recorder Courses 2016

Written for the Lyme Regis Recorder Courses 2016.

The first movement is on a little song that struck my eye while leafing through Krehbiel’s Afro-American Folksongs. The wonderfully joyful and simple song turned out to be a funeral dirge:

I look o’er yander, what I see?
Somebody’s dying every day.
See bright angel standin’ dere;
Somebody’s dying every day.
Ev’ry day, passin’ away,
Somebody’s dying every day.
Ev’ry day, passin’ away,
Somebody’s dying every day.

I have tried to capture some of the the sadness that underlies the seemingly happy tune, as if angels carefully carry a child’s soul to heaven.

The second movement starts with a small double canon (in the basses) and then a ‘ground’ on a beautiful, through-composed song from the Antwerp Song Book (no. 56), in my translation:

How loud to God cried out the Soul
O Lord Almighty, gentle Father,
What shall I do?
My body heavily drags my heart
O Lord, do grace me, do
The flesh tries to devour me whole

The starting point for movement three was offered by chance when I looked into Lyme Regis’ history and found out, to my great surprise, that it is twinned to Bermuda. I heard a Bermudan piper’s band on YouTube play an interesting calypso-like melody that I morphed into the present movement. Later I found out it derived from a Jamaican tune well known in the East-Indies: Linstead Market, the touching story of a market seller lamenting her poor sales that would leave her children without anything to eat the next day.

So through sheer chance, this movement, too, testifies to the sadness of happy music and how this might unburden our souls.

About me

Musical beauty and simplicity are my aim. My guiding principle is the classical European tradition. Folk music, church music and Early Music are the sources to which I return to seek new melodic beauty. I value musical craftsmanship and intuition highly. Musicians are my first audience. It is their virtuosic interplay, comic or dramatic, but always emotionally charged, that is the musical theater my music presents to the listener. The sounds I cherish most are those that through the musician’s hearts, breath and hands bear the mark of their personal interpretation.
Chamber music is, therefore, central to me – I have written for the Bennewitz Quartet and Harry-Imre Dijkstra, the Skampa Quartet, Rosanne Philippens, the Bartók Trio, the Utrecht String Quartet and many others.
My chamber music for recorders has a special place in my work and is played in large numbers by amateurs. The CD Kadanza is a fruit of decades of collaboration with the best professionals who were often also the best teachers.
For me, choral music is also a species of chamber music. It should challenge and offer musical satisfaction to those many amateur singers – that I am one of.

My music features individual performers – to convey a thought, an emotion, and a story to the audience in a virtuoso and intense fashion.

In rehearsal and performance, the performers and I learn a lot from each other. Sometimes their improvisations are included in the musical story. Scores will always be adapted to their needs.

The interplay between performer and composer is absolutely essential in newly written music. As is the interplay between sponsor and composer.

Would you like me to rehearse with you or do you want to know more about a piece?

Do you want me to write a piece for a particular line-up or event?

Please let me know and I will contact you.

Besides composing, I lecture in New Music at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, with a focus on chamber music and music aesthetics. Some of the writing and thinking that I do there can be found in the ‘text’ section.