4.2.2 The conceptual character of De Tijd

Andriessen felt like a fish in water in the Amsterdam scene. In fact, to a large extent he was that scene. The music was immediately appealing (therefore also anti-Adorno, as it was not complicated and not contrapuntal), vital (like the pop music of the times), revolutionary (anti-establishment, anti-tradition, anti-Holy Art, flippant, ironic, and sometimes pretty rude), overwhelming (with strong theatrical elements, which Andriessen developed into a series of grand pieces for theatre later on), easily accessible (again this fascination with pop music), and drenched in a not always pleasant machismo. Despite the strong influence of early minimal on Andriessen, there was also much criticism within his circle, especially of the rather simple harmonic language, which was regarded as lazy and politically suspect as triads were considered ‘right-wing’. European minimalists needed a more progressive and dissonant language.233

4.2.2 THE CONCEPTUAL CHARACTER OF DE TIJD A rhythmic-metric motif within a diatonic tone row was enough of a starting point for pulse-driven American minimalists to write a piece. Andriessen, the European, wanted more: he wanted his pieces to be about something. De Staat [The State] is about the anger regarding the deficit of art. The text, borrowed from Plato’s The State warns against certain modes, the sounds of which may invoke subversive behaviour. Of course, music by itself cannot achieve this, but that did not stop Andriessen from making an attempt: De Staat, with the exception of the beginning, is loud, aggressive, and over-shouting. Still, such exaggeration does convey a message: the music is so in-your-face that it undermines the will of the listener to put up a resistance. The only option after a performance of De Staat is to express enthusiasm and vigorous joy, an effect that this work shares with Ravel’s Bolero and Stravinsky’s Sacre. However, this is not on account of Plato’s text, which is sung in Greek by a choir or four amplified women’s voices functioning as the explanation that goes with a conceptual work of art: only after reading the explanation the artwork is understood and this understanding transcends the artwork itself.

In De Tijd we see the same process. The text, sung in Latin, is a quote from the Confessiones by the church father Augustine and addresses the nature of time. Augustine wrote his famous treatises in order to solve a theological problem. If God created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh, then there had to be yet another entity more pow-

233For more about Andriessen and Amsterdam in the 1960s and 1970s, see

Chapter III, 3.1.4 and Chapter VI, 7.