WRITING
commentaries
on life
TO
ROSE DODD
in music
LOUIS ANDRIESSEN
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Rose Dodd
Rose Dodd
INTRODUCTION
CATHY BERBERIAN, PERSUASIVE ICONOCLAST
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83
John O'Mahony
Ian Pace
FOREWORD: LOUIS ANDRIESSEN, BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAIT
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MINIMAL MUSIC AND THE CHALLENGE OF ANDRIESSEN TO NARRATIVES OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM (1)
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Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger Translated by Rose Dodd
Jan Nieuwenhuis
COMPOSING – A LESSON A TELEVISION FILM BY HANS HULSCHER, ABOUT THE COMPOSER, LOUIS ANDRIESSEN NOS 1978
THEATRE OF THE WORLD: AN AUDITORY ALEPH
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115
Johanneke van Slooten Translated by Rose Dodd
Christopher Fox
FROM THE MAXIMALIST SONIC DENSITY OF DE VOLHARDING TO THE SMALL STILLNESS OF INTIMATE STRING SOUNDS IN MUTED
DE GROTE MUZIEK: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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125
Ron Ford
Yannis Kyriakides
CONVERSATIONS WITH LOUIS, ABOUT SINGING
ONE PLUS ONE: MUSIC AND IMAGE INTERRELATION IN THE NEW MATH(S)
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191
Martijn Padding Translated by Rose Dodd
Monica Germino
GESPREK – A STUDY IN CLOSE COLLABORATION
VIOLIN STORIES
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198
Ian Pace
Elizabeth Haddon
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MINIMAL MUSIC AND THE CHALLENGE OF ANDRIESSEN TO NARRATIVES OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM (2)
ICEBREAKER MEETS HOKETUS
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210
Amy Knoles, Lorna Eder, Robin Lorentz, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and Vicky Ray
Donnacha Dennehy
CALIFORNIA E.A.R.UNIT FEEDBACK
LOUIS, AN INFORMAL MENTOR
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219
Julia Wolfe
Richard Ayres and Rose Dodd in conversation
VIEW FROM THE EAST COAST
MYSTERIËN, A NEW CORNERSTONE
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225
Frances-Marie Uitti
Bibliography, Contributors and Acknowledgements
MEMORY
APPENDIX
LIFE AT A GLANCE: LOUIS ANDRIESSEN BORN June 6, 1939, Utrecht EDUCATION 1957–62 Royal Conservatory, The Hague with Kees van Baren 1962–64 with Luciano Berio CAREER 1974–Composition teacher, Royal Conservatory, The Hague RELATIONSHIPS 1957–2008 Jeanette Yanikian (m. 1996); Monica Germino (m. 2012)
6
Holland Festival, programme 1950.
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Young Louis highlight’s his father’s works, 1950 Holland Festival performance.
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Cowboy Louis.
INTRODUCTION In Autumn 2014, as my previous book was drawing to a close, I began to ponder the nature of biography. I remembered that when I first started reading about music in the early 1980s I stumbled across two books which grabbed my attention. Both books were collections of conversations with composers, one on Stravinsky, the other Berio. The language and discourse both composers offered, and their intimate knowledge of how they worked from inside their own music spoke to me. Writing such as this has an almost poetic, philosophical nature. Another book, the anthology ‘Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music,’ in which Debussy, Busoni and Ives advocate new aesthetics confirmed for me the special quality – the vibrant knowledge of the insider – that some composers can bring to the written word, to constructing thought about their own music. As a composer myself I wanted to place this immediacy of language, of the narrative behind the language of music, at the centre of my next book. Composers are uniquely placed to talk about their own music with an intrinsic, raw knowledge of their work. The notion of a new form of book, a new way of writing about ‘the composer’, tentatively began to take hold, my interest in the music of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen giving shape to the idea. To reflect accurately the material at hand, to interpret and express it: this is a powerful part of making a book speak. I wanted Louis Andriessen’s thoughts captured in his own words; in combination with writers who provide commentaries, theoretical analyses and, in one case, a treatise. My aim has been for textual inclusiveness, with composer, writers, players, collaborators, friends and composer colleagues reflecting Louis Andriessen’s approach to his musical career: collaboration, a sense of equality in participation. The Dutch keen eye for history and all things visual has created a wealth of materials tracking Louis’s musical journey: music archives bursting at the seams with a plethora of images, programme books, historical documents. Together, in this book they speak in equal measure, reflecting an ambitious life, full of music and musical adventures. My aim is for this book to celebrate and refract Louis Andriessen’s career in many different ways, to show the changing aesthetic alignments of his work across the decades. This combination of new and archival material has been drawn together by the subtle design of Joost Grootens to create a sense of literary documentary. With, I hope, a lightness of editorial touch, I have interwoven all these various elements into a beautifully bound retrospective snapshot casting back across the years. Amsterdam, 2019 11
FOREWORD: LOUIS ANDRIESSEN, BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAIT John O'Mahony
First appearing in The Guardian, 2002 written by John O’Mahony with additions by Rose Dodd
Deep in a Dutch forest, about an hour from Amsterdam, the National Youth Orchestra is rehearsing a concert performance of Louis Andriessen’s opera Writing to Vermeer. The work is perhaps one of the composer’s most elegiac, but it is shot through with slithery orchestration and punctuated by grinding tape-loops and recorded explosions, provided by a bank of blinking electronics. Stripped of the usual vibrato and frills, the string section sometimes seems painfully straining at the bow, gnawing at the senses, with a thin, high-pitched whine. The libretto, by film-maker Peter Greenaway, sounds equally uncomfortable in the mouths of the young singers: ‘I miss your cock-eyed, slippery, rednosed, jumping, long purple-headed prick of a paintbrush,’ runs one passage. After the rehearsal, and a few terse notes from Andriessen, the performers seem a little unsure of the merits of the piece: ‘Sometimes it sounds completely horrible,’ says Erwin Poel, a puckish 12-year-old with spiky blonde hair who sings in the chorus, ‘the way that the different instruments clash. I really find that very difficult to listen to.’ Older members of the orchestra, however, seem somewhat more appreciative of Andriessen’s intentions: ‘At first I wasn’t that crazy about it,’ says concert master Philip Payton, ‘But now I’m really beginning to enjoy it. 12
FOREWORD
The music is certainly very dark and disturbing, but there is a nervous energy about it that draws you in.’ This is the usual reaction to Andriessen’s work. Since his days as a radical student composer at The Hague Conservatory in 1957, his mercurial talent has been dividing audiences and goading critics. Known as a left-wing composer in the 1960s, his controversial work leapt out of the confines of concert hall or opera house and into the debating chamber of the Dutch parliament, where questions were asked about the justification for state funding of his ‘Marxist opera’ Reconstructie. Now generally regarded as the foremost contemporary Dutch composer, and the first in the Netherlands’ musical history to gain notoriety beyond its borders, he still has the power to shock and challenge: ‘He is an outstanding figure,’ says conductor and composer Reinbert De Leeuw, who has premiered many of Andriessen’s works. ‘In Holland we even talk now about the Louis Andriessen school, the second generation of the loud, energetic music he has been developing since the 1970s. He had this tremendous influence on younger musicians.’ Andriessen is among the most omnivorous of contemporary composers. His early works were strictly serialist in the manner of Boulez or Stockhausen, then in the 1970s he made a somersault from modernism to post-modernism, adopting a style that was much closer to the minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. Along the way, he has devoured many other sub-genres, from musique concrète to electronic, to jazz and rock. However, the best Andriessen pieces are a highly personal, aggressive combination of all his influences: De Staat (1976) is an effervescent reinterpretation of minimalism with ethereal choral passages and quotations from Stravinsky; De Tijd (1981) creeps slowly to startling conclusion; his opera De Materie (1988) opens with a violent orchestral assault; his earlier collaboration with Greenaway, Rosa, The Death of a Composer (1994), according to a critic from this newspaper, ‘contains plenty of examples of his archetypal, gritty motoric writing but there are also moments of great lyrical beauty, blues-tinged vocal lines, affectionate remembrances of 19th-century music, witty parodies of film music from westerns, even a final hip-hop number.’ Perhaps most remarkable is Andriessen’s willingness to tackle the most thorny philosophical questions: the connection between politics and art in De Staat and the essence of time and matter in the later works: ‘Unlike a lot of composers, Louis is not afraid of big ideas,’ says Amy Knoles, founder member of the California EAR Unit, an experimental music group that has premiered many of Andriessen’s works in the US. ‘He is overflowing with them. And most important, he knows how to weave the seed of an idea into music almost seamlessly, which gives the work its urgency.’ Not everyone in Dutch music is as delighted about the influence of the school of Andriessen and his particularly boisterous 14
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brand of music: ‘It is a symptom of stagnation in Dutch composition,’ says Peter Schat, a fellow composer with Andriessen of what is possibly his most controversial work yet, Reconstructie, who has since renounced his experimental early work. ‘Like serialism, it has become an expression of stagnation. Dutch musical life is based around performance. We never had a composer the rest of the world could remember, such as Grieg in Norway or Smetana in Czechoslovakia, and that has a big negative influence on composition in Holland. But now people feel we have one called Louis Andriessen.’ Many believe that Holland has finally found its great composer, including the younger generation of the so-called Hague school, Andriessen students such as Martijn Padding and Cornelius De Bondt, as well as English disciples like Steve Martland and Richard Ayres. Confirmation of the composer’s international status was reflected in a 2002 Andriessen festival on London’s South Bank, including performances of Writing to Vermeer, a new collaboration with film director Hal Hartley, and concurrent publication in English of a book about his work, The Art of Stealing Time. Reinbert De Leeuw says: ‘In the early 1970s Louis was influenced by American music. And now for young composers in America he has become a kind of godfather of minimalism. It is wonderful to see how he has exported these influences back to America.’ Until her death in 2008 Andriessen lived with Jeanette Yanikian, a guitar player whom he met while studying in The Hague, in a vast fourth floor apartment in Amsterdam on the Keizersgracht, looking out over the canals. Having decided not to have children they devoted themselves to their two cats and to work, she as a musician and therapist, he as a composer: ‘If I am working on a piece, I compose every day, for four to five hours on average,’ he says. ‘When I am composing, everything, even drinking coffee, happens according to plan.’ Andriessen comes across as gregarious, fast-talking, witty, cerebral, but always displaying vast reserves of energy and blustery charm: ‘He’s always been like that,’ says De Leeuw, who first met him when they studied together in The Hague. ‘The first thing I noticed is that he is very noisy, very active. Always jumping around and playing and full of theories and humour.’ With his two ensembles, De Volharding and Hoketus, Andriessen was in the sixties and seventies a dynamic performer, electrifying the audience more in the manner of a rock star than a classical player. ‘He is very physical on stage,’ says Dil Engelhard, who played with De Volharding. ‘He would stand behind the piano when he was playing and jump around energetically as the music took off. I think this has now become part of the Dutch way of performing.’ As a young man, Andriessen wore his hair in a long, lank, hippyish manner, called himself a Marxist and campaigned vigorously against the war in Vietnam. Though he now seems keen to shake off the ‘political 15
1 (Evans: 2013). 2 I am in agreement with Yayoi Uno Everett, who argues for a quite new phase in Andriessen’s writing from the 1980s onwards. See (Everett 2006: 140).
INTRODUCTION Assumptions of over-arching unity amongst composers and compositions solely on the basis of common nationality/region are extremely problematic in the modern era, with great facility of travel and communications. Arguments can be made on the bases of shared cultural experiences, including language and education, but these need to be tested rather than simply assumed. Yet there is an extensive tradition in particular of histories of music from the United States which assume such music constitutes a body of work separable from other concurrent music, or at least will benefit from such isolation, because of its supposed unique properties. Such nationalistic assumptions feed into the historiography and aesthetic examination of minimal music, which is in theory a stylistic/generic categorisation. This is far from being the only area of modern music for which this is the case – certainly the common dichotomy between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘experimental’ music has long been mapped onto a ‘European’ vs. ‘American’ divide. The historian Richard Evans has argued cogently that history is a ‘myth-busting’ rather than ‘myth-making’ discipline1 and with this in mind I seek here to cast a sceptical eye upon some existing musicohistorical mythologies. I will outline some of the dominant themes and underlying assumptions of much recent writing on minimal music, argue how these reflect restrictive nationalistic and exceptionalistic ideologies, consider how the music of Andriessen (focusing on the works up to around 1980)2 is incorporated into these but also confounds them, and suggest how his music can help to nuance some alternative historical and aesthetic models.
IAN PACE
The Historiography of Minimal Music and the Challenge of Andriessen to Narratives of American Exceptionalism (1)
THE FORMATIONS OF HISTORICAL AND AESTHETIC NARRATIVES AROUND MINIMAL MUSIC The term ‘minimal’ music took a few years to become established in critical discourse. While the first works now generally canonised as such date from the late 1950s, with Terry Riley’s In C (1964) widely viewed as a pivotal work, it was not until the mid- to late-1970s that Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young became regularly referred to as composers of ‘minimal music,’ though commonalities between their work had been observed at a much earlier stage. A first ‘period’ in the development of the concept can reasonably be dated from the first allusion to the concept by Barbara Rose in 1965, then the coining of the term by Michael Nyman in 1968, through to the publication of the first monograph on the movement by Wim Mertens in 1980. The term ‘minimal art’ had first gained exposure through a 1965 essay by the British philosopher Richard Wollheim, who used it to refer to Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Rauschenberg.3 In a subsequent essay that year, also on minimal art, Barbara Rose drew some links with developments in music and sound.4 To Rose, the minimal style emerged above all from Kazimir Malevich and Duchamp (and later manifested itself as a shift away from Abstract Expressionism). She presented various artists as more or less aligned with either figure (with Cage mentioned in relation to Duchamp, and Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin presented in an intermediate position).5 83
3 (Wollheim 1968: 387–99).4 (Rose 1968: 274–97). 4 (Rose 1968: 274–97). 5 (Ibid.: 275–8).
Louis and Reinbert greet each other at the end of a concert.
‘Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery – to dissect away’ William Carlos Williams, Paterson1
1 (Williams 1992: 175).
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THEATRE OF THE WORLD: AN AUDITORY ALEPH Jan Nieuwenhuis
‘To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage.’ Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever2
GROTESQUE On the surface, Louis Andriessen’s Theatre of the World (2015) behaves like an opera: Athanasius Kircher, as befits a good operatic protagonist, dies at the end; two lovers are involved, of whom one of course also passes away; someone is raised from the dead; there are intrigues; and supernatural forces are at work. It doesn’t take long to find similar elements in the history of opera. Theatre of the World is an opera from the narrative point of view, if not for the fact Andriessen didn’t call it an opera but emphatically wrote ‘A grotesque’ under its title.
2 (Derrida 1996: 7).
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GESPREK – A STUDY IN CLOSE COLLABORATION (SCORE)
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LOUIS, AN INFORMAL MENTOR
Andriessen, Canadian performance 1996.
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