State patronage in the Netherlands

 

State patronage for new music in contemporary Holland

(Text of a lecture, held on the conference organized by the Royal Dutch Society for Music History at the University of Amsterdam in November 2010)

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Ladies and gentlemen,

In the European past, there was a tradition, a practice, where composers formed a natural part of a network of interrelated exchange, which was reflected in the various funding relationships with church, royal courts and nobility. In those times, there was not much difference between the aims of patrons and those of the composers. In the modern world since the Enlightenment these ties gradually became looser, which offered the opportunity to develop more individual and more daring deviations from traditional practices, until in the last century the composer got divorced from the central performance culture and created a mental space all of his own which was, for musicians, audiences and individual patrons, less easy to access. This gradual change in the relationship between the individual composer and his audience had a strong impact upon the funding of his work: as individual patrons became more rare and more sceptical, eventually the state became the patron of new music, and committees with experts were set-up to make the necessary selections.

The development of modernism since the 2nd World War created the situation, that the composer got financially dependent upon the state (via various institutions) and for performances, upon specialised ensembles. But the breach of new music from the central performance culture had a great effect upon its survival. It is important to realize, that both in France and Germany, in spite of all the ravages of war, a cultural consciousness had survived which lend importance to the creation of art as an important part of the country’s cultural identity, which was supposed to have a benign influence upon society as a whole, slowly dripping into the lower levels of the cultural pyramid.

In the Netherlands however, a very different cultural climate had developed. After the glories of 17th century painting, the arts gradually moved towards the margins of the country’s cultural consciousness; in spite of occasional individual achievements, the overall climate can not be called to have been very stimulating for artistic creation. But in the sixties of the last century, a sudden surge of new music activity, born from the need among young composers to find a connection with new movements in Germany and France, i.e. with the then current musical modernism, led to a kind of revolution, with demonstrations, provocative concerts, manifests, ideological pamflets and articles, and a sharp critique of the central performance culture where these new trends were not readily accepted. Also, campaigning for state funding of new music led to the establishment of the national Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst, or the Fund for Creative Composition, which was supposed to solve the problem that in Holland there never had been a tradition of patronage for new music and thus, composers had to seek employment in other jobs to pay their bills and try to compose in their free time.

Now here, I would like to say something about cultural identity of the Netherlands in relation to the arts and specifically, to music. Of course it will be a generalization, but I can assure you that any cultured man or woman, living for some years in Holland, will be able to confirm its general outlines. The Netherlands were born from a liberation war from a superpower, in this case Spain. Being a rich territory and ideally situated at the crossroads of trade traffic networks, it had enough of being bullied and exploited by much bigger and much more ambitious countries, which sported all kinds of ideological cults around monarchs, religions, power spheres and war campaigns. These cults were, to a great extent, reflected in the arts of which the churches and the courts were the main patrons. In the first period of wealth and freedom of the Netherlands: the 17th century, the flowering of painting is especially unusual in its subject matter: it is mostly daily life, the real world, which the viewer could see framed and often elevated to a higher level. Also religious scenes were furnished with people and sights which could be recognized from real life experience, as can be seen from the local Jewish types Rembrandt used for his biblical scenes, settled immigrants from Spain and Portugal, who kept to their customs and dress codes. In other words: the subject matter of normal, real life, and not the pretentious historical and allegorical traditions of other European countries were popular, and this idea of the free, wealthy burger, who kept to his real, physical world and who would not be impressed by wild ideologies which only could make a mess of the hard-won orderliness in the towns filled with small, individual houses and canals, this became the fundament of how the Dutchman began to understand himself. Being a young country, also the idea of youth as something with a worth of its own, in contrast with the general notion of youth as immaturity, as a stage to leave behind as soon as possible, became part of Holland’s self-image; there are various travel diaries from past centuries by foreigners who were utterly perplexed by the rude and uncouth behavior of children and teenagers in these lands, jumping around like chimpanzees and looked-upon by their parents with an approving smile. This was not just a lack of civilization, it was an expression of individualist freedom, a liberation from authoritarian rules as were common in those pretentious, dangerous neighbouring countries.

This self-image as a small, but free and individualist, materialist and rather immature country was internalized and survived to this day. Holland is not a country of phantasy, dreams, great passions and ambitions, but of a small-scale, orderly life, where all you see is all you get, where most of the creativity is channelled in organizational skills and material cleverness, and where the inner life is kept carefully indoors. To atone for the wealth, individualism and materialism, the Calvinistic group cult of guilt, sobriety and predestination formed a perfect balance so that one could have it both ways. This group instinct went into modern state bureaucracy which is, in the Netherlands, developed to a level of differentiation and regulation which would have made Soviet-Regimes envious. For the calvinistic mind, music, that is: art music as a high art, is a seduction for not being under theological control, and therefore in the churches only functioning as an accompaniment to the psalms or a pleasant ornament to the service; for the tradesman, it cannot be measured, weight, and produced and sold as spices, weapons and slaves can. The absence of a court culture completes the picture of a kleinbürgerliche society where music is not a serious occupation.

When modernism was introduced in Holland in the sixties of the last century, it was welcomed with open arms by young composers, since it combined a couple of factors which perfectly fitted into the Dutch internalized self-image: it was materialistic, without the romantic idealism of things sublime and aspirational; it required organizational skills; it cultivated the utmost individualism which answered a need to break away from a suffocating social environment; it was strongly anti-traditional and thus, anti-authoritarian. But it could not be traded; and this led to much effort to convince the government that it had a social responsibility to support these young contemporary composers which were totally ignored by the central performance culture. So, eventually in the early eighties the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst was installed (Fund for the Creation of Music) and the constellation of Dutch new music reached its completion: new Dutch music began to be paid for generously so that it became totally independent from the performance culture and could develop a performing circuit of its own in the form of new music ensembles, also funded by the state so that low audience attendance would not negatively influence performance and production.

The Dutch calvinistic longing for group control found excellent expression in the structure of the fund: composers of modernist music and programmers of modernist ensembles formed the selection committees, so that the nature of new music could be carefully steered into the direction of which the committee members were the main representatives. There was not a specified artistic programme, or a stilistic guideline laid down as in the former Soviet Union, but a consensus, quickly forming within the new music circuit, made sure that the momentum of musical progress was not lost, by selecting the 'right' composers to be paid for their work.

From this period onwards, many composers developed a type of music in which all the mentioned Dutch characteristics were explored, finding its culmination in the works of Louis Andriessen. Of course there was a certain variety within the subsidized new music, but the boundaries could be detected where composers, who did not feel loyal to modernism and Andriessen-like stilistic elements, were rejected by the selection committees.

It must be said that the presence of a special government funding system for new music is a great thing. It created a community where the ideals of modern music could florisch undisturbed by an indifferent world. But it also had unintended side effects which threw the problems of new music in general, and especially its funding problems, in relief.

To be able to grasp this, we should have a closer look into the structure of the system. The fund worked with 2 forms of funding. First, there was the funding of commissions from music life, i.e. ensembles or solo musicians who wanted a composer to specially write a piece for them. Second, there was a system of stipends, ranging from short term stipends to salaries for longer periods of a couple of years, for which composing plans had to be provided for approval. For both forms of funding, applications had to be assessed: not every application could be honored, and a selection had to be made. For the stipends, only the composer had to apply; for the commissions, the composer as well as a performing body could apply, and in practice this type of application was a combined one. The fund worked with 2 advisory boards of each 3 people, consisting of a composer, a musicologist or someone with comparable qualifications like a music journalist or radio programmer, and a performer related to one of the new music ensembles. Central in the assessment procedure was the notion of artistic quality, which could only be registered on the basis of former works by the composer concerned, since the work relating to the application did not as yet exist. Also factors of laboriousness and performance chances were considered. If the committees advised positively, for assessing the figure of the grant a sophisticated list of possible fees was used, sporting various parameters like duration in minutes and instruments to be used, and thus giving the impression of precise monitoring and definition – although the factors of artistic quality and laboriousness which are very vague and subjective, gave total freedom to the evaluation process. For the long-term stipends, a detailed working plan had to be provided by the applicant composer, which was supposed to make sure that the money would indeed be invested in a correct structure of creative realisation.

When an application got rejected, the applicant could enter an appeal procedure, ask for the assessment details of the advisory board, and try to argue against the advice. Since the general board of the fund, who had to decide about appeals, in practice almost never saw any reason to disagree with its advisory boards, the outcome would be in most cases the same. The only option then open to a rejected composer was taking the fund into court, which was generally shunned since a court of justice only looked into the question whether the correct procedure has been followed; in matters of artistic quality, courts correctly did not see themselves sufficiently qualified. In practice, the fund had almost total power over the funding of new music, also because of the absence of comparable funding institutions or foundations.

We can conclude that this type of funding system, which was supposed to free composers to dedicate their time and energies to the creation of music, created something like a mental prison, where the bars consisted of the unwritten norms of the consensus of the new music circuit as represented by the members of the advisory boards. Instead of creating a free space where inspiration could florish, which would have been the original motivation, it created a kind of mild imitation of the former Soviet Union who had its Central Committee to make sure that new music would develop in certain directions. In the Soviet Union the guideline of music for the people was an openly defined government policy; in Holland it was the factor of artistic quality as used by the fund, which could be filled-in according to the consensus of the new music circuit, which determined the boundaries of what was supposed to be relevant and what not. Both means of evaluation rested on flimsy and subjective opinions in terms of personal taste, but they got a centrally-exercised power over funding, and thus over how composers would realise their musical ideas.

Now, we may ask, why would a government install such an elaborate and utterly bureaucratic system for the funding of new music, instead of opting for the obvious, much more practical and simple solution of giving earmarked budgets for commissions and composer-in-residencies to orchestras and ensembles? After all, the creation of music can only florish in a climate of freedom. An answer can be found in the aesthetic position of most new music: it is on the defence, it operates in a more or less seclused circuit, surrounded by indifference. Therefore, a central bullwark defending new music seemed the best way of ensuring its survival. But this solution has also been its weakness. By creating a separate new music circuit, where audience attendance is rather minor and did not play a role in the quality assessments, new music in Holland made itself vulnerable to government considerations in which cultural awareness plays no part. From the outside, both from the political sphere and from the position of the central performance culture, new music seems to be – for different reasons – of no importance. And the entwining of vested interests by placing composers and programmers of new music in the advisory boards, undermined the credibility of the system. In the present climate of government cuts in the Netherlands, art, and especially new art and music, offer an easy prey to the axe, in spite of the relative small figures which are involved – in relation to the national budget.

The installment, in the early eighties, of government funding, was not motivated by an interest in new music but by social considerations, carried by the political left-wing climate of the seventies and later by the general wealth which could easily afford this marginal luxury. Both the indifference of the government to see music as a factor defining cultural identity of the nation, and the indifference within the broader, traditional performance practice, added to a general indifference of the broader population to art music, fits in with the typical cultural climate in the Netherlands as it had developed over the centuries.

A tragedy is thus currently unfolding. In its utopian idealism, the funding system had isolated itself from the broader musical world; instead of providing something like a safe haven, it has created a separate, interrelated network of vested interests, in which music could be funded independently from the hard and often cruel filter of the central performance practice; and in its isolation, where composers felt that they had to conform to the artistic consensus of the Dutch new music circuit, it has lost contact with current issues in new music, one of which is a revival of tonal idioms and even more traditional styles, also reflected in new figurative painting and new, classically-orientated architecture. If the Netherlands will continue to turn inward and show their back towards the European integration process, new music will die in this country. If a broader outlook will prevail, the typical Dutch situation for new music will also disappear.

State patronage in the Netherlands of new music will eventually appear to have been a short period of luxury, producing a certain type of typically Dutch music, after which only a European orientation will be an option open to composers in the Netherlands to explore.

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 Addendum July 2026:

Meanwhile the Fund for the Creation of Music has been abolished as an independent organisation, and its subsidy channel has been absorbed into a wider national fund, the Performing Arts Fund. The funding of new music has been watered-down and a majority of new works that are being performed, are written by younger generations of composers who see in Philip Glass and pop music their greatest inspirations. The typical 'fund music' representing Dutch national musical identity has died-out. But whether the replacement can be seen as qualitative progress is very questionable - it is like some inedible, grinding food has been replaced by a weak and lukewarm soup that does not readily invite for another helping.

Composers can apply for a stipend (‘to develop their ideas’), institutions (orchestras, ensembles, venues, project foundations) can apply for a commission. The selection at the fund is still done by ‘entirely independent comitee members’ who assess the still to be written musical work in terms of ‘importance for the performing arts in the Netherlands’. These people must be geniusses to know exactly what is important and what not, entirely independently from testing in terms of performance, and about works that may not even exist as an idea in the mind of the composer concerned. It is enlightening to see what the intention of the Fund for the Performing Arts is for the stipend for individual composers:

‘The development stipend for composers is intended for composers who want to invest in their professional artistic development. The aim is that the stipend leads to new works which deepen and broaden the musical practice of the applicant artistically. Next to this, the result should contribute to an enrichment of the broader field of music.’

So, the comitee members know in advance which still not existing work will improve the composer’s development and will contribute to an enrichtment of music life. The unprofessionality and naïve ignorance concerning musical practice is shocking for a national institution in which millions of tax money is pumped. The fund receives – in the period 2025 / 2028 – an annual sum of 9,6 million euros.

So, the Soviet system is still intact, till new government budget cuts will ax the funding system for the arts, including new music. The increasing influene of extreme-rightwing political parties, who see new art as a mere ’hobby of leftwingers’, will surely have an effect in the longer run.

Last but not least: the building in which the Fund for the Performing Arts is housed, unintentionally expresses correctly the nature of what is going-on inside:

https://fondspodiumkunsten.nl/over-het-fonds

 

 

Why art?

 I compose the unutterable - that which cannot be said, only composed. Every serious composer writes down the unutterable, which is the only artistic goal worth pursuing, for every art form. But most contemporary art of the last 70 years (that is, what was presented through the establishments) is perfectly happy with the utterable: what you see, read, hear, is what you get. It is a form of instant gratification, be it a happy one, a neutral one or a boring one. But the unutterable opens doors.

Good art refers to the background against which the work obtains its meaning which is not in the foreground, and not in the used materials. All good art happens in its psychology. But this psychology is innate in the work itself, and not in its surroundings or explanations or worldly context; it has its own context built into its own structure so that it tells its own meaning, without crutches.

This thought is related to a thought of British / Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittenstein:

'Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright, rev. ed. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), p.16. 

 

 

Cancel culture

"Yes, thank you for your inquiry. We are always much interested in a wider public dissemination of thoughtful ideas, and our work at the university is exactly that: stimulate thinking, getting at the bottom of the problems of our civilisation, especially in our faculty. What is the task of a university? That is not merely transmitting knowledge, but forming minds, making young people aware of how to become a really critical and mature adult, capable of making wise assessments, not only in her or his subject but as a worthwhile member of society. It is a matter of responsibility, since the transferrence of knowledge and understanding from one generation to the next, is the basis of our civilisation. Therefore, understanding our society and its past, is essential, whether you will become a notary, a corporate chairman, a dentist or a scientist, a thorough education will offer a perspective otherwise elusive to the great problems of our time. Therefore simply focussing on discrimination of minorities and racism in the public space of society is by far not enough, we have to understand the underlying causes and reasons of such prejudices and shimmering hatred. And these causes are to be found in the basic tenets of our civilisation, which are most of the time implicit and internalised, and therefore the most difficult to grasp and to become aware of. Really very sharp minds and high IQ's and many years of experience are needed to grasp the depth of such tenets and how they infiltrate throughout the world, and it is here that the task of the university becomes clear. In our faculty of the humanities we have spent many discussions on the question, how to improve the curriculum, to get onto a deeper level of understanding, broadening our mind, thinking out of the box - which is the box of convention and routine. Pardon me? ....... Yes of course we're much concerned about the injustices in society but there's nothing we can do about that, our job is to enlighten the background of all those things, and it's there where our great civilizational strength lies. We stick out our neck and take on truly ambitious tasks, especially the hughe subject of our civilization which surely needs a thorough reset. On our last conference in August we have already treated Western literature and sculpture through the ages, the results of which were shocking in their revelations of crime at the sources of production, but yesterday we got to a more profound understanding. Language itself, especially English which has colonized the world in its imperialist attempt to be used everywhere, I say language is the product of a patriarchal, suppressing culture with its forced rules, leading to exclusion. We can see this clearly in the irregular grammar, which is hard to learn, so that many people are struggling unnecessarily, while their intelligence and energies could be spent in much more fruitful ways. Therefore we will, in the near future, embark upon one of our most ambitious projects: to develop an international, crime-free language which could replace English, a new language as a truly just international lingua franca. There have been suggestions of reviving Latin or the original Greek of Antiquity, which were quickly rejected because of their associations with ancient society, and we came to the conclusion that an international language created from elements from languages of suppressed peoples and communities would be best to represent a future in which the humanities would, for the first time, create a just platform for true thought. At this very moment, three of our experts on linguistics are working on a language with elements from different corners of the globe, which have been unjustly underrepresented. We were especially happy with the find of Dr Hofstadter who dug-up from the British Library the English-Yamana dictionary, drawn-up by an English missionary who lived among the Patagonian Yamana tribe in the 19th century and worked all his life to save this precious language, untouched by Western colonialisation, for posterity. Pardon? ..... Yes it really does exist. The circumstance that the dictionary entered the British Library, after many detours, only in 1923 when the tribe itself had died-out, is an asset to its quality: here we have an example of a pure way of communication without the burden of suprematist interfering because the Yamana were never colonized, any attempt by English colonists were thwarted, the British intruders were slaughtered, time and again, so they simply gave-up, and rightly so I would think. In this envisioned new language's purity, the overall structure is also comparable with the language of the Pirahas - a great tribe of the Amazones - as described by Dr Everett in his admirable book. The fact that both tribes had no words for abstract concepts and did not need to count beyond ten, had no awarenes of past and future and entirely lived in the present, show us how humanity could reach a way of being liberated from the encrusted layers of exclusion of people who would want to learn to read and write without the imperialist rules laid-down on them. - Yes? ..... well, maybe some things would be lost but we have to ask ourselves: to which end were these things devised? - No, I can't dwell too long on that, I'm sorry. What was I saying?... Material from the languages of both tribes will be incorporated into the newly devised universal language, probably mixed with Esperanto, the artificial and pure language which has been unjustly neglected but may now eventually find its right context to blossom again. There are signals that esperanto was actively suppressed, and this would only add to its attractiveness. But we did not stop there, no, we got science also in the spotlight. And what appears to be the case? All of our current scientific achievements are the result of a very long history reaching back to the mindset of the ancient Greeks. And the Greeks had concocted a society which had all the marks of patriarchy with a cruel suppression of women, and a so-called democracy which rested on slave labour. So it never was a real, fair democracy. Also their architecture, with the typical straight columns in a row, representing toxic masculinity in their military line-up, they were designed exactly like the phalanxes of shoulder-to-shoulder hoplites. And the entire trajectory of scientific thinking through the ages is burdened by suppressive thinking, excluding competative theories, ideas, approaches, just like religion which has poisoned the life of millions of innocent people and robbed them of any possibility of deserved happiness. We believe in pluralism and justice for all possible approaches of life, and how could we accept a modern science which is the culmination of ages of suppression and the arrogance of the West? Also, almost all of the important scientists, from Aristotle onwards, were white men. How could we accept the results of such a narrowly-defined group? The same goes for culture, painting, poetry, literature, art music, all white men functioning and working for suppressing elites. So we drew-up a plan with some proposals for the curriculum of the university for next academic year. All science subjects, and all cultural subjects, have to be cancelled, and we strongly recommend such cancelling for society as a whole: dentistry, surgeoncy, engineering, mathematics, in short: all subjects which have been practiced thoughtlessly for so long will have to disappear, to liberate everything and everybody who has felt suppressed by existing requirements of a society so much defined by science and technology in any field. Because under the guise of professionalism and knowledge, small groups of a certain kind of people simply wanted to exploit and suppress everybody else, and I have to admit that I have been member of these groups for a long time, and entirely unaware, an insight which has become a heavy burden of guilt from which I - together with my collegues - profoundly long to be redeemed. So, we look forward to the ceremonial closure of our venerated institution and hope that a much more fair and inclusive, alternative institution will soon come into sight, a longterm project for which we have set-up a comitee that is currently studying subjects which will provide a much more just perspective for society as a whole. Thank you very much."

Schoenberg's dualism

 

For Arnold Schoenberg 12-tone composition became a way for the composer to master the chaotic noise of nature through the laws of the organized composition. In “Theory of Form” (1924) he writes:

[O]ne must . . . in all circumstances, use force on nature, on the material—sounds: that one must force them to keep to a direction and a succession laid down by us. One has to force nature—the material—by means of nature—our way of thinking—to work naturally according to our nature; otherwise, we can either not grasp it or else, if one lets the sounds run as they please, it remains a children’s game, like electrical experiments with elderberries or tobogganing or the like. Every more developed game comes about because the course of nature is modified by a force from the outside.

 

This is the result of the dualist thinking that 'the mind' and 'nature' are entirely distinct and separated entities, that there are no relations between the two, a thought going-back to René Descartes, the 17C French philosopher who influenced scientific thinking so strongly, who insisted upon a fundamental split between the two. However, it became a basic tenet of Western science and scientific thinking, with its ideas of progress, speculation and discovery, and was something that Schoenberg found very inspiring.

So, Schoenberg thought he could construct a system with its own logic unrelated to the physical reality of sound, which is defined by the harmonic series and to which the receptive system of our ears and brain is related because both are the result of evolution. However, humans are part of nature, and their mind is also part of nature.

AI has opinions

AI’s opinion about John Borstlap:

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Composer and author John Borstlap has received a polarizing critical reception, with his traditionalist approach to classical music drawing both deep praise for preserving artistic beauty and harsh criticism for perceived artistic conservatism.

Critical Reception to His Books

Borstlap’s writings, including his 2013 book The Classical Revolution and his 2023 work Regaining Classical Music's Relevance, sparked passionate, divided responses:

• Praise: Some scholars, philosophers, and musicians, such as composer Bright Sheng , have lauded Borstlap for offering a "tour de force" that rescues classical music from academic modernism. Proponents celebrate his arguments that traditional tonal art fulfills core human psychological and spiritual needs.
• Criticism: Conversely, the books have met with fierce pushback, particularly in his native Netherlands and Germany. He has faced devastating rebukes from modernist critics who view his rejection of contemporary, atonal, and progressive styles as an outdated or “heartless” reaction to cultural evolution. 

Reception to His Music

As a composer of chamber and orchestral music, Borstlap’s style combines early romantic influences with a contemporary tonal idiom . His compositions, such as his Violin Concerto, have won prestigious international prizes and have been performed by renowned ensembles like the Dallas Symphony and Hong Kong Philharmonic.

·  Praise: Supporters like German aesthetic philosopher Andreas Dorschel praise his music for its "highly sensual attractiveness", noting that Borstlap masterfully connects to the classical-romantic tradition without merely copy-pasting past styles. [

·  Criticism: Some reviewers have been less receptive, occasionally characterizing his chamber works (such as Hyperion's Dream) as too derivative of Brahms or Schumann. Critics in publications like Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine have sometimes described his stylistic choices as bordering on pastiche, citing a lack of originality when straying from traditional models.

Schoenberg's problems

Reread bits of Harvey Sachs' admirable and odd biography of Schoenberg, admirable for its extensive research, and odd for its continuous reservations which entirely undermine his obvious aim to place Schoenberg on the pedestal of musical greatness in the pantheon of the Great European Composers.

Relistened to some of S's works on YouTube - the rich library of recordings of anything that ever has been recorded in whatever way. Jacobsleiter, Moses and Aron, First and Second Chamber Symphony, Verklärte Nacht (ravishing recent recording by the Danish National Symphony under Fabio Luisi), Pierrot Lunaire (the best recording available is with Jan DeGaetano).

Schoenberg was a composer of genius, as can clearly be heard in his early works, and in his astonishing, expressive originality in his 'middle period' of 'expressionism'. He plumbed the depth of his own subconsciousness, and further down, the collective subconscious (the territory as described, later-on, by C.G. Jung), as he said it himself: the artist should delve into his subconscious to present to the world a reflection of what is going-on behind the façade. Well, what he found was a world of angst, destruction, hysteria, where the forces of coherence and order were loosened and finally abandoned (as in Erwartung). In the beginning of the 20th century, the world of 'Old Europe' was dissolving and a 'modern world' was born, beginning with a devastating war that the world had never seen before - thanks to technological progress. The utmost barbarism in combination with sophisticated technology was a signal that this modern world was not at all what the 19th century so optimistically had dreamed-up ('il faut être absolument moderne!' as Rimbaud claimed). 

In the sobering coolness of the twenties, a 'return towards order' became the new ideal for new music, reaching-back to pre-19C music which was seen as a haven of objective enjoyment instead of the cultivation of subjective emotion which got a bad name after the harrowing excess of emotion in the Great War. And Schoenberg invented his notorious 12-tone method of composition where dissonance was 'emancipated' and tonality, as a given by nature in the harmonic series, was supplanted by a very different system whereby individual notes no longer made audible sense in the way they made sense in earlier music. It is an entirely artificial approach and a human construct where the natural resonances of tones is denied. Hence the constipated, forced and fragmented effect of 12-tone pieces and the morbid effect of Schoenberg's only 'comic' opera 'Von Heute auf Morgen' where the only thing that is comical, is the intention to write a comic opera with that system. In fact, Schoenberg himself admitted to a friend after the premiere: 'I have to confess that these sounds make me quite depressed'.

Yet, it is clear to anybody with a musically-sophisticated ear that  Schoenberg was a genius in terms of talent, alas he seems to be the only great composer thus far who got stuck in intellectual frustration. As such, he remains a strong symbol of what went wrong in 20C music. At heart he was a traditionalist, admiring 'the masters'  to bits, and trying to save tradition from vulgarity, as he saw it, by taking distance from the 'normal chords' which - in his opinion - had become trivialised by the popular music of the time. But musical material is not vulgar in itself, it is the context that may trivialise chord, melodies, rhythms - his thinking was literal, materialistic, rationalistic. Also his claim that he emancipated the dissonance (as he called it) is a misconception because a dissonance is not a thing that can be emancipated, but is an effect within a musical context, dependent upon style, aesthetics, etc. etc. Reading Schoenberg's comments upon the great German tradition, one begins to see what his problem was: he looked at those brilliant works mainly in an intellectual manner, and concluded that it was their complex and sophisticated structuralism that made the music 'great'. And that is a nonsensical notion. But it shows that at heart, he wanted to be a classicist, but did not know how to manage that in a time saturated with ideas of progressiveness and modernity as inspired by science, which stood in stark contrast to the musical aesthetics of the 18th and 19th century. He could have discovered the nonsense of such ideas and follow his heart, but that went against his rationalism. And thus, he committed artistic suicide, and never became the Great Composer he always felt he had to be, or maybe already was. I think: that notion was a real potential, unexplored.

Premiere in Concertgebouw Amsterdam

On 29th of October 2025 the superb Italian/Slovene Alinde Quartett presented the Dutch premiere of my - thus far - only string quartet: 'Traum, Lenz, Verwandlung' in the Concertgebouw. The Alinde Quartett belongs to the international top level of chamber music ensembles, with great performances and recordings of the classics but also including new works into their programs. They are 'Ensemble in Residence' of the Philharmonie in Cologne and draw an enthusiastic audience to their concerts in various European venues.

 https://www.alindequartett.com/

I feel deeply honoured by the serious dedication of these young players, who have added the quartet to their repertoire, and who have asked me to write a short piece for one of their Schubert concerts - 2028 is the memorial year of the death of this great composer who worked in the shadow of Beethoven and yet found his own, authentic voice.

The concert in the Concertgebouw - the Alinde's debut in the country - was recorded for national radio, and was, in total, a success. There was no review, in the Netherlands such concerts don't draw much attention, and since I do not have a particular high opinion of Dutch criticism of classical music concerts I'm quite happy with that.

'Traum, Lenz, verwandlung' (1997) was written in a period of almost total isolation, without any performance or players in mind, and the result of finding a short sketch of years earlier for a film project of a young filmmaker (which did not come to fruition). The material invited for further elaboration and thus, the music wrote itself, so to speak, unhindered by any conscious consideration as to the musical world. Some 10 years later a Romanian immigrant quartet tried to play it in the chamber music series of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum (museum for modern art) but that did not go well, and they complained (!) that the music was 'like late Beethoven'. A couple of years later a young British quartet tried it at a concert in London's Kings Place chamber music series but failed; I was not present but friends' stories reported something like a public rape. Later attempts to interest Dutch quartets all failed - no interest. What a contrast to find a quartet at an international top level who could manage their parts in a very impressive way and with great musical insight.... only now the music came into its own.

The music of the quartet, although not easy at all to play, is not 'difficult on the ear' and draws inspiration from the existent classical quartet repertoire, but transforms these influences into a language a bit reminiscent of early 20C music of the Germanic cultural sphere. I remember having thought at the time: what would Schoenberg have written if he had renounced his ideas of atonality and progress, and simply had followed his inclinations? All speculative of course, but I found it a fascinating idea which has stimulated me oftener.