I was tidying-up some old papers, and came across a couple of assessments that had been submitted during the court case I had initiated in 2012 against the Netherlands national funding foundation which had consistently refused to fund commissions I got from music life, on the grounds that my music lacked all forms of originality and was mere pastiche and thus, irrelevant and thus, should not be paid for, even if orchestras or ensembles had chosen to commission me. Assessments of the music at the foundation were done by comitees of experts, drawn from the circles of the new music network: composers and performers active in the ensemble circuit of the country, who themselves were clients of the foundation (grants, commission fees) and thus knew exactly into which direction state subsidies for new music had to go.
Rereading these assessments from international professionals, which were held back by the court and thus could not support my case, reveals the impossibility to convey meaning on an intellectual and professional level completely absent at the foundation and also at the court. In the end, I won the case when it could be demonstrated by my lawyer that the foundation had not taken even the most basic care to assess the contested grant application, it had been treated as something like a doormat. But I lost as well, because the court decided, without any clear ground, that I did not need to be paid at all.
It was clear to me that the exclusion of documents which were a very strong support for my position, was due to the wish to protect the foundation as a state institution. In fact, the mentioned documents were devastating as to the question of competence of the foundation. Since concepts like 'originality' are not objective in the sense mathematics are objective, the opinion of international experts of great reputation does have weight. I quote here from the assessment by the late philosopher and musicologist Sir Roger Scruton, author of the standard work on musical aesthetics 'The Aesthetics of Music' (Oxford University Press 1999):
"It is not relevant that Borstlap's music is tonal, or that he uses harmonies that might have been used by Richard Strauss. Beethoven's harmonies show little departure from the idiom of Haydn and Mozart, yet Beethoven was probably the most original composer who ever lived - original because every note in his works is bent to the task of presenting a distinct musical personality, and one whose integrity cannot be questioned. Nothing in Beethoven is predictable, despite the fact - and because of the fact - that his musical language obeys the rules of a shared and established syntax. In that sense I would say that Borstlap has certainly satisfied the requirement of originality. What he takes from the late romantic tradition he uses with a voice of his own. The melodic line of Psyche, for instance, is entirely Borstlapian, avoids the Straussian cadences and leaps, and opens a soundscape that reaches into emotional regions that are entirely modern. This, it seems to me, is Borstlap's great virtue as a composer, that he has found the way to revitalise a tradition that links the modern sensibility to the enduring vision of our culture."
Western serious concert music up till 20C modernism, has two layers of meaning: the musical language (as described by Scruton), and the layer of expression: that which is being conveyed in terms of musical meaning. This concept has been pushed to the margins or even completely out of sight when modernism in the last century became some kind of 'standard view' of new music: the language as such is the only thing that counts because there is nothing else. And in a culturally-provincial country like the Netherlands, deviations from what is considered by circles of ignorant people as 'the norm', are not tolerated. So, of course since 2012 I have focussed on the world outside the country where I have no place. Therefore I am very grateful to Jaap van Zweden who commissioned and premiered my music with his orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong and thereby proved, by its audience success and enthusiastic press, how miserable the 'new music establishment' in the Netherlands was, and still is, thinking of the fragments I occasionally hear of what is currently being produced.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-aesthetics-of-music-9780198167273?cc=nl&lang=en&#
