Aart Strootman wins Gaudeamus Award #Gaud17

On Sunday 10 September the Gaudeamus Award for composers under 30 was granted to the Dutch guitarist, composer and instrument designer Aart Strootman (1987) in TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht. The jury, consisting of Joe Cutler, Christopher Trapani and Mayke Nas, chose him from the 5 nominees who had passed their first selection.

For this year’s edition 288 scores were handed in, from 36 different countries. The Gaudeamus Award consists of a commission of € 5000 for a new piece to be premiered in the next Gaudeamus Muziekweek. Strootman’s fellow nominees were the Americans Chaz Underriner, Ethan Braun and Sky Macklay, and the Serbian Ivan Vukosavljevic.

The jury comments on Strootman: ‘An artist who sees no boundaries between performing, composing, improvising, and designing instruments. He’s a complete original, whose sonic invention is an inspiration and who approaches composition with a remarkable freshness, reinventing the sound of each instrument within an ensemble down to the finest detail. A performer, an improviser, an inventor and a unique composer.’

Strootman was happily surprised: ‘I hadn’t expected to win the prize, I’m very honoured.’ Asked what he had in mind for the commission, he answered: ‘I don’t know yet. I’m immersed in writing a new piece for the Bang on a Can All Stars at the moment, for the upcoming November Music Festival. I’m going to concentrate on that and work very hard. – But first I’m going to have a stiff drink.’

Like last year, the jury selection betrayed a predilection for composers focussing on sound and texture. From the jury report we learn that Underriner ‘shows extreme attention to detail’; Braun writes ‘beautifully poised music’; Vukosavljevic ‘understands the physicality of sound’, while Macklay ‘finely balances process and intuition’.

However enchanting their works may be, of the 5 composers Macklay seems to be the only who dares surprise us with outright recognizable melodies and rhythms. She also likes to poke fun at tradition, as in her contageous Many Many Cadences for string quartet.

Insomnio performing Ballet Mécanique TivoliVredenburg 10-9-2017 (c) Herre Vermeer

With her spunk Macklay comes closest in spirit to ‘Bad boy of music’ George Antheil, whose Ballet Mécanique sparked off the afternoon. It got a dazzling performance by the Utrecht based ensemble Insomnio under the baton of Ulrich Pöhl.

This high energy piece for percussion, sirens, electric bells, (player) piano’s and airplane propellers is a modern classic. Antheil wrote it in 1924, combining the machine-like roar of the futurists with Stravinskian ostinati and repetitive motifs that pre-echo the minimalists. Pöhl and his musicians blew the roof off TivoliVredenburg and got a thunderous applause.

One would wish young music pioniers would venture further into unmapped territories. Exploring the physicality of sound and the effect of layering chords may lead to hypnotizing, meditative textures, but the overall soundworld becomes so similar you can hardly tell one composer from another. Hopefully next year’s jury will have more ear for truly original voices and select a wider variety of styles, so a new Antheil will not be overlooked.

#AartStrootman #ChazUnderriner #EthanBraun #GaudeamusAward #GeorgeAntheil #Insomnio #IvanVukosavljevic #SkyMacklay

Gaudeamus nominee Scott Rubin: ‘All performance is to an extent composition’

Scott Rubin 2019

Scott Rubin (1989) is one of the five nominees for the Gaudeamus Music Award 2019. The prize is intended for composers under 30, but the Chicago based Rubin defies a strict interpretation of the concept of  composer. – Or of the performer for that matter.

He plays the viola himself, but develops his works in close collaboration with dancers and movement artists. What we see and hear onstage is rather more the outcome of a communal process than the achievement of one particular person. ‘I often act as a performer myself, but I wouldn’t like to use labels that privilege one activity over another.’

All three works he submitted for the Gaudeamus Award involve dancers and motion-sensitive live electronics. Naked to the Sky (2016) calls for 5 performers (4 musicians + movement artist) and was written for/with the Toronto based Thin Edge New Music Collective. Ironic erratic erotic (2017) was composed for/with Jack Adler-McKean, Adam Goodwin and Yuri Shimaoka for a project in Berlin.

In tensions (2018) was developed in collaboration with the cellist Polina Streltsova and movement artist Marie Albert, and was premiered in Paris earlier this year. It will be performed by the fearless cellist Maya Fridman and Emma Evelein in Theater Kikker on Saturday 7 September.

Rubin admits having hesitated to apply for the Gaudeamus Award: ‘I rarely take part in competitions because so few new music institutions support works with dancers. However, Gaudeamus seemed open minded. I’ve been following the festival for years now and have many friends and colleagues who participated in the past. I applied because I thought I had something unique to say and this competition would provide the platform to say it.’

‘I thought that sending a family of interdisciplinary works would convey a cohesive message that contemporary music festivals aren’t just about who writes the best scores for the best musicians. They are about the total collaborative process and audio-visual performance, what the audience sees and hears, and the psychological and theatrical states of the performers.’

‘To me the relation between performer/composer is fluid, non-binary, and intensively collaborative. Everyone creates, it’s just a matter of when. In my honest opinion, all performance is to an extent composition – it’s a question of how far in advance you plan, your relationship to the material and those you created it with, and your attitudes towards flexibility and expressivity.’

‘In my compositional work, I rely a lot on performers to be sensitive and improvise to the best of their abilities at any given moment. They are as much responsible for the success of the project as I am. During the creation process, their material often helps me create structure, so it’s not beneficial to discuss it with regards to ownership or authorship. I often think of myself more as a director or large-scale decision-maker rather than a composer.’

In the Gaudeamus festival he will not be playing his viola on stage. ‘But since all of my works feature live electronics I’m required to perform live from the tech table, often improvising and balancing the marriage between audio and motion data generated by what the performers are doing.’

‘I’ll bring my viola to Utrecht for rehearsal purposes, though. Hopefully I can find some people to jam with…’

I interviewed the five nominees on 4 September in TivoliVredenburg (picture by Co Broerse).

#GaudeamusAward #MayaFridman #NakedToTheSky #ScottRubin #TheaterKikker #TivoliVredenburg

Whoever said modern music is humourless and cerebral? Kelley Sheehan wins Gaudeamus Award 2019

Kelley Sheehan, photo Anna van Kooij

For a moment the envelope doesn’t seem to open, but then Ingrid van Engelshoven conjures up the redeeming piece of paper. ‘The winner of the Gaudeamus Award 2019 is Kelley Sheehan!’ The small American composer is visibly surprised, she hasn’t seen this coming. Probably not entirely coincidentally, the organisation for new music has positioned her right in the middle of her four fellow candidates. – She herself would have divided the prize equally among them, she tells me afterwards.

Sheehan’s surprised reaction is heartwarming, as is the presence of the Dutch Minister of Cultural Affairs. It is a message to up-and-coming composers and other artists: you matter! Thus the award ceremony on 8 September was a nice icing on the cake of a varied festival. A range of cross-border productions spread across the city of Utrecht. – From festival centre TivoliVredenburg to Kunstruimte Kuub and from Theater Kikker to Centraal Museum and Nicolaïkerk. There were also free outdoor performances on the Neude and Weerdsluis.

Collectivity

The fact that young composers no longer exclusively focus on black and white dots on paper is a given. Collaborations with other disciplines such as dance, visual arts and technology are a matter of course. What did strike me in this year’s festival however, was the desire for collectivity on the part of the five nominees, their bent towards joint creation. – A reassuring feeling in times of polarisation and excessive individualism.

The most pronounced in this are the American Scott Rubin and the Canadian Remy Siu. Rubin creates his pieces together with dancers equipped with movement sensors, in direct interaction with the performing musicians. Siu develops music projects with his own Hong Kong Collective, for which he writes software inspired by video games.

In our pre-concert talk Siu even challenged the fundamental concept of a composer. The Canadian Stefan Maier, the British composer Nicholas Morrish and prizewinner Sheehan also regard the performer as a kind of composer.

Strapped violins, crackling cactus

Jurors Clara Ianotta, Yannis Kyriakides and Gerhard Stäbler describe Sheehan as ‘a true explorer of sound’. She ‘works with objects that are stretched in their function’ and creates ‘an unusual noise world’. This certainly applies to Four Sharp Corners for string quartet, performed on Thursday by the Utrecht based ensemble Insomnio. Four string instruments ensnared by fishing wires lie on as many tables. While the musicians try to free their instruments, screaming electronic sounds emerge. With their bows the four string players elicit crunching sounds from their music stands. Two players compete for who can raise or lower his stand with the loudest bang. Whoever said modern music is dry and cerebral?

The Traces that Remain by Nicholas Morrish also has a fresh, humorous slant. Conductor Ulrich Pöhl dribbles back and forth between three old-fashioned gramophones that are prominently placed on stage. He winds up the mechanism and places shellac discs made by Morrish himself. These contain the ticks and splutters inherent in their manufacturing process. The drummer grates a metal comb over the needles of a cactus. According to Morrish, cactus needles were once used to pick up the sound of the records. The ensemble plays fragments of the romantic music we expect to hear from these analogue discs.

Stifling depression, drowning bodies

But it’s not just lightheartedness that sets the tone. In the theatrical DisOrders, Petra Strahovnik makes various forms of depression oppressively palpable. The musicians of Modelo’62 breathe in and out obsessively, writhing over the floor while banging the sound boxes of their instruments, dipping the cup of their clarinet in water and producing an orgy of noise on drums and thunder plates. After about an hour the heavy breathing returns while the musicians are being wrapped in translucent plastic foil. Clearly, there’s no escape from this stifling universe.

The performance Nocturne in EUropean Waters by the Spanish-Dutch composer Jonás Bisquert is downright poignant. Musicians from the New European Ensemble and singers of Consorte are positioned on either side of the Weerdsluis. Gracefully undulating melodies travel from musicians to singers and from quay to quay. Poet Randa Awad recites her poem The Long European Nights, standing on the parapet in the middle of the lock, partly in Arabic, partly in English. Four singers join her, but she abruptly pushes them into the water: ‘Now dead, you oscillate!’ It is a crushing image of the refugees we leave to their fate in the Mediterranean Sea.

Marimba wall

The festival opened on Wednesday, September 4 with the world premiere of W.A.L.L. by Aart Strootman, performed by Slagwerk Den Haag and Temko. Strootman thus fulfilled the composition assignment associated with the Gaudeamus Award, which he won in 2017. He personally built a wall-filling 60-tone marimba, which had been announced with a great deal of fuss. We were even offered a preview of a documentary about its creation. Unfortunately this was rather uninformative. We see Strootman frantically sawing, sanding and fretting, but must learn from the programme booklet that he has divided the octave into 60 instead of 12 tones.

Slagwerk Den Haag playing the marimba wall, photo Anna van Kooij

The promised ‘wall of sound’ also failed to materialise. W.A.L.L. is rather more a study in softly echoing, microtonal guitar arpeggios, sparsely larded with lovely patterns played on the marimba wall. The percussionists – veering upwards from their stools to ‘climb’ the wall – create some beautiful, buzzing passages, but on the whole the wall is subservient to the guitars and the other percussion instruments. Only rarely the percussionists are allowed to indulge themselves in noisy thunderclaps on metal tubes placed between the marimba wall. All in all, the musical material failed to hold our attention over the duration of an hour.

Trumpet concert in disguise

More interesting was Bird, the new piece that Sebastian Hilli, winner of the 2018 Gaudeamus Award, composed for Asko|Schönberg. It is a cheerful amalgam of loud staccato blasts from the ensemble, intersected with sudden silences. Hilli creates a lively question-and-answer game that bounces from jazzy percussion and big-band brass to cheery marching band sounds and exhilarating poppy dance music. The percussionist plays a brilliant solo on bass drum and hi-hat, the pianist pounds out roaring chords on her grand piano.

A star role is reserved for the solo trumpeter, Bird turning out to be a sort of trumpet concert in disguise. Trumpeter Bas Duister has an unprecedentedly beautiful tone full of colour shades, and effortlessly produces the highest notes in virtuoso melodies. The work ends with a parody of the endlessly repeated chords with which classical composers like Beethoven conclude their pieces. Every time you think it’s over, a squeaking piccolo screams for attention. A wonderful piece that sends you home with a cheerful feeling. Gaudeamus could not have wished for a better finale to its 69th edition.

#AartStrootman #GaudeamusAward #KelleySheehan #NicholasMorrish #RemySiu #ScottRubin #SebastianHilli #StefanMaier

Gaudeamus nominee Annika Socolofsky: ‘All the fun lies in those messy moments between the notes’

Composer-vocalist Annika Socolofsky is one of the four nominees for the Gaudeamus Award 2021. Two years ago this prize for young composers was won by Kelley Sheehan; last year’s competition was postponed due to corona. Socolofsky’s work will be featured during several concerts, but she also composed a new piece for the accordion/clarinet duo Zöllner-Roche especially for the festival. On Sunday 11 September the winner of the Gaudeamus Award 2021 will be announced.

‘Donnacha Dennehy, one of my mentors, encouraged me to take part in the Gaudeamus competition’, says Annika Socolofsky (1990). ‘I look forward to making live music again with fellow musicians in a concert context. For this to be my first experience back during the pandemic feels like fasting for a year and a half, and then dining at the most wonderful restaurant. As excited I am to be performing again myself, I really look forward to taking in as many concerts as I can, experiencing the premieres by my fellow nominees.’

COMPOSER-PERFORMER

You are both a composer and a performer, how do you see the relationship between the two?

‘For me, there is no way to un-link them. I don’t think of myself as a composer and a performer, but as a composer-performer. When I’m composing, I’m always thinking about how the music will feel in the body of the performer – what the gestures will feel like, how the energy of the piece will build and dissipate in a manner that feels natural and satisfying to play, what the dialogue will feel like between performers. I’m constantly moving around, conducting, walking, trying to get the music into my physical being, so I know it will feel natural and rewarding to perform, even if I’m not performing it myself.’

‘When I’m performing, I can’t turn off my composer mind. No two performances are alike. I’m always improvising micro variations and micro inflections that respond to the other performers, or the resonance of the hall in real time. I love being flexible and composing in-the-moment like that. You get to feed off the energy and ideas of the musicians you’re performing with. It’s an exhilarating and collaborative way of composing that I don’t get to experience when writing alone in my studio.’ 

Annika Socolofsky: ‘When I’m performing, I can’t turn off my composer mind.’

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On your website you describe yourself as an ‘avant folk vocalist who explores corners and colours of the voice frequently deemed to be “untrained” and not “classical.” How are we to understand this?

‘I feel like I sing in all the ways that classical vocalists are told not to: I belt a lot (kind of a curated, musical shout), I do death-metal style growls, I explore types of vibrato that are not classical, I’ll use a microphone so I can produce sound that wouldn’t normally project through a concert hall in an acoustic setting, and I gravitate really strongly to the music that lies between the notes in folk music.’

‘This between-the-note music is a whole world of ornamentation, inflection, gesture, and swells that folk music lives for, but is often excluded from modern day classical vocal practice. I live for those messy moments between the notes. That is where the fun, the joy, the emotional connection lies for me.’

DOLLY PARTON

In this respect you often refer to Dolly Parton. What makes her so special?

‘The link between me and Dolly is those moments between the notes I’ve just mentioned. Dolly Parton is one of the greatest composers of all time, in my opinion. She’s written thousands of incredible songs that tell women’s stories. But not only is she a wonderful composer, she also approaches her vocal technique from a deeply compositional mind-set. If you take a recording of hers and hone in on a single vocal phrase and zoom in ever more closely, you will find the most spectacular density of vocal inflection, ornamentation, and nuance.’

‘But what’s so amazing to me is not the density or the nuance per se. It’s how this gorgeous web of inflections serves such a natural and powerful purpose within the larger line and the larger story of the song. Dolly’s moments-between-the-notes hit me straight in the heart. They are these pangs of emotion so small, but so powerful that I find myself breathless. Those moments mean the world to me. – I’ve been working on my Dolly Parton impersonation for years, and would be happy to demonstrate some examples of this live.’*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPDY8MlT_T4

DEFYING SOCIETAL DEFINITIONS OF WOMANHOOD

You will perform ‘Don’t Say a Word’ in the Gaudeamus festival, which addresses the feminist issue. It strikes me that even in 2021 the theme of female composers still touches upon an open nerve. What’s your take on this?

‘I couldn’t agree with your article more: “women composers” is NOT a theme! Especially as a queer woman, I often find this kind of concert themes problematic. They try to draw some kind of sense of “universal womanhood” out of what is essentially lazy programming. Personally, I don’t feel that there IS any such thing as universal womanhood (aside from the fact that we all experience misogyny of various varieties).’

‘As a queer woman, my experience with my gender and sexuality is extraordinarily different from the one society tries to model for me. I’m constantly fighting against society’s definition of womanhood so that I can un-become the things I was taught to be that disagree with who I truly am.’

Annika Socolofsky: ‘Dolly Parton is one of the greatest composers of all time.’

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‘And that’s where my piece Don’t say a word comes in. It’s part of a larger song cycle (soon to be released on CD) of feminist rager-lullabies for a new queer era. Lullabies are a centuries-old way of conditioning children with “morals” and societal expectations that are not only sexist, but also deeply homophobic. So I took these old texts from lullabies and nursery rhymes and re-set them to new music, changed the words, altered the meaning so that I could re-tell those lessons in a way that reflects the many facets of my identity.’

‘A cool thing about lullabies is that they’re the only performing space we have as vocalists where there’s no audience. When you’re singing a lullaby to a young child, they’re mostly taking in the musical aspects of the vocal line. It’s not until they are older that they really start processing the words. So mothers singing lullabies to their children are granted this safe performing space, where you can essentially sing the words and thoughts that are not safe to share in society.’

DISTURBING LULLABIES

‘This is why, throughout history and across cultures, you can find so many lullabies with texts that are deeply disturbing. For example, the English language lullaby Rockabye Baby is about a baby falling to the ground from a tree. Or, there is this Sephardic lullaby, Una madre comió asado (“A mother roasts her child”). The mother sings of an invading army, and her plan to roast her child before the soldiers arrive, to save it from a worse fate.’

‘That’s dark. But in society, women are not allowed to express the darkness of motherhood, they’re not allowed to show anger, they’re not allowed to deviate from society’s definition of womanhood. As musicologist Andrew Petitt puts it, “lullabies are the space to sing the unsung, to say the unsayable. You’re alone. Nobody is listening.” So you can express feelings that are inacceptable in society.’

‘Don’t say a word is one such lullaby, which explores the text of Hush little baby, followed by an unexpected turn in the original lyrics. It also explores the word “hush” in great detail. “Hush” is an interesting word in that it can be aggressive and silencing, but also calming and loving.

Which of your pieces are you proud of most?

‘Wow, that’s really hard to answer. I have to say I am most proud of the pieces that manage to capture that Dolly Parton sense of heart-pangs. I compose so that I can hopefully connect with people the way Dolly Parton has connected with me through her music. So I’m most proud of the pieces that have managed to do that.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbjGG7ghvcs

On Friday 10 September at 21.30 CET I will moderate a meet & greet with the four nominees in TivoliVredenburg

*In our talk I took up Annika on her promise to impersonate Dolly Parton; it was captured on video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDGZMwPQzgk

On 12 September Annika Socolofsky was declared winner of the Gaudeamus Award 2021

#AnnikaSocolofsky #DollyParton #GaudeamusAward #ZöllnerRocheDuo

Gaudeamus nominee Jenny Beck is inspired by nature: ‘Farmlands and forests are sonically very rich’

Vocalist and composer Jenny Beck is one of the four nominees of the Gaudeamus Award 2021. In fact the selection was already made last year, but due to corona the competition was postponed. During the festival Beck’s music will be featured in several concerts, including the brand new Memory Town, composed especially for ensemble VONK. On Sunday 12 September the winner will be announced. He or she will receive € 20,000 for a new composition to be premiered in the next edition.

Jenny Beck (1985) writes music for instruments, voices, electronics, and found objects in a variety of small and large ensembles. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at Princeton University, and heard about the Gaudeamus competition through social media. ‘I am looking forward to spending time rehearsing with the ensembles’, she says, ‘getting to know the musicians as well as the other composers and the panellists.’*

‘I find I learn a lot about my work during rehearsals and in live concert settings. Since I’m getting the opportunity to have this experience with three of my pieces at once, I anticipate coming away with some new perspectives and ideas for my current and upcoming projects: aspects of my composing that I’d like to do more of, do less of, develop more, circle back to, etcetera.’ 

Your work often relates to nature, whence this interest?  

‘I grew up in a tiny neighbourhood situated among farmland and forests. These environments are sonically very rich; every season has a different soundscape. And since the sounds come from the environments themselves, they are completely immersive, always all around you, with sounds emanating from seen and unseen sources, from distances near and far, from manmade objects, animals, trees, and more.’

‘You can’t always tell what sound is coming from where, and for my imaginative brain – especially as a child, especially at night – this ambiguity was and is a source of deep fantasy, both fearful and comforting. I now credit my early immersion in these soundscapes as the origin of my musical thinking, and I try to build worlds that are just as evocative and mesmerizing.’

You often employ non-musical instruments, so called ‘found objects’. How do you develop your music? 

‘When I first approach a piece, I feel like I can see it as a whole entity from a distance. The work, then, is to get close to it and see what it’s made of, so that I can translate that from my inner world to this one. Each work may have different parameters or qualities that are important, whether it’s pitch, rhythm, texture, colour, space, noise, breath, flow, mood, or yet something else.’

‘Non-musical sounds can be useful if I want something that is familiar but strange, or something to fill in the gaps between more discrete sounds, or something to create a blur effect within a texture.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCx6WYy7QEU

‘Actually, one of my original interests with found sounds was to work with noises where ‘Actually, one of my original interests with found sounds was to work with noises where duration is built into the gesture that produces them. For example, if you pour a bowl full of beads into another bowl, the duration is set by the quantity of beads in the bowl and how fast you pour them.’

Jenny Beck: ‘I’ve been really inspired by Joan La Barbara’s approach to sound as a physical entity’

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‘So then if I ask a performer to pour the bowl of beads six times, that gesture becomes a rhythm of sorts, and even a structuring element in the piece. I also do this with conventional instruments, where I ask performers to hold notes until the end of a bow or breath. – The found sounds are simply a natural extension of that concept.’ 

Would you have any composers who inspired you?

‘Yes! I’ve been really inspired by Joan La Barbara’s approach to sound as a physical entity; by Unsuk Chin’s rigour and attention to detail; by Jo Kondo speaking about how he lets the notes he writes tell him which note should come next; by Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel’s work with early electronic instruments, how they used technology to engage with the cosmic and sublime; and by Christine Burke and the clarity of her ideas and her commitment to them.’ 

Is there a piece you look especially forward to in the Gaudeamus festival? 

‘I’m proud of different pieces for different reasons, since I set a specific goal for each one of them. Long It Glows, that will be performed by the New European Ensemble on Friday 10 September,was important for me because it was the first piece I wrote entirely in box notation. It ended up being more than twice as long as I expected, so that was an important lesson!’

‘It was also a risk for me to ask the musicians to pluck the piano strings and sing for a section of the piece. I wanted to open up a portal to another world within this world I’d already created; I’m really happy with how that has turned out.’

https://soundcloud.com/jenny-beck-composer/long-it-glows

What are you working on at the moment?

‘I’ve been working on things for the last couple of years that haven’t made it out into the world yet, largely because of the pandemic. I have an album of ambient electronic music that I’m hoping to release in the coming year. It feels like a big accomplishment because it’s music that I always wanted to write. It was hiding inside me somewhere, and I was finally able to get past my mental and emotional blocks and write it.’

‘I’m also working on a big piece that I’m singing, which includes many of the same elements as Memory Town that I wrote for VONK for this festival. These pieces bring together many threads of my work – writing for voice, fully notated music, box notation, found sounds, and electronics – and I’m really excited to see how they turn out and where they will take me next.’

https://soundcloud.com/jenny-beck-composer/until-you-are-in-the-dark

* It’s a jury of three: the Japanese composer Karen Tanaka, The British-American composer Oscar Bettison and the Greek-Dutch composer Calliope Tsoupaki.

On Friday 10 September at 21.30 hrs I will moderate a meet & greet with the nominees.

PS 15 September: our talk was captured on video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDGZMwPQzgk

#EnsembleVONK #GaudeamusAward #JennyBeck #UnsukChin

Slow Roads by Ivan Vukosavljević: a loving ode to the organ

Recently the new music label Elsewhere Music released the CD Slow Roads with eight organ pieces by Ivan Vukosavljević (1986). I got to know the Serbian/Dutch composer in 2017, when I interviewed him prior to the opening concert of the Gaudeamus Music Week, as one of the five nominees for the Gaudeamus Music Award. Although his piece Atlas Slave did not make it to the finish line (Aart Strootman won), it did attract attention: ‘In Atlas Slave, Ivan Vukosavljević builds a hypnotic sound world from a guitar played with a bow’, I opined at the time.

Vukosavljević studied composition at the University of Arts in Belgrade and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he has lived and worked since 2014. He has composed pieces for the Gaudeamus Music Week, Orkest de Ereprijs and Ensemble Klang and won the Amsterdam Marimba Weekend Composition Prize in 2022 with The Ladder. ‘With very modest means and simple instrumental parts, the composer builds maximum musical effect,’ wrote one critic.

It’s an apt description of Vukosavljević’s style, which often combines electronics with physical instruments. He likes to work with a minimum of material and shares a fascination for timbre with many of his contemporaries. This is certainly true of the recently released CD Slow Roads with eight works for organ recorded in churches in the northern Netherlands. His text in the CD booklet seems to be a blueprint of his own composing. He describes our country as a ‘seemingly endless pastoral landscape. Meadows and farmland stretching in the long distance. An occasioanl church tower in the distance’.

According to Vukosavljević, the further north you travel, the emptier and quieter it becomes. Precisely in this stillness he found the five churches in which the CD was recorded. Each has an organ in meantone tuning, with the fifths tuned slightly lower so that the thirds sound purer. The resulting compilation is a beautiful amalgam of compositions exploring the possibilities of the diverse organs in slowly shifting patterns.

The CD opens with The Ladder, recorded on the organ constructed by an anonymous builder in 1531 in the Mariakerk of Krewerd. Organist Lise Morrison sets slowly descending melody lines against stacks of dissonant harmonies. Eventually, we seem to end up in an abyss with tones so low that all we hear is a deep pulsing growl. Compelling and meditative.

We recognise this descending tendency in several pieces. Like in When You Are Able to Become the Patterns of the Earth, played by Tineke Steenbrink on the organ built by Theodorus Faber in the Jacobuskerk in Zeerijp in 1651. Here, however, the underlying surface is more agile and the reflective atmosphere is pierced outbursts that recall the whining sounds of a bagpipe.

Steenbrink also performs Echo (After Sweelinck) on the organ built by Hendrick and Johannes Huys in the Antoniuskerk in Kantens in 1661. Shrill harmonies and diatonic motifs change colour in constantly shifting registers. The simple, sing-along melodies most closely resemble common church organ themes.

Although Vukosavljević does not deploy electronics this time, his eight sound explorations do create that impression. Sharp, squeaking, scraping, vibrating and other indeterminate sounds are contrasted with ultra-low, subwoofer-like roaring, formed by unearthly vibrations that may not be perceptible to all.

Vukosavljević clearly nurtures a great love for the organ. Together, the eight pieces constitute a beautiful set of etudes, forming one extended ode to the organ’s unprecedented richness of sound. Slow Roads is a welcome acquisition for any organ lover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ooOwaMm73Y&ab_channel=IvanV

#AartStrootman #GaudeamusAward #IvanVukosavljevic #TinekeSteenbrink #WhenYouAreAbleToBecomeThePatternsOfTheEarth