Crossroads

‘Crossroads’ consists of four compositions for solo instruments. The four concerts are very intimate (small number of listeners) and only open to the public on a limited basis (by invitation). The places where the concerts take place are determined by traditions and cultures of the past. They can also be places that look to the future; for example a revolutionary building concept within architecture. Light could play an important role here.

The audience is taken by bus from a central location in the Netherlands to a place they do not yet know.

The four compositions for solo instruments differ from each other in their size – the field road is narrower than the avenue – and in the thematic approach of the melodies. Each composition is about 20 minutes long.

“The melody has the future”

Feruccio Busoni
Los Angeles,
15 March 1911

1. Crossroads – Path
for viola and sand
Viola: Heleen Hulst
10 September 2011, Wieringen
concert in ‘de Harmonie’, Hippolytushoef

2. Crossroads – Lane
for double bass and moving objects
double bass: Erik Winkelmann
28 June 2008, Thorn
concert in ‘de Glazenmaker’, stained-glass studio

3. Crossroads – Street
for flute and rolling balls
flute and shakuhashi: Harrie Starreveld
29 May 2010, Zeewolde
concert in ‘de Verbeelding’

4. Crossroads – Avenue
for oboe and humming tops
oboe: Frank van Koten
2 April 2011, Dwingeloo
concert in the Nicolaschurch

What happened before…

The inner hearing: listening to something and thereby discovering that personal inner force, which determines my being as a musician, that is my guideline.

What is music? What and how should it be and how can I make my visions sound? The search for answers to these questions is ultimately determined by the intuitive ability to develop one’s own musicality. The sound world I envisage can then contain that vitality, which I have already perceived in my innermost being.

Only then can I make music as a composer; approaching the nature of music, which awakens in light dimensions and leaves behind what is only audible. The need to express the resounding beauty that you perceive in your dreams requires introspection, a concentration on the essential without external influences. Composing is finding my own language that makes it possible to reveal all this beauty. Making music is therefore my constant need to make dreams resonate; to shape them in such a way that not only are melodies transformed into sounds, but that they also take place in a space that cannot be described.

Then…

Determine your own path and not just let learned experiences point the way. One’s own intuition can ignore obvious, conscious decisions, even turn them in the opposite direction.

One finds oneself in an unknown musical landscape; the elusive sound world seems unattainable; the sounding mountain cannot be shaped. How should one find the ideal line, either as quickly as possible, or consciously and slowly moving forward?

Broad-minded and with an open mind, you make your plans.

At the beginning, the composition is like an unfilled, blank map; every note is an action that demands a new decision. Once you have found the right sounding seed, each note is either a self-placed boundary stone or just a marker. The course of the road then determines the arrangement of the melody and one crosses the sound mountains as if they had never existed before. Finally, a horizon and a width that one wanted to hear open up.

The prerequisite is the order of the ‘value’ of each individual note, i.e. the shades that ultimately form the melody. Why should the first note be followed by the next one? Why do you hear the next note already, although it does not sound. Of course, harmonic thinking and playing with counterpoint play a role. But also other functions, routes, controlled processes can be felt and imagined.

As a basis for ‘Crossroads’, I therefore kept a melody diary. In it, I not only wrote down the individual melody, but also its valence, the evaluative direction of the response, its stimulative nature. Also my suspicions/premonitions and moods, or in other words the motivations that inspired me to form a melody as a unity, were named. First it is about the conscious choice of those notes that may lie within an octave (diastematic); then the valence determines the duration of each individual note, the rhythm.

But all these roads, equal or unequal in nature, but each forming a unity, will cross each other’s path one day. They will intersect or merge. Intersections, crossroads’, energy fields arise, which also point in a certain direction and which one continues to follow. It does not matter if this map of melodies, this network of roads, leads to rhizome-like or purposeful directions; all roads intersect to form sound patterns. The essence of each pattern follows an inner movement, namely the tireless reflection on the resonance that music evokes. By scanning each state and its sequence in advance (periodically), and leading them to another ‘larger’ melody line, other musical shades, perhaps unknown to me, can be determined. These may fill hollow spaces and lead to strange connections. This again, is characteristic of the energy fields of ‘Crossroads’.

What came next…

Crossroads/Plateau

2011/2012 (25’38”)
For oboe, flute, viola, double bass and air sounds

After the four Crossroads episodes, I wrote the two-part quartet Crossroads/Plateau in 2011. This composition is a logical sequel to the four solo works. The same instruments play together in Plateau. The musical aesthetics in the first is similar; the second part, on the other hand, plays with other, new ideas.

In a project draft for the “Landesgartenschau” in Bamberg (Germany, 2011) I had dealt with the sounds of air, not only in direct form, e.g. the breath of the wind, but also indirectly. Birds fly in the air, we hear their voices. So it was not so far-fetched/foreseeable/following to use also human sounds in Crossroads/Plateau, as well as to further develop the topic air in terms of sound. Furthermore, in the last solo piece Crossroads/Avenue gyroscopic sounds were used. The whirring of the tongues, which produce the gyroscopic sound, is produced by the air.

Crossroads/Plateau presents different musical styles (without bias) and consists of 2 movements:
A. The landscape of the past
– uses classic inspired set pieces for the instruments, sounds/calls of birds of the Pantanal and their wing flutter, the noise of windmills and turbines, wind whispering and related air sounds.
– consists essentially of 4 parts:
1. Plateau R1 (Reality) (02’14” – 04’07”)
2. Plateau E (Eternity) (04’07” – 07’27”)
3. Plateau A (Association) (07’27” – 10’04”)
4. Plateau R2 (Reality)(10’04” -15’44’)

The abbreviations REAR refer to the past solo pieces, which are similar in composition. (are a reminiscence of)

B. Plateau (15’46” end)
is looking for other forms of musical expression. The human sounds are changed electronically. The voice leading of the quartet is sometimes strict, block-like and contrasts with the deformed, often glissando-like vocal sounds. Dark clouds of sound as well as bright tonal melody lines, however, do not stand in contrast to each other but correspond to each other. In the end the solid form breaks up into small fragments, sibilants and single notes, dissolving into/to a tonal single/soloistic final note of the flute. tonal soloistic end.

One stands on a wide plain and tries to perceive, experience and perhaps internalize the forms and colours of natural space, one’s own soundscape.

Crossroads/video

2012/2013 (28’58”)

In January 2012, we asked all participants in Crossroads to send us their visual material (photos, film). It should not become a documentary, but a memory of the four journeys, in which the impressions are reproduced and creatively visually edited. In January 2013, the finishing touches were put on this video.

Crossroads/remix

2012 (32’56”)

Peter van Cooten made a Crossroads remix in February 2012, in which he extensively incorporated the background sounds of the four Crossroads solos. This remix was partially used in the video.

Cover CD (image by Svilen001)

Remix Peter van Cooten

Crossroads/samen-gevat

In cooperation with the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU), we put together a programme for a day in Utrecht; the intersection of the four Crossroads works. It was to be a summary of the earlier days: music, poetry and visual art, with various artists who had already collaborated. Unfortunately, the subsidy applications we submitted were rejected, so this could not take place.

Crossroads/Sho-w

2013 (20’48”)
For oboe, flute, viola, double bass and sounds from Japan
Sho: Naomi Sato

The quartet Crossroads/Sho-w has the same line-up as Crossroads/Plateau. Sho-w begins with the second part of Plateau, in which cultural influences from the Occident can be heard. This is followed by the Sho, a kind of bamboo mouth organ and Japanese word sounds, which bring one into the Japanese sphere. Crossroads/Sho-w refers to and shows (show) other worlds, not opposites, but united in a musical context. The composition was completed in March 2013.

Crossroads Sho-w part 2

Crossroads, the vision

As already conceived in 2008, Crossroads (without additions) would become a synthesis of the four solo works.

The instruments are heard in sevenfold; so, for example, there are seven violists, sitting behind each other and being led and instructed by the first violist. Twenty-eight musicians are needed, forming four different instrument groups. The musicians who play the solo parts in the four different pieces are thus the impulses of their own instrument group in Crossroads.

Crossroads was supposed to be accessible to a wide audience and to be performed in a regular concert hall in Utrecht, where all four Crossroad journeys started. Unfortunately, we have not been able to realise this.

Then there is only one thing left: “The only true realist is the visionary”.

Federico Fellini (1920 – 1993), Italian director and author