General rehearsal at 16.30 is open for attendance. Tickets are still available.
Performers:
Asko|Schönberg
Ensemble Academie
Reinbert de Leeuw dirigent
Kristina Bitenc sopraan
Georgi Sztojanov tenor
Nina van Essen spreekstem
Elsie de Brauw spreekstem
Here is the programme note written for BBC about De Stijl (De Materie, part 3) for the last year Total Immersion Louis Andriessen festival at Barbican, London.
De Stijl (1984-85)
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for 4 women’s voices, female speaker and large
ensemble
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Considered to be one of
Andriessen’s classics, De Stijl is sharp and abrasive in tone,
and has something of the air of a manifesto. It draws together ‘high’ and ‘low’,
‘artistic’ and ‘popular’ musics, foregrounding the notion of style as the
conceptual motor of the piece. The title pays homage to the journal De Stijl, first published by Theo van
Doesburg in 1917 in Amsterdam, which served as the theoretical grounding for
the movement known as ‘neo-plasticism’ in the visual arts.
Although De
Stijl is often performed as an independent piece, it is actually the third
part of the stagework De Materie
(1985-88), in which Andriessen investigates ways in which the mind or spirit
handles the material world. The combination of rigorous structural planning and
a diversity of stylistic elements is common for all four parts of De Materie.
Red, Yellow and Blue; bold, black intersecting lines;
black, grey and white rectangular fields; asymmetry: these might be the
keywords to describe the geometrical abstraction characteristic of the painter
Piet Mondrian, who was the most prominent artistic figure of neo-plasticism.
One of his most emblematic paintings is Composition
with Red Yellow and Blue (1927), and it was precisely this work that
Andriessen used as a kind of model for the proportions of De Stijl.
Text © Jelena Novak
The music is a free
transposition of the proportions (durations) and colors (instrumentation) of
the painting. It takes the shape of a Passacaglia, a set of variation on an ostinato
bass. The funky-like bass theme, first played by piano and bass guitar, is a
restless melody of improvisatory spirit. It appears no fewer than fifty-eight
times, sometimes comprehensively disguised, and with only its metrical
structure preserved and detectable.
Two literary texts were used. The first, sung in Dutch,
is by the theosophist and mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers (who greatly
influenced Mondrian), and is about the figure of ‘the perfect cross-line’. The
second text, mainly spoken by a dancer in English, is by M. van Domselaer, and
describes Mondrian’s love of dance. The words about the cross-line are always followed
by the B-A-C-H motive. The female voices that convey the cross-line text are
invariably strained and dissonant. They come across as a kind of vocal perpetuum mobile that critically mirrors
the text. After a climax a boogie-woogie begins on piano, and in the staged
version of the piece the dancer/speaker takes a prominent role from that point
on, narrating Van Domselaer’s text while projecting the image of the perfect
cross-line with a laser beam.
Andriessen was never interested in creating a singular
musical style, suggesting that if his music really does express something like
his own specific language, it is due to his limitations, not his acumen. Thus,
for Andriessen, style appears to be a strategy for avoiding these limitations.
And in the process he endlessly introduces musical references of remote and
unlikely origin, as though to confirm that music is not really about style, but about other music.
