Louis Andriessen admits to some ambivalence about the premise for the series of concerts – in his home city of Amsterdam and across Europe and North America – that have marked his 70th birthday since June this year. “I must, of course, say that the concerts, especially when they are very good performances of pieces, are simply a joy,” reflects the Netherlands’ most celebrated – and in some quarters, most controversial – living composer. “In the beginning, I had the feeling that it was ridiculous to start performing pieces because somebody has been alive a round amount of years. But I’m not too orthodox to enjoy it when it happens.”

If Andriessen has the slightly abashed air of someone ushered into a room to discover a birthday cake and a crowd of well-wishers, then he does, at least, approve wholeheartedly of the list of guests. The programme for hcmf’s two celebratory Louis Andriessen 70 concerts, Andriessen Peanuts and Andriessen in Black and White, features friends and collaborators from throughout his career. Each has played a role in helping the composer realise his vision, from Gerard Bouwhuis and Cees van Zeeland of Hoketus and The Piano Duo, to the musicians Andriessen describes as “my two muses, the violinist Monica Germino and the impeccable Cristina Zavalloni, the Italian singer.”

“A lot of my recent music is written for Cristina, both smaller chamber music and larger pieces. At the moment, I’m writing a mono-drama theatre work for her, based upon fragments of the journal of Anaïs Nin. So when I compose, I think of her first and of her personality. I’m very pleased to have her performing in Huddersfield.”

Featuring a range of smaller pieces from the last three decades, Andriessen Peanuts showcases the range of subject matter and influences incorporated by the composer, who has long looked to jazz, pop and global music as much as Western composition. One of the pieces performed by Zavalloni is Letter from Cathy, a musical adaptation of a 1964 letter sent to Andriessen by the late Cathy Berberian, the singer who was married to Luciano Berio at the time Andriessen was his student. Her interpretive abilities greatly inspired the earlier years of his career.

“I worked a lot with Cathy in the early Sixties and later, and that was, let’s say, my norm, my milestone for how it could be, the performance and intelligence of a singer, and specifically, the wide range of possibilities," he recalls. “What I don’t like in classically trained singers is that everything sounds the same: whether it’s Schubert or Bach or Wagner or The Beatles doesn’t make a difference. I think that’s a very limited approach to the sound of a voice.”

Andriessen in Black and White features several larger pieces which have come to be seen as signature Andriessen works. His mid-1970s piece De Staat has long been celebrated for its vigorous collision of minimalism and dissonance, and for its radical content. The sung text satirically lifts a passage from Plato’s Republic in which the philosopher argues for the suppression of certain morally damaging instruments and key signatures. However, the composer is keen that the work’s political aspects shouldn’t overshadow its musical advances.

“De Staat is a good example of how what I wrote for the voices should be different than for what would generally be heard from classical singers,” he notes. “So in the start I ask for a lot of different techniques. I needed a kind of Greek peasant women sound in the second part, and then, in the final part, Baroque singers. So I was very happy to have found Christina, who can sing in so many different ways and so full of expression.”

The concert also features 1977’s Hoketus, the work which gave rise to the ensemble of the same name featuring pianos and panpipes alongside amplified instruments. The group was not only distinctive due to its double set-up, with two of every instrument, but in how that was used to demonstrate a modern and arresting use of hocket. This rhythmic technique, where melodies are split and alternate rapidly between players, is an enduring favourite of Andriessen’s: it features once again in the new work The Hague Hacking Scrap, which is also included in the concert. What continues to draw him to such a distinctive musical form?

“I don’t really know,” he replies. “It started with a project to work with students in the Hague in the mid-70s, to do a project on repetitive music. We didn’t like minimal music, because it was too much like TV advertisements. My students found what had already happened in America – early Philip Glass and early Steve Reich – too much like entertainment music. I said, ‘You may say that, that’s fine with me, but you must know that it was revolutionary avant-garde music when it started, with La Monte Young and Terry Riley and John Cage, and you should study that to know what you are talking about.’ And then the group consisted of students on different instruments. There were a lot of composers who kept playing the keyboard, but there were, strangely enough, two panpipe players. So we could make two identical ensembles.”

“Then you continue with the fact that hocketing is a technique in different kinds of folk music: the Eskimos have vocal techniques with hocketing, and you have of course the panpipes in Peru and Bolivia, the playing on different percussion instruments in a lot of places in West Africa. So there I found something which is very typical of the development of the American avant-garde in the Sixties and Seventies, which is orientated towards non-Western music. Orientation towards other music than European classical music is a big step forward.”

It must be very demanding for musicians to do justice to his music. “Yes, that is a problem, and I don’t know how to solve it. What I do, of course, is write for people and work with them, and I seem to want things which they don’t learn at the conservatories. Of course, you have to count very well and things like that, and they learn a lot there. But the articulation and the way of holding your instrument and thinking about your instrument is in my case quite different, and that is a problem. Because you cannot write down the way I want it. So that’s why I’m doomed to work with my friends!”

He adds, “That’s what Bach did, too. He was together with his musicians all the time, so he didn’t bother writing down any articulation or dynamics. That kind of alienation of the composer from the musicians is something that I fight.”

Louis Andriessen events at hcmf
Louis Andriessen talk, Wed 25 November
Louis Andriessen 70: Andriessen Peanuts
Louis Andriessen 70: Andriessen in Black and White

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