Dick Raaymakers, Composer, Researcher, Artist
By Arjen Mulder and Joke Brouwer

Dick Raaymakers' oeuvre is a source of wonder and inspiration. It covers a period of almost fifty years, beginning with the first electronic pop song ever, "Song of the Second Moon" (1957) and ending with Ritual Moment (2005), which was performed just once, in a church, by three percussionists two in full view of the audience and the third hidden in darkness. The first points to Raaymakers' enduring preoccupation with the medium of electronics and everything it implied for contemporary music in terms of new possibilities and problems; the latter illustrates his preoccupation with the sound of falling, the way sounds move inside a space, the hypnotic power of repetition, and the religious origins of music theater.
And what a diverse, poignant and highly complex oeuvre lies between these two extremes! Dick Raaymakers has, in fact, worked in six or seven different disciplines: electronic music - autonomous tape music and "popular electronics" - performances, installations, music theater, essays and poetry. And a good case can be made for including his innovative activities as an professor at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and his detailed and meaningful lectures as additional independent components of his oeuvre.
Raaymakers calls many of his works "instructional pieces" or "learning exercises" he is not concerned with entertainment, as humorous as many of his compositions are. There is always something more at stake: a life or death confrontation between art and technology. Or, rather, for both art and technology, Raaymakers tries to create specific spaces, to develop new resources, and to rediscover old and forgotten methods. He analyzes each discipline to its very core. And then, using the insights he has obtained, he plays a game with strict rules, for the purposes of enjoyment, uplifting the mind and pushing the body to extremes.
These strict rules are what make Raaymakers' work so vivid and at the same time so elusive and timeless, so absolutely human and yet so extraterrestial. It is almost impossible to tell which period it stems from, despite certain quaint details, like the fact that all of his electronic music has been made with analog means. Raaymakers uses archetypal images, primeval forms and primal emotions elements on which time has no grasp, which keep the works open for further development. In this essay we'll delve into some of Raaymakers' characteritic archetypes and primeval forms, both from his life and his work. The quotes in italics are all Raaymakers' own words.

Early electronics
Dick Raaymakers was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on September 1, 1930. The family lived in Maastricht until Dick was eight years old. His father was a high ranking civil servant there with the Social Security Board.

My earliest memory. I see tiles, black shoes, endless trouser legs. And a cube. And I know that I pointed at that cube and I said: Radio!
This radio contains music. And its shape, the cube, evokes the image. And I am pointing at it. And this pointing, one might say, already hints at the teacher I will be.
I have been able to verify this memory. One day during office hours, my father came home with a radio, and in some way or other, I understood it. My very first memory. Radio, cube, pointing.

In 1938, the family moved from colorful, exuberant Maastricht to the petit bourgeois industrial Dutch city of Eindhoven, where Raaymakers' father was now chairman of the Social Security Board. They moved into a new house, designed by the renowned modernist architect Willem Marinus Dudok. Apart from a few isolated periods, Raaymakers (partly because of his later tenure at Philips) continued to live in Eindhoven until 1963. He completed his studies at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in late 1953, earning a diploma that qualified him to teach piano.

In my last year as a student, I made an extensive exploration of the fields where music and technology professionally intersect. In those days, that mainly meant the worlds of radio recording technology and the record industry. I was hoping to pursue a meaningful career in one or the other after my studies at the conservatory ended. Obviously, the idea of having to spend my life as a moderately talented pianist and ditto piano teacher did not particularly appeal to me. On the other hand, the thought of entering fields that would do justice to a combination of my two talents in technology and music was exciting and inspiring. Hence my determination to choose a new direction no matter what; if need be, I would start as an unskilled laborer. Which is exactly what happened. The retraining of the in more than one way "untrained" Dick Raaymakers could begin.

Beginning in early 1954, Raaymakers worked for two years on the assembly line in the radio and TV set production department of Philips in Eindhoven, gaining experience in the field of applied electronics. During the same period, he took a hands on course in "radio and measurement technique." By the end of 1955, he obtained a diploma as a "radio mechanic" from the Dutch Radio Society. The technical engineer Roelof Vermeulen, an authority and pioneer in the field of stereophony and artificial reverberation, showed him another possibility for combining electronics and music: electronic music. A few years later, when Raaymakers was working in the acoustics lab at Philips, Vermeulen asked him to explore the possibility of making popular music with the electronic equipment they had developed. In 1957, this led to "Song of the Second Moon," produced with a modified ondes Martenot and a few audio and measuring generators that were connected by some cutting and pasting and pieces of tape. The piece was finished right at the time the Russians launched Sputnik, which explains the title: the second moon was now a fact.
In December of 1957, he followed "Song of the Second Moon" with "Night Train Blues," an electronic pop composition for three ondes Martenots and piano, originally intended as the B side of "Song of the Second Moon" but never released as such. Raaymakers began giving lectures on electronic music at various locations in the southern Netherlands; he continued to so almost without interruption until 2005. From 1966 on, he also teached at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague; his classes often took the form of small performances and public lectures.

I have been privileged enough to witness the totally unexpected integration of two established disciplines, music and technology, from the beginning. And I have been able to follow this development from the sidelines. At the time, this integration was simply called electronic music. When it came about, it was more a kind of congealing, an odd form of reciprocal use, than a really close knit integration. Music had been using technology for reproductive purposes for several decades, and to this day there is a music industry, but at a creative level this integration did not come about until after World War II.
Why do I say I was privileged? Because I was in a position to witness what happened when the peace of the traditional music world was rudely shattered by a kind of electronic meteorite that radically penetrated it. Technology penetrated music and caused a shock wave of expectations and utopian dreams, which people would not be able to express in words for some time to come. But also a shock wave of dismay and disapproval: "Music cannot be mechanized just like that! We will not be plugged into the mains!" said the director of the Royal Conservatory. And he said to me, "As long as I live, I will prevent this from happening violinists being plugged into the mains." This shock wave was very interesting.

Graphic Method Bicycle
From 1963 until now, Raaymakers lives in The Hague. His studio for twenty years was a condemned property in the center of the town. Raaymakers moved in, in spite of continuous threats that this house would be demolished very soon. It was not entirely coincidence that the new studio was close to the Royal Conservatoire, with which the studio began a close collaboration a few years later. Despite the studio's simple facilities, key works were produced there in the next few years, such as Five Canons, Erlkönig Ballad, the film scores Bekaert and Sidmar, the three Mao pieces Chairman Mao Is Our Guide, The Long March and May Mao Live!, and also the interactive music pieces Quartet and Quintet, and the performances The Graphic Method Tractor and The Graphic Method Bicycle.

My pieces can be divided into two categories; there's really no middle course. Either they're completely level and flat like Quartet, Quintet, The Long March and also the Five Canons or something ignites and violence breaks through, as in Flux and Plumes, and Erlkönig Ballad for loudspeakers. What happens then I call ecstasy. Ecstasy is the absolute opposite of technique. Or, more to the point, ecstasy is what is totally lacking in technique. Any emotion evoked by technique through a TV screen or speakers is false and sentimental. What you get is the reproduction of ecstasy, not ecstasy itself. Real ecstasy is about monastery cells, high mountains, immobility. It is different from catharsis. Catharsis has to do with breaking through, with liberation a long tailed comet, except in reverse. Catharsis is asymmetrical; ecstasy is symmetrical. Ecstasy is a process of growing and reducing, and it requires much more discipline than catharsis. Ecstasy is something you do; catharsis is something that happens to you. I know that people experienced this ecstasy at the performance of Chairman Mao Is Our Guide. You were led to this one moment, the shining of this huge red light, and time stood still. Something was released that was much greater than ... than what it was.

In 1976 Raaymakers made the music theater piece The Graphic Method Tractor. The work shows 72 frames from Sergei Eisenstein's film The General Line (1928) in slow motion - showing a tractor emerging from the earth - while a musical box plays "The Internationale" slowed down hundred times. In the spring of 1979 he composed The Graphic Method Bicycle. In this performance, a nude cyclist steps off his bicycle in slow motion over a time span of over 20 minutes, while being pulled along by a wire. Audio sensors register his heartbeat, respiration and overall physical effort. This piece was inspired by an 1891 chronophotograph by Etienne Jules Marey.
In 1878, the French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey (1830 1903) published a book with the title La méthode graphique, in which he described a number of techniques he developed to record physical movements in graphic time patterns by using purely mechanical devices (in a way that is somewhat related to the seismographic registrations of earthquakes). From around 1882, he started adding photo graphic technology, which led to his fame as a pioneer of cinema. Marey introduced new image media that allowed him to disconnect movement from the mover. With cinematographic devices he made human figures, animals and objects move, without movement being performed in reality.
In both The Graphic Method Tractor and The Graphic Method Bicycle the objectives of Marey are extended and even reversed. The aim is to analyse the relationship between labor and its result by using technical and respectively living images in the world of the visual, acoustic and dramatic arts. As a research project, The Graphic Method Bicycle aims to record exactly what happens when one tries to bring back to life a photographically recorded movement in this case, a man getting off a bicycle (as if, through a reversal of time, an insect trapped in amber is suddenly released).
Out of the hundreds of experiments Marey conducted, Raaymakers chose the one involving the dismounting cyclist for this project, because it best lent itself to a theatrical enlargement of the graphic method. Moreover, this experiment allows a reverse course to be taken, from fixed photograph to dynamic process in other words, from a static two dimensional photographic image (amber) to three dimensional living motion (the insect flying away).
Connections to a number of physiological measuring instruments are clearly visible on the cyclist's body. These sensors monitor his heart, breathing, and muscular and emotional activity during the dismounting action, and acoustic signals are amplified and loudly transmitted to the audience. The aim of all this is to enlarge the human body to auditorium size.

The essence of a cycling cyclist is that he travels without fear of losing his image along the way. That is biking: moving forward on a piece of technology with which and on which you are in balance, in the absolute certainty that you're taking your image along with you, that it will not be stolen along insight. And this addition, this quality, is not a commodity. It only becomes a commodity when you reproduce it on records.
The fundamental difference between art and technology is that art results in unique objects that in a material sense are composed of materials of little value canvas, paint, music paper, ink. Science, on the other hand, and especially technology, results in large numbers of very sophisticated, very hard, very consistent and very valuable, completely identical products. Art leads to this one unique, irreplaceable product that you cannot own, however passionately you try to obtain it at auction. Art begins where the objective presence of that particular object ends. Technology, on the other hand, leads to a mass of identical things inviting you to take them. This is why every effort to integrate art and technology, like in the '60s, is doomed to fail. Their interests and their operations are irreconcilable.
So, to visualize how compelling a technical insight can be, to demonstrate this and to show the true value of art, I perform reversal operations in which I drive technical images back into the image machines from which they came. This is not performance, this is Kaspar Hauser. He wanted the apples to go back on the trees, too.

After The Graphic Method
In 1982 Raaymakers developed a performance for two actors, a knocking over machine, lighting and soundscape. The piece, Ecstasy, was dedicated to Josine van Droffelaar, a member of the board of the Amsterdam arts foundation De Appel and a dear friend of Raaymakers. Van Droffelaar, her partner and the entire staff of De Appel died in a plane crash in Switzerland, on August 20, 1983.
In Ecstacy a cyclist knocks over on his head in extreme slow motion, in some 20 minutes. He is linked with a chain to a lame man who slowly arises from his chair while the cyclist falls. When the cyclist eventually falls flat on his face on the stage, an old recording of the Henri Duparc song about love and death, "Extase", is played. Ecstasy is probably the most beautiful and moving work of Dick Raaymakers.

Tumbling off your bike is something that just happens to you. One minute you're riding along and the next you're on the ground. Now something really strange happens if you slow down this action of tumbling enormously. Suddenly you become very involved, as the cyclist as well as the spectator. You experience everything. What happens then is nearly impossible: the inevitability of a fall suddenly seems avoidable. It goes so slowly that you think that you could interfere in every phase of this excruciatingly slow rotation. You can warn the cyclist, or try and persuade him that it would be better to desist from his rash behaviour and list all the advantages of interrupting the falling process.
By putting a falling cyclist in slow motion on stage in reality, like in Ecstasy, you lead the audience to believe they can actually interfere. And at the same time you don't. Because it is theater too. On the other hand, it's also so terribly realistic, that it's literally life threatening. The bicycle only has to slip off its hook and the cyclist will break his neck. It is truly an incredibly dangerous performance, the way he very slowly rolls head over heels and makes a full circle like the big hand of a clock. It is that weird sensation that you recognize from dreams where you are falling, and the slow motion, and nearly the ability to intervene and to say... That this cyclist says: 'Well, actually, this is not really what I wanted or what I had in mind,' that's what I meant, that play of forces.

Raaymakers went on to make a series of new projects, starting with Shhh! (1981). In all these productions, the soundtrack of Laurel and Hardy's Night Owls plays a central role. In the large scale theater production Soundmen (1984), nine soundmen on a huge stage set reproduce the heavy and voluminous falling sounds from the film by operating enormous constructions, machineries, levers, handles, pulleys and trapdoors. The Soundwall (1982-84) is a kinetic pneumatic construction in which heavy metal cubes move independently of each other. The cubes' movements are based on those of Laurel and Hardy: the scaling of walls, opening of doors and entering of windows. The music theater Ow! (1984) is based on the obstacles Laurel and Hardy must overcome in Night Owls: doors, windows, and walls. Each fall from a wall or slam of a door is reproduced by one of four percussionists "playing" wooden beams. In the last piece, The Microman (1982), a single performer reenacts Laurel and Hardy's antics in Night Owls on a miniature scale as a piece of "tabletop theater."
Another important series of work was started by Raaymakers in 1991, when he made the first sketches for Der Fall Leiermann, a solo music theater piece in three acts that served as a study for the later work Dépons/Der Fall. A disassembled tape recorder is hand cranked like a street organ by a lonesome organ grinder as ambient sound fragments are played. On Dépons/Der Fall (1992) Raaymakers worked with percussionist/theater director Paul Koek and Theater Hollandia. In this music theater piece for three actors, consisting of a prologue and three scenes, Raaymakers comments on Pierre Boulez's composition Répons (1981 1984), using "falling machines" and techniques derived from Japanese bunraku theater. This was followed by a large scale music theater piece Der Fall/Dépons (1993). In its seven acts, the phenomenon of imitation is treated exhaustively.
In 1995 Dick Raaymakers completed some of his biggest collective music theater pieces, including Der Stein and The Fall of Mussolini.
Der Stein is a "suitcase opera" in five acts for two actors about a decisive event in the life of the virtually unknown eighteenth century German music teacher Anton Scheuer (1734 1810): the theft and relocation of the boundary stone of the town of Selters in Germany's Taunus Mountains.
The Fall of Mussolini is a collaboration with Theater Company Hollandia and Toneelgroep Amsterdam that mixes, in thirteen "stations of the cross," the demise of Benito Mussolini, recordings at the Hal Roach film studios of a Laurel and Hardy movie, and a 1930's novel of the Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff on Mexican Indians in the town of Guadelajara. These works are all in some form derived from the archetype of humans falling. Falling makes human beings into human bodies, and liberates them from their wish to become machines themselves.

Works of Dick Raaymakers
CD box set: The Complete Tape Music of Dick Raaijmakers. Donemus/Near 1998, Basta 2006
Cd box set: Popular Electronics: Early Dutch Electronic Music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956 1963. Basta, 2004.
Book: Arjen Mulder and Joke Brouwer (eds), Dick Raaymakers A Monograph. V2_Publishing, 2008.

Image © Collège de France