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MICHEL VAN DER AA Above - Between - Attach - Just Before - Auburn - Oog

Above, Between, Attach, Just Before, Auburn, Oog is the long title assigned by Dutch Composer's Voice label to the maiden solo voyage on disc of contemporary Dutch composer Michel van der Aa. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, van der Aa is considered one of the young Turks of cutting-edge European concert music. Composers attempting to make a name in the late twentieth century had to deal with a great deal of mid-century dogma, the legacy of academic serialism, and of minimalism. Van der Aa comes to contemporary music with no such baggage in tow, yet instead of turning back to traditional, audience-friendly musical forms, van der Aa makes avant-garde music that is fresh, uncompromising, and boundary-expanding. He arrives at a time of cynicism and a lack of decisiveness about the future of experimental music; and perhaps his time is right.

Van der Aa works with audiophile-quality, multi-track recordings that are recorded by the ensembles participating in these chamber works; often it is difficult to tell where the live music ends and pre-recorded material begins as the two are combined so smoothly. A favorite device is the use of tearing or ripping sounds on the tapes, a stylistic attribute that is amusingly echoed in the disc's striking cover image. Abrupt punching in or punching out of sounds, a recording engineer's nightmare, is another favored technique. Of these works, the most strongly attractive one is the piano piece Just Before, played beautifully by pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama. It appears that Mukaiyama had some collaborative input into the piece itself, significant as not many virtuosi would care to have such an extreme level of intervention and manipulation of the recorded performance by the composer as is heard. The guitar piece Auburn, which initially helped van der Aa gain his reputation, is impressive in its jazzy, highly dissonant fast section. Oog, for cello, is a nervous piece that has an affecting moment where the cello's tone seems to shatter apart. Listeners who seek in contemporary music balm for their frayed nerves will find nothing in van der Aa's music to ease their troubles. Nonetheless, those who love a challenge, yet hate academicism for its own sake, will embrace van der Aa with enthusiasm and listen to this disc again and again. (Uncle Dave Lewis)

MICHEL VAN DER AA Violin Concerto - Hysteresis

Michel van der Aa’s new Violin Concerto for Janine Jansen received its first performance on 6 November in Amsterdam, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Van der Aa has described the partnership of Jansen and the RCO as his “dream team”. It combines an orchestra with whom he now has a long-standing and intimate relationship, and a soloist with a magnetic stage presence and a heart-on-sleeve style of playing, ideally suited to Van der Aa’s direct and physically expressive music. As “house composer” for the RCO since 2011, he was able to work unusually closely with the players, checking details throughout the period of composition. He has also been free to write the works he chooses. In this case, it was Jansen’s personality that served as inspiration, and the composer claims that “If Janine had played the flute, I would have written a flute concerto.” 

The piece has its roots in the classical concerto – unusually for him, Van der Aa hasn’t even included any electronics – but he couldn’t resist giving it a distinctly theatrical quality. “As an opera director, I love the theatrical possibilities of having someone who is the embodiment of the work.” The theatre begins in Jansen’s presence and personality, but extends across the whole stage. The lead violinist and cellist are drawn in as secondary soloists, and with Jansen often form a trio of their own. 

Their energy spreads outwards to three percussionists, harp, the string groups and finally the whole orchestra. Those lines of transmission are articulated visually as well as aurally – the three percussionists are spaced among the orchestra not only because of the way that distribution sounds, but also because of how it looks. Visual considerations extend to the stage lighting and even to the type of dress the soloist wears. “Yes, I am a control freak,” admits Van der Aa, “But in addition to the music all these aspects are of great importance to the total experience.”
The concerto is composed in the traditional three movements. Van der Aa describes the first as abstract, the second as more direct and melodic, and the third as very fast, performed at breakneck speed and close to the edge of possibility. Like Van der Aa’s other recent pieces – the opera Sunken Garden and the clarinet concerto Hysteresis – it also includes allusions to popular styles; in this case to jazz and bluegrass. With no electronics or video, the alter ego role familiar from many other Van der Aa pieces is taken up by the orchestra, which mirrors and balances the soloist, rather than playing a traditional accompanying role. (Tim Rutherford-Johnson)

LOUIS ANDRIESSEN Writing to Vermeer

One of the last operas produced in the twentieth century was Louis Andriessen's Writing to Vermeer, premiered at the Netherlands Opera on December 1, 1999. It is a handsome production indeed, with libretto and gigantic film projection components by Peter Greenaway and bursts of electronic music contributed by Michel van der Aa. However, all things opera move slowly in the twenty first century, and it has taken a little over six years for Nonesuch to deliver the first recording of the work, Louis Andriessen: Writing to Vermeer. To be fair, this specific recording was not taken from the premiere performance, but from a revival given at Amsterdam in 2004; the U.S. premiere of Writing to Vermeer was presented at Lincoln Center in 2000.

Divided into six scenes, this opera depicts three women close to seventeenth century Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer writing letters to him from his household in Delft, as he is away in The Hague on business. Women writing letters, in addition to doing household chores, practicing music, and other mundane tasks constitute the imagery we most readily associate with Vermeer the painter, and it was this aspect of Vermeer's visual style that Greenaway and Andriessen sought to evoke in Writing to Vermeer. Another hallmark of Vermeer's painting is a subtle lack of drama, and in Writing to Vermeer "drama" is supplied by way of the interruption of external events -- political assassinations, the invasion of Holland by French forces, and finally, the flooding of Delft as a measure to stall the French invasion, which literally washes all of the characters and action away. For Andriessen and Greenaway the parts dealing with domestic life, children and the daily activities of the good Dutch hausfrau are the key elements of this work. To the composer and librettist's chagrin, the external layer of events has dominated the discussion of Writing to Vermeer among critics and most audiences, with its unstated implication that if Vermeer had been there, he might have found a way to stave off these disasters, at least in his own household. This conflict of interpretation may not be resolved anytime soon.

No matter what the controversy, Writing to Vermeer was one of the most completely controlled multimedia environments presented on the opera stage until now, and a mere recording of the music hardly does it justice -- one can argue that even a good DVD couldn't truly capture the experience of seeing it live. The style and sound of Andriessen's music falls somewhere between de Materie and de Staat -- it is not as dense as the former nor as rhythmically intense as the latter, and some of the instrumental texture even approaches a kind of lyric romanticism, albeit stated within the locus of Andriessen's usual modal/bitonal hybrid. The electronic segments by Michel van der Aa are excellent -- he has a masterful control of the technique of moving sound collages through space. One wonders why Andriessen, who long ago made some expert forays into electronic music himself, decided to outsource these segments, but it is undoubtedly for the better. The set comes with a 58-page-book containing the libretto, which one will want, as even though Writing to Vermeer is sung in English, that does not guarantee that all of its text is clearly comprehensible, even though the quality of the recording is outstanding. Writing to Vermeer is such a rich and complex work, chances are the listener will not "get it" on the first hearing, and it gets off to a slow start. Repeated listening, and time taken to concentrate fully on Writing to Vermeer, will reveal its many virtues. (Uncle Dave Lewis)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra / Ed Spanjaard / Christianne Stotijn MICHEL VAN DER AA Spaces of Blank - Mask - Imprint

The three works on this first CD by Disquiet Media, composer, film-maker and director Michel van der Aa’s own multimedia label, together constitute a stylistic cross-section of a genre that, with its refined musical expression of conceptual first principles, has quickly gained ground both nationally and internationally. They demonstrate the scope of a vision of ‘music about music’, in which as an object of study the human being, musician or not, is just as important as musical ideas. When Van der Aa says he is not a composer of notes, he means he is not only concerned with the creative dialogue with forms and musical languages but also with the theatrical aspects of music-making, perceived with the detachment of the principled outsider who constantly asks himself what and how he sees and hears.

His attention is directed primarily to the physical and social facets of music-making: producing sound, the musician as a recreative individual, relationships between musicians, ensemble structure and the interpretative ritual per se, which in his case consistently assumes theatrical forms because human beings form the active centre point. No less essential are the aural and visual perceptions of the listener, with whom the composer plays a peculiarly serious cat-and-mouse game. Van der Aa imperceptibly transforms acoustic sounds into electronic ones, or manipulates them beyond recognition by electronic means, thus creating a sound universe that arouses a permanent state of wonder: what am I hearing, what is meant by this?

As in One, the opera After Life and The Book of Disquiet centre on characters that, thrown upon themselves, are faced with the question who they are and how they relate to their world. It is probably clear by now that only a blurred distinction exists between Van der Aa’s concert and theatre music. The solitary soprano in Here [in circles] and Here [to be found] struggles on the concert podium with the same issues as the protagonist in One: whither, wherefore? Despite their thematic material, the same holds true for the three works on this CD. Imprint, for Baroque orchestra, is seemingly the most musicianly, the ensemble piece Mask as an essay about the relationship between form and sound the most conceptual, and the song cycle Space of Blank the most dramatic, but the common denominators stand out. They deal with the lone wolf and his relationship – or absence of it – to his biotope. (Bas van Putten)

Peter Eötvös / Etienne Siebens / Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra / Claron McFadden MICHEL VAN DER AA Here Trilogy

A branch snaps with icy confidence. It seems like an everyday occurrence, an everyday sound. But within the oeuvre of Michel van der Aa (1970), the snap of a branch means more than just that. In a musical context removed from the ‘everyday’, the gesture suddenly suggests loneliness, insanity, anger. And while the crisp noise a breaking branch makes is indeed pure nature, with closed eyes it also carries an electric charge. The gesture and the sound carry more layers and more weight than one might think. That breaking branch is a symbol for Michel van der Aa’s oeuvre in general and the Here trilogy in particular.
The interaction between natural and electric sounds and a visual-theatrical component are recurring themes in the Here trilogy, composed between 2001 and 2003. The cycle is thematically related to the chamber opera One (2002). In One an anonymous female character (soprano) undertakes an obsessive search for herself, and enters into a dialogue with her alter ego on film. In the second and third sections of the Here trilogy the soprano returns in the same vain quest for herself and for a connection with the world around her.
One and – in a more abstract, purely musical way – the Here trilogy both owe their confrontational dramatic effect to the theme of loneliness verging on insanity. The drama is not an imposed extramusical idea, but rather a product of the musical structure. It is not surprising that Michel van de Aa’s oeuvre is often referred to as the musical equivalent of the work of M.C. Escher. Escher’s perspectivist suggestions and spatial manipulation find a musical parallel in Van der Aa’s equally intriguing play of acoustic distortion.
‘I am fascinated by the contradiction between what is and what seems,’ says the composer. ‘The sculpture When I am Pregnant (1992) by the English sculptor Anish Kapoor appears, seen from the front, to be a solid wall. You only see the belly by looking at it sideways. In all its simplicity, this is an extremely dramatic effect. I strive to create a similar kind of drama in my music.’
In the Here trilogy as well, the dramatic content is an organic consequence of the poetics in Van der Aa’s music. Tension is aroused by the audible failure of the music itself, in which the musical present (live chamber orchestra or ensemble) clashes with the past (soundtrack). As a whole, that failure of the musical progress leads to the sensation of chilling, detachment and disunity that, after the purely instrumental first movement Here [enclosed], is given a voice in Here [in circles] and Here [to be found]. (Mischa Spel)