This article was
published in
Key Notes XXVIII, 3, september
1994
and
in a shorter Dutch version in
Entr'acte of July
1994.
There's also a German version.
Guus Janssen and the
skating-on-thin-ice
feeling
Guus Janssen (1951), composer and improviser, is always on the
lookout for material
that is suitable for carving-up. Music should never be put in an
straitjacket, but
then, that is, a question of trompe l'oeil, or rather tromper
l'oreille. How do
you make a hi-hat drunk? Answer: you equip an entire studio.
Composer Guus Janssen and I live in the same village. It is
called Nieuwmarktbuurt
and lies amid the many others that together form Amsterdam.
Walking through the
Buitenbantammerstraat to the Prins Hendrikkade, I think of the
first time I heard
Guus's music. It must have been in November of 1980, when the
Netherlands Radio Chamber
Orchestra performed his Toonen at Vredenburg Music Centre
in Utrecht. Or was it
before that? Toonen had been performed a month earlier in
Donaueschingen, and I
seem to remember something about a radio broadcast, with the
audience buzzing in
indignation.
The music of Guus Janssen was - and still is - wayward. Very
Dutch too, like the
bicycles here: rickety and rattling perhaps, but more economical
and manoeuvrable than
any other means of transportation. It is possible that people
outside Holland do not
always see its charms. But I am devoted to Guus's music, in
roughly the same way I am
devoted to my bicycle.
I have seen him improvising at the BIM-house, also nearby, but in
the next village, across
the water of the Oude Schans. Raging, bone-dry martellato's, as
though he were
trying to hammer his fingers through the keyboard. I heard him
play the harpsichord in
The IJsbreker. Pogo III, the piece was called, teeming
with tones hopping about
like so many trained fleas. I ran into him in the Amsterdam
Concertgebouw when Riccardo
Chailly conducted Keer. ‘What that man does... that
the piece sparkles
everywhere’,
said Guus. ‘It's as though he gave it a good buffing with
Lemon Pledge.’
His face sparkled
too.
There is a splendid view of the IJ from where Guus lives. His
home, though not so bare as
it was ten years ago, is still soberly furnished. I dropped by on
several occasions. The
first time was in 1984, just after he won the Matthijs Vermeulen
Prize (Amsterdam's annual
music reward) for his composition Temet: completing the
recognition of his dual
musical career, for he had been awarded the Boy Edgar Prize for
Jazz and Improvised Music
three years before this.
As soon as I come in he begins telling me about the piece he is
working on: a rush assignment
for the final concert of Gidon Kremer's Carte Blanche Series in
the Concertgebouw. It is for
a small ensemble in which, next to the violin, a high-hat is
prominently featured. ‘It
will probably fall outside of all accepted and even non-accepted
norms’, says Guus.
‘I took the assignment on condition that I could base the
work on some existent material
of mine. To write it from scratch would have been impossible in
the month they're giving me.
I've taken a theme from Hi-hat: it's also on my solo CD. I
imitated the hi-hat on the
piano in that piece. On the CD I improvised an elaboration of the
theme, but I could just as
well compose it. It's to be a kind of essay on jazz: swing, in
this case. About a swinging
violin, and a swinging violin quickly sounds wrong to my
ear.’
‘Whenever I think of the violin in a jazz context, I
remember a character from one of
Pasolini's films, I don't recall which. A man called Herdhitze, a
blue-blooded type, who lives
somewhere on an estate in Germany. He expounds incredibly
frightening theories. Speaks German
with an Italian accent and, to top it off, preferably while
playing a harp. I can't forget that
image, or the name. I want to recreate the same feeling in this
piece. The name really fits
too, it has something so sharp about it. Kremer is looking for a
lighter segment in his
programme - he said a homage to Stephane Grappelli, but at the
same time he sounded ambiguous
about it. I'll give him the lightness, but then with a
Herdhitzian undertone, which may turn out
to be extremely macabre.’
In what way does it fall outside of all acceptable
norms?
‘The hi-hat: first I'll poke around with it, almost
literally. Eventually, it will start
playing that same basic pattern it always does in jazz, but
endlessly varied and elaborated on.
One could ask if this isn't going too far: the hi-hat pattern is
jazz, no bones about it. A
different composer would leave it aside. But it's another one of
those trivial interests of
mine. I can't defend it, I just do it. And then hope it turns out
to be a good piece.’
A state of marvelling, in no way clashing with his
levelheadedness, is a natural condition in
Guus's personality. He seeks out and gives form to the logic of
amazement in his music. This
is often confusing, and at times even extraordinarily comic.
Preludium, the first improvisation on his harpsichord CD,
opens like a piece by
Scarlatti, but, shifting gears abruptly, it thoroughly derails,
and before you know it, it lands
in a distorted blues pattern. Anything can happen, but the
disarray is never without its own
order. His improvisations are veritable instant-compositions,
hence he is not a jazz musician.
He always puts jazz between quotation marks.
‘I look for material that's suitable for carving-up’,
he says. ‘And that's not
Wagner, at least not for me. It's not that I don't find his music
beautiful, it's incredibly
beautiful, but even today almost everyone is preoccupied with it.
A lot of times I have the
feeling that we're still living in a sort of convulsions of the
Romantic Era, at least in
composed classical music. Really abendländisch - the
field has been literally
exhausted. I feel exhaustion creeping over me whenever I consider
adding something to
it.’
‘Jazz, to me, is a kind of musical reality - one of the many
in fact - and this reality can
be taken as a starting point in creating something. It can be
confronted with a separate reality,
or elements of the one can be transplanted to the other, and so
on. Many composers consciously
close themselves to these types of realities. They keep trying to
follow a single path, and
that's enough. Not that I don't try to do this too, but it's very
nice to look around me along
the way.'
‘I recognize there are many different paths, each with its
own charm. You're free to choose
a prickly mountain trail, but you could also take a pleasant
beach boulevard. And on top of it,
all these different paths influence each other too. This range of
possibilities really appeals
to me. Don't forget, in life too, if all goes well, you come
across the most widely divergent
things. I once read in an interview with Edo de Waart that he has
model trains. That's
intriguing. He conducts a symphony by Mahler, or an entire opera
by Wagner, and then goes home
and plays with a model train. In composing, similar things are
possible. It's not so easy in
performing, but a composer can integrate the two worlds, so to
speak. Of course, the crucial
issue is in how far the artistic personality remains
intact.’
‘Another example that comes to mind is Philip Guston, the
American painter friend of Morton
Feldman. For years he worked at monochrome surfaces and very
abstract things. But when he came
home from his studio he would sit at the kitchen table sketching,
let's say, an ashtray. The
incongruity of the situation nagged at him more and more. There
was something wrong with it: he
got every bit as much pleasure from drawing the ashtray but he
had no desire to give up his
studio. Then he thought: “I'll just make a painting of the
ashtray.” That was at the
end of his career. In the portrait of Feldman on his collected
essays, made by Guston, you can
see the same dilemma: it's unheard of, an abstract painter
drawing a head like that with a
cigarette dangling from the lips. I think it's wonderful. But it
would be better not to wait
an entire lifetime, seventy years, before saying: “I think
I'll go ahead and allow myself
to use a triad in my music again”’
It must have been in 1965 that Guus's piano teacher, Piet Groot,
let him hear a Donemus LP of
Peter Schat's Concerto da camera. Guus, fourteen years
old, knew immediately: That's
what I'm going to do one day.
‘That composing began in the shadow of my piano studies.
There was not a thought in my
mind of becoming a Tchaikovsky or something like that.’ He
consciously chose to study
composition with Ton de Leeuw, even though his interest lay more
along the lines of people like
Schat and Louis Andriessen: ‘It's very risky to take lessons
from someone you already
imitate. It's no good for your development.’
‘Even before that time, I was interested in doing things
with the psychology of music
making: what happens when you botch a passage, or you're nervous.
Ton de Leeuw was against it.
He said it was too anecdotal. That's a stock objection that has
dogged me for a very long time
and I still don't understand it.’
I have an inkling of what they mean. In Toonen for
example, you let the main theme
return as though it were on a pick-up at 33 rpm, then later at 78
rpm, and it sounds in the end
as if the needle gets stuck in the groove. There's some story
behind it, and it does in fact
add an extra-musical dimension.
‘True’, admits Guus. ‘But you could go on to ask
if there's anything wrong with
that. That type of aural information didn't exist before the
pick-up. So it's impossible that
anyone could have got the idea of using it. But historically,
there certainly have been
composers who used the things they heard around them. The clatter
of horses' hooves for
instance has often found its way into music. But you don't hear
it in the streets anymore, so
it's no longer used. It's all a matter of how you handle such
things.’
It is tempting to compare Guus's way of speaking to his music:
one moment faltering,
circumspect, hesitant, and then fluent, teeming with asides and
unfinished sentences. But in his
music, these qualities are premeditated.
‘Most times I come up with the material sooner than the
form. In any case, I'm not a
composer to choose a form and then fill it in. Usually, it works
both ways: a composition grows,
like an organism. If one arm grows, so must the other, and that's
a very complicated business in
composing. The context changes with each new alteration, so it
can lead to endless rewriting, or
to cutting and pasting.’
‘I love a kind of folly. But good folly has to be done well,
it can't be corny. in Keer
I wanted to construct a texture that keeps dissolving, but each
dissolution poses at the same
time the following question. I imagined waves dashing on the
shore, washing over each other.
The question was: what material would fit the image? And then:
what tools were need to shape the
material? In a manner of speaking, I had to equip an entire
studio before getting started.’
Now sheets of music line the table. Schemes with chords and
rhythms. Guus relates that in earlier
compositions he often employed a type of ‘endless modulation
principle’ through the circle
of fifths. He began with a few tones from the scale of C that
would immediately modulate to G,
then D, and so on. The quicker he swirled through the circle of
fifths, the less ‘tonal’
the music sounded. But through constant alterations in the rate
of modulation, the music would
evoke tonal associations, without actually being so.
Other compositions, namely Bruusk, were based on the
overtone series of the bass clarinet
(ex. 1). Concealed in this series, made up of the uneven
harmonies, are, moreover, two dominant
seventh chords. In Keer, he combined the two principles by
applying the endless modulation
principle to the Bruusk chord. ‘I had to resort to all kinds
of tricks to close that immense
hole at the base, it's gaping’
Guus let the 'root' of each following chord leap one or more
octaves (a), omitted in many cases the
lowest tone of the chord - as well as the very highest 'peaks'
(b) -, and expanded each chord to a
twelve-voice texture by foreshadowing the following chord
(c). The result was an extended cycle of
'tone reservoirs', that enabled him to build the
'string-instrument clouds' he envisioned
(d).
‘I very much like the idea of combining that
tenet of twelve-tone technique (that all twelve
tones be sounded before moving on) with something so simple and
natural as the overtone series',
he said in a lecture about his music. ‘It results in the
trompe l'oeil of a music
that is boundless and directionless but at the same time seeks
out directions in a mad way
(unrationalized and machine-like). Is there harmonic progression
in the music or not? In
Keer the pitch machine also runs at repeatedly changed
rates. When it looks as though it
will come to a stop, we hear endless chains of arpeggiated
dominant-seventh chords.'
In this way, Guus consistently probes the margin between the
familiar and the unheard of.
‘The only way I've ever been able to listen to strict serial
music is by recognizing things
in it: Ah... I hear a fifth, or a triad, or even a children's
song. We are evidently
conditioned this way. That's what comes from a lifetime of
musical education. Maybe there are
people who can shut it off. That would be ideal, of course, at
least for this music. Then it
would be appreciated on its own terms, so to speak.’
Yet, you often work with rows, I counter. Is that an
influence of serial thought?
‘In a sense, I began with serialism. I made actual
twelve-tone compositions when I was
fourteen, in my own primitive way, of course. And now... I
certainly turn to rows for more than
just working out the pitches, for rhythmic things too a lot of
the time, although you can hardly
hear it in the music. It often comes up when I'm trying to
construct a continuum, something that
moves but doesn't develop. If approached intuitively - to my
mind, the better way - then it's
off to a good start, but things creep in unnoticed. After a few
bars it might turn out to be
much too fast, proportionately, to the beginning. So then there
would be development. If you're
clever about using rows, you can avoid problems like
this.’
‘The hi-hat pattern, say, could be written in such a
way that it begins to waver. I
could get this effect by running it through a grid that has a
variable pulse in itself.’
Guus takes a piece of paper and begins to write: quintuplet,
quadruplet, triplet, quadruplet.
‘This isn't what is played, it's the grid that the hi-hat
pattern is pushed through. 3:2:1,
very simple actually. Essentially, a form of isorhythmic thought,
I'd say.’
‘Now, if we play this...’, but then the
craftsman takes over: ‘No... this doesn't
really work, does it. Well, if we were to do something with the
accents, you could hear it a bit,
it would sound like a very drunken hi-hat’
Guus based a number of compositions on this principle, among
which are Voetnoot (see
example) for
piccolo, and the orchestral piece Deviaties.
‘Deviaties is totally based on a
2:1 ratio, the swinging rhythm, in fact. This caught my
imagination for the simple reason that
swinging is such a strange phenomenon, it can't be pinned down. I
worked it out in repeatedly
changing proportions, 3:2, 5:3, and so on. It has a strong
stammering effect. But I also coupled
it to various tempos in Deviaties, giving, so to speak,
one bar a particular rhythmic
feel, while the next could suddenly be fast, but with the same
stammering effect. I was pleased
with how it turned out. A real combination of things you can't
combine: rickety but at the same
time performed with unswerving consistency. This type of thing
can't be done in
improvisation.’
‘I'm sure it stems from my dissatisfaction with rhythms that
sound like they're being
counted. In so much music I get the feeling: oh, this a
triplet, or, this is a quintuplet,
as the case may be. Even in my own pieces. I don't get that
feeling with improvised music. It's
the same type of thing with good Baroque music. You don't hear a
single sixteenth-note, and in
fact it's nothing but. This naturalness of rhythmic flow
intrigues me and that's why I do this
type of things. It's absolutely impossible to hear any given
metre or even an accented beat in
Deviaties. Even though everything has been carefully
measured out, it sounds haphazard.’
At home, rummaging through my LPs (yes, I do still play them), I
come across Guus's LP of
improvisations Tast toe. I am struck by the same
shortcircuit when I see the cover.
A black and a white pile of rectangular sticks... #shortcircuit#
- no... piano keys. Disassembled
and then reconstructed in an new way: the perfect metaphor for
Guus's music.
Another LP, Guus Janssen on the line,
hand-dated April 24, 1980. Apparently, I had come
into contact with Guus's music earlier than I had thought. Now I
remember having had the score
of Brake in my hands, even before the LP. (Looking over
Guus's liner notes I read:
‘Someone who makes mistakes while playing will try to regain
control by slowing down (the
rallentando), which is also what happens in this piece.’)
The notes looked so strange on
paper, I could make neither head nor tail of them.
‘They didn't understand it at all’, says Guus. He is
speaking of Juist daarom,
written in 1981 for Ensemble M. ‘Well, it is in fact a very
strange piece, a dear but
peculiar child. But it's the first of a line of compositions,
Streepjes and Temet,
for example.‘ Giving the impulse to set out on this line was
an encounter with Six
melodies, an early work of John Cage for violin and piano
composed in 1950. ‘I
performed it myself, with Jan Erik van Regteren Altena, and it's
never really let go of the
composer in me. It has such a measured and businesslike quality,
and a paper-thin lyricism,
a real skating-on-thin-ice-feeling.’
All the reason for Guus to programme Cage's piece in a
‘composer's portrait’ in this
years's Holland Festival as a tangent of Guus's opera
Noach. Next to his own music, a
trio by Wolfgang Rihm will also be performed there. ‘Just a
single movement, the others
are a bit further from my taste, you might say he expands on
Schumann. But the first movement
is very concentrated and very sharp. It's also about very
primitive musical premises: fifths,
unisons, all those basic concepts one finds at the beginning of
music theory books. I'm really
taken by it and this fellow Rihm is a first-rate composer;
especially that breadth of view,
something that I perhaps lack.'
I don't quite understand what you mean by breadth of
view.
He laughs a bit. ‘How can I put it?... What I do is a sort
of burrowing, that's how it
feels a bit. And burrowing is burrowing, although it can be done
in an very thorough and
interesting way. But with Rihm, there's more of that Caspar David
Friedrich feeling (a German
Romantic painter) and inside that panoramic vision the small
human being goes almost
unnoticed.’
‘This, too, is not what I want to do. Well, I sometimes do
take a stab at it. There's a
passage in Noach, for example, describing the sphere of
paradise on the island of
Mauritius when the dodo still lived there undisturbed. One of
these motionless passages. That's
my stake when it comes to that breadth-of-vision quality. It's
easier in opera. It comes of
itself, if for no other reason than that the time is structured.
If I were to burrow away
throughout the entire two hours of the piece, I think it would be
extremely tiring for the
audience. So I immediately set out to find ways of creating this
tranquil effect. And, obviously,
the most beautiful, or starkest contrast to burrowing is doing
nothing at all. Call it
structured standstill.’
‘It has to do, of course, with the sorts of communication
between Mr. and Mrs. Noah. There
just aren't any! All shapes and sizes of non-communication, and
the most basic form is to
totally ignore each other - what normal people do with strangers
when they pass them on the
street.’
Guus Janssen, the note-burrower, master of the finely etched
line, finished an evening-filling
canvas last year: Noach. Clearly, it is not your everyday
opera, for Guus is Guus. And its
librettist, Friso Haverkamp, who had teamed up with the composer
in a previous opera, Faust's
Licht, is not your everyday writer either.
Noach is a topsy-turvy, cynically framed rendition of the
Old Testament story. The dove
becomes a Skeleton Bird, the rainbow is transformed into a
high-voltage arc of light. Noah is
portrayed as a self-appointed god, glorying in the annihilation
of animal species. He becomes
embroiled in an head-on conflict with his wife, who sides with
the animals and, perched on the
back of a humpback whale, a ‘counter-ark’, refuses to
come aboard.
Guus: ‘The story deals on one level with man's abuse of
nature. Noah, for example, has a
sort of species-meter, a device for gauging the rate of
extinction. In actual fact, it seems
that every fifteen minutes an animal species dies out somewhere
in the world. This contraption
of Noah's measures in actual time, demonstrating over the course
of the opera that at least eight
sorts of animals have vanished forever. In the two years that I
was working on the opera these
types of things would come up all the time. I'd be sitting with
the newspaper in the morning and
read an item about some sea captain pumping oil into the ocean,
pictures of birds washed up on
the shore. You can imagine him standing there on the bridge: he
simply becomes Noah. It fires you
up to get down to composing.’
‘It's a real opera, though, about emotions, expressions of
feeling... but not in the sense
you find so much in classical operas: am I in love or am I
not? Noah's raving lunacy
stands at one end of the spectrum, and Mrs. Noah, with her
profound sorrow and rage, is at the
other end. That was something very new to me, I had to dig into
very different reserves. It was
beautiful at the concert performance of Wening, the fourth
act, that people were really
moved - which is also very operatic, in a Verdian sense.’
Noach is scored for an enlarged setting of Guus's own
ensemble, which appears in the
production under the name of New Artis Orchestra - with the
permission of Artis, Amsterdam's
zoo. Guus describes the final product, a score of 400 pages, as
being ‘as full of holes as
a Swiss cheese’. Alongside the through-composed sections,
namely, are segments for
improvisation, guided by various sets of rules. In addition,
there is a battery of electronic
apparatus: a vast array of taped (mostly animal) sounds, ring
modulators, etcetera.
‘Really old-fashioned stuff’, says Guus, ‘but for
what I needed, these
Sixties-tools work the best.’
‘The music was made in the same way as the pieces I write
for my ensemble. The composed
parts are even rather simple. All those things I'm up against in
composed music have no part in
improvisation. On the contrary, that over-tight rhythmic quality
you find in a lot of composed
music comes to good effect here. It can be a catalyst for all
kinds of escapades.’
The catch to this overall conception is that the opera can only
be performed by the musicians
for whom it was written. The participation of the Tuva Ensemble,
a company of Siberian
overtone-singers, makes it unlikely that it will be produced
again after its series of
performances in June comes to an end [* I was wrong here].
‘The Tuvans sing the fluting of the wind, that was the first
association that came to my
mind and that's the reason I asked them. Wind plays an essential
role in the opera. But, they
also sing the “wind” in the sense of
“anima” or “spiritus”,
the soul or spirit. You can imagine all those extinct animals
hovering over the stage in the
form of wind.’
‘Not so long ago, I heard Stravinsky's The Flood, and
there's a moment in it too
where Noah's wife hesitates. It's just a brief moment, strange
enough, and ten seconds later
she's persuaded. In my piece it lasts two hours an even then she
won't come aboard. She
understands that it's all Noah's delusion and she takes the side
of nature and the free
animals.’
Little solace is to be found in the close of the opera.
Everything comes crashing down. But
the story could start again where it left off. Guus: ‘It
closes with the line it began
with. Open ended, and that's a good thing too. Just imagine if it
had turned out a moralistic
tale.’
The next time I see Guus is on the 1st of March. Gidon
Kremer has just finished
playing in the Concertgebouw and a small crowd throngs outside
his greenroom. Among them, I
see Guus Janssen and Theo Loevendie, both with a score tucked
under the arm. They both have
been granted an audience. Guus waves cheerfully.
Printed on the cover of the score is the title Klotz.
‘I looked it up’, he says.
‘It comes from Porcile. And the man who plays the
harp is Klotz, not Herdhitze.’
We leaf through the pages. ‘Look at this’, gushes Guus,
pointing at one part. ‘I'm
especially pleased with this.’
What does that mean, ‘civettuolo’, I
ask. ‘Flirtatious’, answers Guus.
‘That's now exactly what I mean.’ Then the door opens
and score in hand, he is swept
along inside.
© Frits van der Waa 2006
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