World premiere of deceased Ten Holt

Tonight, Feb 14 honours the North Netherlands Orchestra at the Oosterpoort in Groningen Simeon ten Holt, who died in 2012, with the world premiere of his orchestral work Centri-fuga, which he completed in 1979. It has never been performed to this day and will be christened tonight by conductor David Porcelijn. After the interval, Ten Holt's magnum opus will also be heard Canto ostinato for four pianos, performed by Sandra and Jeroen van Veen, Fred Oldenburg and Irene Russo. Earlier this week, other pianists also performed it at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. 

Ten Holt also completed this piano work in 1979 . The world premiere hit like a bomb and since then Canto ostinato  just about every day on a concert stage somewhere in the world, in just about every line-up imaginable. Elpees and CDs of the various versions achieved monster sales. Much to his own chagrin, Ten Holt gradually became the composer of one piece. Whereas he had so much more to offer. It is therefore particularly gratifying that today the Noord Nederlands Orkest is performing his orchestral work Centri-fuga which he composed in the same period. - He did not write many orchestral works.

A major inspiration for Simeon ten Holt was the wayward composer and pianist Jakob van Domselaer, who, like him, lived in Bergen. 'Van Domselaer was not only my teacher, he was a destiny,' he said. 'He followed traditional theory in his lessons and at the same time he philosophised about Schoenberg. But Van Domselaer was a rather outspoken personality: he declared everything to be zero and considered himself the composer who lived on Olympus. So I didn't go to the conservatory, because he didn't like all that cramming and exams. As a result, I was totally unequipped when I went out into the world. I had to detach myself from him in order to spread my own wings. '

Apart from two periods in Amsterdam and a trip to Paris, where he stayed from 1949 to 1952, Ten Holt continued to live in Bergen throughout his life. In the city of lights, he was briefly taught by such luminaries as Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud, which he described, however, as "decorative experiences, of no compositional importance whatsoever". For lack of money, he moved into a converted World War II bunker in 1954. In this rustic setting, he tried to get a grip on the notions of tonal/atonal.

To this end, he developed his diagonal thought, based on the simultaneous sounding of keys that are in a strong dissonant relationship to each other. After this, he also started composing serial works, of which Cycle to madness (1962) and A/.ta-lon/ (1968) form the key pieces. Ten Holt said: 'With serialism we got the art of timbre, the noise element was discovered. If you think through consistently, it leads to a deepening of what a tone ultimately is.'

He continued: 'In A/.ta-lon/, for mezzo-soprano and 36 playing and talking instrumentalists, all the musical parameters, such as duration, intensity, height, but also timbre, are reducible to one and the same sequence, with all its transpositions and permutations. Even the text I made according to the same structure, purely on language sound.' During the same period, Ten Holt also realised a number of electronic compositions at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, such as I am Sylvia but somebody else and Inferno I and II.

Back to tonality

The freedom-loving Ten Holt soon felt trapped by 'the dictates of the schedule' imposed by serial music: 'I got tired of composing at a table, from my head - from the intellect and not from feeling. I gradually came to realise that tonality is the adequate form to express an inner world. But I was striving for a different form from the one we already knew. Like the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed the idea of a "God after the death of God", I designed the "tonality after the death of tonality". - Although I make use of traditional harmonics, the elements of tension and relaxation that are so characteristic of it, I corporatise them into musical objects.'

Thus, Ten Holt dishes out recognisable chords to us, which, however, do not follow the conventional musical route, as they stand on their own. Canto ostinato was the first piece he composed from this attitude and it thus hit like a bomb. Notable in his later work is the great freedom of interpretation. Not only can pieces be performed by different types of instruments, the number of players also varies and they are allowed to follow their own path through the score within certain margins. So a performance is always different and the duration can vary enormously - Lemniscate for keyboard instruments (1983) took 30 hours at its premiere.

The composer said: 'For me it is about a social process. Man has an inability to communicate and by leaving so much open, I force the players to deliberate. I am only a remote director: I only provide the building blocks. This creates a continuum between me, the performer and the audience: by getting to know, you become known yourself.'

In 2000, Ten Holt did an experiment . During a performance of Canto Ostinato by two pianos and two marimbas, the audience could use a remote control to help determine the course of the composition - louder, softer, darker, more passionate. The average outcome of this audience involvement was projected on a screen in constantly changing colour columns. Ten Holt: 'It was like one big heartbeat. The problem is that feeling does not allow itself to be digitised; it is fluid for once. The musicians didn't quite know how to respond to the screen, because two languages were used that conflict with each other. The experiment had failed.'

Of audience participation, at the world premiere of Centri-fuga no mention tonight, but in this, too, Ten Holt draws a parallel with our daily lives. He compares the orchestral work to an apartment building without a stairwell, in which everyone leads their own life. The piece is built on four tones, performed each time by groups of four of the same instruments, and the time measure takes place according to the principle of centrifugal force. - Curious to see how that will sound!

The quotes in this piece are taken from an interview I conducted with Ten Holt in 2001 for a festival dedicated to him at Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht.