Monday 18 May 2015 he will be cremated in Utrecht: Ton Hartsuiker, tireless champion of new music in our country. Ailing with his health in recent years, he would have reached his 82e birthday just missed. He was active as a pianist, music educator, conservatory director, administrator and radio presenter. Even after his retirement in 1998, he did not hesitate to quit his mission: to enthuse as many people as possible about the very latest notes. Our musical landscape will be a lot more barren without him.
Musica nova
Hartsuiker (1933-2015) probably owes his greatest fame to the radio programme Musica Nova on Hilversum IV (now Radio4), through which he treated a large crowd of listeners to contemporary music every week between 1969 and 1991. It was the follow-up to the radio lectures that composer and publicist Ton de Leeuw from 1957 for the same station. Like his predecessor, Hartsuiker played compositions by living composers, which he explained and contextualised in his typical husky voice.
While this programme was aimed at the interested layman, his presence was also well-nigh inescapable in the professional world itself. He taught at the conservatories of Rotterdam and Enschede and was director of the conservatories of Utrecht and Amsterdam. Younger generations also knew how to find their way to this amiable, always smoothly causative inspirer, such as the pianists Ralph van Raat, Christiaan Kuyvenhoven and the Jussen brothers. Although he spent his life promoting modernism, he was not shy. For instance, he also championed young composer Joey Roukens (1982), whose music unabashedly harks back to Romanticism.
Ensemble M
What stung him is that in the 1970s, he gradually became outstripped as an advocate of the avant-garde by Reinbert de Leeuw and his Schönberg Ensemble. This came into being a few years after Ensemble M, founded by Hartsuiker and David Porcelijn in 1972, on the initiative of a group of students who had taken up Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire wanted to perform. Sadly, Hartsuiker watched as a club of students received more attention than his own ensemble of professionals.
He even saw in this a kind of conspiracy of the progressive press, which was supposedly in favour of De Leeuw c.s. and deliberately played the two ensembles against each other, as he told me in 2008. But despite his obvious rivalry with the five-year younger De Leeuw, he invited him to his radio programme, visited his concerts and helped him rehearse a piece for prepared piano by John Cage.
In 1969, Hartsuiker married the mezzo-soprano Inge Frölich, whom he had met at the Twents Lyceum in Enschede, when he conducted a choir there. They became inseparable and even in Ton's final days I regularly met them at concerts with contemporary compositions. However weakened he was, he always managed to formulate a substantive commentary on the performed works. All his being breathed music. He described himself as 'a musician in a broader sense. Call it being musical'.
His death is not only a personal tragedy for his widow, but also a great loss for the Dutch music scene
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
