For a moment, the envelope seems unopenable but then Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven conjures up the redeeming paper after all. 'The winner of the 2019 Gaudeamus Award is Kelley Sheehan!' The little American almost falls off her stool in amazement. Probably not entirely by chance, the new music organisation has positioned her right in the middle of her four fellow candidates. - She herself would have divided the award equally among them she tells me afterwards.
Sheehan's surprised reaction is as heartwarming as the presence of our culture minister. A message to up-and-coming composers and all artists: you matter! Thus, the awards ceremony on 8 September was a lovely icing on the cake of a varied festival. A range of cross-border productions fanned out across the city of Utrecht. - From festival centre TivoliVredenburg to Kunstruimte Kuub and from Theater Kikker to Centraal Museum and Nicolaïkerk. There were also free outdoor performances on the Neude and Weerdsluis.
Collectivity
That young composers have long since ceased to occupy themselves exclusively with black and white dots on paper is a given. Collaborations with other disciplines such as dance, visual art and technology speak for themselves. What did strike me was the five nominees' penchant for collectivity, for creating something together. - A reassuring feeling in times of polarisation and excessive individualism.
The most outspoken in this are the American Scott Rubin and the Canadian Remy Siu. Rubin creates his pieces together with dancers equipped with motion sensors, in direct interaction with the performing musicians. Siu develops music projects with his own Hong Kong Collective, for which he writes the video game-inspired software himself. He even acknowledged hating the concept of being a composer. The Canadian Stefan Maier, Briton Nicholas Morrish and award winner Sheehan see the performer as a kind of co-composer.
Buckled violins and crackling cactus
Jurors Clara Ianotta, Yannis Kyriakides and Gerhard Stäbler call Sheehan 'a true explorer of sound'. She 'works with objects stretched in their function' and creates 'an unusual world of noise'. That certainly applies to Four Sharp Corners for string quartet, performed Thursday by Utrecht-based ensemble Insomnio. Four string instruments lie constricted by iron wires on tables. As the musicians try to free their instruments, groaning electronic sounds emerge. Meanwhile, they elicit crackling sounds from their desks with their bows. Two players compete to see who can raise or lower their stands with the loudest bang.
Who said again that modern music would be humourless and cerebral? Also The Traces that Remain by Nicholas Morrish has a fresh, humorous touch. Conductor Ulrich Pöhl dribbles back and forth between three suitcase gramophones prominently placed on stage. He winds them up and puts on shellac plates made by Morrish himself. These are filled with the noise and ticking released by the manufacturing process of shellac plates. The percussionist grates a metal comb over the needles of a cactus. These served According to Morrish ever to pick up the sound of gramophone records. The ensemble plays snatches of the romantic music we expect from such analogue records.
Stifling depression, throat-cutting drenching
But it is not just light-heartedness that rings the bell. In the theatrical DisOrders Petra Strahovnik oppressively makes various forms of depression palpable. The - excellent playing and acting - musicians of Modelo'62 breathe in and out obsessively, writhing across the floor while drumming on sound boxes, dipping the cup of their clarinet in water and producing an orgy of noise on drums and thunder plates. After about an hour, the heavy breathing returns and all are wrapped in clear plastic. Clearly, there is no escape here.
Downright poignant is the performance Nocturne in EUropean Waters by Spanish-Dutch composer Jonás Bisquert. On either side of the Weerdsluis are musicians from the New European Ensemble and singers from Consorte. Gracefully undulating melody lines leap from musicians to singers and from quay to quay. Poet Randa Awad recites her poem The Long European Nights, standing on the parapet in the middle of the lock. Partly in Arabic, partly in English. Four singers join her. She abruptly thrusts them into the water: 'Now dead, you oscillate!' It is a throat-cutting image of the drowning people we leave to their fate in the Mediterranean.
Marimba wall
The festival opened on Wednesday, September four, with the world premiere of W.A.L.L. by Aart Strootman, performed by Slagwerk Den Haag and Temko. Strootman thereby fulfilled the composition assignment associated with the Gaudeamus Award, which he in 2017 won. He single-handedly built a wall-filling 60-tone marimba, which had been announced with much fanfare. We were even shown a preview of an unfortunately uninformative documentary. We see Strootman frantically sawing, sanding and freshing but have to read in the programme booklet that he divided the octave into 60 instead of 12 tones.
The promised "wall of sound" also failed to materialise. W.A.L.L. proved mostly a study in gently echoing, microtonal guitar arpeggios and lovely patterns on the marimba wall. The percussionists, rising beautifully from their stools, created some lovely, buzzing passages. Very occasionally, they were allowed to indulge in - splashy - thunderclaps on metal pipes between the marimba wall. All in all, the musical material was too uninteresting to last an hour.
Disguised trumpet concert
More fascinating was Bird, the new piece that Sebastian Hilli, 2018 prizewinner, composed for Asko|Schönberg. It is a joyous amalgam of firm percussive chords intersected with sudden silences. Hilli creates a lively question-and-answer game that bounces from jazzy percussion and big-band-like brass to blaring hoempa and rousing dance. The percussionist plays a brilliant solo on bass drum and hi-hat, while the pianist pounds out roaring chords from her grand piano.
A starring role is reserved for the solo trumpeter, Bird seems like a trumpet concerto in disguise. Trumpeter Bas Duister has an unprecedentedly beautiful tone full of colour and effortlessly produces the highest notes in virtuoso melodies. The work ends with a parody of the endlessly repeated final chords of classical composers like Beethoven. Every time you think: now it's over, a squeaky piccolo screeches for attention. A delightful piece that sends you home with a happy feeling. Gaudeamus could not have wished for a nicer ending.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
