With Battles & Silences, HIIIT (v/h Slagwerk Den Haag) presents a very special sound experience. During November Music 2025, a soundscape can be experienced in the Sint-Jan in Den Bosch, with a starring role for a bell cast from bullet casings from Ukraine. “So that one day there will be no more bullets, because we have turned them all into bells.” For Fedor Teunisse, this project also marks the end of his artistic leadership of the percussion ensemble.
“It's not up. It's far from finished.” Fedor Teunisse may be quitting as artistic director of HIIIT! ‘preferably before Christmas’, but he is still full of energy. “That's also the problem. I could perhaps continue for another 30 years.” Teunisse wants to make room for fresh blood.
Other things
This insight is partly a result of what he experienced during the Corona pandemic. As a teacher at several conservatoires, he saw almost an entire generation of musicians disappear. “I had the good fortune then, the advantage, that I had fixed contracts as artistic director, so my salary continued.” That was not true for many of the creators and students around him.
“I come from the days when there were still ten contemporary music ensembles subsidised by Fonds Podiumkunsten. So as a young percussionist, for my education I could play on all those stages with those great conductors, with those other musicians. The opportunities for young musicians now are many times more stripped down than they were back then. Now I see musicians doing other things.”
Set an example
During Covid, the sector proved vulnerable: “The cultural sector does need to be one where you feel you can build a future. Both in ideas and financially. And that is really under pressure now, I think. You notice this not only among musicians, but also in the recruitment of marketing or producers, for instance. It has to remain an attractive sector. In itself, I can earn enough with my artistic leadership and directorship. I've had all those experiences over the past decades. At some point, it's time to be able to give other people the same experience, because otherwise, in 20, 30 years, we won't have that new artistic director again who is going to do great things. Because you have to make those metres on the ground. You have to lug those tomtoms and those drums around to know what it's all about.”
Fedor decided to stop playing and focus entirely on organising. “I might also want to set an example. A club like HIIIT! has always been a club where young talent did get a place. Then I definitely shouldn't sit here until I'm 67.”
Inverted dustbin
So the latest project he got off the ground as artistic director is not just any project. For Battles & Silences, HIIIT! took a few kilos of bullet casings from the battlefield in Ukraine, to melt them into a clock.
How did he come up with that idea? Teunisse does not see it as a single eureka moment: “Sometimes people think you come up with an idea, but then it turns out the idea has been haunting the back of your mind somewhere for a long time, and it's different lines coming together. Of course, I have a fascination with bells. As they also say so nicely at bell-foundry Eijsbouts, as a bell-founder it is not really a profitable model to make a church bell. Because those usually last about 500 years. They are phenomenal objects. If you walk around the Netherlands and you hear a carillon or a church bell, you almost don't perceive it. You take it so much for granted that those bells ring and how beautiful they sound. Until once you are walking in a village in central Spain you hear a church bell that sounds more like an overturned bin. Then you suddenly realise how incredibly high quality that bell foundry has been in Flanders and the Netherlands.”
Bells and bombs
“It's an incredibly archaic process: making that mould, working with that bell bronze, casting it, taking it out of that mould, the birth of that bell. It's almost like going back to some kind of Greek mythology where the instrument is forged from the fire.”
A native of Rotterdam, he learned early on how profound war can be. His grandparents survived the German bombing of 14 May 1940 and were severely traumatised. “When it thundered, my grandmother would invariably crawl into the china cabinet. That would close and she would hide there. I know my mother always watched war films, for example.”
So now those two lines of war and chimes come together in Battles&Silences, a work Hiit is making in collaboration with Poulson Sq. (Anthony Fiumara & Mathijs Leeuwis). Several kilos of brass were used in the bronze of the bell. That brass comes from the bullet casings of a Ukrainian sniper.
Not anti-war
“Initially, of course, the trigger for the project was the war in Ukraine, and that everyone then felt powerless. Also, suddenly a threat was so real close by. You try to find a response to that. And through my history with Slagwerk Den Haag and HIIIT!, I have a lot of affinity with John Cage. With his ‘Imaginary Landscapes’ he wrote in the 1930s to find answers to the craziness of war.”
Battles & Silences is not an anti-war pamphlet, says Fedor Teunisse. “We are creating an imaginary world where you say: eventually we will continue casting bells until there are no more weapons in the world. It is, of course, a utopia. But in these times when we are very quick to resort to war rhetoric, there is no longer any room at all for pacifist thought. Even if only as a thought in a discussion. That's why I do think this is a valuable project. Because it takes absolutely no sides. But it makes something tangible through sound. Because you don't just have the clock, a landscape has been built around it in sound by Poulson Sq.”
Dying tapes
A landscape in which old, analogue tape recorders play an important role. “There is one phrase I did like very much from Matthijs Leeuwis. He said that tape music is a form of dying. A cassette tape sounds really good when it's fresh. But put it back in a cassette recorder after 15 years and you'll be lucky to play it one more time. There is a kind of humanity and impermanence in that tape reel. Indeed, that is the way to deal with that bell and that sound with integrity. That bell already has so much meaning. What meaning should we now add to that bell? Or is that bell already actually enough? Does that bell already actually have enough of itself? Is that already the message? Fortunately, we found out that there was quite a bit more to do with it. But it does have to do with memory. You already form an image of yourself about that clock. When you see it, you think you know what it sounds like. In the end - it's a small spoiler alert - for much of the first half of the performance, you don't even hear that clock.”
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