The Apollonian Clockwork on Stravinsky by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger

On page 5: “...in 1981, in the first week of April, we were reminded of the tenth anniversary of Stravinsky’s death by a young Dutch composer, Cornelius de Bondt. He did not do so with words but with piece of music, Bint, that the twelve-man orchestra Hoketus performed for the eleventh time., The title of the work refers to a novel by Bordewijk, with which the music shares a certain, severity, and, of course, to the object itself—a heavy beam. De Bondt’s heavy beam is a piece of tram rail, or, more precisely, two pieces, as the instrumentation of Hoketus is self-mirroring. The heavy blows on these rails articulate a composition lasting fifty minuetes, in which much happens even though little musical material is used and in which the listener, in spite of the process-orientated character of the music, never knows exactly where these few chords and rhythms are supposed to go. bint sounds like a machine that has no other purpose that to keep itself in motion. It never becomes clear to which law as of mechanics this colossus is being subjected. It is as if two enormous cog wheels are slowly building up momentum, but because the smaller wheels that connect the big ones are partially imperceptible to the ear, the listener has no chance to disengage his attention. The gnarling in his head and the gnarling of the music on the stage form an energetic counterpoint.

Bint, is a ‘machine humaine’. Few things are so human as a human machine inasmuch as nothing is inherently so un-machinelike. In the human machine, humans must expend more effort and energy to accomplish what a machine, effortlessly, does mechanically. The musical construction of Bint is so finely tuned that just one moment of human in attention can be enough to throw this Swiss-precision instrument out of control.

Even though the material is limited, the piece is by nature just as unminimimal as the closing bars of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Quite contrary to the processes is most minimal music, those in Bint are irreversible. That irreversibility is a result of, among other things, vague allusions to the traditional cadence, where the value of each chord ir determined by its relationship to one unchangeable fundamental chord. This chord is suggested in Bint, but never is heard. The music does not untangle. The knot, which is getting more and more complicated, is simply hacked through. The ‘wrong’ chord that determines the last minutes of the piece thrusts a spoke into the cogwheel which has been deriven to its maximum velocity.

Bint resembles most the execution of a mechanical ritual. One could almost say that it begins where Stravinsky—literally, in the postlude of the Requiem Canticles—leaves off.”

On page 6: “New music, at least as it sounds in Holland, takes on different shapes: strict, often process-orientated forms, with a preference for winds and keyboard instruments; simulated improvisations, written out int the most minute detail; montage-technique; new-tonality (but no neo-romanticism and not ‘back to the symphony orchestra’ to be squeezed in between Brahms and Mahler, or nowadays Shostakovich). Tonality is ‘played upon’—old concepts or Assis and thesis, breathing in and out, may be applied, distorted, inverted, but, in any case, are no longer ignored as they were by serial music.

What the composer of this music have in common is that they are all more orientated towards Stravinsky, Varese, and imporovised music than towards Schoenberg and Boulez. Their music reflects a conception which places serial music, as the furthest consequence of nineteenth-century music, in the mausoleum of the psst perfect tense. Even so-called post-serial music experiences the same fate. When, in the winter of 1981, at a concert of new appeared, giggles broke out in the audience; not because the cluster was so modern and daring, but because it was so old-fashioned.

The true influence of Stravinsky has only just begun. It is an influence which can do without Stravinskianism, without convulsive rhythms, without endless changes of times signatures, without pandiatoniscism, without pas-de-deux. No neo-, pos-, or ism; rather it is the type of influence inspired by misunderstanding, the deliberate distortion, the good wrong conclusion. Real influence is ladder that one lovingly throws behind, just out of reach.”

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In response to all this, there are some sentences that are very interesting, specially when, on the one hand, it talks about labels, as for example any neo-, post- or ism. I need to remember that I do not want to be in any label, however I may be interested in some composer, technique, etc to use for my composition. On the other hand, at the beginning of all the big citation, there is a talk where Andriessen and Schöenberger  talked about the way that the music, Bint, is like a machine unstoppable. I can relate that with Colours (in circles) for marimba and string quintet where, I have the same ideas. Something unstoppable that the only thing this machine wants is to go and go, becoming even more complicated and complex. It is a good term of comparison though!!

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