Louis Andriessen De Staat by Robert Adlington - chapter 2

Jazz, Minimalism and Stravinsky

Quotes:

Andriessen has never sought to disguise the impact made by existing music upon his own composition; the importance of jazz, minimalism and Stravinsky in particular is profound and multifaceted. However, he himself resists use of the word ‘influence’. In his music, reference to other music are a very conscious point of principle. They are, he suggested, deliberate ‘structural allusions’ and not, as the word ‘influence’ sometimes implies, more involuntary genetic traits.

Andriessen concedes that his attitude to other music in itself betrays a constant guiding presence: ‘it does not matter if it’s jazz, gagaku or C.P.E. Bach. The fact that there are structural allusions to other music is a result of the influence of Stravinsky.’

An assessment of Stravinsky’s importance for Andriessen closes this chapter, were there will be more to say on the general question of ‘music about music’.

    Jazz

Andriessen’s interest in combining classical music and jazz reflects a general susceptibility to cross-fertilisation - Gisela Gronemeyer refers to a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between these two genres in the Netherlands. Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg and Theo Loevendie, all prominent figures in the field of improvisation during the sixties, also wrote fully composed music, both for jazz musicians and for the classical concert hall. Younger musicians such as Maarten Altena, Guus Janssen and Peter van Bergen have continued this tradition of bridging jazz and classical worlds. Institutions such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw hall, which hosted jazz concerts from the fifties onwards, helped facilitate the recognition of jazz as a serious art form.

Andriessen’s interest in jazz signals not so much a laissez-faire attitude to the ‘music of the people’ as a perception that jazz is something fundamentally different from pop. While jazz may have been ‘lowbrow’, it was not ‘light’ music; on the contrary, it was ‘the folk music which is musically the most developed.’ Even when it lacked structural sophistication, it remained stimulating and provocative in its attitude to performance - the energy, character and sporadic vulgarity of which contrasted refreshingly with classical performance styles. In fact, while Andriessen’s music has drawn fruitfully on a number of structural characteristics of jazz, it is the approach of jazz musicians to performance that has been of greatest consequence.

A number of Andriessen’s compositions allude explicits to jazz. For instance, De Stijl (1985) chronicles Piet Mondrian’s love of boogie-woogie with the help of a substantial solo turn for honky-tonk pianist. In Facing Death (1990), Andriessen tackles the seemingly impossible task of transferring the bebop style of Charlie Parker to a string quartet. Jazz-Influenced film music styles feature prominently in the music-theatre piece Rosa (1994), which relates the like and death of the film composer Juan Manuel de rosa. The forerunner to all of these, though, was the second substancial piece that Andriessen wrote for the Orkest De Volharding in 1973. Its title, On Jimmy Yancey, refers to one of the foremost boogie-woogie pianists of the twenties and thirties.

On Jimmy Yancey thus includes a number of features that refer directly to Yancey himself. But it also helped to cement those aspects of Andriessen’s newly evolving, post-avant-garde idiom that were derived from jazz, and matter of the ‘blue-notes’ - the lowered third, seventh or fifth degree of the diatonic scale commonly found in blues and jazz. Blue thirds and fifths abound at the start of On Jimmy Yancey, not least in the very first chord, which consists simply of flattened third and flattened fifth. The flattened seventh is later startlingly highlighted in combination with the flattened third, in a harmonic jolt lifted direct from Yancey’s 1939 track ‘South Side Stuff.’

This use of additional notes to complicate a basic diatonic scale remains common in Andriessen’s later music. Rhythmically, the first movement of On Jimmy Yancey predictably makes a feature of syncopated rhythms, with sustained notes placed just ahead of the beat and numerous accented off-beat interjections. However, it also establishes a schism, reproduced in later works of the seventies, between passages with authentically jazzy rhythms and other characterised by the more earth-bound, marching style of Hanns Eisler. The final action of the first movement and the whole of the second movement conform more to the latter, the ever-present boogie-inspired obstinate deprived of any compensating rhythmic whimsy in the other parts, and correspondingly made rather arduous.

Andriessen’s perception of jazz did not stop with questions of harmony, rhythm or scoring. He was also interested in the way the jazz musicians performed. There were two, interrelated aspects to this: first, the way in which jazz performance style offered an alternative to the ‘bourgeois’ performance style of the orchestra; and second, the way in which jazz performance seemed to reflect directly, and thus ‘authentically’m the personality of the individual performer. An early indication of Andriessen’s interest is provided by the first version of Ittorspezione III (1964), in which the solo saxophone - a part written with Willem Breaker in mind - is instructed to play with a ‘brutal and hard sound (like in jazz)’. The raw, unblended tone, varying intonation, and ‘between the eyes’ style of Breuker’s ICP players reflected well-established practices in jazz performance, and was highly attractive to Andriessen, as we saw in the last chapter. Thus, ‘the way in which yo place your finger on the key or stick the reed in your mouth’ was, from the start, a crucial issue for De Volharding. Indeed the scores of the works written for De Volharding, like most jazz scores, give a less than adequate representation of the music, for their impact was considerably dependent on the performance characteristics of the heavy treatment meted out to the upright piano by Andriesse; on the loosens of ensemble and other ‘inaccuracies’ that were almost an article of faith for the whole band.

    Minimalism

That Andriessen was not prepared unthinkingly to adopt the compositional procedures of the American minimalists was further demonstrated in the tape piece Il Duce (’The Duke’) (1973). The work is based on a speech by Mussolini; Andriessen’s treatment of it, which involved selecting a small portion and repeating it over and over in a way that gradually obscures the original verbal content, strongly resembles the early tape pieces of Steve Reich, particularly Come Out (1965) and It’s Gonna Rain (1966). However, Il Duce is intended as something of a riposte to Reich’s works. In his article about composing for Vrecht’s Die Massnahme, Andriessen alludes to ‘American electronic avant-garde music’ in which ‘words or sentences are often repeated unendingly. Within the shortest possible time, the listener has forgotten the text and word becomes a sound.’

There was, however, some hostility towards the glossiness and apparent banality of American minimal music amongst the students: Reich’s music was, in the words of one student, ‘roombotermuziek’ (literally, ‘buttercream-music’). Andriessen was prepared to acknowledge that minimal music had in recent years developed an undeniable ‘TV advertisement association’, but he wanted to persuade the students that minimalism had originated as ‘a rigid and radical’ approach to composition.

Andriessen’s work - Hoketus

    Stravinsky

I think of harmony, melody and rhythm as the main parameters of music… All that whining about textural sonorous fields and special instruments effects bores me. Instrumentation must correspond to the structure of the music. You’ll never hear a flute playing a snatch of a tune in my music. Once it starts its story, it finishes it.

Classical in this instance means music in which the composer creates only the form ‘but leaves the finishing of come content in this form to “the listener’s powers of imagination”´. '… The listener, too, must autonomously collaborate at fulfilment.’ Romanticism imputes to music ‘concrete content, condemning the listener to passivity’. ‘Where music makes use of such intensified means that it despotically sweeps the listener under its spell and rove him of his own power of imagination, it ceases to be music.’ (Andriessen and Schöenberg 1989, p. 100)

Stravinsky displays objects, makes gestures. Mahler giver voice to himself. Stravinsky the person is hidden behind the artwork. Mahler reveals himself as a Mensh, typically romantic: just listen to how deeply I suffer, listen to how happy I am. That type of composers means nothing to me. (Andriessen, in Van Possum and Smit 1994, p.11)

In holding these views, Andriessen does not wish to deny that music can cause an emotional response: he admits to being ‘moved to tears by Stravinsky’s music’, for instance, and in his discussions with Maja Trochimczyk he makes frequent reference to the melancholy, joy and other emotions caused by music. But for Andriessen this reaction cannot be taken as any indication of the composer’s emotional state: rather, it is a simple effect of the musical material itself. In his words, ‘the product of what we do is far more important than we ourselves are. And that is probably what you call any antiromanticism.

Andriessen has sometimes sought to extricate himself from this seeming contradiction by explaining the expressive content of his music in terms of the referencing of other music: that is to say, the emotion is not directly expressed, but ‘quoted’, as it were, at one remove:

I don’t want you to be swept by my music. It must seem that you get swept away. Mahler is genuinely overwhelming, but music should be about overwhelmingness… Your emotions and passions function as an energy, as a motor to create music, but you cannot composer them directly into music… I’m the first to admit that music is, in an exceptionally strong way, about passion. It does not express passion but is a photo of passion. (In Koning and Jansen 1981, p. 14)

What is important for the lucid ordering of the work - for its crystallisation - is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law.