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One of the main problems with the so-called avant-garde music is the absence of memory. I would like to, again, compose while taking memory into account. — Louis Andriessen
To classify Louis Andriessen as a minimalist composer would be an unjust simplification, if not an outright error. Firstly, the rhythmic energy and the timbral power in his compositions is more readily qualified as maximalist. Secondly, to begin to comprehend Andriessen’s work, one must delve into his multifarious influences: from Johann Sebastian Bach and Guillaume de Machaut (for contrapuntal techniques and complex organization of time), to jazz (for harmonic writing, swing, and vocal textures), pop music (for electronic instruments and binary rhythms), and above all Igor Stravinsky.1 Andriessen shared the latter’s desire for a modern style of composition that would be based in the possibilities offered in the musical material itself, and he was equally wary of using this material to display excessive sentimentality. Both composers’ writings are based in montage: references and echoes are woven together, reflecting the historicity of the musical material. Andriessen borrows both material and form to create semiotic play. Intertwined references suggest time and space — a time and space upon which the present time of the piece depends. Thus, the influences from boogie-woogie in De Stijl (1985) evoke Piet Mondrian’s interest in that musical style. Anytime Andriessen appropriated genres or parts of other works, he did so in a way that the borrowed material was incorporated with continuity and without scathing postmodern irony.
Andriessen’s resonance with the American “repetitive” composers, notably Steve Reich,2 is a connection that is nevertheless worthy of establishing as it immediately strikes the ear. However, while Reich composed with “purism” and semiotic denial — an approach that can be summed up by paraphrasing from Frank Stella, “What you hear is what you hear” — Andriessen anchored music with historical and political significance. In his works of the 1970s, in particular, he developed an “aestheticization of politics” (to use Walter Benjamin’s concept) in which musical aggression, even violence, and the hammered repetition of fortissimo chords reflect the brutality of social and political relations, from the Vietnam War to the conditions of workers. Also, while Reich considered that his work took shape within the post-war US context of “Chuck Berry and a million hamburgers sold”3 and thus retained the abstract form of the repetitive process, Andriessen tried to convert a political vision into sound. He did concede that this exercise was a precarious one. If Plato, in the Republic, was correct in stating that musical modes had the power to alter the organization of the city-state, then music could be the vector of radical social change. With De Staat (1976), Andriessen played precisely on the kind of music Plato prohibited.
Andriessen was born into a family of composers4 and nurtured in a Francophile musical and literary culture. In the mid-1950s, he became interested in the jazz of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as in European serialism. His first published work, Series for two pianos (1958), influenced by the piece Structures I by Pierre Boulez (1958), figures among the first serial works published in the Netherlands. But as early as 1959, Andriessen would move away from serialism. His Nocturnes for soprano and chamber orchestra, composed that year, echoes the early twentieth-century French school. In Cage’s wake, he produced two graphic scores in 1961, Ittrospezione I and Paintings, as well as some works in 1963 built around textures and heterophony, such as Ittrospezione III. In August of the same year, he attended the Darmstadt seminar and took particular interest in the works of Luciano Berio and his theatricalized music. For two years, he studied with Berio in Milan and Berlin. While his first pieces borrowed from Darmstadt’s modernist tendencies, including serialism and aleatoric music, Andriessen would rapidly lose faith in the myth of autonomy of the work and the possibility (or even the necessity) of composing from a tabula rasa. Influenced by Charles Ives and, of course, Stravinsky, he would conclude that composers cannot ignore the historical significance of music’s components and that borrowing and allusion cannot be avoided. In his book The Apollonian Clockwork, he wrote:
Stravinsky’s influence can be seen rather in a specific attitude towards musical material. This attitude can be best described as the (historical) realization that music is about other music and is not primarily suited to express personal emotions; that new music implies the existence of other music; that music is only music.5
Two major aesthetic anchors result from Stravinsky’s influence on Andriessen’s work: first, he took artistic license to quote other musical works and, second, he saw an ontological uniqueness in music tautologically expressed, and by correlation, he valued form over the expression of feelings, which became secondary.
But when it came to expression, Andriessen was less formalist than Stravinsky who, it is well known, considered music as “essentially powerless to express anything at all.”6 Although Andriessen did not deny musical sentiment, he considered it an aesthetic attribute of the music, rather than the expression of a psychological state of the composer, as in Romanticism. For Andriessen, music’s purpose is passion and yet “It does not express passion but is a photo of passion.”7 He made musical sentiment a subject; it would be represented rather than experienced.8 He thus made a breakthrough in modern music, as sentiment had otherwise remained outside the scope of serialism, aleatoric music, and the impersonal processes of the American minimalists.
Emotions in fact take center stage in Andriessen’s works — love in De Tijd (1980-1981), death in Inanna (2003) and Racconto dall’ inferno (2004) — but in a radically different way than in nineteenth-century Romanticism. He tackled the problem of expressing an emotion or feeling through a piece without expressing oneself (as a psychological being) in the piece. In other words, the idea is that, rather than translating an emotional state into music, the material itself offers the possibility of expressing sentiment. This approach would even be fundamentally beneficial for listeners in that they could “discover their own emotions”9 through the piece.
The Rite of Spring, for Andriessen, was “the most important and revolutionary work for two centuries to come.”10 He would quote excerpts from the Rite in his operas Rosa, a Horse Drama (also called Rosa: The Death of a Composer, 1994) and Writing to Vermeer (1998). As Paul Grimstad notes, there are numerous common points between Andriessen and Stravinsky:
Both are pianistic composers who treat the orchestra like a piano — or, relatedly, like a big percussion instrument. Both find original and precise timbral expressions of intervallic relationships, which show up as a certain “bite” in their orchestrations. Both use rhythm as a structuring element in ways typically associated with melody. Both are open-minded to the point of eclecticism in their approach to musical form and style.11
Stravinsky’s influence is also audible in Andriessen’s use of montage. In The Apollonian Clockwork, Andriessen distinguishes montage from collage.12 The latter, a heterogeneous collection of objects in confrontation, relies on external ordering, should it be disordered, like the additive or mechanical systems evoked by Boris de Schloezer.13 Montage, on the contrary, finds its coherence and consistency within itself, resembling in this way an organic system. Guided by an internal law such as harmonic continuity, montage nevertheless invites external semiotic play. In this regard, collage would require confrontation, with sutured lines between assembled elements, whereas montage would involve a game of duality: between identification, or the quest for a referent, and poetry, or how the fragments from other works or genres are integrated into the present work. As early as his Anachronie I (1966) dedicated to Ives, Andriessen juxtaposed allusions and quotations. Playing on the musical culture of the listener, the work quotes J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, parodies Michel Legrand’s film music, takes up popular Italian tunes, and includes excerpts from works by Andriessen’s father and brother. With these quotations, Andriessen foiled the expectations confronting the tonal and atonal, erudite and popular.
Beyond musical borrowings, Andriessen transfers visual or architectural structures into the organization of pitches, timbres, and durations. The second part of De Materie, “Hadewijch,” is built off the blueprint of the Reims Cathedral: fifteen “pillar” chords reflect, in the space of the score, the geographical arrangement of the edifice’s pillars. Similarly, the time proportions of De Stijl are based on the dimensions and colors used by Mondrian in his Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, with five instrumental layers echoing the five colors in the painting.
Taking a cue from the Philip Glass Ensemble and Steve Reich and Musicians, Andriessen created his own ensembles: the Orkest De Volharding (“Perseverance Orchestra”) in 1972, then Hoketus, which existed from 1975 to 1986. With these groups, his aim was to guard against the misunderstandings and misinterpretations he felt would inevitably occur if independent groups performed his works. In 1972, he composed an eponymous piece for the Orkest De Volharding. Built of modules, the piece offers its interpreters the option to choose different paths, much like Pierre Boulez’s Éclat (1964-1965) and Terry Riley’s In C (1964). De Volharding is based on a drone played by an electric piano, on which several motifs are deployed successively by adding or removing notes. The modules can be repeated from six to two hundred times. This formal freedom leaves room for indeterminacy.
Although Andriessen took inspiration from the compositional processes of American repetitive composers, he sought to go beyond them by injecting repetition with a political message. Whereas in response to audiences’ reticence to attend performances in traditional concert venues the American minimalists in the early 1970s readily frequented New York lofts and art galleries, the Orkest De Volharding played in factories, schools, and political gatherings.
In his instrumentation, Andriessen borrowed saxophone and drums from jazz; electric keyboards, electric guitar, and bass from rock; and the instruments used in traditional orchestras, amplified to rival the former in sound volume. Drums and electric bass guitar, in particular, occupy an important place in his work, providing a vigorous rhythmic base inspired by be-bop (Facing Death, 1990), boogie-woogie (On Jimmy Yancey, 1983), big bands (De Stijl), and Afro-American funk. Andriessen used the synthesizer as an instrument in its own right, rather than as a mere tool for electronic manipulation. When he used voice, he privileged “straight” voices inspired by jazz or even pop, avoiding vibrato and operatic vocal styles. Pulling away from the symphonic orchestra, he sought out a new orchestral form that he called a “terrifying twenty-first century orchestra.”14 Summarizing Andriessen’s aesthetic, John Adams said: “Andriessen took two quintessentially American languages, be-bop and minimalism, filtered them through the refracting rhythmic techniques of Stravinsky and produced a genuinely original sound.”15 Whenever Andriessen borrowed from commercial music, he would create a “spiritualized” version, to critique capitalist modes of production and consumption.
In the Dutch counterculture of the mid-1960s, and notably the Provo anarchist movement involving political-artistic pacificism, Andriessen endeavored, like other members of the Hague School, to renew orchestral music and compositional methods by making them politically combative. He adopted a minimalist style and gravitated toward unisons, influenced by Diderik Wagenaar’s Kaleidofonen I (1969). This influence can be heard notably in Melodie (1972-1974) for recorder and piano, De Staat, and Volkslied (1971), in which notes from the Dutch national anthem are progressively transformed into those of The Internationale. The compositional act and the ways the works would be interpreted were, for Andriessen, inextricable from their sociopolitical context, even if music’s abstractedness might mute its message for many listeners. As he said, “there is no such thing as a fascist dominant seventh.”16 Social metaphors can nonetheless be represented in music. In the very structure of Workers Union (1975) there is an attempt by dissident workers to escape from the rhythm imposed by the work-machine, by trying to establish their own motifs and tempi, before joining (or being joined by) the rhythm of the piece. This work, “is to be dissonant and chromatic: hard to play and rough to listen to, as hard and rough as physical labor is for workers,”17 writes the music historian Maja Trochimczyk. In this respect, the repetition in Andriessen’s work must be understood to reflect a society whose system of production is based on repetitive and alienating work.18
If Riley’s music inspired Andriessen’s compositions for the Orkest De Volharding, it can also be considered a source for the birth of the Hoketus ensemble. The ensemble came into being through Andriessen’s minimalism class at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, in which the practical work for the course consisted in performing Riley’s In C. The eponymous work Hoketus (1976), born out of these sessions, uses a reductionist approach and borrows the hocket technique used in fourteenth-century Ars nova music. The piece bears the echo of American minimalism as heavy chords are played in repeated rhythmic patterns, but it is also chromatic, in contrast to the normally tonal or modal minimalist writing. Hoketus can be heard as a duel between two identical instrument groups comprised of pan flutes, electric pianos, pianos, bass guitars, and congas, each placed at the extremities of the stage. The groups alternate chords that are almost identical. According to Andriessen’s instructions, individual measures or groups of measures can be repeated as many times as the performers wish. The piece’s repetition is vigorously asserted, and its chromaticism is quite different from the brilliant tonal harmony of Reich and Philip Glass from the same period. The hocket creates ambiguity between the whole — the unfolding of the work — and that of its parts — repeated in alternation by the two groups of players. Playing on indiscernibility, Hoketus draws attention to the subtle differences that become woven into the repetition.
Throughout Andriessen’s work, in fact, repetition creates unpredictable timbral and melodic effects. Like the “psychoacoustic byproducts” that emerge in Reich’s “gradual processes,”19 a shadow melody not played by any particular instrument emerges in the ballet Dubbelspoor (1984, 1994) and in the middle of De Tijd (1980-1981) for female choir and large orchestra. Pure minimalist techniques are not found in Andriessen’s music. He blends minimalism with other techniques20 — as in Orpheus (1977), an avowed homage to Reich and Glass, which applies minimalist processes to structures derived from jazz and rock and, in passing, quotes the title song from the television series Kojak.
Andriessen also put minimalist techniques to use in narrative and renewed forms of opera. The repetitive rigor of the pieces of the 1970s was followed by large-scale narrative works over the following three decades. Die Materie, Andriessen’s first opera, composed between 1985 and 1989 and directed by Robert Wilson in 1989 and, more recently, by Heiner Goebbels in 2014, was described by Goebbels as an “opera of ideas which leaves you time to think about mind and matter, about this dialectic.”21 It is modeled more on Bertolt Brecht and the experimental theater of the 1960s and 1970s than on the great operatic tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 Andriessen also helped create a new form of film opera through his collaborations with Peter Greenaway on M is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991), Rosa: The Death of a Composer, and Writing to Vermeer. These operas are characterized by their use of montage and their integration of both scholarly and popular music, as in the references to Hollywood film music in Rosa and Latin popular music in M is for Man, Music, Mozart. Influenced by surrealism, Andriessen and Greenaway sought to deconstruct the linearity of the narrative in favor of assemblage, juxtaposition, and distancing.
Some of the works from the 1980s explored the metaphysics of musical parameters: De Tijd, inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessions, is a musical reflection on different qualities of time. “Terrifying columns” of chords23 run across the vocal cantus firmus, before entering the “vertical time”24 of stasis. In De Snelheid (1982-1983), composed for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the artistic directorship of John Adams, Andriessen explored velocity expressed in texture, using progressive rhythmic subdivisions to create the effects of acceleration.
Andriessen’s works have become an integral part of the repertoire performed by groups associated with the minimalist aesthetic and the American avant-garde. He composed specifically for some of them — for example, Facing Death (1990) for the Kronos Quartet, Zilver (1994) for the California EAR Unit, Hout (1991) for the LOOS Ensemble, and Life (2009) for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and set to four films by Marijke van Warmerdam.
With his final opera, La Commedia (2004-2008), inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and set to a film by Hal Hartley, Andriessen showed his full compositional palette, evoking Stravinsky, American minimalism, and jazz, proposing a journey that goes, in the words of Alex Ross, “from Gregorian chant to what might be called Satanic Broadway.”25
Translated from French by Jessica L. Hackett
1. Andriessen even co-authored an important book on Stravinsky: Louis ANDRIESSEN and Elmer SCHÖNBERGER (trans. Jeff HAMBURG), The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2006. ↩
2. On this topic, see Johan GIRARD, Répétitions: L’esthétique musicale de Terry Riley, Steve Reich et Philip Glass, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010. ↩
3. Steve REICH, quoted by Robert K. SCHWARZ, Minimalists, London, Phaidon Press, 1996, pp. 56-57. ↩
4. His father, Hendrik, his brother Jurriaan, and his sister, Caecilia, were also composers. ↩
5. ANDRIESSEN and SCHÖNBERGER, The Apollonian Clockwork, p. 100. ↩
6. Igor STRAVINSKY, Chroniques de ma vie, Paris, Denoël, 1962, p. 63. ↩
7. Renske KONING and Kasper JANSEN, “Muziek gaat nergens over, muziek is alleen muziek,” NRC Handelsblad, 19 May 1981, pp. 13-15, quoted in Robert ADLINGTON, Louis Andriessen: De Staat, Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 2004, p. 55. ↩
8. Andriessen invoked embedded scale and similitude more than embodiment. On the possibility of a formal similitude between musical forms and the “forms” of feelings, see Susan K. LANGER, Philosophy in a New Key, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1942. ↩
9. ANDRIESSEN, quoted by Maja TROCHIMCZYK, The Music of Louis Andriessen, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 137. ↩
10. ANDRIESSEN, quoted by ADLINGTON, Louis Andriessen, p. 48. ↩
11. Paul GRIMSTAD, “Notes on Louis Andriessen, Stravinsky and the Apollonian Clockwork,” 2015. ↩
12. See ANDRIESSEN and SCHÖNBERGER, The Apollonian Clockwork, “Chapter 3: On Montage Technique.” ↩
13. Boris de SCHLŒZER, Introduction à J.-S. Bach: Essai d’esthétique musicale, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009. ↩
14. ANDRIESSEN, quoted by GRIMSTAD, “Notes on Louis Andriessen, Stravinsky and the Apollonian Clockwork.” ↩
15. Quoted by Yayoi Uno EVERETT, The Music of Louis Andriessen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 2. ↩
16. ANDRIESSEN, quoted by TROCHIMCZYK, The Music of Louis Andriessen, p. 50. ↩
17. Ibid., p. 98. ↩
18. To use an idea from Theodor Adorno, the repetition must be understood through its “sedimented” contents. ↩
19. See Steve REICH, “Music as a Gradual Process,” Writings on Music 1965-2000, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 34-36. ↩
20. As quoted by TROCHIMCZYK, The Music of Louis Andriessen, p. 145. ↩
21. Filmed interview of Heiner GOEBBELS for the Ruhrtriennale 2014. ↩
22. Filmed interview of Louis ANDRIESSEN for the Ruhrtriennale 2014. ↩
23. ANDRIESSEN, quoted by EVERETT, The Music of Louis Andriessen, p. 102. ↩
24. See Jonathan D. KRAMER, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies, New York and London, Schirmer Books, 1988. ↩
25. Alex ROSS, “Andriessen at Carnegie Hall,” The New Yorker, 3 May 2010. Article available on the blog The Rest Is Noise. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?