Reinier van Houdt and René van Peer: Finding one’s way through an immense building of music (3/4)

Wonder

Ever since listening to music as a child, I wanted to partake of its wonder. The best way to achieve that, of course, was through learning to play it myself. I discovered later on that playing for others, the performance, had magical qualities. The decisive moment and the tension it creates alerts my ears to the smallest details, as if my hearing acquires wings. At first that meant a painful confrontation with shortcomings that I had not previously noticed. But it initiated a new learning process. Above all, it opened this world of extraordinary beauty, so that I could enter it and take part in it. For me the piano and the music were not anymore things that I should conquer and dominate. The boundaries that I used to perceive between the piano and the music on the one hand and myself on the other started to dissolve more and more.

My method is based in actual practice. Essential in music is that it extends in time and that it’s transient. To me a score cannot be a formula or a formal language that encompasses the essence of a piece. Since I discovered Busoni, his statement that, “… everything is transcription as soon as the composers pen touches the paper … the musician has to restore the music in the free-floating state in which the composer found it …,” has more or less become my motto. The source could be something like an infinite body of sound, to which each score, each composer and each musically sentient being is connected; and from which derives most inspiration. My obsession with this as a student often interfered with my musical argument, because I went to explore sounds as such, their colours and hues evoked by attack, harmonies and the placement and movement of the hands. That proved to be an essential period of experimentation and exploration, during which I continually expanded my vocabulary.

Having worked on Skriabin, Cage, late Liszt, Satie, Janáček and Szymanowski I hit on Giacinto Scelsi. His music was like a quantum leap in this process of learning how to move into and out of sound. Sound is the actual practice. It is a reality that doesn’t let itself be reduced to a plain repeatable model, but instead keeps inspiring to ever different interpretations by its unpredictable behaviour in time. The awareness that it’s impossible to replicate a performance attracted me to the minimal music of people like Hans Otte and Charlemagne Palestine, and the ambiguous hidden scenarios in the music of Alvin Curran and Valentin Silvestrov. Unusual scores of Jerry Hunt’s music, and that of Maria de Alvear, Cardew, Bussotti and Stockhausen, confirmed yet again that the crux of the score is its performance, living through the process of perfect imperfection, of exploration, of discovery.

These ‘discoveries’ are always related to the classical composers, as well — to the entire phenomenon of music and sound with the inclusion of the piano canon, and to the experience of playing those pieces. I find that there is ever less difference in approach between performing Scelsi or Sorabji, and Beethoven. They keep moving closer to each other, as far as I am concerned.

Working on Sorabji’s Symphony magnified these findings. Everything is interwoven. In this music there are all kinds of uncharted ecosystems and life cycles, built from motifs, themes and harmonic processes. The associations that throw light through the foliage of 250 pages landscape result from endless experimentation with colouring. Most of the times the right direction is not so much revealed through analysis and mapping the outline, but through exploring the maze of melodic lines and the possible routes along which you can travel through it, and the use of the pedals. The concepts of contents and design prove to be absolutely futile — everything is part of a living environment in which no element is more, or less, significant than any other. But where in Cage’s music everything is always an empty nucleus, here each moment points ahead and back. Just like in life as such — there are always hints of meaning, but they can never really lead to a fixed or conclusive world view. The exuberance and unfathomable decay are the apparent meaning. Whatever emptiness there is, does not lie in the music but resides in the mind. It is the mind that should open itself to these events of life, which inevitably include both growth and falling apart of anything apparently meaningful.

The course of the music is determined by colouring, the dynamics of the internal currents along which the sounds lead you as they emerge while you are actually, physically, playing them. It is instantaneous musical imagination, a process in which everything falls in its right place, making the physical and the auditory experiences coincide. A complex and novel musical language obviously requires a lot of field work to make that happen.