Some friendships grow gradually, ours I remember as one that was immediately there in full force,’ Elmer Schönberger writes in Keten & stompen about the many years he and Louis Andriessen played the piano, engaged in conversation, played cards, drank whiskey, gossiped, wrote each other letters and commented on each other’s work. The instigator of the friendship was their shared love of Stravinsky, about whom they wrote the still-leading monograph The Apollonian Clockwork in 1983. It all began shortly after the premiere of De Staat (1976), the composition that sowed the seeds of Andriessen’s worldwide fame, and ended almost half a century later with glimpses of unabridged alliance in the care facility where Andriessen spent his final days, lost in spirit but still inimitably himself.
Trips to Stravinsky, hours with Bach, premieres in America, proletarian shopping in Switzerland, compositions from Hoketus to May and from De Tijd to Agamemnon: life and work are united in this intimate account of a friendship. Keten & stompen is a response to a palpable sense of loss and contains some of Schönberger’s most personal pages.
Elmer Schönberger (1950) is a musicologist, composer and writer of fiction (novels, theatre) and non-fiction (music). His most recent books are Keten & stompen (2023) and Inspiratie wantrouw ik ten zeerste (2022), a biography about Otto Ketting.
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