Everything had to change in the 1960s, including the music. Composer Otto Ketting (1935-2012) also changed course drastically. For 134 compositions, he followed his own compass, always with the same sharp intuition for timing and proportion and the same unfailing feeling for sound. What led to public protests against his Collage no. 9 in the Concertgebouw in 1966, resulted six years later in his first real hit: Time Machine. This masterpiece of high energy quickly became one of the biggest international successes of post-war Dutch composing. Talking about hits: even those who don’t think they know Otto Ketting, know him from his film music for Haanstra’s Alleman, one of the most watched Dutch films of all time.
Inspiratie distrouw ik ten zeerste is both a biography of Ketting as a person and of his oeuvre. What do the two have to do with each other? The composer himself said about his troubled youth that it ‘must have somehow contributed to determining my taste as a composer and musician’.
Elmer Schönberger (1950) is a musicologist, composer and writer of fiction (novels, plays) and non-fiction (music). For decades, he wrote about music for Vrij Nederland and published among other things The Art of Shooting Gunpowder, The Broken Ear and Hier rest Schönberger. Together with Louis Andriessen, he wrote Het apollinisch uurwerk, a standard work on Igor Stravinsky translated into English, Russian and Italian. Among his most important compositions of the last decade are the dramatic cantata La fuga del tempo, the Giacometti-inspired Eighteen Days and the vocal-instrumental cycle Gezien Hercules Segers.
In my review I claimed that after Vestdijk nobody writes better about music than Elmer Schönberger in Histoire d’Oor. After some browsing in Vestdijk-over-music I deleted that after Vestdijk.
Peter Wesly, Vrij Nederland
About The Woman with the Hammer & Other Composers:
‘Where this prose grows, no musicologist’s prose grows’.
Willem Jan Otten, Tirade
About De kunst van het kruitverschieten:
‘His essays can also be those of a poet because of the maximum of ideas within a minimum of words, thanks to an endless series of associations, language games and quasi-loose structures that force the reader to absorb this consciously powerful food slowly.’
Emanuel Overbeeke, Mens en Melodie
About The Broken Ear:
‘A unique and brilliant book.’
Rudy Kousbroek, PZC
His formulations are tingling and therefore always make you curious, and they make the impossible possible.
Ger Groot, NRC Handelsblad
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention