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 wantrouw 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 helped determine 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 the weekly Vrij Nederland and published among other things De kunst van het kruitverschieten (The art of shooting powder), Het gebroken oor (The broken ear) and Hier rest Schönberger (Here rests 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.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention