Jan-Peter de Graaff is The Hague’s city composer for one day during the Day of the Composer. He is writing a city song that will be performed by Erik Brinkhorst and Neo-Fanfare 9×13 at 17:20 at The Hague Central Station. It will not be a ranting hymn, but a song in which he gives space to his love-hate relationship with the city, where residents of different neighbourhoods live alongside each other and there is constant traffic chaos. We talked to him about his upcoming premiere piece.
It’s not easy to form a picture of that, especially since The Hague has a pretty full programme on the Day of the Composer. But of course I feel very honoured. It is a special task to capture The Hague in a city song. The Hague already has three city songs; all three have their own take on the city. Oh, oh, The Hague by Harry Jekkers, What kind of weather would it be in The Hague by Annie M.G. Schmidt and I Don’t Wanna Die In The Hague by Lasse Passage, a Norwegian singer-songwriter. Very inspiring.
I have lived in The Hague for 13 years, having studied here and lived in different places.
I have a love-hate relationship with the city. My student days were wonderful. I was able to organise all kinds of projects. And I wrote my first opera here. The city has a lot to offer and there are many nice places. But it seems to be composed of different villages with their own character, which makes the city as a whole seem like a messy jumble. There is constant traffic congestion. People from the different neighbourhoods live alongside each other without making contact. The beach and dunes is one big amusement park. It is all just barely settled, as if the city is built on half-hearted compromises that just fail to achieve their goal. Everyone in the city has something to bitch about and on New Year’s Eve, The Hague is one big chaos.
The lyricist Bas van Putten evokes the different impressions and experiences of The Hague in the text that deals with the question: “Suppose The Hague had been flooded in a hundred years and had become a new Atlantis: How do you look back on The Hague then?” On a musical level, I incorporate the constant strife taking place in the city: the posh part of the rich Hagenaars to the west versus the poorer part of the Hagenese to the east of the Laan van Meerdervoort, the civil service versus the citizens, climate activists versus the agricultural industry. It starts with a neat foxtrot and ends in a wild samba. Furthermore, you can regularly hear the piece limping between two chords that don’t seem to fit well together, to shape the feeling of the constant swaying.
The Day of the Composer is the best time to show that the New Mozart could actually be your next-door neighbour. It is great to see that the profession of composer is spread all over the Netherlands and that it can take so many different forms. It is one burst of creativity. Moreover, it also shows that composing is something very normal, part of a living music culture!
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention