Music has everything to do with concentration: composer, musician, listener share the same concentration experience. Every note has meaning and significance, every sound speaks. This concentration has nothing to do with forcing oneself, but with relaxing. The best way the music comes in is not tryingto grasp it, but rather opening myself to let it come in. The focus is inward, not outward.
This meditative concentration applies to all forms of art: a book, a painting, a poem only truly unfolds when we stand still, stop the hectic and turn inward, to the center of our life’s power and source of meaning.
Monks know this for centuries. They read the Bible using themethod known as “lectio divina”. The Bible is not seen as a book to be read, but as a book that unfolds itself. I don’t grasp it as information, but I stop the time and wait until a word or a sentence lights up by itself. It means reading very slowly and, above all, waiting patiently. The one or two words that begin to “speak” can be very ordinary at first sight. If you read the preceding sentence this way, the word “two” or “very” could light up for you. The only thing that matters is what speaks for you personally at this very moment.
By analogy with this “lectio divina”, I compose music according to the technique I call “auditio divina”. In “auditiodivina”, music sounds very sparsely between long silences: a few seconds of music alternates with a few seconds of silence. The silence leads. The music has time to descend. The silence draws the music, so to speak, into the heart of the listener. Music, for me, should not be a constant sound stream, because the longer the stream, the more I feel detached from it. I constantly break the sound stream, in order to have time to absorb each sound and to meditate on what is heard.
A striking effect of this composition method is the fact that the music doesn’t break into pieces. The silences become bridges connecting one cell to another. The music has air and breathes.
Since 2016, I am working on a choir setting of all psalms, mostly a cappella. Psalm 125 fits into the series of all the “pilgrim psalms” (120-134), psalms that the Jews sang as they returned to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC. They are psalms full of hope, godliness and confidence, especially psalm 125.
The translation is by the recently deceased Kees Waaijman. He was an exceptional spiritual thinker, extremely language-sensitive and original in his thinking. According to Jewish belief, the name of God may not be pronounced (this would reduce Him to human proportions). That’s why Waaijmancame up with a very original name for God: Wezer. In Dutch, this neologism is both an invocation (“Be there!”) and an attribute (“He who is”).
Capella Brabant, led by Marc Versteeg, will premiere the psalm. They commissioned me in 2019 a major oratorio in which the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) would reach out to each other by means of resembling texts. It became the Reconciliation Magnificat, which has been enthusiastically received by audiencesthroughout the Netherlands. They now program psalm 125, figuring in their “Kroonpen” series. A bold programming, since “auditio divina” is still a very new and challenging way of making and receiving music. When Marc Versteeg saw the score, he immediately understood the expressive possibilities. It will undoubtedly be a completely new listening experience.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention