Piet-Jan van Rossum about his work ‘aardhand’

Sentiments are fine, sentimentality is not.

A oneliner I learned during my studies, but also while listening to music, reading books, looking at art and movies. I learned it’s better to keep a distance while writing, to put a frame around my frozen emotions. Not that emotions are far out; it’s more that the core of the emotion gets clearer when watched from a proper distance. You can’t describe clearly when you’re in the middle of things. A colleague said: ‘you don’t see clear with tears in your eyes’. Well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. 

2021 and 22 were years full of goodbyes, a goodbye to my two cats Fiets and Foon, a goodbye to my brother and sister, to my teacher Louis Andriessen, and there’s more I won’t tell you. It was two confusing years and my composing returned to basic, classical forms. It was something I did automatically. For a year I only listened to late Stravinsky and Bach. The tough late Stravinsky, works like ‘Threni’, consoled me, believe me or not. The more complex life gets, the more I want this clear distance. There is comfort in classical structure and in reflecting on that. There is comfort in art history and discovering what changed it, as well as the parameters that stayed the same over the centuries.

2021-22 I wrote four big pieces for my own ensemble HAY! in the form of an ‘air and sarabande’, an ‘allemand’, an ‘allemand double’ and a ‘fantasia’. For ‘aardhand’ I returned to the chorale, which has been deeply rooted in my body anyway. My father played the organ in a Dutch Reformed church for 50 years and I heard the 150 psalms a million times. It was kind of a strict church: only the 150 psalms were allowed and they were sung in whole notes, so no rhytmic variation. At home, ‘secretly’, my father would also play more recent chorales. As well as numerous records by organists improvising on chorales. It’s the Bible-belt world, I’ve been there. And it wasn’t that bad. Still the sound of a few hundred voices slowly singing a psalm melody can move me deeply.

Later, when discovering the music of the 20th century, an adventure not exactly welcomed in the family, I discovered the iron and wooden chorales by Stravinsky, Ives and Andriessen. I remember how I had to get used to the ‘wrong notes’. (Ives: ‘all the wrong notes are right!’) First time, for example, that I heard the ‘grand choral’ from Stravinsky’s ‘l’histoire du soldat’ I was totally puzzled by the harmonies. Bit by bit I discovered dissonances can’t be stronger then in a well-known consonant environment. The dissonances in Stravinsky’s ‘grand choral’ shocked me more then the dissonances in a regular Webern piece.

For ‘aardhand’ I wrote a 7-part chorale that builds up gradually. It is at the same time firm and shaky, for example the bass-lines in tuba and trombones are very low and give the chorale an unstable foundation. A chorale like an old fresco in an Italian church, the paint partly gone, the colors faded, but still huge and impressive with the initial message (image) present. Maybe even more because of the decay of details.

Halfway a second small chorale drops in. I’m quoting myself there, it’s a small 3 part chorale in 3/2 I wrote the first year I studied with Louis Andriessen, 1985. We discussed it at the piano, it was my first study in good ‘wrong notes’ and I have fond memories of sitting next to him and debating only one note for 30 minutes, why it should be a B and not a C.

Returning to the sentiment and the sentimentality: there is no chance I would write something like an ‘in memoriam’ for my relatives. Neither did I for my parents. These facts are too personal and too close. I never appreciated composers raising huge monuments for someone I never knew, and I would never bother someone with my own personal monument.

I never did it, not too obvious anyway. Maybe hidden in mirror images. But writing something to the memory of my two beloved cats, that I could do.  For Foon I wrote ‘aarde’, for Fiets ‘aardhand’. Don’t misunderstand me, these two cats were like my children and I still mourn them. It was different, animals, fated to be forgotten, I wanted to offer them a ‘tombeau’.

My wife, Naomi Sato, wrote the motto for ‘aardhand’, a small tanka:
“Shinryoku no komichi wo isogu jitensha yo
Sora made kakete kaze to nari nure.”
“A bicycle hurrying into the spring green,
rush unto the sky and turn into wind..”

‘aardhand’ ends sudden with a loud and a soft bash.  It’s because ‘aardhand’ is my ‘opus’ 108, the number of completion. I end the first part of my catalogue of works with a hammer, like a chairman. The first cycle, the ‘A’ pieces (1985-2023), is complete.  And now I wait if something new will start and what it will be. And to be honest: in the end I couldn’t help compressing my anger and fear into these two last chords. It’s a slam with the door.

Piet-Jan van Rossum/April 2023