On Sunday, January 27th, during the celebration of Simeon 100 in TivoliVredenburg, the original manuscript of Simeon ten Holt’s Opus 1 will be on auction. A unique opportunity to obtain this document, written in 1942!
‘PROPAEDEUTICA, COMPOSITION NO. 1’ is the first work by Simeon ten Holt. It was later published as Composition I and corrected by Simeon at the time. The original manuscript is by the then 20-year-old composer. Ten Holt notated his composition with pen and then presumably sewed it in himself.
From an early age, Ten Holt received music lessons from modernist composer Jakob van Domselaer (1890-1960), who, like the Ten Holt family, lived in Bergen. ‘After the necessary finger exercises, Ten Holt set out on his own to compose the first piano piece he did not reject as a youthful sin: “That Opus 1 is mainly a firm reaction to the milieu in which I grew up: that of Van Domselaer and my father.” While making that first play, he moved to Amsterdam. […] It progressed with difficulty. Looking back, Ten Holt once described the genesis of his first composition as, “The sea washes and grinds, time crystallises.” For more than a year he continued to toil in his upstairs flat in Amsterdam for the completion of that six-minute piano piece’ (J. Heymans, Arabesk: On Simeon ten Holt, pp. 117-118).
This is a copy of the score of Simeon ten Holt’s first official composition. It features an additional, hitherto unknown title (Propaedeutica) on the first page, while the later dedication to Ten Holt’s friend Herman Plomper does not yet appear above the composition. This manuscript has turned up in Bergen: presumably it belonged to a member of the ‘Berger gang’, the circle of creatives in which Ten Holt also engaged.
Important is the handwritten, signed text the composer wrote on the last page. After a Latin motto, he explains: ‘[…] Care was taken to connect the standing and going element truthfully and to ensure that the sub-parts, the harmonies among themselves, were recited in their context to form an organic whole and not fragmented and localised by an obvious arid rhytmic.’
The manuscript and computer version were released as a special edition by Donemus in 2023 to mark the 100th anniversary of Simeon’s birth.
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