Even More Andriessen

Thank you internet for indulging these impulses with sweet delicious access!

De Tijd (Time) depicts exactly that, clunky events happening with arbitrary regularity in a measured stasis that seems to exist outside of it. A consistent rush-hush of strings forms the soup of time in which big loud percussion events occur - time gives the events a continuum that unto themselves would not be there, the events give time some measure, for if nothing happened, whether time went on forever or just stopped would be arbitrary. If we were high right now, I'd be blowing yr mind.

Rosa, The Death of a Composer an opera for film written with famed director Peter Greenaway, was less compelling - it sounded like the chugga chugga music Peter Greenaway used in his other films that, to me, has never worked all that well without the visuals. But I haven't seen the film, so what do I know... I used to love some Peter Greenaway in my heady college film snob days but I don't think I've seen anything after Propsero's Books, an experiment so filigreed that I remember it emptying the Union Collonade when the Films Committe screened it. I'm not sure if I even made it all the way through it, though I'm pretty sure I was the one that nominated it.

Here is Peter Greenaway giving a lecture on the opera itself (40 some-odd minutes, in 4 parts)


De Staat (State) as performed by the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble (whose new music badassness I discovered through their recording of Janacek's Dance of the Vampires with Ivo Bittova - I want a hockey jersey that says Nederlands Blazers on it, maybe with a giant Dutchman slamming a puck into the goal with a music stand) is a whole universe of music encapsulated in thirty-three minutes - fluttery Appalacian Spring pastorale twists up in wholly cerebral minimalism, threatening to break into a merengue at any moment. It is as much Steve Reich as it is Steve Howe - just brilliant.