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    Eurovision Disqualifies Joost Klein Hours Before Final

    Just hours before this year’s Eurovision Song Contest final was scheduled to begin in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday, the glitzy singing competition was thrown into crisis after organizers banned the Netherlands’ entry from taking part.On Friday, the Dutch musician, Joost Klein, whose songs mix pop with hyperfast beats, did not appear for a scheduled rehearsal to perform his song “Europapa,” a song about a transcontinental European odyssey that had been among the favorites to win.Shortly afterward, the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, said in a statement that it was “investigating an incident” involving the Dutch artist. On Saturday morning, a Swedish police spokeswoman said in an email that officers were investigating a man “suspected of unlawful threats” toward a Eurovision employee and had passed a file to prosecutors to consider charges.Eurovision organizers said in a new statement that it was Klein under investigation, and that “it would not be appropriate” for the musician to compete in Saturday’s final while a legal process was underway.The decision caused an immediate uproar among Eurovision fans on social media, many of whom were backing Klein to win.AVROTROS, the Dutch public broadcaster that picked Klein to represent the Netherlands at Eurovision, also objected to his disqualification. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the broadcaster said that the organizers’ decision was “very heavy and disproportionate.” The spokesperson said that, on Thursday, Klein made “a threatening movement” toward a camera operator who was trying to film him after his semifinal performance. The camera operator had continued recording Klein even though he had “repeatedly indicated that he did not want to be,” the spokesperson added.Klein’s Eurovision journey, the spokesperson said, “shouldn’t have ended this way.” More

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    36 Hours in Amsterdam: Things to Do and See

    12 p.m.
    Find your perfect street food
    Between the Lindengracht Markt and the neighboring Noordermarkt, a pricier, organic market that also has antiques, handmade jewelry, artisanal pickles, soaps and honey to browse, there are plenty of street-food stalls to choose from. (Walking while eating is frowned upon in Dutch culture, so grab a picnic table). On the Lindengracht side, try a sabich (€7.50), a stuffed vegetarian pita at Abu Salie, or for a classic Dutch lunch, go for the speciaal beenham and braadworst (a sandwich piled high with sausage, ham and sauerkraut, €6) at Fluks & Sons. Stalls throughout the markets also sell raw herring, sometimes covered in onions. Join locals at the Noordermarkt for fresh oysters (from €3.50 each; find them beside the entrance, next to the church tower). Dutch sweets also abound, including the ever-popular poffertjes (mini pancakes in powdered sugar or syrup) or warm and gooey stroopwafels. More

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    Simeon ten Holt: The Minimalist Composer Who Keeps Getting Left Out

    As centenary events celebrate Simeon ten Holt’s work, music historians have questioned his omission from histories of Minimalism, and its focus on American greats.“Canto Ostinato,” a keyboard piece by the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt made of overlapping layers and repeated patterns, has amassed a cult following — in the Netherlands, at least.In “About Canto,” a 2011 documentary directed by Ramón Gieling, people talk about the piece’s impact on their lives: a former D.J. who has some of the score tattooed on his shoulder, a woman who gave birth to her second child while “Canto” played and the brother of a man whose suicide note said that “his life was fulfilled” after hearing the piece in concert.“Canto Ostinato” is the most famous piece by ten Holt, who died in 2012, and it is still extremely popular in the Netherlands. But established histories and concert programs of Minimalism beyond that country tend to congregate around a core group of important American figures — like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young — and ten Holt’s name is routinely missing.There are clear similarities between ten Holt’s work and compositions by these more well-known figures. At the same time as celebrations mark ten Holt’s centenary —including a Dutch lecture-performance tour exploring his biography and important influences and many performances of “Canto” in the Netherlands and abroad — music historians have been asking if more (and more international) names need to be added to the canon of great Minimalist composers.“It really obscures the history — and the pervasiveness of attraction to the music — when we just think of Minimalism as a handful of figures,” said Kerry O’Brien, the co-editor of the forthcoming book “On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement,” which coincides with the release of Patrick Nickleson’s “Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music and Historiography in Dispute.” Both books seek to dispute the written histories of Minimalism by widening its cast of characters.Simeon ten Holt’s birth 100 years ago is being marked by numerous celebrations in the Netherlands.Friso KeurisAfter hearing Glass perform in the Netherlands, ten Holt began writing “Canto” in 1976. That same year in New York, Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” sold out two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, and Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” premiered. Both are widely considered seminal Minimalist projects.While the term Minimalism has often been contested by the musicians it’s been used to describe, by the early 1970s the term had gathered momentum as a shortcut for describing music made with long tones or drones, apparent stasis masking gradual change and an emphasis on repetition. The genre subsequently dispersed, feeding into other genres like pop, noise and ambient.“Canto” shares a lot of traits with Minimalism’s canonic multi-piano works — such as Reich’s “Piano Phase” or “Six Pianos” — and invites structural comparisons with the overlapping parts and type of group improvisation in Riley’s landmark composition “In C.”“Between a piece like ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ and ‘Canto Ostinato,’ I find there to be a through-thread of gratifying harmonic development,” said Erik Hall, a Michigan-based musician who followed his solo, multi-tracked Reich album with a similarly constructed “Canto” recording. He added that he found further comparisons in “the pacing, duration and endurance it takes to really sit with it and take it in.”The pianist Erik Hall in his home studio in Michigan.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesHall has made a solo recording of ten Holt’s Minimalist piece “Canto Ostinato.”Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesTen Holt’s route to a Minimalist style was far removed from developments in America. He was born in Bergen, in the north of the Netherlands, into a family of artists, and ideas from visual art informed his particular route in minimal music.Before studying in Paris in 1949, ten Holt studied composition with Jakob van Domselaer, an associate of the painter Piet Mondrian and one of the first to transfer the principles of minimal abstraction and strict geometry of the art movement de Stijl into music, in his piece “Proeven van Stijlkunst” (Experiments in Artistic Style). “It’s from the 1910s, and it sounds like Minimalism, it’s absolutely fascinating,” said Maarten Beirens, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.Like many other European composers in his broad age group, by the late 1950s, ten Holt was incorporating serial procedures into his compositions, prioritizing dissonance over tonality and consonance. Later pieces like “Canto” saw ten Holt abandoning serialism, in a move he called “tonality after the death of tonality.”“There is no Minimalistic composer who has so much freedom” as ten Holt, said the pianist Jeroen van Veen, adding that ten Holt’s fluid compositions “gave back what had been lost in the classical tradition: being flexible onstage.” But in the wider historical schemes — of Minimalism, and of European classical music too — those characteristics do make him “an outsider,” van Veen said.The Dutch string quartet Matangi performing ten Holt’s “Canto Ostinato” in January 2020. Performers around the world have arranged the keyboard work for saxophone ensemble, cello octet, symphony orchestra and string quartet.Tessa Veldhorst/De SchaapjesfabriekAs does the lyrical Romantic pianism of “Canto,” which brings to mind Chopin or Rachmaninoff — and which connects to a longer history of European art music tradition.But ten Holt’s exclusion from the canon was because of more than just this traditional turn. He “wasn’t a composer with the kind of connections that many composers had,” Beirens said. Unlike his compatriot Louis Andriessen, Beirens added, “he did not have steady relationships with certain performers, with orchestras or with the music business until a later point in his career.”That change came with van Veen, who started the Simeon ten Holt Foundation in 2015 to promote his music to an international audience. Still, today the vast majority of ten Holt recordings and performances remain in the Netherlands.Language and location played a part in ten Holt being overlooked, too. “The history of Minimalism depends on where you are in the world,” O’Brien said, adding: “If you read a Dutch language history of Minimalism, a Minimalist classic like ‘Canto Ostinato’ would be, I think, front and center.” But such stories have yet to break into Anglophone-focused discussions of Minimalism.When it comes to understanding Minimalism, “we know how things ended up,” O’Brien said, “and then we look back to history to reinforce the lead-up to that.” And a composer like ten Holt — who bridged musical worlds without ever truly settling in any camp — quietly disrupts those narratives. More

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    Louis Andriessen, Lionized Composer With Radical Roots, Dies at 82

    After challenging the Dutch musical establishment as a young man, he went on to write a series of large and loud symphonic works that grappled with big ideas.Louis Andriessen, who as a young iconoclast disrupted the Dutch classical music scene before becoming one of Europe’s most important postwar composers with a series of large-scale, often brash works, died on Thursday in Weesp, the Netherlands. He was 82. His death, at his home near Amsterdam in a specialized village for people with dementia, was announced by his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Andriessen’s musical influences included Stravinsky, bebop and American minimalism, different styles that he often presented in gleeful confrontation. His music was a unique blend of American sounds and European forms, the composer Michael Gordon said in a phone interview.“These pieces are really constructed like big symphonic works, but using the materials of the vernacular,” he said. “The music was the bridge between European formalism and an almost hipster riffing on American jazz and minimalism.”In the latter part of his career Mr. Andriessen created monumental pieces that probed big ideas. “De Tijd,” meaning time in Dutch, took on that subject. “De Staat,” set to the text of Plato’s “Republic,” was about political organization. “De Materie” (“On Matter”) began with a 17th-century treatise on shipbuilding and ended with excerpts from Marie Curie’s diaries.He collaborated with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway on a movie, “M is for Man, Music, Mozart” (1991), and two operas, “ROSA The Death of a Composer” (1994) and “Writing to Vermeer” (1999). In his book “The Art of Stealing Time,” Mr. Andriessen wrote that in Mr. Greenaway’s films, “I recognize something of my own work, namely the combination of intellectual material and vulgar directness.”The opera director Pierre Audi said that each of Mr. Andriessen’s works for the stage “could fly away into fantasy and extreme freedom of structure, with collages of different musical idioms.”“But what characterized them all,” he added, “was an inner architecture. He managed to build operas like cathedrals.”Mr. Andriessen’s early career was fueled by Marxist ideals and the desire to upend traditional practices in classical music. He founded two ensembles in the 1970s. De Volharding (Perseverance) consisted of players who were equally versed in improvised and experimental music, with the idea of giving them greater influence over the musical material they performed. Hoketus, which disbanded in 1987, was named after a medieval technique that splits a single musical line among multiple players.Mr. Andriessen used that technique in “Symphony for Open Strings” (1978), in which musical phrases are painstakingly pieced together from single notes. The players use only open strings, meaning that their left hands, which change the notes on the fingerboard, are rendered useless. It is a way to handicap the very instruments that in traditional symphonic writing receive almost all the expressive material.Mr. Andriessen in 2018 after a performance of his “Symphony for Open Strings” by the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room. The orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, is at left.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn later decades he accepted commissions from major orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, which gave the premiere of his tone poem “Agamemnon” in 2018 during its two-week festival devoted to Mr. Andriessen.In large-scale works his sound was typically strident and bold. His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Most of all, he liked it loud.Mr. Gordon recalled a rehearsal of one of Mr. Andriessen’s orchestral works at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, Mass., in 1994. Mr. Andriessen felt that the piece had come out sounding too polite. The musicians said they had trouble finding the notes.“I would rather you play the wrong note very loud then the right note very soft,” Mr. Andriessen responded.Louis Andriessen was born on June 6, 1939, into a Roman Catholic family in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His father, Hendrik Franciscus Andriessen, was a composer and organist who became the director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His mother, Johanna Justina Anschütz, was a pianist. Louis was the youngest of six children, all of whom were musical. (Two brothers also became composers.)From 1956-1962 he studied composition, music theory and piano at the conservatory, then traveled to both Milan and Berlin for advanced studies with Luciano Berio. While studying in The Hague he met the guitarist Jeanette Yanikian who became his partner. They married in 1996, and she died in 2008. Mr. Andriessen is survived by his second wife, the violinist Monica Germino, whom he married in 2012 and for whom he wrote several works. Beginning in 1966, Mr. Andriessen and a group of fellow Dutch musicians pushed for Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw Orchestra to engage more vigorously with contemporary music. In 1969, they led what became known as the Nutcracker Action, when activists sabotaged a Concertgebouw performance with frog-shaped metal clickers. That year he collaborated on an opera, “Reconstructie” (“Reconstruction”), which decries American imperialism as it pulls together various styles, including pop, jazz, Mozart pastiche and a speaking chorus. A weeklong run of sold-out performances of the work forced the Dutch culture minister to defend the spending of taxpayer money to finance what was called anti-American agitprop.From 1972 to 1976 Mr. Andriessen composed “De Staat,” a work that would come to define his combination of intellectual rigor and brash sonic exuberance. In “De Tijd,” he played with the listener’s perception of time by manipulating repetition and silence. The frantic, clanging “De Snelheid” (“Velocity”), composed in the early 1980s, investigated the perception of speed and its relationship to harmony.In 1985 he completed “De Stijl,” a Mondrian-inspired piece that would become part of the massive stage work “De Materie,” which sets scientific, historical and mystical texts to a powerful score teeming with sonic hues. Reviewing a 2016 production at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan directed by Heiner Goebbels, which featured a flock of live sheep, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as “colorful, exciting and, during reflective episodes, raptly beautiful.”Mr. Andriessen with the Philharmonic in 2018 after a performance of his “Agamamnon.” His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs Mr. Andriessen’s fame grew, the classical establishment he had once heckled embraced him. Beginning in 1978 he taught composition at the Royal Conservatory. Yale University invited him in 1987 to lecture on theory and composition. The arts faculty of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands appointed him professor in 2004. He held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall during the 2009-10 season.Among other honors, he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition in 2011, for “La Commedia,” a polyglot romp through hell anchored in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and the 2016 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.One of his last major works, “Theater of the World,” centering on the Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher, received its premiere in Los Angeles in 2016. The music blends children’s songs, Serialism and baroque influences into what The Guardian called a “superb, surreal journey.”Having developed dementia, Mr. Andriessen moved to the village in Weesp for people with memory loss last year. The village, called Hogeweyk, has multiple pianos, and Mr. Andriessen would improvise on them for hours. More