Maar de zon is nog op…

Maar de zon is nog op…

You can hear up to five different languages in this music. Such as Arabic in combination with a Bulgarian folk song, or Spanish spoken in a poem during the Latin Salve Regina. Or Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell passing by in English while with Nick Cave someone's hair gets messed up and a blackbird whistles loudly in Dutch.
All that at the same time, criss-cross each other.
Apples and pears you would say, squeek-grunt type contemporary music, get rid of it!
But strangely enough, all those different things don't collide here and they don't get in each other's way either. On the contrary: there is a clear and hopefully understandable music, no squeek-grunt at all.
The composition Maar de zon is nog op... ('But the sun is still up...') eventually came about by combining the different parts described above in the right way, and placing them in what's the right place for me.

How did I make it?
Before even putting anything down on paper, I recorded sound clips (samples) of some of the singers of the choir: things they just loved to sing, or a song they enjoyed as a kid, or that they found very beautiful, hummed on a bicycle or sang in the shower – something that awakened their love for singing and led them to join a choir.
I put together and arranged all those different samples like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, and I shuffled and moulded them until the multicolored composition emerged that also works as a whole. And finally I wrote it down in a score.

The common thread in this music is a Spanish poem about silence. A silence that is broken again and again by different notes, notes that are stilled yet again in different silences. And there is also a second thread of a children's song in which a child full of energy is in bed but not yet ready for the silence of the night (The sun is still shining, the blackbird still singing so loud)...

Why did I do it like this?
In this composition, everyone can sing something that they love and which therefore is really part of themselves. This can result in an exciting, new way of rehearsing and performing for everyone individually, but also for the choir as a whole. A way which hopefully also provides an even more personal musical experience. And which especially strengthens the communication between the choir members themselves and with the audience…