Скачать или смотреть Peter Schat - To You, Op. 22

Peter Schat (1935-2003)

To whom : for voice, guitars, keyboardinstruments, tops and electronics, Op. 22 (1970-1972).

words by Adrian Mitchell

Lucia Meeuwsen, soprano
Ensemble Nederlands Muziekgala
Conductor: Kenneth Montgomery


Program note (English): Just as more guitars kept appearing in the streets of Amsterdam some time ago, they did so in my scores too. In 'To You', there were already nine of them (including three bass guitars). On the streets, however, they were confiscated by the police because of a secret edict of the president-oligarch of the municipal law-courts. (This still happens. Guitarists of all countries, beware of the Lord High Amsterdam Music Thief!). When people realized-partly because of me - the scale on which guitars were being nabbed, they were furious, and so of course was I. Adrian Mitchell found the words as early as 1964, and I chose To You: MY LOVE, THEY ARE TRYING TO DRIVE US MAD. 'To You' had received awards from the Unesco and the City of Amsterdam in the meantime. For the presentation of the latter award - the 1973 Matthijs Vermeulen Prize - I asked for, and was grudgingly granted, permission to give a detailed explanation of the connection between the piece and the legal music thefts on the streets. The Alderman for the Arts who issued the bull assured me over a drink that there would now be a definite end to the 'wrong policy'. The law of the jungle struck again this summer, completely in keeping with the rules: the street-flautist Sygurd Cochius reported in a newspaper that during the past seven years about six thousand guilders worth of instruments had been taken away from him..... And on July 3rd 1974, on the evening of the day on which our present central-leftish Netherlands government, unprecedentedly and insanely evacuated the institute for the mentally deficient, Dennendal, the musicians, busy with the TV recording in the Vondel Park could do little more than helplessly dedicate the performance to the victims of the deportation........ 'AFRAID OF GOING MAD' .
The topicality of Mitchell's poem had only increased in ten years, and the curse on the godforsaken bourgeois balls-up resounds in 'To You' . - PETER SCHAT

Peter Schat was a Dutch composer and writer on music. He studied composition with van Baaren at the conservatories of Utrecht and The Hague (1952-1958), with Seiber in London (1959) and with Boulez in Basle (1960-1961). Between 1974 and 1983 he taught composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In 1967 he co-founded STEIM (Studio voor Elektro-Instrumentale Muziek). His awards include the Matthijs Vermeulenprize (1973, for To You) and the Joost van den Vondelprize of the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität of Münster (1990).
Schat's training was as a serial composer. His first compositions, such as the Introductie en adagio in oude stijl (1954) and the Septet (1957), combine traditional forms, including sonata form, with dodecaphony. But his lessons with Boulez led him to a more radical, strict form of serial thought, and even before that he was regarded in the Netherlands as one of the leading members of the avant garde of his generation. In the fourth part of the Octet (1958), dedicated to van Baaren, it is the players who determine the order of its 12 segments, while in the final part there is occasion for individual improvisation. In Improvisations and Symphonies (1960) free performer invention becomes the central component. The work also reveals Schat's inclination towards the theatrical, with spatial movement prescribed in the form of performer-directed 'promenades'. Of his Boulez-influenced pieces, Entelechie I displays structures with fixed properties and less fixed 'commentaries' upon them in the form of retrospective and anticipatory 'shadows'; the work also involves complex textures in its accumulated heterophonies. However, as Schat subsequently became involved with socio-political issues, he came to associate the static qualities of this piece and its successor, Entelechie II, with what he saw as the immobility of western social institutions serving a cold war mentality; Boulez himself was described as a 'premature specialization', a biological concept relating to a species without a chance to develop.
In 1969, Schat was one of the leading figures in another demonstration event -- the notorious 'notenkrakersactie' in which a group of activists disturbed a concert by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, demanding an open discussion of music policy. In the same year, alongside the composers Reinbert de Leeuw, Louis Andriessen, Jan van Vlijmen and Misha Mengelberg, and the writers Harry Mulisch and Hugo Claus, Schat was also involved in Reconstructie, a 'morality' theatre work, again a homage to 'Che' Guevara, about the conflict between imperialism and liberation. The symbolic central character is a US imperialist Don Giovanni, who seduces and rapes the ladies Bolivia and Cuba; his opponent is the Commendatore 'Che'.