All through last week’s rehearsals, and the weekend’s bounty of Muziekgebouw/Muziekdagen concerts, I’ve been mindful of my own odd perspective, as someone who approaches contemporary composing via jazz and improvised music. At orchestral concerts in the Grote Zaal Saturday and Sunday, my perceptions were intensely colored by regular preoccupations: like, how the sounds of jazz and improvised music have subtly infiltrated contemporary ‘classical’ music.

I leave it to listeners and my fellow critics to assess the pieces on Friday’s night’s Double Dutch program. After attending the rehearsals and meeting or renewing my acquaintance with the four composers—a fine bunch of very different individuals—I can’t pretend to be objective. Still, the response from my opinionated friends in the house was very positive, even from folks I’d have expected to balk at Florian Maier’s piece for orchestra and death metal band. To my ears Metropole (and guest soloists Claron McFadden, Wu Wei, and Noneuclid) played superbly, and conductor Jurjen Hempel showed that for him, it’s really about the music: bringing out the composers’ intentions, and coaxing the best performances from the players.

Thursday, November 6:

This week, watching Metropole rehearse the four new compositions that'll make up Friday's Double Dutch concert, it's often seemed that the process of rehearsing new music recapitulates the composing of it: that composer and orchestra both make the same long journey from mastering isolated fragments to assembling them into a smoothly-integrated sequence.

Wednesday, 5 November: The sky over Amsterdam looked different this morning, to this American. I couldn’t put my finger on the reason. Then I realized it was because I was standing tall, looking up proudly—instead of staring at my shoes, like I had reason to be ashamed.

Tuesday, 4 November, 10:05:

The Metropole Orchestra does its first run through of Guus Janssen’s Four Songs with Wu Wei—master of the Chinese mouth organ the sheng—for whom it was written. It starts off swinging, on jazz turf, and almost immediately toys with the jazz convention of the two-bar break: those brief interludes when a full band drops out, to let a soloist or two inject a few notes before everyone piles back in.

Monday, 3 November Oh good—you’re reading this, if only to know why someone is blogging here in English. My immediate job here is to report from/on the rehearsals for Friday’s (7 November) Double Dutch concert in Amsterdam: pieces by four composers who have mediated or floated or move(d) between the worlds of composed and improvised music—Maarten Altena, Guus Janssen, Willem Friede, Florian Maier. That interface between worlds is near to my heart; in the late 1990s I spent four years in Amsterdam, writing a book about improvised music and related composing in the city. Altena and Janssen figure prominently in New Dutch Swing, which was published 10 years ago. The last few years I’ve been living deep in the US—writing in Chicago, and then teaching in Kansas—so I’m eager to hear where things stand, now that I’m back in Holland for this project. Which is more than enough about me.