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.

But Janssen, one of the most playful of composers, is always tweaking expectations. The breaks expand and contract unpredictably, and the soloists don’t fill them in a conventional way. The orchestra gets so swept up in the score’s momentum, conductor Jurjen Hempel lets them run a minute or so before cutting them off. ‘Zwingt wel,’ someone calls out, and right he is: it does swing well. Then Hempel begins the business of fine-tuning some unison rhythms.

One of the songs for Wu Wei is in Brazilian bossa nova rhythm—that got an involuntary laugh from us onlookers. (The closest thing to a criticism I’ve heard from any of these composers of conductor Hempel is that he rushes the tempos, which could be a rehearsal tactic, but this bossa was a little too fast to sound suitably relaxed.) Another song I’m tempted to call a Chinese blues, much as I hate facile comparisons between the blues and other indigenous musics. But in the case it’s hard to avoid, with the rhythm section playing an intermittent Fats Domino rhythm-&-blues beat, and the soloist hammering away at chords like bluesman Elmore James sweeping his guitar. There’s no trace of ‘Chinese’ writing for orchestra, although Wu Wei gets some lovely bent notes and vibrato effects that smack of home.

The sheng: it’s surprising loud. And Wu Wei can play it very very fast, with clipped articulation. Janssen never really pretends it’s anything other than what it is, which is enough. They’ve played together before, even did a concert in the Westerkerk, where some listeners mistook on old Dutch tune for a Chinese number—until Guus started playing church organ like a draaiorgel. Wu Wei had requested the piece—had told Guus, just once I’d like to play with a big band.

There are short episodes in this suite that blossom in funny ways: into, say, a too-bright triumphant chord, or a quick pile-up of cross-rhythms—eruptions that suggest the bumper-car trajectory of vintage Warner Bros. cartoon scores, the sound that Bugs Bunny hopped to.

As far as I can tell, the only improvising was by the composer, who while following the score would pull out a harmonica and add a few non-virtuoso fills here and there. When he learned I had my harmonica with me, he said, “You want to play on the concert? You could improvise.” You’ll be relieved to know my answer.

Tuesday, 4 November, 11:30:

Next, a second rehearsal of Willem Friede’s Pod, which begins to come into focus for me. It’s episodic too, but Friede doesn’t jump from one subject to another in the typical postmodern way: he’s as apt to slide new material under a section already in progress, so it sneaks up like a new development in a dream. To me he’s more modernist than postmodernist, if that helps. Some mysterioso writing for strings and harp fit the fog that lingered over Hilversum all day. There were also those Bartoky bits mentioned yesterday, and some straight-up big band writing: brass punches and improvised flugelhorn and saxophone solos over swing rhythm. Zwingt wel!

Friede after all may be best known as musical director, composer and pianist for the New Cool Collective Big Band. But he’s conservatory trained—like Florian Maier he studied with Klaas de Vries—and doesn’t neglect the strings, penning memorably silky passages for cellos and violas. One three-note phrase gets passed around from section to section, among horns and strings: he exploits the spatial relationships that are an often overlooked tool in the composer’s kit.

In rehearsal he may be the most laid back of our four composers, joking a little with the conductor, but he closely monitors the band’s dynamics

Tuesday, 4 November, 13:15:

The week’s first rehearsal for full orchestra and the German metal band Noneuclid, who play Florian Maier’s Black Metal Vortex, a Death Metal Symphony. Such a meeting between Maier’s old band and symphony orchestra has been a lifelong dream, he said yesterday. But his lyrics seem at odds with his happy persona:

In the slow ooze of panic
I give in to eternal catastrophe....
A bleak singularity....
A smothered worm in putrid blood.

The improvisation here comes mostly in what he describes as “controlled aleatorics”—where the players might, say, be instructed to play particular pitches in random order, out of sync with one’s section-mates. This leads to some lovely effects, for example an out-of-focus blur of flutes.

Today we can hear how the very difficult parts the string players had worked on yesterday fit into the larger whole, can hear Maier’s command (like Friede’s) of orchestral resources. From the rehearsal, with Noneuclid’s volume turned low and their drummer in an isolation booth, it’s hard to picture how it’ll sound in the concert hall Friday night. And when Maier, playing in the band, contributes some gurgly, death-rattle vocals, there’s a risk of unintended comedy. But when you hear how the strings, horns and orchestral percussion match up with and complement the distorted guitars, you get the feeling it’ll work out all right. Zwingt wel, after a fashion.

How do these musicians do it? I’m exhausted after four hours a day of just listening to them rehearse.