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.

At the Metropole Orchestra’s rehearsal in Hilversum a little later, conductor Jurjen Hempel introduces Claron McFadden to the band as “one happy American.” She had already showed me her Obama campaign button.

On the way in to the old VARA studios this morning, I run into Guus Janssen, and ask him to talk about Four Songs he’s written for the Berlin-based virtuoso of the sheng (the Chinese mouth organ), Wu Wei, to premiered Friday. We sit down for a hurried talk over coffee.

“Alan Laurillard had suggested we play together. I was doubtful, but Alan convinced me. We did four duo concerts, and while traveling one day, Wu Wei told he’d always wanted to play in a big band—to play real jazz, in fact. Then a few months later Frans van Gurp asked me to write a piece and choose a soloist. Not that the Four Songs are typical big band music—more a kind of ‘light music,’ which is what Metropole started out doing decades ago.

“We met four times between the middle of 2007 and this week, and emailed back and forth. I wrote him some sketches, or exercises, to try. A lot of that material didn’t work, so I threw it away.

“He had given me a sort of road map of fingerings, of possibilities and impossibilities. The strangest thing for me was, he has to hold the sheng up when he plays, shifting its weight from one hand to the other, depending on the fingering. So you have to consider that. Each of the songs has its own melody—there are no themes they all have in common—but all the melodies came out of the technical possibilities of the sheng. What I wrote is difficult, but he seems to like it.

“I was completely forgetting about Chinese music, wanted to hear the sheng without that cultural background, but you can’t escape it in the end. It makes for some strange clashes. I also like the whole Toots Thielemans kind of thing. I thought it must be possible to make it sound like a big chromatic blues harmonica. Chinese music is not about triads, so I wanted to write him some traditional Western I-IV-V chord progressions.

“I knew from the beginning Wu Wei was able to improvise, so there are moments where I let him go. In the second song, a bossa nova, he improvises these soft glissandos.” They’re quite spooky-sounding, like the song of some mythical giant bird. “Each time it’s different; that effect is very hard to control, even for him. On the fourth song, a strange hard-bop kind tune, he gets two straight solos accompanied by the rhythm section. I wrote out the chords for him to follow, but he was nervous about that, so I told him, just listen to the band and react to what they play.

“We only decided yesterday that I would play the harmonica myself.” It’s a small role for blues harp, practically a cameo. “I see harmonica as playing a sort of ‘shadow solo,’ because harmonica and sheng are related.”

As Hempel and Metropole rehearse Four Songs a few minutes later, Janssen is particular about coaxing the right jazzy accents from the horns. When the clarinets master one passage, he tells them, “Yeah: now do it fortissimo.”

The ending sequence, mostly without sheng, is a rhythmically complex display of orchestral fireworks, and as Hempel drills the musicians on it, over and over, it comes alive This composition will be well received at Friday’s concert, I expect.

After that, Metropole rehearses Maarten Altena’s Song Book, with soprano Claron McFadden. Janssen had kept asking for things to be sterker—stronger. For this piece, Hempel and Altena keep requesting the orchestra rein it in. “Absolute pianissimo,” Jurjen requests at one point.

The vocal lines are very challenging—there are some odd swoops, and several moments when McFadden’s voice has to leap upward, then plunge below the melody’s normal pitch range.

Maybe it’s because the texts she sings come from the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, but the big dissonant string chords Altena has formulated keep reminding me of Charles Ives, that 20th century composer with 19th century roots. Would it make sense if I said Altena had written some lovely harsh dissonances? They’re transparent but very bracing; the high register string parts I mentioned in Monday’s blog entry—in the setting for the poem for “This Day, O Soul”—could make your ears pop.

Many Dutch composers have expressed admiration for Ives over the years—Altena and Louis Andriessen, for two. On Guus Janssen’s recent and very fine solo piano CD Out of Frame (GeestGronden) there’s a piece called “Walden Pond”—named for the 19th century American nature writer Henry David Thoreau’s rural retreat—that evokes Ives’s sound world, right down to a quotation from Ives’ favorite tune to quote from, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” That patriotic anthem was written when Americans had reason to proud of their place on the globe. Today, it feels like those days could be coming back.