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.

The Metropole Orchestra is rehearsing in a Muziekcentrum in Hilversum for four days this week, with Jurjen Hempel conducting. They worked on three pieces this morning and afternoon. Before today, I knew Metropole for their work with jazz musicians, and of course I knew of their successes as a pop orchestra. But as someone put it to me today, they do a wide range of things, with this concert at the other extreme. Now I also think of them as Metropole the new music ensemble.

The conductor runs a rehearsal with brisk efficiency: they cover a lot of ground in an hour. When Hempel clarifies a point for one or another section of players, by singing a phrase to them, he conveys the rhythmic ease of a scat singer: he lets them hear the swing of it. Not that he’s “jazzing the classics,” but he keeps the rhythms aloft.

The players are quick studies. Altena had written some precise, rapid passages at the very top of the violin fingerboard; in about four passes the string players had it down, the pitches and attack and rhythms clear-cut, and no grousing about how difficult it was. (Here and on Florian Maier’s piece, first violinist Alida Schat asked a lot of clarifying questions—made sure they understood a composer’s intentions.) After they worked on his piece today, Altena characterized them this way: “They’re ‘yes’ people rather than ‘no’ or ‘yes, but’ or ‘no, but’ people.” Altena has set four poems by the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, for soprano Claron McFadden. “I rediscovered Whitman this summer. He’s very modern. I like the sound of his language very much, aside from the meaning or context.” But, he added, there’s also Whitman’s Utopianism, and very American sense of optimism: the belief one can reinvent oneself. I suggested a parallel to the way Maarten had reinvented himself—an improvising bass player who sought greater order in his music-making by becoming a composer—but he brushed the comparison aside.

There is some very nice low register writing in this ex-bassist’s pieces—tricky passages for contrabass clarinet and two contrabasses. His string harmonies can be astringent, but they don’t obscure his love of melody. “The older I get, I just want to write music that sounds good. I’m not ironic like most Dutchmen.”

While he and I were talking in the cafeteria, Florian Maier came by to say hello, revved up from rehearsing with his longtime German metal band Noneuclid. When he walked away, Maarten said, “It used to be all the composers played the piano; now it’s electric guitar: a change in the parameters.”

Maier’s piece—Black Metal Vortex, a Death Metal Symphony—is for Metropole and Noneuclid. Today’s rehearsal is just for the strings, because their parts are fiendishly hard—metal guitar being about fast, meticulously accurate, rapidly articulated string playing, after all. He’s written some particularly striking passages for cellos and basses, playing in complex stuttery rhythms. Again, it didn’t take long for the musicians to get them sorted out. Afterwards I asked Maier if he was trying to test the limits of what string players could do. No, he said, I wrote it the way I heard it in my head—although he said sometimes, he comes up against the limits of western notation, which wasn’t designed for this level of rhythmic complexity.

Talking with Maarten Altena earlier, I’d missed too much of the rehearsal of Willem Friede’s “Pod,” with its sneaky transitions, intermittent funky drums, simultaneous duple and triple rhythms, very striking, thorny writing for clarinets, and strings that reminded a couple of listeners of Bartok. Yeah, might be a little Berio in there too, he allowed. So is that “Pod” like in iPod? Well, he said, sizing me up (we’d just met), there are all kinds of pods. Peas come in pods. There were those alien seedpods in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I added. Sure, he said, and those half-organic game controller pods sticking out of people’s flesh in the film eXistenZ. Or, he said, rolling now, it could stand for Point Of Divergence. That’s plenty of points of departure right there. More on the music tomorrow.