Everywhere in the world, people play with sound: on musical instruments, with their voice, with their bodies, and in their minds. They enchant and surprise us with their play, they let us move, halt, remember and forget. How does this work? This question is my personal drive.
Making and hearing music is an intimate and sometimes invasive mode of human social interaction. This insight is important for my musicological research practice but also for my own play with noises, sounds, with my body and with my voice. The recorder and later the oboe were extensions of my own body. Yet they also confronted me with the limitations of my body. What you hear is not always what you want to hear, and what you think you hear is not always what those around you hear. Singing provides me with the best opportunities to deal with these discrepancies, possibly because I regard singing as a collective enterprise. For playing the oboe I needed to emphatically assert my presence in order to articulate and shape my tone. In a choir, by contrast, I need to adapt, colour in with the other voices, bend along or offer subtle resistance. This convinces me that music requires social skills that reach beyond musicality proper.
Some of the music I made
Vocaal Ensemble Venus
Kamerkoor Venus is specialized in contemporary composed music.
Utrechtse Domcantorij en Capella Occento
With the Capella Occento choir we sung in the Fringe programme of the Utrecht Early Music Festival (1997), we made a European tour with a scenic performance of Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci (1998), and a European tour with Bach’s B-minor Mass (2000).
Abagqugquzeli
Rehearsals and a performance with Skho Miya and her maskanda band Abagqugquzeli in Durban (2008-2009).
Chapel Choir of Lincoln College Oxford
From 1999 to 2003 we sung Evensong on a weekly basis in Lincoln College Chapel (Oxford). We also recorded a couple of CDs, and incidentally sung Evensong in St Paul’s Cathedral London, Canterbury Cathedral and York Minster.
Ars Nova Trajectina
Ars Nova Trajectina (the early-music ensemble of Utrecht University’s Musicology Programme) specializes in European music from 1300 to 1600. Here we sing Guillaume Dufay’s ‘J’ay mis mon cueur’ live in the Sint-Nicolaaskerk in Amsterdam.
