ARTICLES
ABOUT KEN
Excerpt from Europe @ 2.4km/h, a novel
by
Ken Haley
Published
(2011)
512-528km
Late at night I discover that the sound of double basses being wheeled in their cases along a path is almost indistinguishable from rolling thunder. A rumbling wakes me in my room at the Apeldoorn hostel, on the edge of my sister-in-law’s hometown. Before I roll over the drift back to sleep, I see the cream-coloured cases gleaming under an electric light. This will bear investigating tomorrow, I tell myself.
Late at night I discover that the sound of double basses being wheeled in their cases along a path is almost indistinguishable from rolling thunder. A rumbling wakes me in my room at the Apeldoorn hostel, on the edge of my sister-in-law’s hometown. Before I roll over the drift back to sleep, I see the cream-coloured cases gleaming under an electric light. This will bear investigating tomorrow, I tell myself.
And so it does. Over breakfast I get talking with Jurjen Toepoel, in his late 20s, who is tour manager for the Dutch National Youth Orchestra (Nationaal Jeugd Orkest), which at 50 years is much older than anyone in it. The 70-strong orchestra - divided for concert purposes into two ensembles of 35 members apiece - is domiciled at the hostel here for three weeks while on its summer tour. Tonight it will be performing less than an hour away, in Arnhem. Would I like to join the tour bus and hear the concert? Sure thing.
Despite the ‘national’ in its name, the musicians in it now hail from Poland, Spain and further afield. They are more European than Dutch, more global than European. So is their repertoire. Tonight they present the world premiere of a work commissioned from a Japanese-American composer Ken Ueno especially for them.
I meet Ueno at Arnhem’s Muzis Sacrum Concertzaal and, after he makes a starling admission for a classical composer - declaring ‘I’m a musician because of Jimi Hendrix’ - we just riff.
‘I had a different life plan to that of many musicians,’ he tells me. ‘US West Point military academy.’
‘What were you aiming for there?’
‘You know - the usual. Maybe general or senator.’
‘No higher than that?’
‘Well...then I discovered electric guitar. I think there’s a crossover, although I wouldn’t exaggerate it. YOu won’t find me intserting death-metal passages into the middle of symphonic movements. What really grabbed me about classical music was when I heard Bartók’s string quartets and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and they hit me viscerally, direct. Duke Ellington used to say, “There are only two types of music: good and bad.”’ And so to Necropolis, the piece her wrote for the youth orchestra. Ueno created the work while living in Rome, on a fellowship at the American Academy there. He found inspiration in Etruscan burial sites visited near the Italina capital. ‘The city of the living is in ruins, but the Italians are living over the dead,’ he explains. So the work plays itself out on a parallel plateaux, as it were. It is in three movements, but two are ‘submerged’ in silence (a touch of John Cage, there), so only the second one is audible. Almost unheard of.
I meet Ueno at Arnhem’s Muzis Sacrum Concertzaal and, after he makes a starling admission for a classical composer - declaring ‘I’m a musician because of Jimi Hendrix’ - we just riff.
‘I had a different life plan to that of many musicians,’ he tells me. ‘US West Point military academy.’
‘What were you aiming for there?’
‘You know - the usual. Maybe general or senator.’
‘No higher than that?’
‘Well...then I discovered electric guitar. I think there’s a crossover, although I wouldn’t exaggerate it. YOu won’t find me intserting death-metal passages into the middle of symphonic movements. What really grabbed me about classical music was when I heard Bartók’s string quartets and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and they hit me viscerally, direct. Duke Ellington used to say, “There are only two types of music: good and bad.”’ And so to Necropolis, the piece her wrote for the youth orchestra. Ueno created the work while living in Rome, on a fellowship at the American Academy there. He found inspiration in Etruscan burial sites visited near the Italina capital. ‘The city of the living is in ruins, but the Italians are living over the dead,’ he explains. So the work plays itself out on a parallel plateaux, as it were. It is in three movements, but two are ‘submerged’ in silence (a touch of John Cage, there), so only the second one is audible. Almost unheard of.