Louis Andriessen: 'De Staat' (review)

A work called The Republic composed in 1976 could well have been intended as a celebration of the American bicentennial. But Louis Andriessen's concerns were much nearer home. As Robert Adlington summarizes the situation, 'De Staat is grounded in assumptions about performers, performance style, venues and audiences, none of which have necessarily been readily reproducible outside the Netherlands, or even Amsterdam'. Nevertheless, this strongly local perspective comes alongside the claim that 'this piece—and, to a certain extent, Andriessen's music more generally—is the outcome of a comprehensive reassessment of the very criteria by which contemporary music should be judged': and Adlington chides earlier commentators on De Staat for failing to respond adequately to the fact that 'it is demonstrably not just another configuration of notes and rhythms, to be assessed alongside all the other modern scores against which critics customarily exercise their aesthetic sensibilities' (p. 122).

In isolation, this kind of writing could arouse suspicions that unrealistic claims are being made about the 'landmark' status of this particular composition: and there may well be some who prefer to regard 'its exuberance, strength of conviction and noisy lack of refinement' (p. 1) as evidence of youthful extravagance and iconoclasm which, thirty years on, have less to offer than Andriessen's more recent and generally less abrasive compositions. If De Staat is a boldly disrespectful gesture from the margins—it would be a good choice for the Panic-like role of tabloid shocker at the Last Night of the Proms—the recent La Passione (2002) seems content to sit squarely in the mainstream, albeit a mainstream that can accommodate Michel Legrand and Stephen Sondheim alongside some of their more earnest contemporaries. But De Staat, as Adlington sees it, intentionally 'lacks "good taste" in its unrelenting volume and general lack of musical decorum' (p. 130); and this suggests a broader argument about the role of music within a cultural practice where social agitation and political conviction are to be encouraged.

Alert to the value of relevant contextualization, Adlington's initial chapter on 'Music and Politics' ranges beyond the specifics of 1970s Amsterdam and the Orkest De Volharding to a prehistory in which Eisler and Brecht have pride of place. Adlington also acknowledges in a note that 'the parallels and differences between Cardew and Andriessen during the late sixties and early seventies would make for a fascinating study' (p. 116). Nevertheless, there is too little space available for the kind of comparisons that would place Andriessen's 1970s version of agitprop against the very different contemporary responses to political commitment found in (for example) Nono, Henze, and Lachenmann, or the kind of socially committed activism represented by Nigel Osborne's work in Bosnia.

Was Andriessen's 'engagement' ever more than a modish gesture from an irrevocably bourgeois embodiment of privilege and self-indulgence? Adlington identifies elements which can be defined in terms of both success and failure. On the one hand, the work's 'crudity of content, far from signalling a failing of creativity or imagination, is a central premise, for it is Andriessen's way of trying to wrest the large-scale musical statement from the clutches of bourgeois connoisseurship'; on the other hand, 'Andriessen's later music, in becoming more structurally intricate, lowers its guard on this front: works like De Tijd [1980–1] and De Snelheid [1984], their uncompromising idiom notwithstanding, invite knowledgeable appreciation and in so doing sit more easily in the concert hall'. From this perspective, De Staat becomes a unique attempt at 'an impossible task' (p. 124). Nevertheless, a not dissimilar task has seemed less impossible to Steve Reich, whose more consistent commitment to varieties of minimalism has enabled him to increase the didactic content of his works in recent years—The Cave and Three Tales, in particular—without losing an appeal which, if not positively anti-bourgeois, seems to attract audiences who might not bring much 'knowledgeable appreciation' to Birtwistle or Carter. This is another...