Zaterdag 21 juni | Het Wijkpaleis, studio van Andreas Kunstein | 20:00 - 21:15 uur
Regulier €15, studenten €10
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Programma

Laurens de Boer
Three Preludes (2023/24)

• Prelude 24/11
• Prelude 15/3
• Prelude 24/5

For Sophie (2025), (premiere)

Joey Roukens
Summer Preludes (2020) – nos. 1, 4, 7 & 8

• No. 1: Summer Nostalgia
• No. 4: The Weather Has Changed
• No. 7: Raindrops
• No. 8: After the Rain (Little Meditation II)

Andreas Kunstein & Sofie Hanekroot
7.5 + 0.5 Little Blues (2022), (premiere)

Oscar van Dillen
Eludes (2020) – nos. 7, 4 & 6

Paul M. van Brugge
Again I Tried Everything I Possibly Could But I Still Can’t Get My Damn’ Car Started Blues (2010)

Over de componisten en hun werken

Laurens de Boer

The Three Preludes were composed as opening pieces for the three concert programs of the triptych Laurens de Boer performed in 2023/2024. These programs featured works by his composer colleagues Sinta Wullur, Albert van Veenendaal, and Andreas Kunstein, alongside music by Philip Glass and George Gershwin.
For Sophie (2025) was written for Sophie Jiang.

Rhythm and percussion are recurring elements in the work of pianist Laurens de Boer. He specializes in contemporary music and is particularly interested in combining it with other genres.

As the regular pianist of the Rosa Ensemble, he performed for over ten years in the Netherlands and abroad, and recorded several CDs, including Selling Hoovers in Mojave (inspired by Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa) and Diepe Wildernis(based on texts by Brazilian author Guimarães Rosa).

For his solo project Percussive Piano, he commissioned numerous composers to write ‘Groove Etudes’ and ‘Drum Solos’. A special edition of this project was presented in Hong Kong in 2015 with works by local composers.

Current developments of the project include WorldRhythms Project (working title), inviting composers worldwide to incorporate elements from their musical traditions, and Polymetric Etudes, which explore groove and cross-rhythms in contemporary piano music.

Laurens de Boer is co-founder and pianist of Duo De Watertoren (percussion and piano), which premiered the chamber opera Die Frau ohne Piano by Paul M. van Brugge during the Operadagen Rotterdam. He also collaborates regularly with other soloists and ensembles, including the Doelen Ensemble and Asko|Schönberg.

He studied piano at the Rotterdam Conservatory with Barbara Grajewska.
Website: https://percussivepiano.nl

Joey Roukens

Summer Preludes is a piano cycle consisting of twelve preludes and an epilogue, written during the summer of 2020. It was one of those warm, capricious summers we have been experiencing more often in recent years, with a prolonged heatwave in August but also rainy, almost autumn-like days. The Summer Preludes can be heard as a kind of musical diary, with each prelude reflecting a specific day or period during that summer: sometimes gentle, sunny days; at other times more turbulent ones; then again, the stillness of a summer night, an endless rain shower, or the sluggish heat of a sweltering wave.

For me, summer is also the season for rest and reflection, and many of the pieces therefore have a contemplative tone. I wrote these Summer Preludes purely for my own pleasure—unlike most of my compositions, which are written on commission.

Joey Roukens studied composition at the Rotterdam Conservatory with Klaas de Vries and psychology at Leiden University. He also took piano lessons with Ton Hartsuiker.

His musical language is characterized by directness and a high degree of eclecticism. Many of his compositions strive for a natural fusion of elements from diverse styles, genres, and modes of expression. He frequently uses diatonic, triad-based harmonies, regular rhythmic pulses, references to popular music, musical material drawn from the classical heritage, and occasionally a banal twist. Roukens was active in pop music for many years.

His works have been performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Asko|Schönberg, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Tokyo Sinfonietta, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, Ralph van Raat, and Janine Jansen.

Website: https://joeyroukens.com/about/

Andreas Kunstein

Andreas Kunstein studied history and philosophy, received composition lessons from David Graham and Ratko Delorko, and studied composition at the Folkwang University in Essen with Wolfgang Hufschmidt, and at Codarts in Rotterdam with Peter-Jan Wagemans and Klaas de Vries. In addition to composing, he teaches composition and piano.

His generally free-tonal works are often influenced by popular musical styles. They are published by Donemus Publishing in The Hague.

Many of my composition students write blues or blues-influenced music during their lessons. It’s enjoyable, and there are also several didactic reasons for it. So it’s no surprise that in 2022 I began composing a blues cycle myself. My composition student Sofie had just finished her first orchestral piece when we sat down together to go through some of her earlier sketches. We both really liked the beginning of a blues she had written some time earlier, but Sofie wasn’t sure where it might belong. By then, her style had become more minimalist, with a strong individual focus on rhythm and meter, so finishing the blues no longer seemed very interesting to her. On the other hand, the sketch was too good to discard. We both felt it would fit well stylistically into the blues cycle I was working on at the time. So the decision was easy: I added a few more bars, and the piece became No. 4 in the cycle.

A concert featuring blues and boogie-woogie pieces by some of Andreas students is planned for late 2025 in his studio, performed by Laurens de Boer.

Sofie Hanekroot

Sofie is studying psychology at Erasmus University. She received piano lessons and later composition lessons from Andreas Kunstein. Her works are mostly rooted in the tradition of minimalism.
In 2023, the Rubric Piano Trio (Dré Wapenaar, Peter van Russen Groen, and Valentijn Visch on three pianos) performed the premiere of her commissioned composition Trill Treadlings.
Her compositions to date will soon be published by Donemus Publishing in The Hague.

Oscar van Dillen

Eludes by Oscar van Dillen:

The title Elude is derived from the verb to elude = to avoid cunningly or adroitly (Penguin Reference 2001), which has as noun the word elusion. However, the composer chose to create for this music the new noun Elude, in assonance to Prelude and words like it, such as Postlude, Interlude etc. Therefore, as pre-lude means fore-play, inter-lude in-between-play, and post-lude means after-play, thus e-lude means outside-play.

This music plays outside of and around tonal, modal and atonal systems, even outside a single style, and enters and leaves such musics at will, never completely bound to each set of formulas and conventions. It is precisely therefore that there are 12, each in its unique key signature, and not 24, as in keys (major and minor set apart), as is the case in similar keyboard collections by Bach, Chopin and Shostakovich.

The 12 Eludes each have their own way of playing outside of mode and key, using a simple, technically mostly 2-voice based, setting. The setting, a technically 2-voice mostly, leaves an open space in harmonic sound, because all redundant tones are left out. The overall sound created by the open intervallic structure of the work as a whole results in a transparent sound and a unique harmony.

The contrapuntal score is written in a concise and precise way to achieve this openness and transparency. Moreover, the precise register placement of a wealth of pitches within the time-frame of each phrase enables several parallel and simultaneous harmonic interpretations.

The tonally trained ears may hear various tonal implications, whereas the more modally trained ears will be keener to pick up on some modal suggestions and meanings, all contained in this fully chromatic music. This polysemy is intentional and is what lies behind the original idea of the Eludes in the first place: a common reality for an audience, yet with a truly wide variety of experiences and interpretations, both emotionally and technically.

The score on purpose omits indications of tempo, dynamics, phrasing and pedalling; the performer instead is trusted with all these to decide. Contrary to his custom in his other scores, the composer left this open, feeling that in this particular work a capable individual interpreter’s choices, of course logically based on and connected to the note text itself, should be preferred. This modus operandi allows for a wider variety of possible performances and expressions.

The work was originally conceived for piano, but should with some registration adaptations certainly allow for performance by various keyboard instruments too, such as organ and harpsichord, and beyond that for accordion, and marimba or vibraphone. A piano version realized by the composer was released on streaming media at the time of publishing of this score.

In a certain way, this book consists of two parts: the 7 parts I–VII and then the 5 parts VIII–XII, both parts being of similar duration, even though the second part of this cycle is slightly longer than the first. Thus, for performance purposes also a half cycle can be chosen, as can of course an individual piece.

Written 29 October – 7 November 2020.

Oscar studied North Indian classical music and bansuri, as well as classical and jazz flute. After studying medieval and Renaissance music, he studied classical composition with Klaas de Vries, Peter-Jan Wagemans, and René Uijlenhoet at the Rotterdam Conservatory. He teaches world music composition and music theory in the jazz, pop, and world music department at the Conservatory of Rotterdam.

Website with more information: https://www.oscarvandillen.com/

Paul M. van Brugge

Again I Tried Everything I Possibly Could But I Still Can’t Get My Damn Car Started Blues’ for piano (8’). A man tries in many ways to get his old car started, but whatever he does, nothing works… or does it?

In this work, Paul combines jazz and classical idioms to almost literally illustrate the narrative.

He studied composition and arranging at the Rotterdam Conservatory (now Codarts) with teachers including Klaas de Vries and Bob Brookmeyer. Since 1997, he has taught composition and arranging at the jazz department of Codarts.

Paul writes both concert jazz and classical music as well as music for film, theater, and dance.
His compositions are published by Deuss Music, where further information about him can also be found.