What do you do when you aren’t composing? I am not a professional composer in the sense that I make my living with it, I work in a business academy, lecturing in cross-cultural communication. It is a completely different world indeed! In my free time, I like to read poetry, in many languages. Out of […]
Year: 2018
The winning submission for an arrangement of Dutch folk songs is by Rolf Straver, a Dutch amateur composer – congratulations Rolf! Rolf made a cello duet titled “All’ombra del Tiglio Verde” (“Under the Green Linden Tree“), using the melodies of two of the songs that I previously posted on this blog: “En er waren d’r twee […]
25 years have now passed since the last broadcast of the Dutch radio presenter, Ate Doornbosch, who spent between 1957 to 1993 criss-crossing the Netherlands, recording men and women singing songs of their lives spent on islands, on farms or in fishing villages. These songs were collected in a 9-CD box set named after the […]
In my last blog, I wrote about the songs I had been listening to from Ate Doornbosch’s ‘Onder de Groene Linden’ collection. Here, I’m posting recordings of four of the songs that I found the most musically-striking. This blog is a first call for participation from you, the reader, or from anyone in your circle […]
Now that spring has broken, it is finally time to complete projects that have lain dormant through the dark days of the year. Here is a video of my trip to a winter solstice ceremony in the middle of the Netherlands last year. The ceremony revolved around the playing of the Midwinterhoorn: a long, curved, […]