DESCRIPTION:
Diderik Wagenaar (1946)

Cat music : for 2 violins (1994)

Marijke van Kooten, violin
Marin Mars, violin


Program note (Dutch): Cat music bestaat uit drie karakterstukken voor twee violen. Het gaat om muzikale karakters; er is geen sprake van verwijzing naar, of beschrijving van enig buiten-muzikaal gebeuren. Het eerste deel 'Playing' (Spelen) is een eenvoudige melodie met een simpele opbouw. Flageolettonen zorgen voor tijdelijke verkleuringen van de gebruikte tonaliteit. Het tweede deel 'Hunting' (Jagen) is het langste van de drie en is een soort 'perpetuum mobile'. Melodische beweeglijkheid en onregelmatige afwisseling tussen de instrumenten vormen het onderwerp. In het derde deel 'Purring' (Spinnen) gaan de twee violen weer geheel samen op in een rustige, drie-stemmig geharmoniseerde zang. - DIDERIK WAGENAAR

Diderik Wagenaar is a Dutch composer. He studied music theory with Jan van Dijk, Hein Kien and Rudolf Koumans, and the piano with Simon Admiraal at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. As a composer he is essentially self-taught. He was appointed as a teacher of theory and 20th-century music at the Royal Conservatory in 1969.
Wagenaar is, along with Louis Andriessen and Cornelius de Bondt, one of the central figures of what has become known as the Hague School. His works represent the typical approach of this group of composers in its most austere form, with their exploitation of homogenous textures, their clearly defined, though irregular rhythmic structure, and their dissonant, but centripetal harmonies. He is especially remarkable for his handling of long, purely unison passages, which significantly influenced the work of Andriessen.
Wagenaar is the author of a modest but significant output, which shows a very constant development. The early works display abrupt shifts between different textures and still show traces of his interest in jazz music. From this period, Liederen (1976) is a convincing example of cyclic development within a mosaic-like framework. His exploration of the ambiguity between harmonic and rhythmic density reached its apex in Metrum (1984), a complex, polyrhythmic work for four saxophones and orchestra for which he was awarded the Kees van Baaren Prize in 1989. In the works that followed he reconciled a rich, chromatic harmony with a ritualistic, Stravinskian formal clarity. Solenne (1992), for six percussionists, marked a new phase, where his musical language, though in essence unchanged, assumed an expressive tranquillity and a lyrical vein. This development led to his first full-scale vocal work, Trois poèmes en prose (1995), which earned him the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize in 1996.