When you look through your old stuff, you sometimes discover little gems and beautiful memories. I had that pleasure last week, when I opened a drawer that had been closed for a long time.
What did I find? Well, there was this folder containing my compositions. I studied composition briefly at the Zwolle conservatoire, about fifteen years ago, and looking at those now, I can appreciate the quality of some of them (of course there is also a lot of “junk” – try outs, stuff that didn’t work out the way I wanted, unfinished pieces…).
I did, for example, find my little three-part cycle for three woman’s voices (or choir) of Dutch poems. Well, actually only the first and the last song have text, the second one is more like a vocalise. Back then, I wrote this composition quite intuitively, but when I look at it now, I can see a lot of structure there that I created unconsciously. The turns, chords, movement, they are connected throughout all three pieces. All three songs have something to do with the sea, with travel, with adventure, and with reflecting on your experiences. Basically, life. The songs are not as easy as they look. This could be a nice thing for our new trio to look at…
I also found an old score. The score of Inanna, by Louis Andriessen, my opera debut. Back in 2003, I was asked to be the understudy for Cristina Zavalloni, an Italian singer, who was going to play the title role in this opera/music theatre piece. Of course, I said yes, and I got to sing almost half of the performances, playing and singing together with the professional actors of ZTHollandia, a.o. the late Jeroen Willems, Hadewych Minis, Henriëtte Koch and Joep van der Geest. It was an amazing experience, of course, and one that really shaped me as a singer. Acting next to these great actors was both very inspiring and totally scary. In the end, the show was a success, and I’m still looking back fondly on that experience.
I picked up the score and played and sang through it. It was amazing how vividly everything came back. I got myself one more show, but now from a ten-years-later perspective, and it was so rewarding. I clearly saw and heard Jeroen sing and play his part as my father, the water god Enki in his basin on stage… I saw Hadewych do her little nervous dance… I felt the tension with Henriëtte, who played my sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of the Underworld, who would kill me… Joep came back to mind, my husband, who became arrogant and self-important and paid for it with his life… The music brought it all back, together with my feelings of stress, fear, utter happiness and enthusiastic daring, in this wonderful experience. The magic of music.
And now I passionately want to do opera and music theatre again.