Composers Voice Highlights-CV 72

Article by Jacqueline Oskamp for the CD: Composers Voice Highlights - CV 72

Huib Emmer (b. 1951). Music always stands in relation to music; at least, this is an opinion commonly expressed. It implies that music always makes use of, refers to and comments on existing music. No matter how many cases this rule may be applied to, it would not be doing justice to Huib Emmer's music. Even though he would not deny his knowledge of music history and he once compared his working methodology with a ruminating cow chewing its material beyond recognition, it is from non-musical sources that Emmer derives inspiration.

Film (and preferably the tackier type of B film), architecture (in particular, a run-down industrial site) and literature (bizarre science fiction stories) provide ideas for his pieces. The aesthetics underlying Emmer's work were once succinctly put into words by Ken Hollings, the English writer Emmer frequently works with. Prompted by a series of black and white photographs Emmer had made of industrial landscapes, he wrote: "These images are exact, rigorous and uncompromising(...). Their precision is an immediate comment on how deterioration and decay expose the meaning of things, leaving what remains disorientating and ruling out vapid explanations."

In a word: ‘Dissonant.'

Not only does Emmer draw inspiration from other art disciplines, other media serve as examples while processing the material: film and literature being his two most important teachers. The legendary Russian film director Dziga Vertov developed a cinematic model for polyphony; how layered material may be played at different speeds. The techniques of montage and the cut-up, derived from film and literature (William Burroughs especially), are ones Emmer usually applies.

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Other-worldly listening experience

By Pay-Uun Hiu

Huib Emmer
Modern Compositions
IKZI

Loos Ensemble

Laid-back easy listening is not the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about works by composer and guitarist Huib Emmer.

This CD by LOOS celebrates the 25th anniversary of the ensemble comprising a solid team of musicians with deep-seated convictions producing granite music that is musically aesthetic. Huib Emmer, whose background is rooted in the LOOS ensemble, investigates the dimensions of electronic and acoustic sound, which is highlighted by pianist Gerard Bouwhuis in Camera Obscura and by saxophonist Peter van Bergen in Blue Distance. Both compositions are in a customary relentless style but contain crystalline beauty. When the acoustics are combined with the crackling alien sounds by Huib Emmer it makes for an other-worldly, inimitable listening experience, especially when heard through car speakers while cruising along a motorway at night.

 
Full Colour Ghost
fullcolourghost
 
Review by Ken Hollings on Radion in The Wire (2001)

This series of subtle meditations on structure and mood is Dutch composer Huib Emmer's response to a commission from Rotterdam's Radio Worm last year, to produce a new electronic piece to be broadcast each month in Germany and the Netherlands.

Muffled fragments of movie dialogue are carefully countered by distressed beats and tightly edited sequences of repeated sounds.

Tiny sets of variations on a single cell are audaciously run backwards.

Throughout, Emmer displays both the strength of mind and the technical skill to pull disparate elements into a cohesive whole