Bang on a Can

Louis Andriessen is the enfant terrible emeritus of Dutch music, known for explosive, excessive music, for street orchestras and X-rated operas. At first hearing, Dubbelspoor (Double Track) seems a radical departure for this confirmed radical - its patient, quiet sonorities, gentle repetitions, and poised silences seem a far cry from the fist-pouding polemics of Hoketus and Hout. In truth, though, the piece represents the other side of the Andriessen coin, adamant in its quietude, and stoic in its covert romanticism. The chords and melodies are not unlike those found in Andriessen's other, louder works; the course the piece takes is also recognizable. Even the orchestrational techniques - exact doublings, long decays, etc. - are from the composer's usual bag of tricks. But here they are used for very different purposes - to magnify and to mirror, to crystalize and to reflect. Like all mirrors, this one distorts, to greater and lesser degrees: the first half of the piece is all fractured symmetries, inexact repetitions and "negative melodies" (produced by the disappearance of tones rather than their arrival), all indicative of an inversional, Nabokovian aesthetic. In the second half these same elements produce a gentle motion, eventually motorized into a deliberately synthetic and cosmopolitan hybrid - an operatic boogie woogie as played on Baroque instruments. As Andriessen says: "I prefer the jacks of all trades - the Purcells and Stravinskys, who are at home anywhere, borrowing here, stealing there."

--Bang on a Can All-Stars