Ask pianist and composer Rudi Martinus van Dijk about his identity and one could run into difficulties.  Is this Culemborg-born music-maker, who later emigrated to Canada, a Dutch Canadian or a Canadian Dutch composer?  Van Dijk favours the former, although he likes to be seen as a 'mid-Atlantic' composer.  This generous geographical positioning meshes perfectly with Van Dijk's multiple bearings.  His biography leaves no doubt about this: Culemborg, Toronto, Paris, London, Boston, southern Spain, Dartington, Lelystad.  Or, put another way, if one were to take the distance between America and Canada on the one hand and that to Ancient Greece on the other, one would come out somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or, more precisely stated, in an area of numerous confluences, where it is almost impossible not to be swept along in the maelstrom of prevailing currents.  It should therefore come as no surprise that Van Dijk, being an 'international' composer, views much of contemporary composing with a healthy reservation and with a certain necessary sense of skepticism.  When reading in one of the Netherlands dailies that harmony and melody were again permitted, his reaction was one of utter amazement.  He immediately wondered, "Who prohibited that?"  If one thing has always been foreign to Van Dijk it is system fetishism.  Also with regard to the so called twelve tone system, introduced by his teacher Max Deutsch, a pupil of Schoenberg, he has always harboured certain reservations.  This is not to say that Van Dijk does not have the greatest admiration for the members of the Second Viennese School.  Incontrovertible evidence for this is to be found in his Violin Concerto, completed in Boston, which can possibly be regarded as the Dutch counterpart to the well known Violin Concerto by Alban Berg.  Not only is this composition a homage to a prematurely deceased family friend, it's elegiac tone and heartrending tragedy, not to mention the regular recurrence of choral melodies, make for inevitable associations with the creator of 'In memory of an Angel'. 

 

Van Dijk also shares with Berg a liberal and unorthodox treatment of what tradition has handed down.  No matter how unshakeable the connection between form and content, it is content that determines the form in the music of Van Dijk, and not vice-versa.  That the bold, expressionistic side of Berg and Schoenberg has not escaped Van Dijk's attention is proven in The Shadow-maker for baritone and large orchestra, written in Toronto and performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mario Bernardi with baritone Victor Braun.  Tonal references are present here as well, just as they are in every single composition by Van Dijk.  This demonstrates a kinship not only with Berg, but also with Britten, Henze, Tippett and Martin, all composers who have not simply exploited the resources available to them, but rather gratefully 'inhabited' a rich saturated musical landscape.  The result is a multi-coloured, occasionally mosaic-like - think of his brilliant piano concerto written for Bernard Jacobson - design, in which the melodic aspect is always primary and the harmony as a rule quickened by a pleasing melos.

Another important characteristic of Van Dijk is the striking ability to 'cast' his pieces for musicians.  Take his Concertante for flute, percussion, harp and string orchestra, about which the flautist Jean Pierre Rampal has laudingly remarked "C'est une oeuvre tres bien construite et remarqueblemant ecrite pour la flute."  Construction indeed, but then an animate construction and not mere formalism which, according to Van Dijk, is one of the greatest dangers threatening any composer; the important thing is in fact to be able to manoeuvre in any direction.  Mention has already been made of the relationship between form and content.  In Van Dijk's experience, content is to a large extent the product of the unconscious; here the composer likes to invoke the image of an unseen 'someone' or 'something' standing behind him whispering to him what he should do.  If, in the experience of Van Dijk, one is completely and without prejudice open to this image, let's call it intuition, then everything often falls into place.  Despite the fact that after the event it is hardly or even not at all possible to understand rationally the details of the composer's working process, the result is nevertheless watertight.  The underlying trend up until recently toward formal construction cannot be separated from the will for renewal 'a tout prix'.  Van Dijk is conscious of the impossibility of renewal in this way, though all too conscious, having made the point time and again, that renewal must not be seen as a synonym for originality.  The composer has sometimes compared the single-minded struggle for renewal with the image of an 'umbrella with appendicitis', and the tendency to want at all odds to be original with the building of 'an extremely large match with bits from the Eiffel Tower'.

Apart from numerous orchestral compositions, including not only the above-mentioned examples but also the evocative Irish Symphony commissioned by the Fund for the Creation of Music (first performance by the National Symphony of Ireland), Van Dijk has also made his mark in chamber music.  Here too one is struck by the lack of inhibition with which Van Dijk lets himself be carried along by his subject, as evidenced for example by the Two Pieces with Interlude for soprano, flute/piccolo/bass flute and piano.  Reviewing a compact disc recording of the composition, one critic rightly pointed out the fact that the form is entirely dictated by the content of the texts by Shelley and Yeats, and that the accompaniment in the piano and respective flute parts form the decor against the background from which the solo voice plays a principal role, emphasising the expression of the text.  Voice and instruments are combined seamlessly in the composition Miniatures for clarinet solo, subtitled Lament for a dying bird.  Using a completely different approach, Van Dijk has with this sublime piece established a monument for the clarinet within the twentieth century literature that stands full comparison with the major clarinet works of Berio and Boulez.  Van Dijk proves in this abstract mini Requiem (basically a moving 'memorial to nature') that it is just as possible, given a point of departure consisting of intuitive elements, to arrive at a perfectly concentrated and concise whole as with a constructional basis.  Apart from the almost completed full-length opera Kama Loka, Van Dijk is working on a concerto for orchestra.  From the preceding the many sided orientation of Rudi van Dijk may now be sufficiently apparent.  An orientation which may seem to imply an adherence to trends but which on the contrary makes the composer a living symbol of the mercury principal.  One of the properties of mercury is that it does not amalgamate with matter with which it comes into contact but rather remains by its very nature intrinsically unadultered in form.  It is this unadultered quality which is the watermark of Rudi van Dijk's compositorial creative process, a quality which marks him out as a composer belonging to all ages and, at the same time, to no age at all.

 

Article by Maarten Brandt