Vlakken & Lijnen - Compositie IIb

performed by Cheng Quartet at Grachtenfestival at August 13, 2017 In 2017, it is 100 years ago that De Stijl, an avant-garde Dutch art magazine, was founded. This would become the springboard to fame for artists such as Gerrit Rietveld, Vilmos Huszár and above all Piet Mondriaan. As it seems that this was a consentient art movement, one might be surprised to hear that Rietveld and Mondriaan never met each other in person. It was Theo van Doesburg, chief editor of the magazine and mastermind behind De Stijl, who wrote most of the manifests and decided that these artists formed a front. A front, physically together or not, it was. Each in their own way, these artists aimed for all-encompassing harmony by embracing the abstract and elementary. They stripped their visual language to its most basic form; solely using horizontal lines, vertical lines, planes, primary colors, white, grey and black. The De Stijl-artists believed that artworks built on these elements and intuitively composed would inspire its spectators and spread harmony and equality all around. When the NJO asked me to compose a string quartet inspired by De Stijl, I was disappointed to find out that so far, very little music has been inspired by this art movement. The single “official” composer in this movement, Jakob van Domselaer, only wrote the rather minimalistic Proeven van Stijlkunst, before he decided to hit a different artistic road. Decades later, composer Louis Andriessen dedicated the fourth movement of his grand work De Materie to De Stijl. Both compositions have, in my opinion, little to do with the philosophy and aesthetics of the art movement. Vlakken & Lijnen grew out of my fascination with Mondriaan’s paintings. When gazing at his works at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, it hit me how playfully he switches between the function of a line and the function of a plane. The colours, forms and the overall composition obviously stand out in Mondriaan’s painting. I think it’s unfortunate that the variation of functions often goes unnoticed. When zooming in on that, suddenly Mondriaan’s oeuvre turns into a series of games – each painting built around it’s own rules. This string quartet is a set of 6 short movements, each inspired by one of these games. With a selection of clear musical motives, I aimed to musically illustrate the many ways Mondriaan jumped from line to plane and back.

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