Organizing labor: composers, performers, and “the renewal of musical practice” in the Netherlands, 1969–72

Adlington, R. (2007) Organizing labor: composers, performers, and “the renewal of musical practice” in the Netherlands, 1969–72. The Musical Quarterly, 90 (3-4) pp. 539-577. ISSN 0027-4631 (print) 1741-8399 (online)

Abstract

In the history of postwar Dutch music, the generation of composers who rose to prominence during the early 1960s has a special place. Figures such as Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg, and Peter Schat championed serialism, Cagian conceptualism, and graphic notation, thereby transforming the musical landscape in the Netherlands, which had hitherto been resistant to the musical innovations of the years after the end of the Second World War. This generation also identified openly with the political and social movements that sprang up in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities during the 1960s.1 Peter Schat, for instance, shared the basement of his Amsterdam home with the anarchist group Provo, and in 1968 travelled to Havana to attend Castro's Cultural Congress; Schat and Andriessen travelled together to Paris in May 1968, where they saw Sartre speak at the occupied Odéon Theatre. The composers' leftist preoccupations were often manifested in their musical activities: these included political concerts, campaigns against establishment institutions, and a large-scale collective music theater piece about Che Guevara and the Latin American struggle against U.S. imperialism. Their activism reached a height of notoriety in November 1969, when Schat, Andriessen, Leeuw, Mengelberg, and other young musicians disturbed a concert by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in protest against “this status symbol of the ruling elite in our society.”2 In the long term, such exploits were to be credited with “shaking Dutch musical life out of its suffocating provincialism.”

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