related works

Red, white and blues : Dutch new blues pieces, for piano, volume 1

Genre: Chamber music
Subgenre: Piano
Scoring: pf

Camera eye : voor 2 saxofoons, 2 basgitaren, violoncello, 2 piano's en slagwerk / Huib Emmer

Genre: Chamber music
Subgenre: Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring: sax-s sax-a 2perc 2g-b 2pf vc

Ballade : for guitar and harp, 1989 / Jurriaan Andriessen

Genre: Chamber music
Subgenre: Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring: g hp

Trio : for bassoon, piano and violoncello / Erik Lotichius

Genre: Chamber music
Subgenre: Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring: bsn pf vc

composition

Grab it! Quintet A : Version for bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, mallets, bass and multimedia / JacobTV - Jacob Ter Veldhuis

Author(s):
Veldhuis, Jacob ter (Composer)
Description:
Originally composed for tenor sax November 1999 for Arno Bornkamp with financial support from the Dutch Performing Arts Fund. The world premiere took place at a concert called ‘Who’s afraid of…” at Vredenburg in Utrecht, February 2, 2000. After a performance by Arno in July 2000 at the World Sax Congress in Montreal, Grab it! became a repertoire piece and by request arranged for other instruments and combinations.

Growing up in the '60s with blues, jazz, and rock, American music had a profound influence on me. In Grab It!, I sought to explore the 'no-man’s-land' between speech and music. Speech inherently possesses melody and rhythm and I discovered that these qualities often intensify when people become emotional. Grab It! is based on the original speech of life-sentenced prisoners, whose verbal aggression aligns with the harsh sound of the tenor sax. I composed Grab It! as a duet—or a 'battle,' if you will—between the tenor sax and speech grooves, often in unison. The soloist 'competes' with a relentless barrage of syllables, words, and one-liners.

In jail suicide is not uncommon: ‘He tied one end around the pipe, and he hung himself. So he went out the back door rapped up in a green sheet with a tag on his toe…You lose everything!‘ Still Grab it! should also be understood as a ‘memento vivere’. Death row as a metaphor for life: Life is worth living. ‘Grab it!’