related works
Red, white and blues : Dutch new blues pieces, for piano, volume 1
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Piano
Scoring:
pf
Q.M. (Quantum Mystery) : for ensemble / Petra Strahovnik
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring:
ob cl fg h vn vla vc db
Singing the pictures : for 10 instrumentalists, 1981 / Huib Emmer
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring:
2panfl 2sax-a 2perc 2g-b 2pf
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring:
2fl ob cl fg h trp tb perc cb
composition
Grab it! Quintet B : Version for soprano or alto sax, trombone, baritone sax, bass trombone, percussion and multimedia / JacobTV - Jacob Ter Veldhuis
Other authors:
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!’