related works
24 capriccio's voor viool solo
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Violin
Scoring:
vl
Honk : for soprano and ensemble / Martijn Padding
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Voice and instrument(s)
Scoring:
sopr rec/fl cl-b trb vl pf el.g cb perc
Tres poemas negros : pour chant et piano / Ignace Lilien
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Voice and piano
Scoring:
zang pf
Plint : for big band / Guus Janssen
Genre:
Orchestra
Subgenre:
Big band
Scoring:
3sax-a 2sax-t 2sax-bar 5tpt 4trb trb-b tb 2perc g-e pf db
composition
Grab it! X12 : for saxophone-orchestra & soundtrack with video ad lib. / JacobTV - Jacob Ter Veldhuis; arr. by Marco C. de Bruin
Other authors:
Bruin, Marco C. de
(Orchestrator)
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!’