related works
Recueillement : pour chant et piano, 1947 / [texte] (Ch. Baudelaire), Kees van Baaren
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Voice and piano
Scoring:
sopr-m pf
Lenteliedje : for mixed choir and chamber orchestra / Israel Olman; words by C. Lanis Leipoldt
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and orchestra
Scoring:
GK orch
Eine Lebensmesse : for mixed choir and orchestra / Jan van Gilse
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and orchestra
Scoring:
GK4 orch; words by Richard Dehmel
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and instruments; Mixed choir and orchestra
Scoring:
GK4 2perc 2vl vla vc cb / GK4 2perc str
composition
The hollow men : voor gemengd koor en orkest / Kees van Baaren; tekst: T.S. Eliot
Other authors:
Eliot, T.S.
(Text writer/Librettist)
Baaren, Kees van
(Composer)
Contains:
Moderato
Lento
Adagio
Allegro molto
Tempo di marcia
Description:
Program note (English): Genuine poetry can communicate before it's understood.
It is very well possible to transform this statement by T.S. Eliot to: Genuine poetry can be set to music before it's understood.
The number of restrictions applying to the original needs no further extension. In the modified form the aphorism means that certain, purely poetic elements of a poem - consonance, rhythm and the affective weight of the word - on the basis that it is stipulated with purely musical elements of a composition and its common appeal to conscious groups which lie outside the range of the reason, in every way is a sufficient creative incentive for the composer. To 'understand' in the traditional sense of the word, means to transform the poem's contents to terms and by means of these terms, determine the poet's 'intentions', and therefore composition is by no means done in advance. (One does not take it in spite, when we, although this wanders from the point, notice that such understanding has no need to effect composing...)
We have rather broadly dwelled on a composer's conceivable attitude to the poetry with the sole aim of showing that which Eliot states regarding the poetic contact, preceding the understanding to yet a stronger degree in the combined poetic-musical contact.
The cultural and critical background of the poem's context is not of the essence as the consequences derived and developed when listening to the The Hollow Men.
The music consists of six parts: a short instrumental preludium and five poems composed separately from each other. The material motivation can be summarised in a range of six tones, which (with an exact repetition of three tones higher) form a series, containing all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. The working method shows, however no important points of similarity with Arnold Schönberg's 12-tone technique. - KEES VAN BAAREN