Bird, Candle & Ignorance (2009)

for alto saxophone and piano

Written at the request of Duo Beumer & van Ham (Sander Beumer and Hans van Ham)
Premiered by Duo Beumer & van Ham at Theater Kikker, Utrecht on 5 February, 2010.
Duration: approx. 7'

Explanatory note:

There are some major events in our world of which we have no idea whether news reports about these issues are reliable: 9/11, swine flu vaccinations, RFID chips and so on.

Also we are gradually being manipulated by control systems, intimidated by a small circle of rulers until we finally probably will have ended up, being consuming-driven and ignorant citizens.

People like David icke, Alex Jones and films like Zeitgeist, which warn us against these, what I would call threats, have had quite an impact on me and these threats are worrying me,

A rather burdening and non-musical starting point, it surely is. But it was this that served as a starting point for this composition.

Candle expresses human creativity that will finally become almost extinct.
Ignorance is the indifference and apathy.
Bird stands for freedom, like the bird, soaring freely in the air. A freedom which should always be our right to have.

This is not the same order as in the title, in which I chose the order in favour of rhythmic  preference.

  FEATURED

  Currently working on a work for      saxophone quartet, requested by      the Bron Saxophone Quartet.

  My latest work is "Ritual text      for the afterlife"  for women's          choir and tubular bells.
     Ancient Greek goldplates with      texts - recently  found in graves -      that were carried by the dead on      their journey to afterlife.

  In progress is a work of a much     bigger scale: Blodeuwedd,  a     dance poem for narrator,      singer/reciter, dancer and      ensemble. The poem is by the      Welsh poet Tony Conran.

  Another recent work (2016) is
     O me! O life! (Walt Whitman) for      choir and string quintet.

  My Guitar sonata (1982) is      now being published by
     Editiones Eudora (Madrid),

  Draaf, Foekje. Draaf!

    Watch the television interview.     (You need to understand Frisian,     though).