ABSTRACT
In his review of the Amsterdam premiere of De Staat, Elmer Schonberger noted that the piece posed a problem for anyone wishing to account for its impact. This chapter addresses some of the ideas and preoccupations. It examines the relation of Louis Andriessen's work to the Plato text from which it borrows extracts and its title. The chapter assesses the degree to which De Staat is 'about' other music, and what attitude it takes to that music. It also looks at De Staat as a contribution to Andriessen's ongoing concern with the politics of musical performance. De Staat is a predominantly instrumental work: the vocal episodes take up less than a quarter of the work's total duration. Indeed, all of the vocal sections in De Staat, with their direct, reductive style, bear the influence of this 'agitatory' style of text-setting, establishing a direct line of continuity with the concerns and imperatives surrounding Andriessen's work on Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstcck.
