ABSTRACT
In his review of the Amsterdam premiere of De Staat, 1 Elmer Schönberger noted that the piece posed a problem for anyone wishing to account for its impact. The ‘impressionistic prose’ often resorted to in the wake of a powerful musical experience would be entirely at odds with ‘this iron-strong composition, in which the slightest impulse towards musical haziness is systematically cut short’ (Schönberger 1976). Yet, as I noted in the last chapter, the work engages with such a range of ideas and preoccupations that a purely factual survey of its compositional structure is more than usually inadequate. In this chapter, I address some of these ideas and preoccupations. Specifically, I look in turn at three distinct topics. First, I examine the relation of Andriessen’s work to the Plato text from which it borrows extracts and its title. Second, I assess the degree to which De Staat is ‘about’ other music, and what attitude it takes to that music. Third, I look at De Staat as a contribution to Andriessen’s ongoing concern with the politics of musical performance. Each of these topics potentially opens up complexities of interpretation that could occupy whole chapters, if not separate monographs. Only an introduction can be offered here – although, with Schönberger’s warning in mind, this limitation of space perhaps acts as a welcome constraint on hazy discursiveness. Nevertheless, De Staat’s idiosyncratic treatment of its set text, of its ‘intertextual’ references, and of the traditions of the concert hall, deserve careful consideration, for these things are in no small part responsible for the individual place it holds in recent musical history.
