Jan Boerman: The Complete Tape Music.(Review)

Compact disc sets, 1998, Donemus CV-NEAR 04/05/06/07/08 (Boerman), CV-NEAR 09/10/11 (Raaijmakers); available from Donemus, Paulus Potterstraat 16, 1071 CZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands; telephone (020) 676-4436; fax (020) 673-3588; electronic mail info@donemus.nl; World Wide Web www.donemus.nl

You have to give it to the Dutch--they take their support of culture seriously! Donemus, the state music publisher, has undertaken to release a series of recordings documenting the electroacoustic music of Holland. Rather than produce compilations, as many other countries and studios have done, Donemus has made the decision to release the work of individual composers, at least so far. The first recordings are devoted to two of the pioneers of Dutch electronic music, Jan Boerman and Dick Raaijmakers. Both men have composed a great variety of music for all sorts of genres, but these box sets concentrate on their tape music. Each set is also accompanied by a CD-sized hardcover book (each well over 100 pages) in Dutch and English which includes valuable discussions of the composer, the music, technical and aesthetic issues, and chronologies.

Jan Boerman (born 1923) has been working in electronic music studios since 1959. The Delft Polytechnic in Utrecht, out of which developed the world-famous Institute of Sonology, housed the first electronic music studio in Holland after the Philips laboratory in Eindhoven, which was not generally open to composers. Dick Raaijmakers (born 1930) got a slightly earlier start, working as a researcher at Philips and completing his first electronic composition in 1957 (not included in this collection). A select few composers were invited to work at Eindhoven, including Edgard Varese (where he created his Poeme electronique in 1958), but by 1960, Philips decided to close the facilities. It generously passed its equipment on to the Delft Polytechnic, which quickly became the primary site for electronic music in The Netherlands. Administrative problems, however, caused both Mr. Boerman and Mr. Raaijmakers to leave Utrecht in 1963, whereupon they began setting up a private studio in The Hague. Their facility eventually became incorporated into the Royal Conservatory of Music, and both men became members of the faculty. (Many years later, in 1986, the Institute of Sonology echoed their move by transferring from Utrecht to the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.)

Mr. Boerman was trained in the traditional manner as a pianist and composer, and his initial exposure to the electronic music studio was both a shock and revelation. There was relatively little "repertoire" in this new domain, so, while he had been struggling with serialism and with "finding his voice," Mr. Boerman quickly intuited that here was a vast new terrain to explore quite free from the stylistic pressures (i.e., the triumvirate of Paris, Darmstadt, and Cologne) that were so powerfully felt at that time in Europe. Mr. Raaijmakers, on the other hand, had been studying broadcasting, recording, and applied electronics at Philips, so was more naturally drawn into the world of studio composition.