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The Essential Guide to Dutch Music: 100 Short Lives of Composers

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This is a wonderful compendium of Dutch musical compositional creativity. Well written by a cadre of Dutch composers and musicians, scholars in their own right who know this music first hand and situate this creativity within a context.
I was primarily interested in the post war generation, creators, like Louis Andreissen, Peter Schat, Robert Heppener, Theo Loevendie and Willem Breuker, Maarten Altena,Klaas de Vries, Ton de Leeuw composers you may already know, perhaps not, and whom I've heard of in passing but never was able to get a strong historical fix on their work.

Caveat emptor, Dutch composers have been around for some time, quite interesting with neat, multi-voiced theories on how music is to unfold, as Benedictus a Sancto Josepho (Buns) for short is here lived from 1640 to December 1716. If you do not scour the Groves Encyclopedia, you will never know of this Dutch antiquity. It's facinating the musical creative theories we never seem to confront and understand. This book is a helpful guide in this respect.

Each composer's profile is followed admirably comprehensively by a list of 'Compositions' all in generic order(I found a shortage of piano solos, since the Maastricht Treaty, and further back) a 'Bibliography' (mostly Dutch references, so you need to be conversant there) and a 'Discography'.

You will find the Dutch fascinating,compelling, engaging, theoretical, playfull, severe,transgressive,passive, opportunists, and tepid and flaming revolutionists of sorts (when it was fashionable to be so) in all genres, particularly their postmodernist utilization of popular genres, as jazz, like the multi-tiered collective democratic Orkest de Volharding, a lean and mean Woody Herman mixed with Luciano Berio timbres, and the high energy of post war European youth.
The Dutch are fantastic improvisors as the Willem Breuker Kollektief manifests,Breuker largely self taught who hated to practice, rather found the language of improvisation to be a path bearing fruit.He wrote much music for film and theatre which has been another vigorous genre for the Dutch. They know where the corridors, the paths to money resides.And getting away from the setting of Brecht texts was an escape into making money. Improvisors actually became in great abundance, a Marxian surplus in The Netherlands after the Bretton Woods Treaty being eradicated, the time of new Anti-Vietnam demonstrations and liberalism with anarchist tinges which took root over the Western democracies as Holland.You will find no shortage of Dutch virtuosi as(also Bass Clarinetist Harry Spaarney). It's a form of escapism from politics, which after the revolution was over New Complexity Populism took Dutch Roots.
Well written arrangements of or original compositions was a focus for various improvisor collectives, many of which have now vanished and have eradicated their original semi-anarchist affinities. The younger generation all crave the high flown complexity musical language a la Ferneyhough, and even that now has run its course into the ground. Pianists as Ivo Janssen is sopmeone to follow in that he plays the entire Dutch repertoire, at least that which is interesting.
Misha Mengelberg(from the famous musical family) is a fascinating composer improvisor pianist.
There are also wonderful orchestral works by imaginative composers as Peter Schat, Tristan Keuris, Konrad Boehmer(a German prize winner who lives now in Amsterdam). We will never hear these orchestral canvases in the United States, who will do these works?, so you may as well read about these developments of the timbre of the orchestra,masterworks,forgotten neglected as "Symphonies" of Peter Schat or Theo Loevendie,again Tristan Keuris.
(Senator Jesse Helms will not give National Endowment funds for Dutch music,to American Orchestras, let the Dutch support their own kind, Jesse will tell ya, from the tobacco millions he spek fer)

Jolande van der Klis is a well known musicologist and is the editor here, great vision in this rather encyclopedic book. I found the type much too small and utilize a magnifying glass much of the time.

Bravi!