He stood out for his idiosyncratic style of conducting: without baton and singing along with the compositions. Rosario Mussendijk, alias rapper Sor, became known last winter when he made the final of the TV program Maestro won. “I had never heard of the show, because I hardly watch TV. But when I got wind of it, I immediately wanted to learn to conduct. I had absolutely no idea how to do that, but I did know: I’m that nerd who wants to dive into this. “I’ve already won,” I said when the program asked me if I had the spirit to win.”
So Sor (Amsterdam, 1996) was passionately singing along with the orchestral works while conducting. “Classical music is dying in youth, I often hear,” he says. “That is only partly true. If you ask my peers if they know “La Valse d’Amélie” by Yann Tiersen, they will say no. While if you ask them about the movie Amelie, they’ll probably say that’s that movie with that beautiful music. Classic isn’t dying, they just don’t come into contact with it in a conscious way. I’m going to change that with my record.”
His debut album will be released on Friday Bae Doven† The title hints at one of the composers whose work Sor reinterprets, but also at one of the similarities between them: hearing problems.
Deaf
Sor came up with the in 2017 hip-hop collective Black Acid† While still working under the producer name Ros, he and the group gained fame with quirky clips and hard performances. A bright future beckoned. Until he suddenly woke up deaf. Cause unknown. The doctors think it’s an autoimmune disease. He was turned inside out several times and nothing was found. His hearing in one ear is now only five percent. And with the other he hears forty percent. Thanks to drugs, a hearing aid, a microphone around his neck and a backpack subwoofer that presses the bass into his back, he was able to make music again.
Above the classic samples, hard basses and strings, Sor talks about it on his album. About how he struggled with the thought that his hearing loss was a case of karma, and about how bad his acting is that he’s all right. “A friend who has heard the whole album described it perfectly. He felt that I was rapping damaged on my first EP. On my second with my ‘chest’ (slang for with pride, with persuasiveness, ed.) and now I rap with my heart. That touched me. But I’m very proud of it. I can really relate to that description.”
The plan for a hip-hop album with only classical instruments, to “dig deeper than just the synthesizers that I was known from”, he has had since an impulse purchase in 2020: the purchase of a violin. “In retrospect, a very bad one, but good. After tuning it for two hours, I looked to see if I could get a note out of it. A month later I called my manager because I knew how my album was going to sound.”
Erik Satie
Are there no snags in using pieces by Satie or Beethoven? “The things I want to sample can actually be sampled royalty-free, because the longest-living maker died seventy years or more ago. Why hardly anyone does it is because it’s very difficult to take it out of the context in which it exists. For example, if you want to sample Beethoven, and I’ve tried that quite a few times, it’s hard to make something original out of it.”
Apart from the fact that he likes it, he says, he is also just a nerd who can no longer enjoy the quality of the sound through his ears, but all the more the compositions. “They change time signatures, they don’t have a fixed tempo, and now there are conductors conducting everything differently. Things like that make it fun for me to sort through.”
For the single ‘Zozijn’ he sampled one of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédies’ and converted it to a four-four time. Sor’s eyes twinkle as he hums the composition. “That theme is really beautiful, it was my entrance to classical music as a young boy. Satie was ‘mad’. He could commit himself to get inspiration at regular intervals, by simply adding ‘inspiring’ to his agenda. He is also the creator of the ambient genre. Musique d’Ameublement, he called it. He played in whorehouses, and when people looked at him, he stopped playing. His music was made for atmosphere, to have in the background. I find that hard.”
Interfaces
Hip-hop and classical music have a lot in common, says Sor. “Beethoven and Mozart were rebellious. If they were making music now, it would be hip-hop. I feel like I’ve always been a rebel as an artist. In ‘Hmm hmm’, one of my previous singles, I say: ‘Fuck the media, I say that loud, I say that loud/ They’re on my skin, but they don’t even fuck with my skin.” Then I was rapping those sentences twice as loud at a party of the NPO. Later I heard that the director thought that was the best performance of the day, and that the message had got through.”
At his concert on May 26 in the Concertgebouw, he plans to rap, sing, conduct and make music with his ‘sorchestral’. Very exciting, he thinks. “I now have the first Codarts Rotterdam scores, so that I can already get to know the musicians.”
He hopes that “commercial media will realize that hip-hop is more than what they think now.” “On the other hand, I want hip-hop musicians to realize that focusing on composition pays off. People often continue to do what they are used to, while that is not where hip-hop started. If I only want to sing high and unintelligible on a track, that should be possible. As long as I say what I want to say. That to me is hip-hop.”