He has been living here for a month now, Camiel Jansen (34) says proudly about the small studio apartment in Amsterdam. He renovated and installed everything himself, and everything also needs to be designated: kitchen, walls, cupboards, lamps, styling. In six weeks. He walks from here to here in the thirty square meters, coffee grinder in hand. Yes, he is going crazy from the work in the street, would I like a vegetable juice too? I milled the electricity here myself, tiles still need to be laid there, just sit down, sorry I have nothing to eat.
Thud. Finally, the most energetic, or perhaps even busiest, composer in the Netherlands sits down. Slouched a little, shoulders slumped. He looks tired. Jansen is busy, productive and obsessed. There are three major commissioned compositions, he works at the Amsterdam Conservatory, he presents concerts and he is increasingly invited by NPO Classic asked as a presenter.
And now Camiel Jansen gets another job: he is our new Composer of the Netherlands. “A huge honor. I’m really looking forward to it.”
As a child, Jansen composed a lot. But he was twenty when he first seriously put notes on paper for other people. “Music must sound good,” he has learned over the past fourteen years. “I want my aunt who knows little about music to come to a concert and think ‘wow, beautiful!’ Regardless of whether the message gets across.”
Sit, stand up, sit, stand up. Are you also busy when you compose?
“Yes, then I’m talking to myself like a frothing at the mouth.”
He is now working on a six-minute piano quintet for violinist Emma Roijackers and her Hear and Now festival. “Six minutes sounds short, but it is actually quite difficult to tell a story in six minutes.” And then he also has to hand in an opera in the same week in February. Both must be good. “There is no such thing as a seven. It is either a nine or a four.”
What do you mean?
“Because composing is a creative process. Something is inspired or not: a nine or a four. I think I am really satisfied with only three or four pieces of mine, and even then only a few minutes.”
Aren’t you too hard on yourself? Mozart and Beethoven also wrote sevens, right?
“That’s true. It’s of course super subjective. I can tell from my music whether I was inspired or not. But you have a point, Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and they all sound the same. I can’t do that, write ‘per meter’, so to speak. I don’t have one style either. That’s a weakness. I like composers who have one sound. Steve Reich, John Luther Adams. Mozart too. I don’t think I dare to do that, can and will.”
Why don’t you want it?
“I want those things fresh sound. Well, that also puts a lot of pressure on yourself. Plus, the audience isn’t looking forward to it at all. That does require a certain predictable signature. Hmm, why don’t I accept sevens? What a confronting question.”
Jansen thinks for a moment.
“You have to be your own shit also a bit bad, I think. Otherwise you become complacent. You have to continue to sharpen your own language.”
Do you never sit at your piano and think: ‘ooh, what I wrote now sounds great’?
“Yes, it is. These are often moments of a few hours, a kind of flow in which you work out an idea that you firmly believe in. That is a pink cloud, wonderful, a fantastic feeling. Every composer has that. But that feeling sours quite quickly. The chance that you can recall that again two days later is small.”
“When I write a piece I am constantly unsure: ‘Will the musicians like it enough to play? what kind of clown is this.’ Arjan Linker came recently [trombonist en componist] along here. What a genius. I showed the first sketches of the piano quintet and played something. He listened and said, “Hmm. It’s not so clear what you want. I think you’re unsure whether it’s interesting enough.’ And then his finger shot to bar 13: “I can see you here you started, but you find this triad too simple, and then you go there and there there are bugs in the instrumentation and eventually your idea becomes cloudy.’ Man, that was so confrontational. I threw the whole idea away, and since that conversation I have been trying to let go of the critical musician delusion.”
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Yet many of your pieces do have a common denominator: activism. Isn’t that also a signature?
“That’s true! That’s not at the note level, but I certainly have a signature in terms of projects. Namely that I want to put music into the clay with both feet. As a maker you have a social responsibility: you are given that stage, then you have to do something with it. I often say it: a composer is a sponge and a mirror. You absorb the environment and you give it back.”
So a six-minute piano quintet must also have a social theme?
“I think I’m going to give it a socially reflective thing in the title, yes. But the larger projects are better suited for it. That opera I’m composing for the Chamber Music Festival Schiermonnikoog is about the housing market. About a rich yuppie woman who comes out of a burnout and can outbid a ton on a house on Schier, while the son of an islander has to move to shore.”
You trained as a jazz bassist, but now mainly write for classical musicians. That must have been quite a change?
“You can give a jazz musician a composition on a beer mat. It took some getting used to the fact that classical musicians play a G when there is a G, while I think ‘you understand that that can also be a D, right?’ Or they would want to know exactly what something should sound like, and I would say ‘yeah, you know, a bow like that.’ No, that’s not how it works in classical music. It took me a while to learn to appreciate their respect for the composer. Now I am very precise.”
How do you actually become a Composer of the Netherlands?
“That was very strange. That morning in August, my then girlfriend asked: ‘Which awards would you like to win?’ Composer of the Netherlands, that seems to me fucking fatI said. Only I thought that was too late. My big project The Foundations [zie kader] had been the ideal occasion. That afternoon I got a call.”
“Then you have to pitch ideas. They not only want to get to know you as a composer, but also want to know how you will actively carry out the ambassadorship.”
And then you said?
“I will group my music for the next two years under the heading ‘sound for the divide’. I want to organize projects that show the contradictions in the Netherlands as they really are. I have the feeling that people are becoming increasingly alienated from each other. But at the same time I know that that is not the case. Research by the Social and Cultural Planning Office and CPB says that we are much closer together than we think. We all want the same thing: prosperity, good education, equal opportunities. Politics responds to the differences, I want to show the similarities.”
Can new music just be music for music’s sake, or does it have to have a social theme?
“Music is the starting point. I don’t think of a topic ‘because it is important now’ and put music under it. I see something in society and hear a sound about it. Or I hear a sound that reminds me of a social theme. Ideally, music and theme reinforce each other.”
“I certainly also believe in music for music’s sake. However, I am not yet at a point in my development where I trust it. For now, I still like to be inspired by my environment, the newspaper, politicians who make me angry.”
Do you ever incorporate something very personal into your music? Heartbreak, for example?
“I don’t write like a tormented artist, but I am a very emotional person, of course I return to the music myself. I hear exactly how I felt at the time with each piece. But just writing a violin sonata about my own break upNo, I’ve never done that. Maybe I should try that. But it’s so cliché.
The world is built on clichés.
“That’s true. They should write a song about that.”
In the meantime, Jansen has gotten up at least five times for a polar bear tour. Get water, put on music (jazz), accept a package (thrown on the bed in a parabolic arc), show your self-built piano. “I really need some mental peace, man…”
Do you recommend it, being a composer?
Jansen stares out the window for a while.
“I recommend everyone to be involved with music. It is healing, healthy for your emotional process and for your connection with people around you. Really, even if you do a karaoke evening. Every person has to do that. But do I advise everyone to lock yourself up for four months to put notes on paper? No. To do that you always have to go through a confrontational conversation with yourself, you have to want that. Although it is ultimately healthy. You learn a lot about yourself.”
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