In his film music Henny Vrienten managed to touch the mysterious and heavenly

On the death of Henny Vrienten (1948-2022), Rob van Scheers re-listens to five of his versatile soundtracks.

Even before he threatened to fall into the proverbial black hole, Henny Vrienten received a phone call from director Vivian Pieters. She had conceived the plan for the thriller in 1984 The prey. Would he like to write the film score? Now Go ahead still apart, she meant.

‘As long as there isn’t a reggae beat under it’, Vrienten answered. “I’ve seen that now.”

No, no, carte blanche. And so Henny Vrienten started a second life as a film composer at the age of 36, a career switch he made in 2015 at VPRO’s Free Sounds described as ‘a leap of faith’.

We had to understand: within a pop band, everything is verbal. No scores are written there. He couldn’t, by the way, even if he had once studied classical guitar for a few years. He preferred to mess around with his band in the rehearsal room. What if you pick up a D chord there, Ernst? A way of making music that suited him best. Everything intuitive. But now he had to design a soundscape in his Amsterdam home studio that did justice to the tension of the film.

A new beginning: The prey

More than 35 years later we look at The prey on DVD, with special attention to the film music. The plot in brief: the mother of school girl Valerie (Maayke Bouten) is deliberately killed late at night, the perpetrator drives on. Valerie investigates and unravels a conspiracy. We would now call it an entertaining telefilm.

And then Friends. The soundtrack starts with a theme on the synthesizer, panflute position. Here he clearly consulted Ennio Morricone. As the story progresses, a plaintive chromatic harmonica comes along, a deliberately slightly detuned acoustic guitar, pulsating bass tones, and the occasional slap on the keyboard to startle the viewer. Music that serves the film.

He put a pop song under the credits: Only, infectiously sung by Liesbeth List. It was the only time that Vrienten afforded a Doe Maar-esque outing. The film did not do much in the cinema, but from now on more directors would be on the doorstep of Vrienten.

No coincidence, of course, that the name of Ennio Morricone falls here. In 2012, Vrienten was a Summer Guest. One of the topics discussed in the broadcast was the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) with music by Morricone. Nothing happens for the first twelve minutes of this epic western. That is, we see three crooks on a platform in the desert. They are waiting for a train, but it is two hours late. The boredom is expressed in a composition for squeaking and creaking windmills, an annoying bluebottle, the cracking of knuckles – it lasts and it lasts.

Then the train thunders inside, and harmonica player Charles Bronson makes his entrance with his howling blues harp. The squeaky windmill and the buzzing fly are a taste of what Italians call ‘musica concreta’. According to Vrienten this is proof ‘that everything can be music’. To him, Morricone was a celebrity.

Less is more: without a trace

Was his soundtrack from The prey still fairly boarded up, in without a trace (George Sluizer, 1988) he chose less is more. He places an exceptionally languid bass part under the opening images of Johanna ter Steege and Gene Bervoets who are on holiday in France. All the way Henny Vrienten. Very summery, too. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong.

Ten minutes later, Ter Steege is kidnapped by the French sociopath Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) and the music becomes a lot more nervous. Every time that creep shows up, we hear a blistering saxophone. This serves as a vignette, a well-known technique among film composers. Each character gets its own music loop. The public recognizes this and automatically makes the connection. A who’s who in nuts.

‘God yes, that’s my fretless bass in the beginning!’, remembered Vrienten in 2013 when de Volkskrant made a reconstruction of the laborious recording process of without a trace† ‘There was no budget, I did everything myself. With those little organs and a fake guitar I was looking for a kind of uncomfortable, not happy atmosphere. Now I would do it completely differently, with strings. George Sluizer had talked me down for three days beforehand, so that I knew all the deeper layers of the film. Furthermore, he set me completely free.’

Magnum opus: The Discovery of Heaven

Strings. Want to develop as a composer. In his opinion, Vrienten climbed a step higher with each new film. He studied composers such as Stravinsky and Ravel. He learned about dynamics and atonality before he dared to work with the Metropole Orchestra himself, assisted by composer, arranger and conductor Dick Bakker.

Like Friends in Free Sounds explained: ‘I always make a template from the film score. On the piano, on my bass, a mysterious harp. Everything that is diffused and that you cannot get out of an orchestra. Then I recorded it at home. Then I went to the Metropole Orchestra with those tapes, and they had to record them. And that actually went very well, so I could keep my own atmosphere.’

Yes, Morricone could do it all himself with his conservatory training. But for a pop musician – as history has shown – it is not so bad to hire an arranger. Let’s put it this way: The Beatles did it too. This is the experienced producer George Martin, a graduate of London’s Guildhall School of Music.

Then Lennon and McCartney would say: we do hear that trumpet from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerts (with the song Penny Lane) or something à la Mozart (at In My Life), and George Martin took care of that. The rest of the world thought: Gosh, those Beatles are so eclectic. But behind the scenes, the producer’s share was at least as great.

For what we may call his magnum opus, Vrienten went with the Harry Mulisch film adaptation for full orchestra: The Discovery of Heaven (Jeroen Krabbe, 2001). Because the story begins in heaven, a church organ is first put to work. After that it is a bit quieter. Ada Brons (Flora Montgomery), one of the main characters, plays the cello herself, so at first we mainly hear chamber music.

But it is Vrienten who gives sound and color to the key scenes, as in the song The Conception , when Ada is separately impregnated (as heaven intended) by her two lovers Onno Quist (Stephen Fry) and Max Delius (Greg Wise) on the same night. Since we are in Cuba, the music piece starts almost like a bolero (Ravel influences). Acoustic Spanish guitars, but the theme slowly grows into a symphony. Layer upon layer, the entire orchestra in motion, without being bombastic. This is film composer Vrienten at his best. Jeroen Krabbé: ‘He immediately captured the heavenly and mysterious feeling I was looking for, even in the first musical attempts.’

fun project: sailor’s wives

In 1930, the German director Henk Kleinmann shot his Jordanian melodrama sailor’s wives† It was supposed to be the first Dutch sound film, but then the money ran out. In 2003 the film was restored, actors recorded the lyrics and Henny Vrienten made the music. Here he shows his popular side. Polka, accordion, sea shanties, a runaway barrel organ: you will not easily find Jordaneser. Vrienten: ‘Writing film music is a craft. My father was already a carpenter, so I’m just continuing that family tradition.’ For your information: the film can be viewed for free on the EYE film museum website.

Back to rock ‘n’ roll: Everybody Happy

After thirty years of film music, Henny Vrienten had seen it. He started making solo records again with adult pop songs, such as the album But still… (2014). When he appeared he said to de Volkskrant: ‘I enjoy making film music, but it is museum music: most Dutch films are shown briefly in the cinema and after that your music is gone, because that work hardly ever appears as an album. Only children’s films continue to circulate: Kruimeltje, Madelief, Pietje Bell.’

Yet in 2016 he could not say no to the Flemish director Nic Balthazar, with whom he had previously worked on Until forever (2012). This was the deal: Vrienten was going to write the music for the comedy Everybody Happy which the Belgian rock group Triggerfinger would perform. The story is about a stand-upper who has a bright future behind him, the soundtrack is first and foremost: guys with guitars. Brilliant pop, rock, slide guitar, back to basics. For the composer it must have felt as if the circle was closed.

Final chord

It is a pity that no comprehensive documentary has ever been made about Henny Vrienten as a film composer. As it is now about Morricone in the cinema: Ennio, from director Guiseppe Tomatore. A parade of enthusiastic spokesmen of the caliber Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood and Bruce Springsteen tends to be hagiography, but to watch the maestro at work is a joy, and the viewer learns a lot about what makes a film composer tick. We would have liked to hear more about this from Henny Vrienten.