Set to perform the Harp Concerto by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, for the opening concert of the Dutch Harp Festival (Real Men Play the Harp – March 27^th), German harpist Andreas Mildner takes a moment out of his busy orchestra schedule to tell us about his perspective as a male harpist, commissioning pieces for tuba and harp, and what rock band he recommends.

Elizabeth Jaxon: Have you ever personally encountered the stereotype that the harp is a feminine instrument?

Andreas Mildner: No, actually, I personally don’t think it’s still a stereotype. For me, there is no difference anymore between male and female harpists. In the number of players overall, of course there is a difference, but if you look in the orchestras at the moment, there are many male harpists.

EJ: Why did you choose to play the harp?

AM: I wanted to do something different from my brothers. We all played instruments, though they are not musicians now. When I was six years old, it was clear to me that I had to play an instrument, for myself. My brothers played violin and piano, and I just wanted to do something completely different, so I chose the harp.

EJ: Have you played Schafer’s other great work for harp, the Crown of Ariadne?

AM: I teach it sometimes, but I’ve never played it in a concert. The concerto is a completely different style from the Crown of Ariadne.

EJ: What qualities would you say make a great concerto soloist?

AM: Hm, that’s a good question… I think, you have to be a great artist. You have to say something. There are many good musicians, but there are just a few who really have something to say. It’s not anything specific to the harp; this is the case for all musicians. I think this is the most important thing. Then, of course, you have to have all the necessary technique and skill.

EJ: You have a duo with tuba! One normally wouldn’t think that harp and tuba would go well together. How do you make it work? What kind of repertoire do you play?

AM: We only play pieces which are written for us. When the tuba player [Andreas Hofmeir] first asked me if we could play together – six or seven years ago – I wasn’t sure if the combination would work. But I love it, because if you have a tuba player who can play really soft, then there’s no problem with balance. You can play pianissimo on the harp and can still be heard. There are many duos written for horn and harp, and the tuba is so similar to the horn, so, why not?

EJ: So, you transcribe some of these piece for horn?

AM: No, no, we just play original works. We have transcribed two pieces, but normally we prefer to play originals. We play pieces by young German composers, for example Adrian Sieber, older composers… We have a wide variety of pieces of totally different styles: from avant-garde, with special effects, to beautiful music, in the style of film music.

EJ: Does your duo have a CD?

AM: Yes, it’s coming out soon. I thought in February, but it’s not here yet, so perhaps in March.

EJ: Have you ever commissioned anything for harp solo.

AM: Yes, but it’s not finished yet. I’m waiting for two pieces right now, but one of them I’ve been waiting for for over two years! I don’t have a fixed deadline, because I want the composer to have time to think about the harp and what he’s going to write. 

EJ: Do you give the composer a blank slate, or do you have any ideas yourself of what you want from the piece?

AM: Hm, sort of. For example, I commissioned a piece for flute and harp half a year ago – we did the premier in October – and the only thing I told the composer was that I wanted some kind of relationship to a certain Mozart violin sonata. He just took two bars of the rhythm, and that was the connection.

EJ: What music do you listen to for fun?

AM: I listen to contemporary jazz. We have a very good jazz pianist in Germany, and I’m enjoying his CDs at the moment. I also like alternative rock, probably because it’s the most important music to listen to these days. I listen to bands from different countries – Sweden and Canada.

EJ: Any bands in particular?

AM: The Weakerthans. (http://www.theweakerthans.org/)

EJ: I’m looking forward to hearing you play next month!

AM: Thanks, see you there!

Elizabeth Jaxon: As competition director, what has your role in the preparation for the 2012 festival been?

Marit Eisses: I’ve coordinated the competition, basically from the beginning. My job currently involves processing the applications, and I am also responsible for all the communication with the contestants. In the [board] meetings, I am the person who represents the competition. When there’s a conflict between the festival interests and the competition, I’m the one who defends the competition’s interests. I look at the whole event from the competitors’ point of view, whereas the business director, for instance, would take the financial approach to things and perhaps argue points by saying, “We would really have to look at our budget.” I would be the one to say, “No, we have to think of our contestants.”

All the board members are doing multiple things, actually. I’m the competition director, but I’m also the head of the secretariat, so I’m receiving all incoming communication, coordinating the meetings, doing all the translations and editing, and basically everything having to do with written texts.

EJ: As your regular day-job, I understood you work with costumes. So then, how did you get involved in organizing a harp festival?

ME: Yes, I’m a dress historian, actually. I work at the fashion and costume department of the Gemeentemuseum [Municipal Museum of The Hague]. I first met Remy back when I was younger, we come from the same town. We kind of lost touch, but two years ago we found each other again, and I offered to help him with the organization of the Dutch Harp Festival. For the first edition of the festival, I was involved as an assistant to the PR department, to the secretariat also, and I was the competition jury secretary. For this second edition, most of the people who were on the board last time had left, but apparently some of them had recommended me to take over one of the positions, so I was asked to join the board. True, I’m not very much involved with the harp, but I do very much enjoy it.

This festival is certainly a change from what I usually do. It’s a big contrast to be, on the one hand, competition director for the Dutch Harp Festival, and on the other hand, just a department assistant at the museum. Along with the other board members of the DHF, I’m on top of everything, I get to make the decisions, and I have a lot of influence over how things will happen.

EJ: As we’re having this conversation [Nov 15, 2011], the submission deadline for the tape round of the Harp Competition is just about to arrive. Can you explain how the judging for this round will take place?

ME: We’re collecting all the application documents right now. The first thing that will happen is we will review all the documents to see if everything is in order. The artistic committee will check whether the program is okay: whether it’s within the time limit and whether they agree with it artistically. When everything is in order and the quality of the audio recordings are checked, then there will be a jury sitting. We have invited three jury members to judge all the audio recordings. We’ll make the recordings anonymous, so the jury members will not know who is playing what. Once we have the results, we’ll have to wait until we have everyone’s confirmation and everyone has paid the registration fee and promises to come to Holland, then we can announce the names of the contestants and do everything to prepare for the live competition.

EJ: You said there are three jury members, but they are anonymous, right?

ME: Yes, we can’t announce their identities, because otherwise they could technically speaking make contact with the contestants, or the contestants could make contact with them and send them their audio recordings so they could perhaps recognize it when judging… Not that we do not trust our jury, but of course we don’t want that to be possible, we really want to guarantee the anonymity of the audio recordings. That’s why there are really strict procedures. I’m the only person who knows the identity of the candidates and which recordings they sent in, so I don’t get to be present at some of the jury sittings, for example when they decide where the cut-off point is established for how many contestants will go through. Nobody else can hear the audio recordings before the jury sitting as well; I’m the only one who has access to them. It’s a rigorous procedure. If you want to organize a competition with a high level of transparency and not allow for any corruption, you have to be quite strict. Otherwise, there are too many loopholes. I just want to be able to tell everyone it was really honest, and you can check that we didn’t do anything debatable or didn’t influence anything ourselves. The results came directly from the jury and weren’t anything that we could have affected.

EJ: Are there any other things about the
procedure of this competition that makes this one unique?

ME: The basic one is this issue of anonymity: the fact that two of the rounds take place behind a screen, or at least without the identities of the contestants being revealed. Therefore, initially, it’s entirely about the music and not about other things that may consciously or unconsciously influence a jury’s judgment, such as how someone looks, or whether they know this person, or what their nationality is. The first judgment is
really just the music.

Also, the jury is approached not as a collective team who together have to evaluate and judge the performance of the contestant, but the jury members are invited as individual musicians who individually must decide which candidates they prefer. There shouldn’t be any influence from the other jury members within the evaluation; they can’t discuss the candidates. And they don’t give any grades as part of the voting procedure. With a lot of other competitions, they have to give you a number on the scale of 1 to 10 how well you perform, and usually you have these very extreme grades which significantly affect the average grade, by which one jury member can sometimes exert a lot of influence over the outcome. In every round of the Dutch Harp Competition, the jury members just have to answer the question, “Do I want to hear this contestant again? Yes or no.” And for the final round they just have to make an order of ranks, “Who do you think should receive 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize?” They don’t get to add further subjectivity to it. But, of course, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. As is the case with these blind auditions, you can’t always tell the difference between young contestants and those who are older and who have therefore just had more experience and more time to learn. Behind the screen, you can’t see if someone is just very young and still has a lot of development to go through. You can’t give them credit for being a brilliant harpist at 14 years old but just not as good as someone who already has an established career.

EJ: But that’s often an issue in competitions, because people are impressed when the young ones can play well. It’s kind of a handicap to be older, in a way.

ME: Yes, it must be true that you’re often at a disadvantage to be older.

EJ: But behind a screen, you can use your experience to your advantage.

ME: There’s one other element by which we really try to create an honest judging procedure. We’re taking care how we establish who will be on the juries for the preliminary round and the competition in March, because we want to create a very balanced jury, in most ways. We want jury members from different nationalities and also an equal number of men and women (or at least not all men and one woman). We want to have older musicians as well as younger ones and also more non-harpists than harpists. This way, you get a lot of different influences combined. It’s sometimes said about competitions which take place in a specific country, that harpists from that country always win. I think part of that phenomenon is the national allegiances of the jury members and the competitors, but it’s also just the style of playing that people have learned to appreciate within their own country. We really want to let that go and make sure the Dutch style doesn’t necessarily get preference, that different tastes and different musical traditions are represented in the jury.

Marit and some of her favourite reform dresses, currently on display at the Gemeentemuseum. Photograph taken by Astrid Hulsmann.

Marius Flothuis (1914-2001)
Dutch composer, musicologist, and music critic

Despite composing around 100 works, in almost every genre, Marius Flothuis had no formal training in  composition. He had studied piano from an early age, and inventing new music had always gone hand-in-hand with his explorations of the instrument. He premiered his first creations while still in grammar school. Otherwise, his music education and subsequent work centered mainly around musicology. He wrote extensively, authoring many articles, critical reviews, and several books. In his research, he displayed a special preference for Mozart. His doctoral thesis was on Mozart’s arrangements of his own works and of works by other composers, and his book “Mozart’s Piano Concertos” explores the classical composer’s evolution through his concertos. Flothuis arranged the Divertimenti for piano and completed cadenzas for all of Mozart’s piano concertos, for which they had not already been written. Many harpists may be familiar with his cadenzas for Mozart’s flute and harp concerto, arguably the most stylistically sensitive we have to choose from.

The positions Flothuis held over the years gave him a central place within the musical society of the Netherlands in the 20^th century. He was associated with the famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for many years, serving first as assistant to the artistic director, then as programme editor, and finally as artistic director himself. He also worked as a music critic, the librarian at Donemus Amsterdam, professor of musicology in Utrecht, and chairman of the Zentralinstitut für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg. It is amazing to think that he found time for composing, on top of all these responsibilities he assumed.

His prefered genre was chamber music, and he also featured the voice in many of his works. Strangely, of all the songs he composed – with either piano or orchestral accompaniment – the one genre he never pursued was opera. His œuvre also includes many lesser-known pieces for harp, or for various combinations of chamber ensemble with harp. For those who have discovered Flothuis through the Pour le tombeau d’Orphée, it may be particularly interesting to explore the rest of what he has written for the instrument.

• Kleine suite, for twelve harps (1951)
• Sonata da camera, for flute and harp, (1951), awarded the Northern California
  Harpists Association Prize.
• Berceuse brève, for harp, op. 75, no. 1
  (1963)
• Allegro vivace, for two harps, op. 75,
  no. 2 (1969)
• Molto lento, for harp, op. 75, no. 3
  (1975)
• Allegro, con precisione, for harp, op.
  75, no. 4 (1978)
• Allegro fugato, for three harps, op. 75,
  no. 5 (1984/1994)
• Six easy studies, for harp, op. 87
  (1985-6)
• Sonorités opposées, for harp, op. 75,
  no. 6 (1986)
• Rapsodie, for harp, op. 102 (1999)
• Saraband, for mezzo-soprano and harp, op. 103 (2001)
• Odysseus and Nausikaa, madrigal for voice quartet and harp, op. 60 (1958-60)
• Trois nocturnes, for cello and harp, op. 84 (1983-4)
• Poeme, for harp and small orchestra, op. 96 (1993)

The solo that will be performed by the contestants in the Dutch Harp Competition – Pour le tombeau d’Orphée – was written in 1950. Flothuis dedicated the piece to Phia Berghout, one of the most highly regarded harpists of his generation in Holland. She played with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and, later in life, was one of the founders of the World Harp Congress. Even just within the Tombeau we can see many characteristic elements of Flothuis’ style. Above all, he was concerned with the quest for purity and beauty. His most important musical influences were Mozart, Debussy, and Willem Pijper (a Dutch composer of the generation previous to Flothuis). Like the former two, Flothuis concentrated much of his attention on form and the relationship of form to content. In these aspects, his work is concise and displays clarity and balance. Borrowing from Pijper’s germ-cell technique, he had a style of constructing very short motives, each with a limited range and minimal repetition of notes, and then sending these motives through endless variation. This technique appears from the very beginning of the Tombeau. His melodies – those in the Tombeau being no exception – have a way of winding along chromatically by whole- and half-steps. He makes use of polyrhythms, polymeters, and irregular meters, which appear here as unexpected devices to create variation throughout the piece. And, while he was aware of the post-modernist drive to free music of tonality, and he did experiment with dodecaphonism in some of his works, his could not deny the need for his music to gravitate to one or more tonal center.

It is said that Marius Flothuis lead his life – both professional and personal – with great integrity. Even throughout the tumult that the second world war caused in Western Europe, he stuck to his ideals, upheld his sense of morality, and always sought truth. In as much as one’s soul is made transparent through music, Flothuis’ compositions reflect this admirable character. This is as great a legacy as anyone could hope to leave.

References:
- Joyce Kiliaan, ‘Marius Flothuis’, Amsterdam: 1999
- Stichting Donemus, ‘Catalogus van werken van Nederlandse componisten; 5: Marius Flothuis’, Amsterdam 1950