Composer Theo Loevendie (91) will be the first to confirm that he has a great future behind him. But that doesn’t stop him from having dreams. Like writing a string quartet. Only no one ever asked for it, so Loevendie decided to take the opposite route. He scoured the internet for Dutch string quartets, “And there are quite a few.” Finally he heard the sound he was looking for in the young Dudok Quartet. And so a letter fell on the doormat of the musicians. “We regularly receive requests from composers if they can write something for us,” says cellist David Faber, “But not of such an international caliber as Loevendie.” The two generations found each other; Wednesday evening the Dudok will be launching Loevendie’s new string quartet in the Concertgebouw.
Today, a week before the premiere, they are playing the piece in Café Welling, the composer’s favorite pub, where he gave a jazz concert three days earlier. Now Loevendie is listening at a round table with a blue Uzbek cap on his head. He has quite a collection at home. “Every time I went to an Asian country, I bought one,” he says.
The four-part string quartet bears witness to the influences his music underwent. It includes a ‘Dutch’ clog dance, a Turkish Zeybek and a ‘Fugitive Jig’, a playful reference to the fugue and the gigue – from the toolbox of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he admired. But everything bears Loevendie’s own, idiosyncratic rhythmic stamp.
Also read the interview with Theo Loevendie: Theo Loevendie: ‘I have led an adventurous life’
Big catch up
With some imagination you could hear his biography in it: raised in the poor Amsterdam Kinkerbuurt among market vendors, driven by an insatiable curiosity about the world beyond. His teacher took him to organ concerts by Bach when he was eight. In the early 1950s he traveled to Istanbul as a jazz clarinetist and met his future Turkish wife on the boat. Encouraged by her, he did not enter the conservatory until well into his twenties.
“My life is one big catching up,” he grins. “I was not brought up in any tradition, either religiously or musically. But I am in awe of it, I never reject anything, because traditions are breeding grounds. The fact that I am not a supporter of anything gives me the freedom to find knowledge and inspiration all over the world. I usually derisively call myself an exoticist.”
In the early 1960s, during his studies, Loevendie wrote his first string quartet, which he now calls ‘a run-up’. “That didn’t sound or smell like adulthood yet.” At the end of his career, the composer wanted to delve into this form again. “I initially had the plan to build on the legacy of Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók. I was irresistibly drawn to the way the Dudok Quartet played Haydn, a composer for whom I have boundless admiration. Damn, that’s the way it should be, was my first thought.”
Playfulness and humor
But after the first movement, he took a different turn when he came across an arrangement of a gypsy piece by the quartet. “Balkan music in seven-eighths.” He drums enthusiastically on the table. “I often call myself a half-Turk and with such a time signature it is impossible for me to sit still. I realized that the Dudoks can go either way rhythmically, so I decided to continue dancing.
The musicians experience working with Loevendie as a relief. “The string quartet as a high art form is often admired so much,” says first violinist Judith van Driel. “But in Haydn’s day it was not expensive. A string quartet embodied above all the joy of making music, which we are always looking for. Theo composes with Haydn-like playfulness and humor.”
This is one reason why the quartet also plays many of its own arrangements by jazz musicians such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans. “That brings us closer to the craft and further from the altar,” says cellist David Faber.
“And in that I feel a bond with the Dudoks,” says Loevendie. “They don’t retreat to a small piece of sacred classical ground, but expand their field of view and the world.”
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