Battleground (2025)

‘Battleground’ was part of the project ‘Een flat met 1000 ramen’ created for the String Quartet Biennal of 2025 in Amsterdam. In this project involved 6 composers who had been commissioned to compose a contemporary answer to Joseph Haydns six quartets, Opus 20, in combination with a narrative written by Joke van Leeuwen. Battleground has been composed as a ‘musical comment’ to the second quartet of Opus 20. It is based two motives from this quartet: the trills from the second movement and the fugue theme from the fourth movement of Haydn’s quartet. The narrative deals with a young student; whose father is a war photographer. She yearns for a connection with him, but he seems unreachable. In this setting, Haydn’s quartet symbolizes the musical world of the father, while ‘Battleground’ symbolizes the inner world and imagination of the daughter as she longs for a real connection and considers even joining him, the next time he will visit another warzone. 

The piece consists of four movements:

1. The sky has changed. Trills and harmonics dominate this piece, creating a calm yet slightly unsettling atmosphere. In essence this movement is a 15-note choral, hesitantly waiting, longing for a resolution.The movement ends with a hesitant, first attempt of constructing Haydn’s fugue motive in the cello, waiting to make a connection with the past.

2. No more doors, nor windows. This movement is about total shock. There is a static electrical charge through the whole movement. There is sound of pizzicato ticking away like seconds on a clock and dark blurry chords in the low registers, but without a clear direction until halfway the higher registers break through with the return of the choral from the first movement, building a feeling of longing that bursts in a pulsating, angry statement. The movement closes with variations of Haydn’s fugue theme again, this time performed by the violins and viola, alternating, while the cello holds every upbeat.

3. Off limits. The 15-note theme from the choral but now played in an aggressive pizzicato variant returns, with the two upper voices playing the original in parallel diminished 4ths and the two lower voices playing the inversion in parallel major 6ths. This transitions gradually into a sound that could remind of a drum computer. Reletless, square, machine-like. 

4. Epilogue. The fugue theme in three different speeds in the upper voices repeats like a clockwork set to three different speeds, while the cello in an eerie high register plays the 15-note choral theme for the very last time in an attempt to reach out. Yet the clocks stop. One by one.