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John Borstlap (1950) is a Dutch composer, born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He is one of the earliest European pioneers working on a ‘renaissance’ of tonal and classical traditions. Strong reactions to both his music and writings, pro as well as contra, typify him as an unusual figure in the otherwise calm field of contemporary music.

He grew up in Overschie, a suburb of Rotterdam, as the son of a couple who were both painters. As a composer, Borstlap developed during the period that in the Netherlands a form of combative modernism emerged, which from the sixties onwards established itself along more or less ideological lines and in opposition to the regular performance practice which, by younger composers, was considered outdated and politically burdened by conservatism. Having no confidence in modernism and the following postmodernist fashions, he created a relatively small oeuvre which is rooted in pre-war traditions, which inevitably isolated him from current trends in new music at the time. From the eighties onwards, his chamber music began to be performed regularly, and in the new millenium his work and ideas appear to have been comparable to revisionist trends in painting (new figurative art) and architecture (classicist / traditionalist new architecture, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world).

Family background
John Borstlap stems from an artistic milieu: both his artist parents provided an atmosphere where the visual arts and music were seen as an essential part of life. His father had (before the Second World War) also worked as décorateur at the theatre in Rotterdam, where German opera companies provided a short annual opera season. Classical music, in the form of recordings and classical radio stations, was almost always present and thus formed a natural backdrop. He was the first child of the second marriage of his father, whose first wife had died in the war. In 1952 his sister was born. Student days After enrolling in the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music in 1968 for studying the piano and the organ, Borstlap quickly showed great musical talents, especially in music theory and solfeggio. After one year, the organ study was discontinued and replaced by composition, his teacher being Otto Ketting, at the time a well-known composer of the younger generation. After a couple of years of fast development on the piano (with his teacher Elly Salomé), progress slackened and interest waned. Being, at first, very interested in the offerings of the composition course, and after some explorations in the then fashionable atonal modernism, he turned towards tonal traditions which met with sceptical disapproval from his teacher who, nonetheless, let him go his own way. When however, after 6 years, the final exam approached, it appeared that Borstlap was not allowed to take the exam because he had developed in a way that showed ‘not enough understanding of modernism’.

Early development
After the failed attempt to round-off his studies, which also excluded him from the possibilities of studying abroad, in 1973 he went to the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra with his first tonal piece ‘Invocazione’ and played it to Jean Fournet, then chief conductor of the orchestra, who liked the work (‘Enfin de la vraie musique’) and promised to include it in one of his future programmes. Half a year spent in Paris, sight-seeing and working at the Chambre de Commerce next to some private music teaching, also offered the opportunity to see Fournet again and to remind him of his promise, which was soon after fulfilled in a radio recording of ‘Invocazione’ with the Dutch Radio

Philharmonic Orchestra
After having moved to Delft in 1974, John Borstlap made a living by private piano teaching and accompanying ballet classes, while carrying-out extensive studies in art history, Jungian psychology and delving into the scores of composers he admired and studied. The American pianist Christopher Czaja Sager, who had shortly before settled in the Netherlands, discovered some of his piano pieces which he performed many times, including radio recordings. In 1981 Sager premièred Borstlap’s ‘Variations’ for piano and string orchestra (commissioned by the Johan Wagenaar Foundation) with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Antoni Ros-Marbà with performances in Amsterdam and The Hague.

Cambridge and beyond
In 1984 Borstlap successfully competed, on the basis of two prizes he had meanwhile won with his Violin Concerto (Wieniawki Competition in Poznan and Prince Pierre de Monaco Competition in Monaco), for a full British Council Scholarship for a year study at the Music Faculty of the University of Cambridge, which ended a long period of artistic isolation. In Cambridge he studied with Alexander Goehr, who had introduced modernism in England and represented its Schönbergian strand. As Borstlap wrote in his book, ‘The Classical Revolution’ (2013): “Understanding the Schönbergian heritage would mean understanding of the origin of musical modernism.”

After taking the Master of Philosophy Degree he returned to the Netherlands where he worked a couple of years in music management, during which period his composition work was laid aside. Various applications at the national music fund, the Dutch centralized funding institution which made grants and fees for commissions available so that composers could spend much of their time on their work, were rejected on artistic grounds, with the result that most of the commissions which came his way, could not be paid. When the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Hartmut Haenchen performed Borstlap’s ‘Sinfonia’ (in fact, his first symphony) in 1990, a work which was received well by players and audiences alike, he decided that, to be able to compose, he had to choose for the relative poverty of the Amsterdam social security benefit, on the consideration that he had a right to be paid for his work which began to be performed regularly, and that it made no real difference whether the work was paid via one or another state channel. In the nineties John Borstlap was involved in various projects, one of them being an extensive concert tour of the Ludwig Trio for which he wrote a string trio, the production of a CD with his chamber music and the organization of a chamber music festival in Haarlem, a historic town close to Amsterdam. While working on his music, his writings on musical and wider cultural subjects began to be published, and his critique upon the Dutch music subsidy system began to take the form of a cultural analysis, causing some constroversy and heated debate.

The beginning of the new millennium saw various performances of his elaboration of a Wagner sketch, ‘Psyche’, in Manchester, the Netherlands and Rumania, and the publication of a long essay: ‘Recreating the Classical Tradition’ in the tome ‘Reviving the Muse’ (Claridge Press UK 2001) in which Borstlap formulated his latest ideas about the possibilities of a renaissance of the tonal tradition. ‘Psyche’ received a successful performance by the Orchestre National de Montpellier in 2008.

The conflict with the music fund
As a result of the increasing frustration about the impossibility to be correctly paid for his commissions, something that was also increasingly experienced by various other Dutch composers who did not agree with the aesthetic consensus of the Dutch new music establishment, in 2003 he set up the ‘Composers Group Amsterdam’ (with composers Joep Franssens and Jeff Hamburg) with the aim to campaign for a reform of the subsidy system. This resulted in a half-hearted reform in 2006, under the pressure of the Ministry entrusted with the responsibility of art subsidies, and with great resistence from the small circle of composers who considered themselves representing Dutch music in general and thus entitled to sit at the board and in the artistic committees of the national music fund, thus influencing the selection process of payments along artistic lines. Borstlap’s analysis of this system, as expounded in various articles, among which in the Dutch Journal of Music Theory, contributed to some wider awareness of the defects of this system, but not enough to make a real reform possible. In spite of growing recognition of Borstlap’s work in music life, payment of his commissions continued to be problematic, since the music fund refused to take any positive feedback in concert practice into consideration. In 2012, after another rejection of payment of a commission, Borstlap took the music fund into court where he won his case: the fund was shown-up as being biased, careless, and refusing to consider the clear signals of recognition in music life. But the court also approved the refusal by the fund of payment. In the ensuing appeal procedure at the Supreme Court, the court changed a deadline with retroactive effect, so that some essential documents that Borstlap had brought into the procedure could be ignored. This long-drawn struggle to obtain a basic right to be paid for his work confirmed Borstlap’s conclusion that in the Netherlands, new music is treated and paid for along ideological lines and not according to the instructions of the Ministry, where artistic quality and functioning in music life are explicitly mentioned as the guiding principles. In spite of various attempts by Borstlap to alarm the Ministry about the malfunction of the music fund, it never took action.

Cultural emigration
Borstlap’s artistic independence from the new music establishment in the Netherlands and his orientation towards a revival of the classical tradition, comparable with various trends in painting and architecture, relates his work and ideas to wider cultural developments abroad, which resulted in a strong moral support by Roger Scruton, the well-known British conservative philosopher, musicologist and aesthetician, and the music philosopher Andreas Dorschel, as well as other international experts. Borstlap never considered himself to be a typical Dutch composer, but felt he defended a cultural idea closely related to Europe’s cultural identity, an idea which never found much sympathy in the Netherlands. The outcome of the court case confirmed Borstlap’s belief that there was no place for his work in the Netherlands and thus he focussed his interests on performance possibilities abroad. Since then, interest in Germany and Austria has grown, resulting among other things in a commission by the Kammersymphonie Berlin for a classical symphony and acceptance of this work in Vienna by one of the well-known orchestras (by January 2015: performance dates and conductor under negotiation). In 2014, international star conductor Jaap van Zweden took Borstlap’s music on board with plans to perform it with the Hong Kong Phiharmonic Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, being principal conductor of both orchestras.

Aesthetic
Borstlap’s music is rooted in both French and German pre-modernist traditions, and is specifically influenced by music as it flourished at the beginning of the 20th century when dynamics of tradition were still strong but no longer felt as prescriptive orthodoxy, and freely varied in many different directions. In the seventies, French stylistic influences seem to dominate, while his later works from the eighties onwards develop into a more Germanic-classical direction, culminating in his third, ‘classical symphony’ (commissioned by the Kammersymphonie Berlin). Before embarking on his classically-orientated orchestral writing, he experimented with classical forms and rhetoric in his chamber music, finding personal ways of treating old formulas and modes of expression. Being unhappy with the way new music after the Second World War developed, especially disliking the ideologies of ‘progressiveness’ in the arts which seemed to him unrelated to the ‘true meaning of art’, and understanding that contemporary composers were gradually creating a context for new developments divorced from general performance practice and with a different audience type, he foresaw that traditional music life would never accept music without tonality and without some forms of structure which could be related to the existing repertoire and therefore be understandable to musicians and audiences educated on this repertoire. After realizing that his talents could develop better under the stimuli of music from pre-modernist times, which would mean that his music would be better ‘at home’ in traditional concert life, he decided to follow his instincts rather than the consensus of the sixties and seventies. This would seem to place Borstlap firmly in an aesthetically conservative camp, which he felt to be inappropriate and incorrect. Exploring art history, he went searching for a philosophical model which would serve his music better than a simple ‘conservatism’ in which he did not believe any more than in ‘progressiveness’.

The difference between 20C ideas of artistic developments and those of Renaissance Italy taught him that the 20C attitude to the past and its traditions could be seen as a restriction rather than a liberation, and that being inspired by past achievements did not exclude personal exploration and renewal and did not necessarily mean a limitation on artistic freedom. This discovery opened the way to an escape from what Borstlap considered 20C biasses and taboos, and relates his work to the more diverse and still tonally-oriented music of the first half of the 20th century which showed a more varied range of styles than post-1945 music history was prepared to admit. When, in the eighties, theories of postmodernism began to circulate, Borstlap took from postmodern thought the idea that modernism was a historic period and not a prescriptive orthodoxy to be followed as a condition for authenticity (following the ‘Zeitgeist’ as the only option for a contemporary artist), and combined this insight with the understanding common to Renaissance architects who wanted to revive the art of Antiquity by recreating it according to their own ideas and adapting it to new circumstances, thus combining individual, new creation with the ideal of reviving a lost culture.

The idea of a possible Renaissance of the classical tradition Borstlap further developed in his book ‘The Classical Revolution’ (2013) which he sees as an explorative exercise after the demise of 20C aesthetic ideologies, but in the same time as an attempt to restore the idea of ‘high art’ in the field of contemporary music in opposition to an increasingly trivial modern cultural environment where ‘classical music’ as a genre is increasingly under attack. The book can also be seen as an elaborated way of explaining a ‘return’ to a ‘normality’ which has disappeared in the 20th century, and thus has to be analysed in its nature and its relationship to the present, a ‘normality’ which can no longer be taken for granted and thus requires a level of understanding unnecessary in former times. To which extent has Jungian psychology contributed to Borstlap’s aesthetics? Up till date, he has not written about it, but it is probable that Jung’s idea of ‘archetypes’ confirmed his assumption of the existence of underlying collective receptive frameworks, which would explain the workings of traditional processes on an unconscious level, which gives the notion of ‘tradition’ a meaning rather different from the one usually conferred to the word within cultural discourse.

“In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures.” (Wikipedia)

Although Borstlap’s philosophical explorations may on first sight seem to be a justification for an excentric and ‘anti-modern’ aesthetic position, his music can clearly be linked to the recent resurgence of contemporary figurative painting and, in the anglo-saxon world, a revival of classical architecture, both a reaction to and a critique of modernism in the respective fields.

Borstlap’s writings about music and culture in general can be considered as a contribution to the discussions about a possible cultural framework for the 21st century, where the art of the past (including its music) can live in a future which loves and understands the achievements of former times and in which artists can freely learn from and be inspired by an art which can still speak to people across boundaries of space and time.

Idiom and method
John Borstlap has no specific ‘method’ which can be traced to concrete historical systems of craft. He himself claims to have learned more from the visual arts and architecture than from music theory, which must be an exaggeration, since in his work many representative structuring devises of tonal traditions can be detected. Elements of 19C through-composing and traditional, classical counterpoint characterise much of his work, as does the Schönbergian notion of ‘developing variation’, in which a motive is continuousy transformed into new presentations, a technique especially obvious in his ‘Sinfonia’, where a Schönbergian influence is manifest. In later music, like ‘Capriccio’, ‘Psyche’ and especially in his third symphony, more classically-conceived themes which form an always recognizable Gestalt can be heard. The harmony is more dissonant in the early works, while the later works, under the influence of a more prominent classical aesthetic, show a strong presence of the ‘normal’, regular triadic tonalities, forming contrasts with passages where chromatic writing transcends the boundaries of classical harmony. It is in the tension between differently organised tonal fields which provides the dynamics which propell the music forwards, which is merely the normal procedure as handled in pre-20C music. Yet, in the way these dynamics are realised, Borstlap’s music differs from any suggested examples, and it is here that the mixing of elements from different styles and different time periods can find a personal touch.

The philosophical and aesthetic position chosen, which stands in contrast with the more general ‘spirit of the times’, means that references to the outside world are rare in Borstlap’s music. There are hardly ‘invocations’ of nature or human drama. Only in his songs and the short opera ‘Flucht nach Kythera’ does the music relate to more or less concrete human experience, while most of his works seem to exclusively refer to abstract, interior experience, but always in a way which strives after expressive eloquence. The result seems to avoid any influence of 20C music which focusses on fragmentation, blockwise structuring, or ‘mechanical’ layering, while occasionally including a sharpness of dissonances, which can be effective within a context which continuously seeks to establish harmony and wholeness. On the whole, Borstlap’s music sounds more as if having been written around 1900 than in het second half of the 20th century, which the composer looks back to as a more creative period than the one we live in a hundred years later. But he insists on the ‘contemporaneity’ of his music, and in his attempt to revive an aesthetics of harmony and expressive narrative, Borstlap is close to contemporary artists who reflect an increasingly apparent scepticism about modern culture as felt in contemporary society as a whole. Critical reception

Before Borstlap’s music began to receive some recognition, especially outside the Netherlands, performances were severely criticised by the press and condemned for ‘not being of its time’, ‘not modern enough’, and especially, as being imitation and pastiche and not original creation. Although no critic has ever been able to substantiate such claims, such reception meant that Borstlap’s isolated position in Holland reinforced rather than diminished his aesthetic convictions. But there have also been positive reactions in Holland, of which can be quoted:

“Hyperion’s Dream, Night Music and Capriccio (a traditional horn trio) are works which seem closer to Brahms and Schumann than to the threshold of the new millenium. But that just does not matter, when – for example, in Hyperion’s Dream’s second movement – the plaintive melody in the ‘cello, shifting from major to minor, touches the heart. And there are many moments like this.” Luister, Classical CD Magazine “In his music, John Borstlap combines great craftmanship with the utmost original thematic material. It is remarkable how refreshing new tonal music can be.” Mens & Melodie, music magazine Other positive reactions came from abroad: “Borstlap’s Fantasia captures splendidly the spirit of Liszt’s late music, and develops it in a personal and convincing way.” Alfred Brendel “I was immediately captured by the way he creates music. John Borstlap is the rare sort of personality who uses musical language to express, with great originality, his spiritual message.” Libor Pesek “John Borstlap is a first-rate composer indeed, one of the finest in the Netherlands.” Lukas Foss Roger Scruton, the well-known British philosopher and musicologist, had the following to say: “I think he is one of the truly remarkable intellects of our time, a serious and inspired composer, and a person with an unusual grasp of the role of the artist in general, and the composer in particular in the cultural conditions that have developed in modern Europe.” Also of interest is the opinion of Andreas Dorschel, philosopher and music aesthetician, lecturing in Graz and editor of the series ‘Wertungsforschung’ as published by Univeral Edition in Vienna: “Borstlap believes in the possibility of connecting with the classical-romantic tradition, and I understand his compositions as a convincing proof that nowadays such connection can be achieved, without reverting to the eclecticism of style copies or (postmodern) style collages. His music shows a composer who creates a music of highly sensual attractiveness, but who also has full intellectual mastery over the material which is his starting point.”