Cornelis de Bondt
1953, The Hague
“Presumably (although I cannot be sure, for who can know which Gods are awake within me?), I was conceived by Poseidon in the aftermath of the February disaster of 1953. Over nine months later, I was born into a world that, despite my sincere efforts, I could never truly call my own. I felt like a counterpart to that other son of the ancient Sea God, a sort of Anti-Bellerophon. Like my half-brother, I was sent from place to place with a secret letter for my host containing the message of my desired death, but in my naivety, I believed it to be a promise of life. Like Bellerophon, I was tempted by my host’s wife, and just like my half-brother, she cried foul when I refused her advances. While Poseidon’s tsunami protected Bellerophon from the Amazons entrenched on the battlements of the city walls, and Poseidon only calmed his flood once the women exposed their genitals, the Sea God directed his tidal wave right at me because I resisted the allure of the Muses. I was eventually swallowed by a destructive wave of laziness, ignorance, carelessness, and foolishness. Poseidon believed that, like my half-brother, I was blinded by the ambition to enter Olympus. But nothing could be further from the truth; I did not want to become a part of the House of the Mountain Gods – I wanted to utterly destroy this House to its core. But I share Bellerophon’s naivety. While a horsefly from the Gods was enough to cause his downfall, the indifference of mortals sufficed for mine.
My musical practice had two facets, on one hand, composing new music, and on the other, analyzing and teaching existing music. Both aspects of this Janus-faced practice shared the same artistic foundation: the essence of both practices is not based on specific properties that can be formulated, defined, and thus objectwise determined, but they take place in the action, and are, therefore, subjectwise. Just as it is true for the good and the true; all these things are nameless, and they dissolve into nothing when they are coined with a name. The artistic action is not guided by an ego but solely by the urge of talent to make the action excellent and therefore exemplary. My theoretical activities, like my compositional ones, were primarily a practice, something you do: analyzing, listening, writing, singing, and playing. Unlike information transfer, knowledge transfer takes place in the action, allowing the information to become one’s own. Knowledge is not primarily a cognitive affair but above all, a physical one. Anyone who plays a musical instrument or navigates the city by bicycle knows this from experience. Teaching was, for me, an artistic action, just as composing was always also an investigative and educational action for me. I became fully aware of this at the end of my teaching practice when I encountered my other half-brother, Joseph Jacotot, son of a Fire God. I realized that I was an ‘ignorant teacher’ and an ‘ignorant composer’ who practiced their craft without being hindered by any preconceived knowledge or science. I probably learned more from my students than they did from me.
My most meaningful lessons took place in a self-designed laboratory, such as my aesthetics class ‘The Technique of Beauty’ and the studio ‘The Atelier’. My most interesting compositions are works that emerged out of nowhere, whose artistic content was not tied to any non-artistic interest, such as ‘Bint’, ‘Karkas’, ’De Deuren Gesloten’, ‘Grand Hotel’, ‘De Tragische Handeling’, ’Dame Blanche’, ‘Bloed’, ’Die Wahre Art’ of ‘Gli Toccha la Mano’. Works written specifically for particular musicians, ‘close to the skin’. Where these works came from, I do not know, and the Names of the Gods associated with the origin of this creative process are unfamiliar to me.
The years from 1975 until the beginning of the 21st century were favorable to me. Starting from 2005, trouble brewed in the art world; the ‘God of Hot Air’ gained the upper hand in art policies, both in funding and education. This eventually led to a lonely battle, an ultimate attempt to save what I considered the essence of the musical practice. Initially through political channels and, when this proved to be a hopeless endeavor, through legal means. The fact that it was a lonely battle makes it tragic. In several texts on this website, I provide a detailed account of this struggle. The only God I can still count on is the ‘God of the Earth’, that is, of Death, because everything will be absorbed by the earth. The path to the earth is inevitable, but for now, I continue my solitary fight. No longer against the Gods, or against anything for that matter, only for something, namely, art.”
Composer — Teacher
So goes a portion of a letter from Cornelis de Bondt to Taunis Haas, a musicologist and writer from Nuremberg who is a friend of his. This letter may appear somewhat narcissistic, but one cannot be entirely sure; it could equally be an ironic stance by De Bondt, a subtle jab at Haas. The two men have a not entirely unproblematic relationship, as some of the texts on this website reveal. ‘Friends’ is actually an exaggerated term, used due to a lack of a better one, as the term ‘acquaintances’ would be too casual given the depth of their mutual correspondence.
It is no coincidence that De Bondt places the focus of his work at the end of the previous century, as it has everything to do with the shift in the societal significance of art. After his legal battle, with the dramatic culmination, or nadir, being the withdrawal of his work from the public domain in 2013, culminating in the surrender of his work to Poseidon, he attempted to reshape his composing practice. In this process, he shifted the focus from the public sphere to the private domain. This was a deliberate choice because, in his view, the public sphere had been thoroughly corrupted by that ‘God of Hot Air’. This maneuver resulted in three areas of work worth mentioning: his DOS Lab project Sonatas, his Metamorphosis project, and perhaps his most curious work: Beethoven 11. Most of the works from these projects have not yet been performed, with a few exceptions.
DOS-Lab — Sonatas
This project has a long history; the software developed by De Bondt for it dates back to the 1980s. The subject of this project was the ‘score,’ which, in his view, is wrongly seen as the essence of a composition. This was also the subject of his legal battles, including the appeal to the Council of State. He started writing the Sonatas, and the ‘score’ became a DOS-Lab program. Pianists who wanted to perform a Sonata had to give their interpretation, which would eventually lead to a conventional score but one that was entirely unique, written ‘to fit’ the pianist. De Bondt himself wrote the initial versions of the Sonatas, like ‘pilot scores’. He co-authored some Sonatas with his composition students, who then performed them themselves. He wrote the programs based on their concepts, which, of course, had to be entirely consistent so that they were suitable for his DOS-Lab, almost like ‘machines’. The DOS-Lab ‘scores,’ known as ASCII texts in which algorithms were formulated to realize the Sonata, were, in essence, blueprints for a conventional score generated by the DOS-Lab software from these ASCII texts. For De Bondt, these ASCII texts were the actual ‘score’, and the processing in the DOS-Lab was just technology, similar to the photocopiers used by the DONEMUS publishing house in the 1980s to print scores. Through the lessons with his students, the Sonata project became an organic interplay between teaching and composition practice. Composing and teaching merged, and the division between teacher and student dissolved.
Metamorphoses … in nobis sine nobis…
The ‘Metamorphoses’ are a series of compositions that provide a response to the challenge faced by Steve Reich after composing works such as ‘Piano Phase’ and ‘Clapping Music’, works that are entirely consistent. Reich questioned what he could write next after those pieces. He opted for a more flexible form in which he applied techniques from those early works but without the strict consistency associated with them. In the ‘Metamorphoses’, De Bondt provides an answer to this by incorporating harmonic development.
The first ‘Metamorphose’ consists of 144 ‘blocks’ and a Coda. Each block is formed by a four-voice, rhythmic canon. The blocks gradually evolve. The second block is a repetition of the first, with one modification, a note from one of the four voices, slightly prolonged. The process of change is akin to the hands of a clock; you don’t see them move, but after a few minutes, the ‘big hand’ has shifted. In the first section, only the rhythms change, and then the pitch, one by one. The harmony of the last block is entirely different from the first. Each block must be played as if the piece starts anew each time. In the Coda, the entire process is sped up, reversed from front to back, as if a coiled spring, slowly wound, is released. The whole piece lasts for approximately 40 minutes. The instrumentation is open.
The remaining ‘Metamorphoses’ are variations on this theme. The fourth, ‘DEUS’, is written for all the instruments at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam, consisting of nine large and smaller organs (including a harmonium) and two grand pianos. It’s the only work in the series that has been performed.
Beethoven 11
De Bondt wrote in a somewhat odd text, which he titled as ‘Testament’, a number of chapters about his work. Including the following quote:
“Over fifteen years ago, I had an epiphany: I had to, and would, write Beethoven’s 11th Symphony. I had no idea what this meant. Ideas come from nowhere, they are intangible, and their feasibility can only be determined when they take shape, in my case, the form of a score. My initial thought was that the idea was nonsensical — there are probably more nonsensical ideas than good ones. It seemed like an impossible task to execute the idea because how can one write a symphony for a composer who passed away almost two centuries ago? And how can you avoid the platitude of pastiche? It had to be more than a symphony in Beethoven’s style; it had to be a work that he could have actually written had he lived longer. Not necessarily that he would have written it, but that he could have. There had to be an artistic necessity in it that derived from his oeuvre. This aspect provided my first opening: it was about his body of work, not the man himself. It’s not an ego matter, but solely about the genius, that is, the talent. I didn’t have to be Beethoven; I just had to understand his talent through his work. Only if this could be achieved could the danger of mere pastiche be avoided. The next step was the realization that it should not be based on existing sketches or fragments by Beethoven; the 10th Symphony, therefore, was ruled out. It should not be about restoration or variation.
In his intriguing work The Time That Remains, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses the messianic formula of hōs mē, the as_not. The formula is found in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians [I Cor. 7:29-32]:
But this I say, brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having wives may be as_not [hōs mē] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. But I wish you to be without concern.
Weeping as not weeping’ should not be understood as ‘weeping like not-weeping’, but as ‘weeping as_not weeping.’ It’s not a comparison between weeping and not-weeping; the as_not [hōs mē] is a messianic formula in which weeping is negated, as time contracts, dissolves, or comes to rest. In the messianic interpretation, the ‘time that remains’ doesn’t refer to the ‘end of times’ in the sense of what might happen then, as in the Christian view, but to the end of time itself; the time ‘coming to rest’. Understanding the concept of as_not is crucial for grasping the meaning of ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’.
In What Is The Contemporary? Agamben poses questions: ‘What does it mean to be contemporary?’ and ‘Whose contemporaries are we?’ Agamben immediately provides the answer that Nietzsche (via Roland Barthes) offered: ‘The contemporary is the timeless’.
Someone is ‘contemporary’ if they can consciously alter their position in relation to their time. If you genuinely belong to your own time, you don’t seamlessly merge with it, and you don’t simply conform to its demands. It is precisely because of this shifting perspective that a certain anachronistic position is taken. This position allows for a better perception and understanding of one’s own time. It has nothing to do with nostalgia, solely with the fundamental necessity of distance. All of this relates back to the distinction that the ancient Greeks made between chronos and kairos, between experiencing time as a sequence of moments and as a ‘timeless’ moment where ‘time comes to rest’. In this ‘coming to rest time’ we might find the space for ‘Beethoven 11’ to relate to the ‘contemporary’ time.”
Beethoven 11 could indeed be the ultimate consequence of his earlier work, which often took music history as a compositional starting point. These works are not so much based on literal quotations but rather attempts to take the underlying structure of the examples he uses as a basis for his compositional technique. In this method of working, ‘style’ serves a different function; this style is not a template that is appropriated as an object but rather a parameter, just like harmony, rhythm, syntax, or the overall structure. Style, in this context, is not an articulation of some identity principle.
Etudes
In addition to the aforementioned projects, from 2020 onwards, De Bondt also worked on what is known as the ‘Etude project’. This project involves short etudes in the form of a MIDI file, created with his DOS-Lab. These compositions typically have a duration of 66 seconds, but they can also last for 4’33”. They are not intended to be performed live; they are simple audio files created using ‘General Midi’. These can be used for short videos that he made with his mobile phone. The linking of sound to visuals is often the reverse of what is customary; in the ‘Etudes’, the visuals are edited to match the sound. In one case, a second version of an Etude was created using professional equipment, both in terms of camera usage and the software used to create the audio file. The goal was to investigate whether the quality difference in the technology used had an impact on the artistic content. The title of this Etude, No. 23, is ‘Emmer’ (Bucket). The videos were used in a presentation in the spring of 2023 at Studio LOOS, under the title ‘The Essence of the Ornament’.
Writer
Besides to the composition projects mentioned above, De Bondt started writing texts, and in recent years, this has become the core of his artistic practice. In addition to essays and pamphlets on art and art policy that he already wrote around the time of the legal battles, he began focusing on writing (short) stories. A portion of them is published on this website, also in English (and some in French) translations. The stories are fiction, but occasionally, his views on art also come into play. On the other hand, the essays sometimes have a fictional element. Fiction and reality intertwine.
One of the (long) stories is the elaboration of the plot for the opera he envisioned, ‘De Man van Smarten’ (The Man of Sorrows), the ultimate dream of his composition practice, which he started in the late 1980s. Producing this work is no longer possible in the current art climate, which is why he decided to create at least one version of it in a discursive form. The story is, of course, not a libretto or a film script (an option he also considered), as the text is too extensive and detailed for that purpose. However, the text could serve as the source for a libretto, as all the plot-lines are carefully developed.
Coda
De Bondt has no need for labels, as he writes in the aforementioned letter to Haas: “If I were to call myself a composer, writer, or teacher, it would be as an ‘ignorant one.’ That is the only thing I know for certain.” It is not about the persona for him, but about the work, which has come into being without ego in the artistic act. He has made no effort to ‘market’ his work, not only because he lacked the talent for it, but primarily because this ‘entrepreneurship’ heralds the end of art by rendering it harmless. Pinning down a characteristic is to crystallize a subjective act into a tangible object. The ultimate weapon of the ‘God of Hot Air’.
— J. Chr. de Vries, December 9, 2023, Bonnemort