La Recta Musica

La recta música y las rectas palabras […] que custodio en la torre.

Starting in the 2025/26 season, the Asko|Schönberg ensemble chooses to take on a new name: ‘Het Muziek’. [Something like ‘It Music’.]

• In Dutch the wrong article is deliberately used, indefinite [‘het’] instead of definite ‘de’ — in correct Dutch it’s ‘De Muziek’.

According to the press release, this new name emerged from a ‘creative process’ in collaboration with a trendy design agency, guided by the ensemble’s ‘artistic mission’.

The artistic director explains: “The name ‘Het Muziek’ may sound simple, but it’s actually radical in its clarity. It grates. It puts music at the centre — as concept, as force, as sanctuary. And it’s open, inviting, and multilayered — just like us.”

‘It Music may sound simple…’ Try explaining that in English. Don’t! Gerard Reve already warned against it in his unmatched ‘How to Become a Writer Oneself’: untranslatable puns are best avoided if you want to make it on the international stage.

As for that ‘artistic mission’, it’s only outlined through a series of noncommittal slogans — ‘Music at the center as concept’, ‘open, inviting, and multilayered’. All well and good, we’ve known such slogans since Coca-Cola’s ‘The Real Thing’.

This is the problem when you get into bed with managers who believe that the content of your artistic praxis exists only to serve the form. It never becomes specific.

— § —

The above quote — The pure music and the pure words […] which I guard in the tower — is from the poem El guardián de los libros [The Keeper of the Books] by Jorge Luis Borges.

Poetry in Romanticism is nothing less than the act of imagining the world, and the Romantic spirit was still very much alive in the last century. Not for nothing did the Dutch progressive government of the 1970s adopt ‘Imagination to Power’ as its motto. The rise of the ensemble culture in those years — and those that followed — was a Romantic gesture. And, composers were leading the charge here. Ensembles such as the ASKO Ensemble, Schönberg Ensemble, Orkest de Volharding, Nieuw Ensemble, Ives Ensemble, LOOS Ensemble, and Hoketus were founded as artistic responses to a music culture dominated by orchestras and opera — based on personal engagement and a sense of adventure, grating against all odds until something worthwhile emerged.

In the second half of the first and the beginning of the second decade of this century, most of the ensembles were first removed from structural funding, and then most commission structures for composers were dismantled. Everything had to make way for the Neoliberal Dream, which replaces poetic truth with the power of the market. Under the guise of ‘cultural governance’, composers and musicians were pushed aside by managers.

— § —

Not only the practice of music, but also music education fell under this new power. At the Royal Conservatoire — where I studied and taught for many years — policy was gradually adapted to neoliberal thinking from the early 2000s onward. The so-called Bologna Accords of 2006 were a key instrument in this shift. Education institutes increasingly fell under the control of accreditation committees. Meeting accreditation requirements became a core institutional goal, and teachers tried — through tricks and patchwork — to protect the content from the formal façade. At first, the management left enough room for this; in the end, it was all a matter of clever wording. But in the 2010s, the pressure mounted, and the space for flexible content shrank proportionally. This trend was strongly reinforced by the demand for entrepreneurship.

Students are now regarded as consumers, conservatoires as competitors. New teachers are offered contracts instead of tenured positions, often for small part-time jobs. The sense of involvement from both students and teachers steadily eroded. Genuine, substantive criticism can now be comfortably swept away under the rug of ‘consumer feedback’; each year a ‘student satisfaction survey’ is conducted, in which one can rate such vacuous questions as ‘What did you think of the class overall?’ with a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. The results are translated into an enormous report full of meaningless graphs, followed by conclusions printed on colorful sheets and pinned to the inside of the bathroom doors: “The survey has led to the installation of a microwave in the canteen!” Everyone satisfied. And the Conservatoire could hang a sign by the entrance that read: “Excellent School 20##”. Instead of being taught to think critically, students are encouraged to collect credits and tick off checklists.

— § —

The musical ‘Keeper of the Books’ was, without doubt, Reinbert de Leeuw — the godfather of the ensemble movement. In the Royal Conservatoire’s obituary of 14 February 2020, there were two striking sentences: His death seems to mark the end of an era. It is now up to all those inspired by him to prove otherwise. The absence of a comma after the word ‘those’ in the final sentence shows just how far management had already distanced itself from Reinbert de Leeuw. (See also: The Comma.)

With its new name, ASKO|Schönberg, too, distances itself from the Keeper. The ensemble could have chosen to refer in its new name to him, or to his legacy — to signal that what is imagined and what is lived are entwined. But no. Instead, a name was chosen that may sound slightly off in Dutch, but ensures that the artistic practice itself remains, above all, comfortable [gezellig].

Naturally, there is a connection between the gradual erosion of critical thinking in arts education and the sheepish compliance with the neoliberal arts policy imposed by the government and followed by the funding bodies. Composers, musicians, teachers, and students no longer take the reins to shape or transform the order of things; they acquiesce to it. On digital platforms, I notice proud reactions of composers and musicians on favorable reviews, and they even extend gratitude to those who bestow them. It is a world inverted — a world of platitudes and docility, in which critical thinking has been rendered harmless. It is a world inverted — a world of platitudes and docility, in which critical thinking has been rendered harmless.

In the fragment about the “Tartars from the North,” Borges writes (in Spanish): “Inocentes como animales de presa” — a phrase that has consistently been translated as “innocent as beasts of prey.” But this is incorrect: animales de presa refers not to predators, but to prey animals — those that are hunted.

Perhaps we composers, musicians, teachers and students in the Age of Imagination were indeed predators — fierce and driven — but over the past few decades, we have lost our courage, our passion, and our imaginative power, and degenerated into innocent prey.

— Cornelis de Bondt, April 22, 2025