Het Leven Is Net Een Krentenbol...

The full title is a Dutch saying — Het leven is net een krentenbol, met af en toe een hard stukje: life is like a currant bun, with a hard bit every now and then. I learned it in Amsterdam and wrote this five-minute trio for ney, cello and piano in 2018, for the Turkish players Ayça Arın and Barış Aygün. It is dedicated to people who are lost and try to figure out why they are always in their own vicious circle.

The ney — the Sufi reed flute — is asked, for much of the piece, to blow air through the instrument without producing any pitch at all, and then to open into a wide, wavering vibrato; the cellist plays seagull glissandi and moves between ponticello, tasto and ordinario; the pianist works on the strings with fingers and nails, in glissandi and clusters, before returning to the keys. All three players also breathe — irregular, fast inhalations and exhalations, audible, uncoordinated — so that the ensemble sounds like one anxious animal. The form is a circle: the same short cycle of gestures comes round again and again, each time with a hard bit in a different place.

It is a piece about repetition as a trap, written with a great deal of affection for the trapped.