Rob du Bois
[4] In the late 1960s, Bois became a performing member of the ICP (Instant Composers Pool), which had been founded in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and drummer Han Bennink.
[6] Du Bois played keyboards in a number of ICP projects, including Breuker’s grandiose February 1969 “happening”, Mozart Opera, which also featured Derek Bailey on guitar, Paul Rutherford and Willem van Manen on trombones, and Han Bennink on drums.
[9] A number of Bois’s more militant colleagues began staging public protests, the most widely reported being the Nutcracker Action on 17 November 1969 when demonstrators disrupted a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose activities they claimed were “maintaining an undemocratic artistic environment”.
Although he never composed an opera, Bois’s output includes two extended music-theatre works: the ballet Midas (1970), and Vandaag is het morgen van gisteren: (helaas geen sprookje) (1975), an hour-long extravaganza for soloists, children’s choir, orchestra and brass band.
The two wind quintets (Chants en contrepoints from 1962 and Réflexions sur le jour où Pérotin le Grand ressuscitera from 1969) were both writ -ten for the Danzi Quintet, and Bois also wrote solo pieces for some of the members of this well-known ensemble: flutist Frans Vester (Muziek for solo flute, 1961), oboist Koen van Slogteren (Beams, for oboe and piano, 1979), and clarinetist Piet Honingh (Vertiges, 1987).
[1] At this time he employed serial technique under the stylistic influence of Anton Webern as well as, amongst others, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio.
Tentatively in part III of Muziek voor fluit solo (1961), but especially by the time of Espaces à remplir (1963), the Deuxième série de rondeaux (1964), and Ad libitum (1965), Bois had begun including sections with degrees of improvisation.
[25][27][28] In these works, du Bois would fix the registers of certain pitch-complexes to create groups that dominate one or more parts, or even the entire ensemble for sections of the score.
[28] Even in a fully notated score such as Muziek voor altblokfluit (1961), when working within these fixed pitch complexes du Bois said he had the feeling of improvising "like a jazz piano player" (quoted in§.
[31] However, by the mid-sixties—for example in Pour faire chanter la polonaise (1965)—rhythmic control is almost completely abandoned so far as notation is concerned, while pitch and dynamics continue to be exactly prescribed.
One of the earliest and most extreme examples is the orchestral music for the ballet Midas (1970), which contains quotations from the works of Johann Strauss, Jr., Gustav Mahler, Antonio Vivaldi, and John Blow.
[3] On the other hand, particularly by American critics reviewing printed scores rather than performances, this was regarded as a "haphazard and sketchy" carelessness of vertical or linear movement, resulting in textures "perforated by absentminded silences"[13]—an arbitrary and unjustified usage of clichés from the "catalog of newly-invented and already-used-up effects" in vogue at that time, as well as an indifference toward sonority, intensified by a "gaucheness of the 'traditional' passages".
His music from around 1985 is associated with that of composers such as Konrad Boehmer, Walter Hekster, Ton de Kruyf [nl], and Jan Vriend, who are described as "post-serial" in style.
[2][34][3] Bois was consulted by the Dutch Society of Composers in April 1974 in a widely publicized case in which the composer Hans Kox declared himself a victim of "cultural murder" after a number of music critics had unanimously savaged Kox’s opera Dorian Gray, and a group of colleagues led by Tera de Marez Oyens called on the Society to take legal action against a “conspiracy” of "shameful criticism".
[35] In addition to his work within the Netherlands, Bois has published internationally on these subjects, and later became recognised as an authority in the area of copyright issues involved with sound sampling.
