For much of my working life, my music had a clear function: it accompanied films, documentaries, multimedia projects and other visual work, always serving the story rather than itself.

Now I’m mainly interested in what remains when that specific function disappears and the music can finally stand on its own.

‘Freed’ from that purely supporting role, I now approach composing more like I once approached painting: intuitively working with colours, textures and form. Rather than following a predetermined plan, I start with small musical ideas, sometimes a theme or a memory, and simply follow where it leads me.

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I often use tonality, but can just as easily move towards abstraction (whatever I think that is...), minimalism or modernism.

‘Neo-classical’? I don’t really see it as a style or genre. My autonomous music is simply a mixture of everything I’ve heard, played, made and found interesting throughout my life. Sometimes serious, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes ironic, sometimes with a wink.

 

What remains is a residue: centuries of musical history, filtered through memory and the creative process.

Sometimes I only realise afterwards what I was doing, and the beautiful thing is, sometimes I really just don’t know.

 

Ehm, but what about that book, "The Drowning of Bart Dijkman"?
The answer is somewhere in these pages.