Music • Images
CRISIS POETRY PODCAST
During the first months of the Corona crisis, we got one email after another from management at HAN, where I worked.
A colleague of mine came up with the brilliant idea of turning those texts into songs, we called it the Crisis Poetry Podcast.
It turned out to be quite a fun compositional challenge. These emails were of course not written with metre in mind, so there was no rhythm, no cadence, no nice lines for a composer to work with. Just very boring sentences someone had written on some lost Tuesday morning. Still, I tried to find rhythms and melodies in the texts that fitted the words perfectly, without changing them in any way.
11 songs became something of an ‘underground’ success among our colleagues. At some point, though, it started to bother me.
I didn’t feel entirely comfortable turning my supervisor’s own emails into songs behind his back and passing them around among colleagues. So I went to see him. I told him what I had done and played him the songs. He smiled. The kind of smile that makes you wonder whether you’ve just been very brave or very stupid. The complete podcast is available on YouTube.
A few remarks.
Morgen Volgt Zeker is treated as a kind of church mass. The leader sings “morgen volgt”, the congregation repeats it, somewhat muttered, the leader continues with “zeker nog meer”, and so on. It becomes increasingly ridiculous.
What I found important, though, was to take the music completely seriously. I didn’t want to make it sound like a joke or an amateur parody. The songs were produced as proper, fully developed songs, with all the attention to arrangement, performance and production that I would give to any other piece of music.
Somehow, that makes the joke even better. The more seriously you take the music, the more ridiculous the words become.
By the way, who are all those people coughing in the background and shouting “hallelujah” at the end? 😏
In Zoveel procent I initially had no idea what to do with the text. It was just a rather dry, bureaucratic piece of management speak from one of the emails.At the time, I was also busy with Rombus Films and Dwaalfilm de Wadden, and I had some music lying around that I had made earlier. One of those pieces, 'Spoonbill' suddenly seemed to fit.
Late one evening, I put it on again. And there it was, the melody happened to have exactly the right rhythm for the first line:
“zoveel procent gepland, zoveel procent ongepland.”
From there, things somehow started to fall into place.
And then Jan van Veen entered the picture. I decided to treat the text as if it were a deeply serious love poem: a warm, almost sweet little choir, with my best imitation of this legendary Dutch radio voice, low and smoky. I hadn’t planned any of this. I was just listening to something I had made earlier.