Selected Vocal Music

Pythagoras

Pythagoras is a podcast opera about the love of wisdom and speaking truth to power, involving music, mystics, math, and maniacs – and in the end everyone dies. Written for vocal quartet and ensemble, and inspired by American podcasts and Greek tragedies, the opera highlights themes as critical thought, cult-like adoration and democratic unrest.

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Various works

A musical canon about science.

De Bètacanon

QUATRE BOUCHES et al.

In De Bètacanon, the fifty scientific topics from de Volkskrant’s eponymous project are sung in a musical canon in four voices, interwoven with love songs for DNA, enzymes, prime numbers and entropy. The result is a canon as a love song to science.

Recording by vocal quartet Quatre Bouches: Sabine Wüthrich (soprano), Petra Ehrismann (alto), Michel Poels (bariton) and Job Boswinkel (bass), with Govert Valkenburg and Bas Ponsioen (tenor), Gerben Uilenbroek and Ruben Naeff (piano), conducted by Wouter Padberg. Recorded by Frerik de Jong, Kleinman Audio.

An aria about the love we share online.

Fill the Present Day with Joy

MUSIC11 MUSICIANS

Inspired by the ever-increasing personalization of our online world, the piece Fill the Present Day with Joy is a song about you. With lyrics taken from Facebook status updates, reaching from a quotation of Wordsworth, via loving wall posts, to automatically generated texts by Facebook itself, the piece expresses the love we share online.

This music aims to reflect our online community. I discovered one category of posts on Facebook that was very powerful: those tiny messages about love. Perhaps it's because I am living abroad and I see most of my friends and family exclusively online, or perhaps it’s because those small and unpretentious messages sound so genuine. It's about the genuine love for small things, the things that make life worth living.

Live recording by Jessica Aszodi (soprano), Matt Albert (viola), Thomas Kotcheff and Charlie Magnone (piano).

Download sheet music free of charge.

An oratorio about Moby Dick.

Moby Dick: VI. The Non-Valvular Structure of Blood-Vessels

Moby Dick

W4 NEW MUSIC & CONTEMPORANEOUS

With a libretto from Melville's Moby Dick, the composers of West 4th New Music – Matt Frey, Molly Herron, Tim Hansen and Ruben Naeff – wrote an oratorio that focuses on Melville's literary themes outside of the narrative. Their individual and contrasting sections collectively explore the story of both the danger and determination inherent in pursuing one all-consuming quest.

Contemporaneous was conducted by David Bloom, featuring singers Charlotte Mundy, Ariadne Greif, Lucy Dhegrae, Sean Christensen, and Alex Samaras. New York-based visual artist Andy Cahill created visual art, with projections taking inspiration from visual representations of the drawings Rockwell Kent created for the 1930 Modern Library publication of Moby Dick.

National Anthem (of the Happy Nation of Chaos)

SUSPICIOUS MINDS’ SINGERS & SAXOPHONE QUARTET DOUBLE ESPRESSO

For its 2007 edition, the annual arts & debate festival happyChaos adopted the theme borderless, and established the Happy Nation of Chaos, a new borderless state. In an era in which everything is possible and permitted, we’re seeing an explosive growth in technology, innovation, consumption, and globalization – but for what price? HappyChaos organized an evening-length program around the theme Borderless, featuring debate, film, music, theatre, visual art, spectacle and a party.

Ruben Naeff wrote text and music for the national anthem of this Happy Nation of Chaos.

happyChaos is run by college students and editors from the Vrij Nederland magazine.