That is, if one assumes that the listener from around 1960 was familiar with the music of the Second Viennese School – and in those days there were not a great many in the Netherlands. This is why Ketting’s First Symphony was a milestone in its genre. While in the international avant-garde dodecaphony and serialism were rapidly gaining ground, the atonal works by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg and their successors were looked upon with great suspicion by the conservative Dutch music scene. In 1956 the performance of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto in Amsterdam caused a commotion. Just like everywhere else he was already controversial here in the Netherlands. In the 1930s the at the time ubiquitous Willem Pijper labelled Schoenberg an ‘in essence’ destructive force. Thus expressing an opinion that did not stimulate his many pupils – some of them dominated Dutch music life in the 1950s – to embrace dodecaphony. At best people were only moderately modern. The fact that Pijper did consider Webern a master did not have any repercussions for Dutch music.

Twelve-note technique considered a historical necessity
Or maybe it did: Pijper’s pupil Kees van Baaren certainly was encouraged by his teacher to continue his dodecaphonic explorations. And it was van Baaren who, as a composition teacher at the Conservatories of Utrecht and The Hague, made the twelve-note technique the basis of his curriculum. He became the influential tutor of a group of musicians all born in or around 1935, that as composers, performing artists and activists drastically reformed music life. Peter Schat, Louis Andriessen, Jan van Vlijmen, Reinbert de Leeuw and Misha Mengelberg – none of them escaped the teachings that van Baaren considered a historical necessity. In the late-1950s Schat, Andriessen and van Vlijmen were converted, although only the latter for the rest of his life. For the first time Dutch music became truly contemporary. The Gaudeamus Music Weeks, organised by Walter Maas in and around the village of Bilthoven, became a meeting place for independent radicals.

Van Baaren did not have a monopoly on the twelve-note technique. At the same time Ton de Leeuw – a pupil of Henk Badings and Olivier Messiaen – went through a serial phase. And so did the perpetual outsider Otto Ketting who, advice from his father Piet Ketting and Louis’ father Hendrik Andriessen aside, never had composition lessons from anybody. But his star rose fast in Gaudeamus circles and beyond.

Ketting had studied the trumpet in The Hague and had for years played in the Residentie Orchestra. He had discovered Schoenberg, Berg and Webern all on his own. Both his passionate plea for Webern in the music periodical Mens en Melodie (1958) and his early works are testimony to this. When in 1960 Ketting received a grant to study in Munich with Karl Amadeus Hartmann, he had already written his Komposition für zwölf Tönen for piano (1956), his Webernian Due Canzoni (1957), his Passacaglia for orchestra (1957) and his First Symphony.