Rozalie Hirs

When you listen to Rozalie Hirs’ composition Platonic ID you realise that your attention keeps moving back and forth in time.

Short bursts of harmonies invite you to search your memory – how are the new sounds related to those you have heard before? Anticipation – where do they lead to? At the same time you observe relations within these harmonies, relations between components that each have their own characteristic and thus together form something new. A multiform raster that spreads over several dimensions, as a complex crystal that springs from the imagination and cherishing hands of an artist.
You will get a similar experience from reading Hirs’ new collection of poems, Geluksbrenger (Bringer of Luck). Words and phrases are scattered over the page in well-balanced configurations. The eyes can move freely from one bearer of meaning to the next, making their own patterns, venturing bigger and bigger steps. Words meet each other, come in each other’s context, raise each other to a heightened, clear state of awareness. For a moment they glow with the lines that connect them, then they fade away.
In her latest orchestral work Roseherte, that will be premiered at the Nederlandse Muziekdagen, Hirs encourages the listener to make connections between musical components that she has examined and ordered meticulously. It is an exploration of a Garden of Eden that moves you. A journey that gives an open ear and mind the opportunity to find a new meaning and be renewed.
René van Peer

Current events and premieres:

Sunday 8 November 2008: Roseherte (world premiere). Commission by the Dutch broadcaster NPS and the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst. Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Micha Hamel. Nederlandse Muziekdagen, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam.

Thursday 19 February 2009: Hello heaven hello thunder (world premiere). Commissioned by Orkest De Volharding and the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst. Orkest De Volharding. Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ, Amsterdam.

Sunday 2 November 2008: Family Tree/Stamboom. Rozalie Hirs, voice; soundtrack. Opening of WortMusik, Goethe Institute, Amsterdam.

Friday 14 November 2008: Book of Mirrors/ #23.2 (composition, Rozalie Hirs; film, Joost Rekveld). CalArts New Century Players conducted by David Rosenboom. Redcat, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Los Angeles (United States).
Repeated on 15 November 2008.

Tuesday 18 November 2009: article 0 [transarctic buddha]. Johannes Fischer, percussion. Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin (Germany). Debut on Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Wednesday 18 March 2009: article 1 to 3 [the] [aleph] [a]. Jenny Lin, piano. Concert and podcast. Women's work series, Greenwich Music School, New York (United States).

Sunday 5 April 2009: Poetry pieces (I-III), Van het wonder is woord and other works. Stevko Busch, piano; Rozalie Hirs, voice and laptop. WortMusik, Goethe Institute, Amsterdam.

A concise personal portrait:

Rozalie Hirs’ interests:
Music, wrens, ring modulations, sinus waves, nightingales, canaries, all types of noise, the cocktail party effect and other psycho-acoustic phenomena, the way the brain works.

Rozalie Hirs’ heroes and inspiration:
Hildegard von Bingen (as a composer, poet and scientist), Guillaume de Machaut (as a composer and poet), Iannis Xenakis (as a composer and thinker), Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Louis Andriessen, Dick Raaijmakers (as a composer, poet and thinker), Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson (as a poet and scientist), Hans Faverey and Cees Nooteboom (as a novelist and poet).

Three characteristic statements by Rozalie Hirs:

• The interesting thing about music is that it is created together, by the musicians with each other and by the musicians in collaboration with the composer. And music is in itself also a number of different elements and ideas that sound together. These elements – e.g. tones, ideas, voices, rhythms, harmonies and melodies – are expressions of relations between people, as well as relations between various processes in our body. For example, between the heartbeat and processing processes in the brain. In good music we can discern these relations and listen to details and to the whole in ever changing constellations, from ever changing perspectives.
• Music is a concentrated world of sound in which we can experience intensively who we are and how we react. 
• In music you experience a succession of emotions and, as it were, simultaneously reflect on them, undergo them, think about them.