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De Snelheid • Listening Guide

De Snelheid ('Velocity') was composed between 1982-3 and is one of a group of large-scale works in which Andriessen sets out to investigate fundamental properties of music.

But unlike De Tijd ('Time') which takes as its starting point a quotation from Dante's Divine Comedy, and uses a weighty philosophical text from the Visions of Saint Augustine, De Snelheid was prompted by a light-hearted remark during a car journey, as Andriessen recalls:

With De Snelheid, the idea came about in a funny way. I was in Italy in a car with friends and we were driving very fast – too fast! We had music on in the car stereo and someone said, 'How fast do we have to drive in order to be as fast as the music?' Of course, it's a ridiculous idea because the speed of a car and the speed you feel in music have nothing to do with each other.
(Louis Andriessen)

For Andriessen, the speed of music is defined by harmonic rhythm, or the rate at which the harmony changes, and not simply by the ticking of a metronome at a certain BPM (beats per minute). To explore this in De Snelheid, he pits a metronomic pulse played by woodblocks against staccato and sustained chords:

The constant clicking of the wood blocks sounds like a woodpecker which then turns into a humming-bird. When you look at a humming-bird it appears to be stationary in the air but in fact its wings are beating so fast you can't see them. But the real speed of the music is experienced not by the fast wood blocks, but by the speed of the harmonic change of the chords.
(Louis Andriessen)

The woodblock pulse gets progressively faster throughout the piece, using a kind of gear change technique, known as 'metric modulation' (or sometimes 'tempo modulation'). You can see a more detailed illustration of this here.

The instruments are grouped together in three orchestras. Orchestras 1 and 2 have the same instrumentation (saxes, brass, piano and percussion each playing 4 woodblocks) and are positioned to the left and right of the stage. Orchestra 3 has a contrasting timbre, and is made up of flutes, electric harps, bass guitar, Hammond organ, strings and percussion playing bass drum and tom-toms. The instruments are balanced with amplification, which gives the music its characteristic 'sheen'.

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