Programme notes

Written for Marieke Grotenhuis’s accordion quartet BIG HOUSE featuring Renée Bekkers, Pieternel Berkers and Ellen Zijm, Delirium Still premiered at November Music in Den Bosch in 2014. The form of the piece tracks an early 20th century hurricane from its birth at sea to landfall. In order to depict the ravage upon the villages of newly arrived immigrants at the climax of the piece, I collected than four hundred folk melodies which we recorded in the summer of 2014. I then stacked the melodies in groups of 25 or more, organized by key and tempo so that you’d hear, say, 25 very fast melodies melodies streaming along in G major or 50 slow melodies in D minor. In that way, I could pit the extreme calm of the later against chaotic sections where hundreds of melodies in different keys dovetailed in and out of each other.