Deze morgen was

Tera de Marez Oyens interviewed - an extract:


BD:    Is it fun to work with electronics?

TdeMO:    It used to be enormous fun.  I worked in the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht.  I don’t know if you have heard of all the great work there.  This was a big, old-fashioned studio with walls full of apparatus, where you had to plug in and you had to turn knobs, and it was really a sport to work there!  You could discover things.  I must say, now that we all have computers and you need a technician to sit there and work on your piece, you tell him what you want and the fun is a little bit lost on me.  I liked the old-fashioned way better.

BD:    Should we take some of your older electronic music and make sure it’s played on “original (electronic) instruments”?

TdeMO:    Well, the fun is that you don’t have to have these instruments.  It’s on tape, so you don’t have to create it again.  It’s finished.

BD:    Do you view the electronic sounds that can be created as more colors on your palette?

TdeMO:    Yes, and magnificent colors, too.  With electronic sounds, you really can get anything you want.  I started all that because I hated electronic music!  I had heard it and found it so cold and inhuman, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.  Then I got a musical prize and I had to do something cultural with it.  So I thought, “Why not find out what I hate about this electronic music?”  So I went to a course of Gottfried Michael Koenig, and I was not longer than two weeks in this course and I was totally turned around.  I loved it and I saw the possibilities.  It’s really very fascinating to work with it.