Dutch Composer Ruben Naeff got inspired by the Dutch Prime Minister

The Deviant Septet. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 7:30 PM (world premier)
Greenwich House Music School - New York, New York
Admission:$15

Inspired by Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, about a soldier who sells his soul to the devil, the New York based Deviant Septet presents a concert with a different instrumentation and a Faustian spirit. Especially for this program, the Dutch composer Ruben Naeff (1981) wrote For the Deviants: a tribute to the deviant voice, which was inspired by the Faustian pact that the current Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte recently had made with the politicians Verhagen and Wilders. 

When Naeff began working on the piece, he started looking for Faustian themes, inspired by Stravinksy's Histoire du Soldat and Zappa's Titties and Beer, that both will be performed at the concert, too. He realized after a while that he had been occupied by such a theme for quite a while: recently the leader of the Dutch conservative party, Mark Rutte, had barely won the elections and eventually chose to form a government that included the populist anti-Islam party that just had won tremendously. The choice for this controversial coalition partner was not obvious: he ignored the socialist party, who had got just one single seat less, and chose to include the conservative Christian party, which had dramatically lost half of its seats in parliament.

Ruben Naeff. Photo: UvA FNWI

Educated in both mathematics and music and recently employed as an economist, Ruben Naeff finds himself in an attempt to comprehend the world and set it to music. His love for mathematics led him to write De Bètacanon (The Scientific Canon), a paean for science that was commissioned by the Dutch national newspaper De Volkskrant and in which the fifty scientific topics of the newspaper's eponymous project were sung in a canon in four voices. The financial crash of 2008 inspired him to write The Dancing Dollar, in which he set both Citigroup's share price and its former chairman's words to music, and where he asked the Dollar for a dance. After that, many economically inspired pieces came to life, including a businessman's Elevator Pitch for solo flute and a neoliberal creed Credo for chamber choir, with texts from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Ruben embraces all kinds of music and strives to write music that inspires and moves.