The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

Australia, where he had gone to begin a new life.

      “What kind of colonizers are we?” Willemsen cried above the sounds of the piano. “How come we have never heard this music in Holland? The Portuguese know about Brazilian music, they are familiar with Villa-Lobos, but we haven’t got the faintest idea that there is such a thing as an Antillean mazurka. These islands have belonged to Holland for over 350 years, much longer than Brazil was a part of Portugal. And we know nothing, we cannot believe our ears. I don’t know about you but I am really starting to feel a strong sense of indignation. As if I have been kept in the dark on purpose.”

      Even though he had partaken liberally of the local libation, he was making perfect sense. When it came to matters of culture, the Netherlands in its long colonial past had only possessed one colony: Indonesia. The other territories had just been conquered lands, populated by people with the status of mules and the cultural refinement of parrots.

      Johnny Kleinmoedig was the youngest pianist that evening, thirty-one years old at the time, born in 1962. In the Fortkerk, sitting in the front row, were his black father and white mother, a touching sight: the black father tapping his foot in time to the music, the white mother, ever so softly, humming the melody to herself. Edgar Palm was the oldest pianist, a bald, jovial, chubby man with a pair of glasses he must have bought back in the 1950s that were perched crookedly on his nose. Born in 1905, now eighty-eight, he was still full of vigor, at least behind the piano. Padú del Caribe (b. 1920), Wim Statius Muller (b. 1930), Dominico Herrera (b. 1931), and Livio Hermans (b. 1935) formed the links between the oldest and youngest generation.

      Regardless of their ages, the pianists all played with their souls. I saw it, I heard it: this was music that belonged to its performers like an effervescent tradewind; this was music they had grown up listening to from the cradle, like a language you pick up while playing with it and that later you no longer have to make a conscious effort to learn. They played music for their pleasure, at the concert, after the concert; they played half the night, till the crowd of listeners had thinned and the servants began cleaning up the glasses. Of all the guests, the pianists were the last to leave, together with August Willemsen and me, for we did not want to miss a single note of the festivities nor a drop of the local punch.

      4

       Geniuses of the Right Hand

      Five of the six pianists were also composers, as I immediately discovered that evening in November, since they each played some of their own works. They merely turned out to be the pearls among the grab bag of brooches, earrings, chains, and glitzy watches. Between them Edgar Palm, Padú del Caribe, Dominico Herrera, and Wim Statius Muller have more than four hundred works to their name, joined now in the long line of tradition by Johnny Kleinmoedig, who on a murderously hot Christmas Eve in 1982 had composed his first waltz.

      Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the working method of Dutch Antillean composers has remained the same. Like their European predecessors, they first write out the entire composition, complete with dedication, notations for dynamics, time signature, and finger positioning. On the basis of the score, performers are then free to improvise. They first play what is written on paper, and then add their own inventions—just like Chopin and Liszt had done in their day and age.

      There were stacks of sheet music on Hortence Brouwn’s piano. I found quite a few Curaçaoan waltzes, dances, and mazurkas among them. I started studying several of them, inspired as I was by that scintillating concert in the Fortkerk. The pieces were not as easy as I thought. Possessed of a natural lilting quality, the melody sticks easily in the memory; at the same time they are melancholic in tone, and that mood perfectly matches languid tropical nights. But you need nimble fingers to be able to play them with panache.

      While plodding away at the mazurka Giselle by Edgar Palm and at one of the countless runs in the intensely wistful waltz Despedida (Departure) by Wim Statius Muller, I was reminded of a statement by the pianist Arthur Schnabel, which was often cited with pleasure and approbation by Glenn Gould: “Chopin, the genius of the right hand . . .” To Schnabel and Gould, Chopin’s left hand merely prances along, while the scores by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are blueprints for cathedrals, of monumental constructions buttressed equally by both hands.

      Dutch Antillean composers followed Chopin’s example. When I started studying the pieces, I understood why: they never forgot that the left hand must always keep the dance rhythm. Without that prancing left hand the character of the music would be lost.

      A few months later I heard Wim Statius Muller again, at someone’s home. In the meantime I had grown used to the custom of a pianist sitting down to play a series of requests for waltzes and various dances during receptions, celebratory occasions, or ordinary birthday parties. It could be Statius Muller, Kleinmoedig, Livio Hermans, Robert Rojer, or any amateur pianist. For lack of being able to find anyone better I was occasionally called upon to play; and even though I was fresh from Europe and not in the same league as the islanders, I overcame my timidity with the thought that a Curaçaoan would rather hear an imperfect rendition of Despedida than nothing at all.

      Statius Muller played one of his own mazurkas and this time I paid more attention to the rhythm he followed.

      A memorable quarrel had taken place in Paris in 1842. Chopin was giving a lesson to a student in the house of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer when the latter suddenly burst into the room. The student, Wilhelm von Lenz, had been practicing the mazurka opus 33 no. 3; Meyerbeer sat down and Chopin asked Von Lenz to begin again. “He is playing in two-four time,” said Meyerbeer, “and it’s a mazurka, so he should be playing in three-four time.” Chopin became angry and asked Von Lenz to start over again, this time keeping time furiously with a pencil in his hand. A purple blush spread over his pale cheeks. As a rule, Chopin never lost his temper; he was the embodiment of amiability itself and always whispered to his students, when all of a sudden he started shouting like some querulous person indulging in his pet peeve: “It’s in three-four time; it’s in three-four time.” His eyes blazed with anger. Meyerbeer watched the storm pass with the look of satisfaction on the face of someone who knows he is right. Indeed, Chopin had the tendency of slipping into two-four time when playing mazurkas, even though they are clearly written in three-four. That was because he often held the second beat quite a bit longer. He made the mazurkas sound more rhythmic than they were on paper.

      Statius Muller did exactly the same.

      5

       A Port of Transit

      Caribbean island music had that which I have always sought in my travel writing: it clearly expressed how cultures shade into one another.

      At the end of the eighteenth century, European frigates setting sail for the Caribbean islands brought all sorts of musical forms with them that had already crossed several borders on the old continent. For example, the English country dance had spread out across all of Western Europe, and on the other side of the Channel, owing to a faulty translation, was erroneously called contradanse. The French contradanse sailed to Saint-Domingue, which had become a wealthy colony because of sugar cane, and underwent African-influenced transformations in the plantation houses. The monotonous rhythmic thump was syncopated and changed into a rolling beat.

      A great deal of music was made on the Caribbean islands. It was the only form of entertainment, certainly on the remote plantation houses. Practically every country estate had a spinet, later on a piano, and not just for young ladies but young fellows as well. Whenever the planters went to the cities, they hurried to the stores where the latest sheet music was on sale. They were less interested in the gazettes, as they only contained old news; music was the slender thread that bound them to their country of origin: contradanses or minuets, printed in faraway Paris, but suddenly so close they could be performed in the homes of the urban citizenry or the backyards of the sugar farmsteads.

      In accordance with the basic principles of the French Revolution, the Jacobins abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1793. They applied the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality