LUNAPARK

Music with a touch of craziness

Sander Germanus is the type of composer who feels very much involved in music history: "I want to add something to contemporary music", he states decisively, "and I have very clear ideas how I want to do it". In fact, he feels that he is more inventor than composer. His music, thanks to his integrated use of quarter-tones, is indeed different, surprising, innovatory, exciting and adventurous — very much music for today. "I’m looking for something that I can identify with, for the spirit of the times that characterises today’s society. I was born in a wealthy land, I was brought up on a new housing development and I had a good childhood. Of course, there was always and is some distress and grief, but I never knew great suffering, not on the scale that the Russians have; as a Western European you shouldn’t even try to write about it".

Sander Germanus prefers to give his ideas a more playful, joking and unexpected turn, aiming for lightness within a serious and complex formal structure. "I love playing with what my audiences expect to hear and surprising people". A considerable amount of this element of surprise stems from one of the things that fascinate him the most: quartertones, or rather microtones, the ‘notes between the cracks of the piano’ as Charles Ives so pithily expressed it. "I didn’t think that the music that I heard that used quarter tones at that time was particularly beautiful, and I immediately had an idea how to do it better".