Following the world premiere of Sci-Volo Palla on Saturday, June 20 during the Tectonics Festival in Flagey, Werner De Smet spoke with Klassiek Centraal with composer Maya Verlaak about her investigative compositional practice, in which calculation, musical relationships, technology and uncertainty come together in a system that only takes full form in performance.
Composition as contextual inquiry
Maya Verlaak does not start her work from sound alone, but from the full context of a compositional commission. Each new work begins for her with a critical analysis of the situation in which it will function. "I'm not afraid to learn new technologies or techniques," she explains, which in her practice has led to skills in programming, woodworking and metalworking and soldering: "As long as I keep learning new things, I can move forward."
She argues that it is crucial for a composer to view every commission as a research project. She grew up in an artistic environment where analysis and observation were central. Her father, artist Patrick Verlaak, taught her from an early age how to analyze a work. "We often visited both contemporary and classical art exhibitions and my father always gave me detailed explanations of each work, which allowed me to empathize easily."
Control, calculation and notation
Verlaak questions conventions within contemporary music practice. "I don't understand why some composers choose to stay within the lines," she tells, "you then follow something that someone else determined for a different context, at a different time, with different values and rules." For her, a composition is a construction of musical material, connected by musical relationships within a particular concept. Although people often call her a conceptual composer, she nuances this: "It's never about me, but about communicating the concept to the musicians and the audience."
At the same time, she makes extensive calculations for each composition in which all possible outcomes are explored. For each composition there are hundreds of pages of calculations. A piece is only truly finished for her when she delivers the score, because at that point she knows all the parameters of her concept and further calculation is no longer possible. At that point she lets go of control and it is up to the musicians to explore the parameters within the built constraints.
Tectonics and the work as a system
For her work within the Tectonics Festival, Verlaak collaborates with Brussels Philharmonic and conductor Ilan Volkov. She previously participated in Tectonics in Glasgow, where she came into contact with the work of Christian Wolff. About the boundary-pushing nature of the festival, she is clear: "You can go very far, I see no boundaries, because every musical concept must be presented in the right way, otherwise you only present half the idea."
The starting point of the new work lies in an investigation into the rhythmic behavior of overtones, an idea that arose from an earlier collaboration with pianist Marlies Cornelis. In Sci-Volo Palla she moves this to strings, written for soloists Sarah Saviet and Jasmijn Lootens, whom she fully trusts in this experiment. The soloists must search for overtones without pressing the string with their fingers, only via the bow. The search for sound is part of the material. Although the soloists function within a fragile and unpredictable system, the orchestra material itself is entirely conventionally notated. For Verlaak, the tension thus lies not in improvisation, but in the relationships between timing, listening and response.
Time, uncertainty and performance as process
Based on this process, Verlaak developed a computer program that analyzes each attempt by the soloists and converts it into three-part scores, which she calls "postcards". When the scores of both soloists slide over each other, as many as 36 different melodic layers can sound simultaneously. In total, six hundred postcards were generated. As a tangible part of the project, Verlaak plans to distribute all these 600 postcards to the audience. This way, the listener literally receives a fragment of the system in their hands; the audience becomes the owner of a piece of the musical puzzle.
In the performance, a system emerges in which soloists, conductor and orchestra are dependent on each other. Although some describe this kind of work as a "social experiment," Verlaak emphasizes that this is not a predetermined main concept, but rather a consequence of the way her musical systems function. Within this system, the oboist and the bassoonist also play a crucial role via electronics. Through a pedal, they can live transform the orchestra sound into the raw material. This intervention serves as a form of confirmation: it makes the underlying relationships in the composition audible to everyone. Although the structure is fixed, the timing remains unpredictable: "I never know how something develops over time; I always know very precisely what can happen but not when." The role of conductor Ilan Volkov is crucial in this: he acts as the communication medium that must listen and decide when the orchestra may enter.
Musicians and collaboration: from rehearsal to teaching practice
The musicians in this work are invited to understand the underlying relationships within the material. Verlaak indicates that some musicians experience this as a discovery, while others find it exciting because familiar certainties are absent. They stand on an extremely fragile stage, where the focus shifts from individual virtuosity to a collective ability to grasp the 'game'. According to her, virtuosity here shifts from playing a melody to concentration ability, playing the 'game', and communicative ability between musicians. She prefers to work with musicians who have an "explorer attitude".
At the same time, Verlaak emphasizes that her current working method has become less radical than in earlier work, partly due to the changed context in which she composes today and works with larger structures such as a symphonic orchestra. This inquisitive attitude carries through to her role as a teacher at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. "Students learn best from examples in the field," she explains, bringing everything she learns from her own practice into the classroom. At the same time, she also learns from her students; their different backgrounds force her to "be more tolerant in relation to all kinds of music" and remain more flexible in her own perspective on the profession.
Audience and experience
Verlaak does not view the audience as passive spectators. "The audience is an adventurer in that context," she says, "you give them something to discover." She describes the work as a maze without a fixed exit. "I want people to lose their way," she states, "they may search for the exit, but they may also simply stay in the maze." The work is structurally static; it does not move toward another point, but offers time and space for their own journey of discovery within the whole.
Her drive to continually seek new forms is inexhaustible: "I believe that every new work needs a new form to be clearly communicable; if I pour different ideas into the same form each time, then you don't fully communicate the idea." She hopes that projects like this contribute to a future in which concert life is not only about passivity, but about active depth to better understand ourselves.
Ultimately, a creation is successful for Verlaak when the musicians and audience feel the space to explore the material as free explorers. In a time when concert life often tends toward more passive forms of concert experience, her systems force us into an active, layered way of listening. "Come without expectations," she advises the listener at Flagey. "I do too." It is in that shared uncertainty that the music of Maya Verlaak finds its greatest strength.