Credo

from _Credo_ [ http://www.rudimartinusvandijk.com/ ]:

To me, music and art in general should ideally mirror who we are and what
we can be, with the observation that "when an Ass looks into a mirror you
cannot expect an Apostle to look out."

In today's society there is a need for new spiritual values, new rituals,
a new mythology.  It is not sufficient for me, as a composer, to merely
express a Zeitgeist, but to express a spirit of our time as it might be, and
intuition and religious considerations also play a part in this.  With religious
considerations I mean universal intelligence, not to be confused with the age-old
church dogmas and doctrines whose ritual significance in our Western
materialistic society is dwindling all the time.  For the rest I believe that a
preoccupation with political ideologies is detrimental to the creative mind.

Carl Gustav Jung, who was and still is an important figure for me,
already warned that much is lost in the world because man does not take into account
his individual and collective dark side.  In our time all is directed
outwards.  Rationality has intensified, in twentieth-century music as well.  As a
result originality has become the aim of many creative figures at the cost of
authenticity and this, in turn, has led to the unconcious being supressed
resulting in a lack of communication.

In my music I aim to express myself in symbols as much as is possible. 
In my view this is where my work differs from much contemporary music which
appears to consist solely of symptoms and contributes to the growing
superficiality of our society.

I go my own way.  This is a lonely process, but it is the only way for me
to say something that has content.  A content that might have meaning for the
spiritual and, to use a grand word, moral development of myself and my fellow
beings with whom I wish to communicate.  For me, the latter is a conditio
sine qua non for essential creative activity.  I want to be sure that I can
listen unhindered to constructivism to my inner world, the dark and deep ocean of
the collective unconcious, so that I can dream the dreams I wish to dream

--- Rudi Martinus van Dijk, 1997

--- Article by Maarten Brandt:

Ask pianist and composer Rudi Martinus van Dijk about his identity and
one could run into difficulties.
Is this Culemborg-born music-maker, who later emigrated to Canada, a
Dutch Canadian or a Canadian Dutch composer?  Van Dijk favours the former,
although he likes to be seen as a 'mid-Atlantic' composer.
This generous geographical positioning meshes perfectly with Van Dijk's
multiple bearings.  His biography leaves no doubt about this: Culemborg,
Toronto, Paris, London, Boston, southern Spain, Dartington, Lelystad.  Or, put
another way, if one were to take the distance between America and Canada on the one
hand and that to Ancient Greece on the other, one would come out somewhere in
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or, more precisely stated, in an area of
numerous confluences, where it is almost impossible not to be swept along in the
maelstrom of prevailing currents.  It should therefore come as no surprise
that Van Dijk, being an 'international' composer, views much of contemporary
composing with a healthy reservation and with a certain necessary sense of
scepticism.  When reading in one of the Netherlands dailies that harmony and melody
were again permitted, his reaction was one of utter amazement.  He
immediately wondered, "Who prohibited that?"
If one thing has always been foreign to Van Dijk it is system fetishism. 
Also with regard to the so called twelve tone system, introduced by his
teacher Max Deutsch, a pupil of Schoenberg, he has always harboured certain
reservations.  This is not to say that Van Dijk does not have the greatest admiration
for the members of the Second Viennese School.  Incontrovertible evidence for
this is to be found in his Violin Concerto, completed in Boston, which can
possibly be regarded as the Dutch counterpart to the well known Violin Concerto
by Alban Berg.  Not only is this composition a homage to a prematurely
deceased family friend, it's elegiac tone and heartrending tragedy, not to mention
the regular recurrence of choral melodies, make for inevitable associations with
the creator of 'In memory of an Angel'.
Van Dijk also shares with Berg a liberal and unorthodox treatment of what
tradition has handed down.  No matter how unshakeable the connection between
form and content, it is content that determines the form in the music of Van
Dijk, and not vice-versa.
That the bold, expressionistic side of Berg and Schoenberg has not
escaped Van Dijk's attention is proven in The Shadow-maker for baritone and large
orchestra, written in Toronto and performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Mario Bernardi with baritone Victor Braun.  Tonal references are
present here as well, just as they are in every single composition by Van
Dijk.  This demonstrates a kinship not only with Berg, but also with Britten,
Henze, Tippett and Martin, all composers who have not simply exploited the
resources available to them, but rather gratefully 'inhabited' a rich saturated
musical landscape.
The result is a multi-coloured, occasionally mosaic-like - think of his
brilliant piano concerto written for Bernard Jacobson - design, in which the
melodic aspect is always primary and the harmony as a rule quickened by a
pleasing melos.Another important characteristic of Van Dijk is the striking ability
to 'cast' his pieces for musicians.  Take his Concertante for flute,
percussion, harp and string orchestra, about which the flautist Jean Pierre Rampal has
laudingly remarked "C'est une oeuvre tres bien construite et remarqueblemant
ecrite pour la flute."  Construction indeed, but then an animate construction
and not mere formalism which, according to Van Dijk, is one of the greatest
dangers threatening any composer; the important thing is in fact to be able to
manoeuvre in any direction.
Mention has already been made of the relationship between form and
content.  In Van Dijk's experience, content is to a large extent the product of the
unconscious; here the composer likes to invoke the image of an unseen
'someone' or 'something' standing behind him whispering to him what he should do.  If,
in the experience of Van Dijk, one is completely and without prejudice open
to this image, let's call it intuition, then everything often falls into
place.  Despite the fact that after the event it is hardly or even not at all
possible to understand rationally the details of the composer's working process, the
result is nevertheless watertight.  The underlying trend up until recently
toward formal construction cannot be separated from the will for renewal 'a tout
prix'.  Van Dijk is conscious of the impossibility of renewal in this way,
though all too conscious, having made the point time and again, that renewal
must not be seen as a synonym for originality.
The composer has sometimes compared the single-minded struggle for
renewal with the image of an 'umbrella with appendicitis', and the tendency to want
at all odds to be original with the building of 'an extremely large match with
bits from the Eiffel Tower'.Apart from numerous orchestral compositions,
including not only the above-mentioned examples but also the evocative Irish
Symphony commissioned by the Fund for the Creation of Music (first performance by
the National Symphony of Ireland), Van Dijk has also made his mark in chamber
music.  Here too one is struck by the lack of inhibition with which Van Dijk
lets himself be carried along by his subject, as evidenced for example by the
Two Pieces with Interlude for soprano, flute/piccolo/bass flute and piano. 
Reviewing a compact disc recording of the composition, one critic rightly pointed
out the fact that the form is entirely dictated by the content of the texts by
Shelley and Yeats, and that the accompaniment in the piano and respective
flute parts form the decor against the background from which the solo voice plays
a principal role, emphasising the expression of the text.  Voice and
instruments are combined seamlessly in the composition Miniatures for clarinet solo,
subtitled Lament for a dying bird.
Using a completely different approach, Van Dijk has with this sublime
piece established a monument for the clarinet within the twentieth century
literature that stands full comparison with the major clarinet works of Berio and
Boulez.  Van Dijk proves in this abstract mini Requiem (basically a moving
'memorial to nature') that it is just as possible, given a point of departure
consisting of intuitive elements, to arrive at a perfectly concentrated and concise
whole as with a constructional basis.  Apart from the almost completed
full-length opera Kama Loka, Van Dijk is working on a concerto for orchestra.  From
the preceding the many sided orientation of Rudi van Dijk may now be
sufficiently apparent.  An orientation which may seem to imply an adherence to trends
but which on the contrary makes the composer a living symbol of the mercury
principal.
One of the properites of mercury is that it does not amalgamate with
matter with which it comes into contact but rather remains by its very nature
intrinsically unadultered in form.  It is this unadultered quality which is the
watermark of Rudi van Dijk's compositorial creative process, a quality which
marks him out as a composer belonging to all ages and, at the same time, to no
age at all.

---|-----|--------|-------------|---------------------|
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist

"... simple, chaotic, anarchic and menacing.... This is what people of today
have lost and need most - the ability to experience permanent bodily and
mental ecstasy, to be a receiving station for messages howling by on the ether from
other worlds and nonhuman entities, those peculiar short-wave messages which
come in static-free in the secret pleasure center in the brain." - Slava Ranko
(Donald L. Philippi)

The German word for "noise" _Geräusch_ is derived from _rauschen_ "the
sound of the wind," related to _Rausch_ "ecstasy, intoxication" hinting at some
of the possible aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music. In Japanese
Romaji: _uchu_ = "universe"... _uchoten_ = "ecstasty," "rapture"..._uchujin_ =
[space] alien!

"When you're trying to do something you should feel absolutely alone, like a
spark in the blackness of the universe."-Xenakis

"For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the
world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It
is for the hearing. It is not legible, but audible. ... Music is a herald,
for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. ...
Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and
control is a reflection of power, that is essentially political." - Jacques
Attali, _Noise: The Political Economy of Music_

"The sky and its stars make music in you." - Dendera, Egypt wall
inscription

"Sound as an isolated object of reproduction, call it our collective memory
bank... Any sound can be you." - DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid (a.k.a. Paul D.
Miller)

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
--Arthur C. Clarke, _The Nine Billion Names of God_