On Henk Badings

>From: COUL@ezh.nl (Manuel Op de Coul)
>Subject: RE: Choral music

>No, it's true that much too little of Badings' music is recorded on
>CD, let alone his microtonal music. I can only speculate why. I just
>checked the catalogue of NM Classics and it contains one work only.
>The rest can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Eenvoudig: hij was fout tijdens de oorlog.

I suspect that Manuel is being polite and circumspect in not
mentioning Badings' fortunes during the period of the Nazi
occupation of the Netherlands. Following my usual "better
blatant than latent" strategy, I'll help out here. Badings was
one of the Dutch musicians who, after the end of the Second
World War, was judged to be a "collaborator" by his Dutch
peers. Unless I'm much mistaken, the judgement against him
had to do with a ten-year ban on his works being ah...either
published or performed (I don't recall which at the moment.
Perhaps Manuel can help out here). The extent of his collaboration
was judged to have been rather serious - the only judgement
that I can think of which was harsher was the lifetime banishment
of Willem Mengelberg from conducting. Unless my memory fails
me seriously, Badings' collaboration centered around his being the
director of the Royal Conservatory during the Occupation; he
replaced Sem Dresden [yes, he was Jewish] and ran the conservatory
during the Occupation.

The judgement remains a controversial one, in that there are
folks I know who argue that Badings' decision to assume the
directorship of the KC was a more complex one than can be
described as being an embrace of Nazi ideology, and that Badings
was, in some measure, attempting to mitigate a terrible situation.
But the stigma of his actions pursued him long after the end of
the war (as was the case with Mengelberg), and I would have no
trouble believing that accounts in some measure for the relative
scarcity of his published or recorded output. In recent years,
there has been some attempt in a general way to deal in a more
nuanced fashion with the notion of what actually constituted
collaboration with the Nazis [being "false" (fout), as the Dutch
say], and the cases of both Badings and Mengelberg have been
reappraised somewhat.

So, now you may have another strategy for provoking heated
arguments with your Dutch musician friends! Last summer,
there was a big festival celebrating Mengelberg's justly
praised relationship as a conductor with Mahler's work, and
the feathers flew a bit (at least in the press) even then. But
Regardless of the extent of Badings' willingness to waltz with
the NSB and the Nazis, its difficult to avoid his influence on
Dutch musical life as an educator, in his early work with
electroacoustic music, and in his pursuit and promotion of
things microtonal.

Tot ziens,
Gregory

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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