A Brief History of New Music
In Middelburg, Zeeland, 1969-2005

Christian Blaha

From the late 1960s onwards, the Dutch province of Zeeland’s capital Middelburg was to become the Dutch center of international avant-garde culture and music. The city would hold this unique position for about two decades. There was the equally famous and notorious association Youth & Music Zeeland (Jeugd en Muziek Zeeland - J&MZ) - a direct descendant of the artistically conservative Fédération Internationale des Jeunesses Musicales founded directly after World War II. From 1983 J&MZ was to be transferred to the New Music Zeeland Foundation (Nieuwe Muziek Zeeland - NMZ).

The J&MZ association’s success as an avant-garde cultural organization can be explained by the confluence of three phenomena: the political Zeitgeist, as a result of which the artistic experiment could be given the necessary subsidiary room to maneuver (also in order to be allowed to partially or completely fail), the poor climate in the Netherlands with regard to the musical avant-garde in general and the culturally completely derelict province of Zeeland in particular, and last but not least the chemistry between those directly involved in the J&MZ organization. J&MZ would not allow itself to be tired of things like fanatical and persistent resistance, mainly from the confessional side, or a constant lack of financial leeway. The association was driven by a pioneering and rebellious spirit with the undisputed artistic credo: ‘We do everything that someone else does not do’.

In the early period from 1969 to 1976, the brand-new, professionalized association built up essential ties of trust with various renowned national and international musical artists, including Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Louis Andriessen, Willem Breuker and Leo Cuypers. Thanks to the fruits of this collaboration, Middelburg quickly became the undisputed pioneer and inspiration for composed and improvised music in the Netherlands. In addition to these latest musical expressions, J&MZ also brought a very broad spectrum of artistic expressions into the limelight in this early period, which was particularly evident between 1971 and 1975 at the annual Festival Music on the Street (Muziek op Straat - FMS). The aim was to break through the gaping gap between the public and the new arts, avoiding as far as possible conventions from traditional concert practice. It was also the J&MZ association that, with the opening of the first Zeeland movie house (Zeeland Filmhuis) from 1974 onwards, brought international alternative film to the attention of the public in a systematic and large-scale manner.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of the initiatives taken by J&MZ, the ‘law of stimulating backwardness’ came into force, which meant that a disadvantaged province gradually took the lead in the avant-garde arts. This fact was to be confirmed once and for all in the summer of 1976. After seven years of creating an avant-garde climate in the capital of Zeeland, J&MZ, as the ‘indoor’ successor of the FMS, introduced its flagship to the festival: the Festival of New Music (Festival Nieuwe Muziek - FNM), for which it was the first organization in Zeeland’s history to receive a cultural subsidy from the Ministry. With the FNM, J&MZ would be able to draw the national attention of the public and media to itself in a consistent manner. The fact that the FNM – and, thus, Middelburg as the ‘Mecca of New Music’ – immediately acquired a notorious and famous reputation was the result of the unorthodox programming. Composed, improvised music was combined with film, performances of a marathon-like character often lasted until late at night, and a special, relaxed atmosphere was created in the small-scale city of Middelburg. Among the artistic highlights of the early years were the first large-scale presentations in the Netherlands of the work of Iannis Xenakis, Sylvano Bussotti, Michael Finissy, and Brian Ferneyhough, who all attended this event, the presentation of George Crumb, the discovery of the Italian Giacinto Scelsi and the production of the Zeeland-Suite by Leo Cuypers. From 1976, thanks to the tireless efforts of pianist Geoffrey Madge, J&MZ also played an important stage role in the rediscovery of the avant-garde ‘Forbidden Sounds’ of the 1930s and 1960s from Russia.

At the end of the 1970s, the pioneering role of J&MZ in avant-garde music in the Netherlands reached full maturity. This fact was also confirmed by the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, which financially supported the Zeeland association in 1978 to represent the Netherlands during a study visit to Japan. In this context, valuable contacts were established that were the direct reason for the first large-scale cultural Japan event that took place on Dutch soil: the FNM in 1979. The next FNM, in 1980, was mainly dedicated to the Hungarian György Kurtag, to whom J&MZ gave a broad Dutch introduction, even before his major international breakthrough arranged by Pierre Boulez. In 1981, J&MZ founded its own ‘house orchestra,’ the Xenakis Ensemble, which at the same time made a significant contribution to the world-famous Dutch ensemble culture.

Although J&MZ’s pioneering activities in the field of avant-garde art were much appreciated in the Netherlands and far beyond, its position within its own province remained very unstable. Since 1979, J&MZ has also had to deal with an increasingly erratic flow of subsidies, which eventually led to the collapse of the association in mid-1983. But in October of the same year, it resurrected as the Nieuwe Muziek Zeeland (NMZ) foundation. This resurrection was facilitated by the provincial government, prompted by the fear that the province would otherwise lose a substantial part of the national cultural subsidy received as a result of J&MZ’s merits. With various large-scale projects, lectures, workshops, and invitations to the world-famous American composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, the FNM editions again reached artistic heights in the years 1985-1988.

At the end of the 1980s, NMZ began to lose its unique artistic brilliance: the provincial ‘goodwill’ came too late. The saturation of key stages for new music in the Netherlands, the rise of neo-liberal politics for profit as the supreme priority, and political ‘glasnost,’ which also caused the demolition of dividing walls within the arts – these were all factors that caused NMZ to lose its laboratory sodium function, which caused the unique character of the Zeeland organization to be lost. This brought the golden decades 1969-1989 of the avant-garde in Zeeland to an end. In the period after 1989, a number of memorable concerts with large-scale productions could not prevent the last period of the NMZ (1989-2005) from generally being characterized by a slow but steady decline in artistic terms to an above-average range of works that could also be found elsewhere in the country. In 2005, the foundation was dismantled. Yet, the years of enormous creativity of J&MZ/NMZ from the period 1969-1989 deserve to be kept in grateful and living memory, in order to inspire future generations.