Wim Mertens at Pallas Theater

Season: 2019
Opening: 22 October 2019
End: 22 October 2019

The “architect” of minimalism returns to Greece!

The pioneering European minimalist composer and one of the world’s leading contemporary composers comes to Greece at the Pallas Theater in Athens (22/10). In a journey through space and time with beauty as his guide!

Faithful to his repetitive structures, he has managed to spread minimalist music in unexpected spaces and make it popular with “unsuspecting” audiences, thanks to the particular melodic sensibility that permeates all his compositions, and the characteristic timbre of his voice, a falsetto that seems to come from the piano itself and that simultaneously “spas” the norms of contemporary music. The Flemish composer, who “is not classical enough for classical music lovers and at the same time is too classical for the pop world”, will in a year’s time celebrate 40 years of a very productive career.

Since the early 80s, the versatile Belgian composer, musicologist, counter-tenor, guitarist and pianist Wim Mertens has managed to gain an appeal to a wide audience, always working with a focus on minimalism and positioning music as a basic human expressive need: “I don’t belong to the category of professional musicians who approach all musical genres. That’s why I felt from my first steps that I should create a new audience for my music… Especially in Greece you are looking for more flexible musical interpretations and I feel that the audience is open to my inspirations, they understand the way I sing in an unconventional language and most importantly they make my music their own” he told Anastasia Kouka in ETHNOS.

In his discography he has recorded around 70 albums, some of which have become almost classical. From the score for Jan Fabre’s The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984) and Peter Greenaway’s award-winning film The Belly of An Architect (1987) to the now classic albums of minimalist composition – a milestone in his career, Vergessen (1982), Struggle for pleasure (1983) and Maximizing the Audience (1985) – the first album on which he added a voice, his own.

One thing is for sure, Mertens never repeated musical forms because they were successful or standardized for the sake of commercial appeal.

Mertens was born in Neerpelt, Belgium in 1953. He started learning guitar at the age of eight and after 10 years of continuous involvement with music, he obtained his first degree in 1975 – against the odds – in social and political sciences, seeking the answer to the question “what ultimately determines historical events, what are the factors, what are the elements that drive history”, realising that all art forms change and are shaped by following historical events.

Eventually, he studied musicology at the University of Ghent and higher theory and piano at the Ghent Conservatory and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. His doctoral dissertation (1980) eventually became the famous book “American Minimal Music”, a landmark text on American repetitive music by LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. “This music showed me that there are new areas to explore and we must not rest on our laurels or we will lead to musical sterility.”

Since 1978, when he was working as a producer at the then Belgian Radio – Television, he performed concerts of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Urban Sax and others and thus he got acquainted with American minimalist music. He admired American composers “who feel free and work more by intuition as opposed to the Europeans whose war has taken them back and put many barriers and in their compositions they strive for seriousness and logical sequencing”. He also co-produced the Funky Town radio program with Gust De Meyer, his main collaborator on the experimental album “For Amusement Only”, where they wrote electronic music for… pinball machines.

Mertens has managed to find the popular parameters of contemporary music and uses them in compositions either for symphony orchestras and smaller orchestral ensembles, or pieces for piano and voice (his own, always) or for “minimalist” and unexpected combinations of instruments (twelve piccolos, ten trombones, thirteen clarinets). “In music there is always the difference between what you see and what you hear … I say you see what you hear. The listener has to understand through hearing. To move away from conventional codes, such as language, and to understand with clarity the composer’s creation … I translate silence as a phase within the music. I incorporate elements of silence and atonality into my music, far from the rules of tradition.” he told Dimitris Doulgeridis in NEA.

In the first part of his two concerts in Greece, Wim Mertens will present his most recent work, “That Which is Not” from 2018, which according to him combines “logical flow with the playful element and the concepts of fun with virtue”.

This work along with his recent releases, “Dust of truths”, “What are we, lock, to do?” and “Charaktersketch”, published together in a cassette entitled “Cran aux oeufs”, confirm his excellence and charisma, both in terms of composition and interpretation.

In the second part of his concerts in Thessaloniki and Athens, the audience will enjoy a selection of the best known tracks from the composer’s rich discography (1980 – 2018), tracks that are particularly loved by the Greek audience: “Often a bird”, “Struggle for pleasure”, “Not at home”, “Close cover”, “The tonality”, “4 Mains”, “No testament” and many more.