An Interview with Wim Boerman in Apeldoorn, Netherlands 2015.
Wim Boerman (1951) studied flute at the conservatory of Arnheim – Rien de Reede and Frans van der Wiel. With fellow musicians he formed orkest de ereprijs in 1979, in their early days a collective of musicians without a conductor. Their main goal was to perform new, especially for the ensemble written pieces for traditional concert halls and extraordinary venues (for instance outdoors, markets, museums). In time the complexity of the pieces made it necessary to involve conducting and after several years of combining both performing and conducting Wim Boerman has been the artistic director and conductor of the ensemble for a good many years. In 2005 Wim Boerman received an achievement award by the Polish Ministry of Culture. During all these years he has found it essential to remain teaching in Arnheim.
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Septian : Can you tell me concisely how orkest de ereprijs and young composers meeting were established?
Wim Boerman : the ereprijs is an ensemble for contemporary music and especially into sit in new pieces. It’s a special line up, in orkest de ereprijs we have 10 wind and brass players, guitar player, bass, piano, percussion. And we moving from Arnhem to Apeldoorn, we already have contacts with Gaudeamus Foundation and we decided to ask the jury members of Gaudeamus Foundation to teach in Apeldoorn, And that was the beginning of Young Composers Meeting in 1995. And in the next year we got Louis Andriessen one of the main teachers and he asked Martijn Padding, and Martijn Padding asked Richard Ayres, so now Martijn and Richard are the main teachers for this composers meeting and every years we asked some foreign composers to join us.
Septian : Why are you all really concern towards young composers and are there further purpose from young composers? Or is it nothing other than a meeting for young composers to exchange their knowledges, ideas and together lerning to work wirth an orchestra?
Wim Boerman : it’s a lot of things that you (participants) do together I think. You can tell it to your self when you finish this week in young composers meeting, you meet composers about your age, about your experience from all over the world, and somebody like you from Indonesia that have background(culture and etc) and somebody from West Coast of America meeting here in Apeldoorn also means that you exchanges a lot of ideas. And for the ensemble, we just into sit in living music, composers who write nowadays and who write especially music for orkest the ereprijs and the best way we thought of getting to know them and to have a kind of “network” of composers all over the world because music is completely international for us. So we invited you and you meet with each others and we meet you. The top composers already in ’95 we still have contacts and they are still into composers
Septian : What is the most difficult part to conduct this event and can you give me tips on how to conduct an event like this which is able to still exist for so many years and able to produce great future generation.
Wim Boerman : Now the money is the most difficult things.Everybody knows that funding this kind of process is still difficult and at the momment is more diffuclt than a few years ago. So we have savings and lack of money. But we still are able to keep it up right because the members of the event still want to do it. And the senior composers like Martin and Louis are not asking a huge ammount of money to teach here, and this circumstance we still can do it and this today to do so. And of course the ansamble, as you have heard yesterday in the concert, the ensemble consists of people from the ages from 28 to 60. So it’s a new way and young musicians are coming in but still also some others. And all these men are still interested in playing new live music and that’s the main reason, I mean if they don’t want to do it then it stops but getting them together, rehearsing for a long week from 10 – 5 (10 am -5 pm?) it’s like a hell for the young but they love to do it. And that’s makes we work
Septian : Lastly, what do you hope for young composers in the future?
Wim Boerman : Their compositions, to perform their music and who want to work together with them and to develop new ways, new guides and raise of performing contemporary music and be the best of them.
Of course yesterday we played the new piece by Martin Padding who is like 55 years old but of course not all in his mind, he is a composer of contemporary music nowadays actual music. So that’s not different from you but you are like how old are you? 20? 22. So you are young and living and you also write contemporary actual music so this combination of living composers who now write for this ansamble. That’s what we love to do, to perform this music, to investigate new boundaries, to investigate new worlds of sounds or complexity or whatever. That what orkest de ereprijs is about.
Apeldoorn, Netherlands 2015