Life of Buma Classical Award winner and composer Mathilde Wantenaar

And this year the Buma Classical Award goes to… composer Mathilde Wantenaar! In its annual review of copyright income, BumaStemra sees that as a young woman, the 30-year-old Amsterdam woman stands out above a predominantly older and male field of composers and arrangers. A lot of work has been performed, written and on December 8 there was also a striking premiere of her accordion concert in Vienna. It is time to visit her in her apartment in East Amsterdam, where most of that music was written.

Do it yourself

Mathilde Wantenaar prefers to make everything herself. Whether it is the spicy cake from the oven that scents her entire house, the dark blue blouse that she tries to make at her kitchen table using sewing patterns. Or her home itself, which she transformed from a bare attic floor with peeling walls into a bright, friendly apartment with plants, musical instruments and art.

Composing full time

Yes, making something out of nothing is her own thing, but that blouse just won’t get finished. The pieces of fabric are waiting patiently next to the sewing machine, but Wantenaar hardly finds the time for it. She’s too busy doing what she loves most: music. She has an abundance of composition assignments: her agenda is so full that she can no longer take on a new piece. She is composing full-time, or ‘writing’, as she calls it, there in that modest attic space in East Amsterdam.

Her own “studio”

A kitchen and living room in one, with a piano less than two meters from the kitchen table -that is where she spends most of her time composing. The keys give her an overview of all the voices she is trying to interweave. Above the kitchen there is a loft as a bedroom and behind the sliding door along the roof truss a mini dormer window, which just fits a desk with a computer on which she works on her music. She blocks her internet while writing and often works into the evenings, she reluctantly admits.

I’m still looking for a good work-life balance, but it’s a bit ambiguous: I would like a little less stress, but I don’t want to write less.

Mathilde Wantenaar

Luck and hard work

She calls herself privileged that she can make a living from composing. Born into a musical family, with musician parents who paid for her music lessons and did not stop her from going to the Conservatory. Teachers who encouraged her, gave her self-confidence and helped her with her first assignments.

She initially humbly omits her own role in her success. Because she was also lucky, she thinks. “You can work as hard as you like, but you have to have people around you who encourage you, who open doors for you.” She says that at the end of her studies, composer Willem Jeths (one of her main subject teachers at the Conservatory) arranged for her to write a piece for violinist Lisa Ferschtman. She liked it so much that she ordered another piece from Wantenaar, which was later adapted for string orchestra. “That’s how the ball started rolling,” she reflects.

Other pieces by Wantenaar also began to lead a life of their own: her first orchestral work, Prélude á une nuit américaine, which she wrote for the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, was later played again by the Netherlands Philharmonic under the direction of conductor Markus Poschner. “Twice, even,” says Wantenaar. Poschner then took it back to various other orchestras: it was played in Antwerp last March and on November 17 and 18 it will even be played overseas, in Salt Lake City.

More luck

But Wantenaar never knows in advance whether a piece will succeed. “That’s the risk of new music. You try to deliver quality, but whether it has that magic that makes it stand out above the rest… that is also a matter of luck. You just have to find those things that make it beautiful.” At the same time, she thinks that’s the fun of it: if you let someone write something new, no one knows what it will be, not even the creator.

Be your own audience

In determining what is ‘beautiful’, Wantenaar is guided by what fascinates her, what she is captivated by and what she therefore wants to let others hear. She doesn’t think in terms of ‘what the audience wants’ or ‘what is accessible’, because for her there is no distinction between them. As a composer, you cannot help but be your own audience, she believes. When composing, she sits in the seat of the listener, the musician and herself. “The audience feels it when the musicians enjoy playing. Everyone then gets involved, and you all become completely one.”

Excruciating route

But before that happens, Wantenaar has already gone through a long and sometimes excruciating process with her work, especially when it concerns a large piece. In the first phase she mainly gains inspiration. For her latest work, the accordion concerto for about eighty musicians with soloist Vincent van Amsterdam, which will premiere in Vienna on December 8, she first fantasized about all the types of accordion music she knew. From the jazz standards and French musettes she used to dance to when her father played the accordion, to the raw, expressive contemporary sounds of Sofia Gubaidulina. Then, with some sketches, she tried a few things together with Van Amsterdam and his instrument. She then developed the ideas, after which the work became increasingly concrete and intensive. In that phase she usually gets completely sucked into the piece and it becomes difficult to eventually let go.

Tango

That process is wonderful and terrible at the same time, says Wantenaar. That’s why she makes those clothes, for example, to be able to step out completely when she’s stuck. Or she goes for a walk, humming her piece out loud. She demonstrates how she then walks like an absent-minded composer, shaking her head back and forth, hair covering her face: “I then walk very strangely down the street,” says Wantenaar. “Especially with that tango.”

Do it again and again

Moreover, composing can be lonely. Wantenaar finds it difficult to maintain social contacts. “Everything just goes on. That’s a thing. We haven’t even been on our honeymoon yet,” she gestures to her husband Jonas, who, as now, usually works in the same room on his laptop. “We just keep postponing it.”

She is grateful that she has so much work, but can also curse about it sometimes. “Then I think: this is not how I want to live my life.” Yet she is now doing what she wanted as a child, when she felt herself being drawn to the piano to play with those sounds and voices. Crafting with those nuts still gives her pleasure every day.

Then, joking: “It also helps that Jonas sometimes laughs at me when I lie here with a tormented mind hating my work. Then I see it through his eyes and I can laugh about it too. And if the musicians ultimately enjoy playing it and the audience likes it, then I immediately want to do it again.”

Website: Mathilde Wantenaar
Text by Stella Vrijmoed

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