Wim Mertens: "The goal of my music is to reach a non-specialized audience"

The Belgian musician, composer and countertenor Wim Mertens is persevering like few others.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
25 October 2022 Tuesday 06:49
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Wim Mertens: "The goal of my music is to reach a non-specialized audience"

The Belgian musician, composer and countertenor Wim Mertens is persevering like few others. Two years ago he started his Inescapable Tour, with which he celebrated his 40-year career, but the pandemic stopped him in his tracks. They only did five concerts, and now he returns to the stage but with Winds, a new wind quartet, piano and voice project.

This Friday the Barcelona Jazz Festival will bring you to the Palau de la Música (8:30 p.m.), in an evening where musts like Wound to wound or Struggle for pleasure will be heard along with more recent cuts like European grasses or Victims over victors. La Vanguardia subscribers have a 15% discount on the price of tickets, as long as they buy them at Entradas de Vanguardia.

How does it affect your music that you interpret it with formats, in this case very different for you as a wind quartet?

For a long time I have moved and performed in very different formats, and doing this is motivated by a decision I made at the beginning of everything, and that is that a composition does not have to be linked to an instrumentation or a format. These transitions between the different instrumentations have always been one of my points of interest and it's also something that goes a bit against that tradition.

But does that changing instrumental dress then modify the theme?

The overall body of a simple composition remains intact. Obviously then there are some small adaptations in the orchestration of each piece if you play it with an orchestra or if you play it solo on piano. But I always try to respect the global idea.

His Barcelona concert will be within the jazz festival. Can I classify him as a jazzman?

Personally, I have been very interested in jazz music for many years, but also the concept of a jazz festival in countries like Greece, Italy or Spain has become an interesting, much broader term, and thus there are not only specifically jazz artists but also others of contemporary music. Because with contemporary music you do not subscribe to a classical canon, and you are not specialized in certain harmonic and rhythmic languages ​​of jazz. It is very comfortable to be in this type of jazz festivals

What are you a pioneer of?

Starting in 1980, I and other contemporary music musicians decided not only to compose our music but also to play it live, creating our own ensembles and unfolding as performers. This element for me is fundamental, and in fact for me music does not end when you compose it but when you create that union by bringing it to the public. And this is again very important because that audience changes every night and every night you get different inputs from them.

So when you're on stage, what's most important to you?

That my musical language is accessible to the public, and also that it is an audience that is not necessarily specialized.

You have always said that your music always seeks change. Do you still think about it?

It is not a conceptual decision, but something everyday. I mean that what I sing every night of the concert is completely different from everything else and everything that will come because that depends on the inspiration and the electricity of the moment. And those are the elements of change that I'm always looking for. These elements in musical terms have a lot to do with dynamics and tempo. These two parameters are the ones that I have given great importance to for more than thirty years, and in fact in many of my pieces they are the ones that determine their structure. It is a new accent in Western European music because it traditionally focuses on the height of the notes and the duration of them.

The last time you played in Barcelona was also at the Palau de la Música, and you did it just a month before the lockdown. From then to today, how do you think it has affected your perception of the role of music?

The five concerts we did in Portugal and Spain in February and March 2020 was the beginning of the Inescapable Tour, which referred to a four-disc box set containing compositions from a forty-year career. Having to stop that tour was something very traumatic for the musicians who accompanied me, and not so much for me as a composer, because during the pandemic I did not stop composing. The experience I had in these two years will be present in the settings of the new compositions that will come out in the future. And I was also able to publish a couple of albums, the last of which was the double album Heroides, inspired by Ovid's poems. And it is that you cannot stand still because music needs to be played constantly with or without an audience.

After the break due to the pandemic, does music have a therapeutic function?

It is good to highlight it because it is evident that the public after covid has returned with great expectations such as seeing the faces of the musicians again... for me the intensity of this reunion has been a very new experience.