Being bold and going your own musical way

In the Netherlands, we have musicians and composers who prioritise their own artistic values in everything they do and who, whenever possible, make no concessions to what they have in mind. This often yields truly beautiful results. Perhaps this requires you to be open to their artistic dreams and their realisation. One of the most authentic composers the Netherlands has to offer is Stephen Emmer.

Emmer has emphatically created his own musical world where you can both marvel at the creative process and, above all, find much to enjoy.

Music, a life’s work

His latest album Asymmetrical Dot is, according to Emmer, the third part of a personal conceptual series of albums, of which Maison Melody and Mt. Mundane were the first two parts. We were delighted by the announcement of a fourth part, with which Emmer hopes to complete the series – a true musical tetralogy – next year. Four interlinked LPs that together form an artistic documentation of Emmer’s inner experience and life cycle. An immensely personal portrait captured in music.

Characteristic of the albums to date is the way in which Emmer allows vulnerability and openness to go hand in hand with resilience and perseverance in his compositions. The way in which he has dedicated himself to continuing to make his music, in spite of personal ailments, speaks volumes. Looking back, Maison Melody was therefore a musical expression of Emmer’s personal limitations, caused in part by a combination of tinnitus, unilateral deafness and vertigo.

Obstacles and perseverance on life’s journey

All three conditions manifested themselves in him one after the other. They would be a significant blow to anyone’s life, but just imagine what it means for a composer who had organised a significant part of his life around music, with all the value and importance that hearing entails. For Emmer, this was not the end of the line; he did not give up and sought and found his way. For more information on this, read this first part of an earlier interview with Emmer in which these limitations are also discussed at length. And bear in mind that he also dedicated himself to putting this issue, which affects many musicians, on the agenda and to raising awareness by setting up the Artists Against Tinnitus foundation.

It was precisely these personal limitations, coupled with the collective restrictions imposed on the world by Covid, that gave rise to Maison Melody. With Mt. Mundane, Emmer portrayed how he personally overcame a mountain of adversity, and on his latest album, Asymmetrical Dot, he draws on his experience of his bicultural identity and deeply personal events, such as the death of his mother and, conversely, the birth of his first grandson. Looking ahead to the fourth instalment, Emmer is keen to point out that he sees it as a fusion of all his musical and aesthetic preferences, steering clear of the prevailing dictates of how music, at least according to commercial standards, should sound: that album, in particular, will be Emmer’s ultimate musical expression. Alongside the three existing pillars of this musical life’s work, that promises a great deal to look forward to.

The album under the microscope

WiM: How much of a challenge was making this album for you?

It was a huge challenge. I need a challenge. If I don’t push myself, artistic laziness is just around the corner. So I really do seek out that challenge. I am hard-working, but there’s also an intrinsic laziness in me. I want to avoid that at all costs. For my next project, I want to get to grips with third stream jazz – think Miles Davis, think Gil Evans. It’s not something I’ve studied, but it’s something I do want to work on. And that’s quite a puzzle.

WiM: You mention that now, yet at the same time your new album demands attention with everything that’s going on—when you consider how you’ve used electronics, when you realise how you’ve incorporated the vocals, when you think about how everything fits together—there’s a great, great deal of challenge in that, and so you haven’t just challenged yourself, you’ve also set a challenge for the listener. It really brought to mind our previous conversation, in which you’d already given us a sneak peek of your new album. You were talking about the vocals back then and told me how enthusiastic you were about them. Perhaps I should have been better able to interpret your enthusiasm back then, but it’s turned out so beautifully – congratulations!

Thank you very much; I don’t think I even realised that at the time. During the creative process, when you’re right in the thick of it, you’re still busy fine-tuning and adjusting, and even with recording processes that are far more advanced than in The Beatles’ day, lucky accidents still happen. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a mistake; a technical question about the recording can sometimes lead to a solution you didn’t see coming, which can ultimately provide a brilliant twist to a musical challenge. That’s a lovely process.

As a creator, you can shut yourself off from that completely. But the question is how you deal with it. I once had a whole discussion about it because someone had different expectations of what I would create, as I’d initially indicated something else. In the end, he was able to accept the final result because he let go of those expectations. So that’s necessary to be able to move forward.

WiM: If you look now at what you had in mind beforehand and at what actually came out of it, how do those two relate to each other?

Because of my commissioned work, I’ve always had to work very much towards a final product. That was always very much a given there. I’ve carried that approach over into my independent work. And co-producer and mixing engineer Fernando Aponte (Fernando Aponte was the principal sound and recording engineer as well as producer for Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also produced a number of Sakamoto’s collaborative albums. He also worked with artists including Tito Puente, Arto Lindsay, Salif Keita, George Benson and Marc Ribot.) suggested some adjustments, but these relate much more to the sound aspects than to the structure of the compositions.

WiM: How did you get started with the analogue synthesiser?

I actually started using it on one of these compositions at some point. I was already doing that back in the Minipops days. I also made use of that glitchy electronics when I was making tunes. Think of the tunes I made for NPO 3 for children’s programmes. And I think also for the fiftieth anniversary of the Holland Festival.

And that wasn’t always a pleasant experience: it sometimes led to quite painful experiences for my ears. So I did persevere with it, but now I sometimes had to take a break in between. I just wanted that; compare it to how you sometimes eat dishes, different flavours one after the other – sometimes you just have to be able to put sounds one after the other. I started listening to it more calmly, not the way I used to listen to it.

Making music is about creating something special

WiM: Did you go back to the young Stephen?

Yes, perhaps. I was boyishly enthusiastic and really enjoyed it. I also received some criticism on Mt. Mundane: people perhaps found it a bit too raw. I mainly thought: I just want to do what suits me. Not give in to expectations or conventions. And that’s what I did. At the same time, I hope that the wordless vocals also leave room for the listener’s own interpretation. That was a conscious choice. I didn’t want the lyrics to be too prescriptive. After all, that happens so much already. For me, the music tells the story, not the literal lyrics, which might steer the listener in a certain direction – and I didn’t want that.

WiM: What strikes me most is how you’ve allowed the music to develop and how the vocal lines seem to embark on their own adventure alongside it.

Thanks, I’m glad you hear that and that you appreciate it too. It’s precisely in contemporary pop music, with all its predictability, that you often hear melody and vocal lines coinciding, and I really wanted to steer clear of that. Songs in a particular key often already feature vocal lines that fit perfectly with it. Notes from a melody line therefore often appear in the vocal lines as well. That is exactly what I had in mind and what works better for me, just as, for example, in jazz, where that tension is incorporated in a similar way. Pop music as we know it today is simply too predictable for me.

I read an interesting article called ‘Age of Average’. Uniformity in music, in cars, in architecture – you see it everywhere. In fashion too, for example: people often dress in a fairly uniform way. I really can’t relate to that at all. I simply have an inner resistance to it. The struggle should be on a global scale: stop striving for more of the same!

Whether from a social, philosophical or cultural perspective: not the same thing over and over again. It seems like a punishment to me if you had to make the same thing time and time again for a record label. I look at that with horror. In the past, that was synonymous with Rank Xerox, but that’s something younger people don’t know about now.

There’s a doctrine in the music industry that says you should keep going in a successful direction. I don’t go for that and, as a representative of the music industry once said to me: “That’s commercial suicide.”, to which I replied: “I call it artistic self-development.” -Laughs heartily-.

WiM: Take Bowie, take Mark Hollis. They kept developing all the time, didn’t they?

Exactly. It’s about carrying on. As Zappa said: “Those old record bosses used to say: ‘We don’t know. You’re the expert.’ They did give musicians freedom and space. Zappa longed for that. And now it’s all about market figures, metadata, and you have to listen to that. The artistic perspective counts for far less than sales.

The voices you hear

WiM: On to the voices then, please. How did you find assigning the voices to the various compositions?

For me, it was the case that the compositions actually already determined the voices. Think of it as deciding which instrument I might otherwise have chosen – a flugelhorn or something else entirely. What I’ve done here, incidentally, isn’t anything new. It’s a trend you come across at various points in time. Whether that’s in jazz or progressive rock. You use it to infuse emotion into the compositions, but it also gives you the opportunity to fit the voices in like an instrument. The tracks where Arpi Alto sings – she’s a contralto with an enormous range – I’ve therefore incorporated into compositions where the instruments already move between low and high registers.

WiM: It’s lovely that they all wanted to take part.

Well, there are several sides to that. Glenn Gregory (Heaven 17) remarked that this was the “Stephen Emmer way” and that people would simply fall for my words. That really isn’t the case; I get genuine feedback from the people involved that they’re impressed by the compositions and therefore wanted to take part. Then there are also people who are drawn to the names of those who have worked with me before and therefore place their trust in a collaboration. And, to be fair, these are the people who wanted to collaborate; that says nothing about any others I approached who decided against it. You only see what has come of it.

WiM: Would you, for example, like to collaborate with Rosalia?

Oh, definitely! I’m always on the lookout for voices with a high degree of authenticity, and that certainly applies to her. It’s more than just the voice; it’s also about how eclectic someone can be in their work. If someone possesses that quality, both in terms of voice and attitude, then I can certainly envisage a collaboration.

WiM: Perhaps Nynke Laverman would be a good fit too. Especially given her latest album and the way she makes music with her partner—and certainly her vocals—I’d definitely recommend you have a listen to her.

I’ll certainly do that. Less and less music has any degree of individuality. And if there’s something new with a touch of individuality, I’m usually quick to embrace it.

WiM: How did that work with the compositions where you combined vocals?

Yes, that was really a matter of experimenting. Really figuring out what fits best. In the past, happy accidents in the studio; now I sought them out, I mixed the vocals and checked the results, just as a painter mixes his colours.

A relaxed recording period

WiM: Precisely because we’d spoken before and you’d already given a preview of this album back then, I really felt that you had the most fun making this one.

Yes, that’s true. With Mt. Mundane, I felt I really had to follow a certain approach. And that wasn’t the case this time. This was indeed one of the freest works I’ve ever created. When I made Recitement, someone remarked: “Yes, you can still hear the tunes in there”. I don’t expect anyone to notice that now, I’ve really left that behind me.

WiM: To me, alongside that artistic freedom, it also comes across that you’ve accepted your hearing impairments as they are and, above all, have worked with them independently.

Yes, I do think that’s right. The dizziness had gone, so I was able to do more again. With the previous album, I’d handed the music over to others; that wasn’t the case this time. I actually played on it myself.

WiM: Shall we take a look at a couple of tracks on the album that perhaps resonate more than others? What can you say about ‘Accepting The Albatross’ and ‘Amboina’?

That’s about accepting one’s fate. For example, indeed, limitations. I’ve mainly linked that here to my background. I come from two cultures, and that’s what it’s all about. Sometimes I might feel more Indonesian, other times more Dutch. It’s also about being able to accept the beauty in that. And that’s what makes it so beautiful.

Amboina, then, is the island where my mother was born. Her father, a , was a director at the post office. He managed the post office on Ambon, and that is where my mother was born. If you go further back in time, you reach a moment when my mother and I were living in a flat and a fire broke out, and we were told to stay upstairs and not come down. A fireman then shouted: “Where are you from?” And my mother replied ‘Amboina’, based on her experience, as a sort of Frenchified variant of Ambon, whilst the fireman probably just wanted to know exactly where we were. To honour her, I decided to name it that. If you look at the composition, I have tried to set her life’s journey to music, and at the end, at the transition from life to the hereafter, I have her greeted by three choirs. Not religious, but very spiritual.

Just before that, you hear a huge bell, an Indonesian gong and a Dutch bell sounding together, as an announcement of that transition. What I particularly wanted to capture in the composition was to do justice to the way she lived her life. I tried to act in her spirit, with notes.

Classical music heading into the future?

WiM: The album is very beautiful and, as such, consistent in its structure. You’ve collected quite a few compositions on it, with each one roughly the same length.

Yes, I really did my best to achieve that. I can’t stand it when an artist says upon a release, “There are three good tracks on it, the rest are fillers.” How can you justify that?” Brian Wilson also referred to Pet Sounds as pocket symphonies. That term has always stuck with me. I’ve more or less adopted that term, if I may put it that way. And I did want to add something to it. I was at a concert by Gabriela Ortiz this week and she was wondering what the future of classical music should be.

If you look at it very simply, you could say that the present and future of classical music are both very uncertain. You could even call it precarious and under pressure, even in terms of interest. In my view, that means ‘we’ as creators need to come up with new ideas. At least, that’s how I see it. In that context, I also see the reaction of the first National Composer, Willem Jeths, to my work; he remarked “It’s great that you’re bringing melody back into contemporary classical music, because it’s been lacking, and it’s very good that you’re able to do that, and that you’re actually doing it: because it’s sorely needed again after the ‘throw everything overboard’ mentality of the 1970s avant-garde.”

I believe we need to take a broader view as well. Does it have to be one or the other? That is also why I want to combine sonic experimentation with traditional elements such as melodic thematisation in contemporary music, precisely to take the wind out of the sails of polarisation within the music. After all, we can do both together.

If you assume that listeners’ attention spans are so short these days, then perhaps you need to approach the structure differently based on that idea. Why not then go for the length of a pop song? If you do that and combine it with the structure of the adagios, as I previously used on Mt. Mundane, then you can combine short compositions with downtempo and, at the same time, with narrative; that could be the solution for classical music.

WiM: Don’t people just want to see this live at some point?

Yes, I’m getting that question quite often now. I didn’t do that with Mt. Mundane, because that was music for a full orchestra, so it would have been very expensive. Maison Melody was released around the time of the pandemic, so that wasn’t possible. Now I am thinking about a possible way to stage it; I’ve got plenty of ideas, but that still needs further development.

It’s fair to say I don’t get questions like this very often. Questions are often quite general, and the way you at Written In Music approach a conversation really sets you apart. In the end, it’s the persistent one who wins. That applies both to my music and to you as a magazine.

WiM: Thank you, Stephen, thank you for your time and thank you for this conversation.

[Written In Music - Marcel Hartenberg - June 6, 2026]

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