No longer afraid of sound

As a child, Stephen Emmer accidentally played a piece by Bach. Now, the composer is called 'the Godfather of Dutch TV theme tunes'. Deafness and tinnitus caused him a crisis and a new album. Stephen Emmer (66) waves an envelope in his living room in Amsterdam. “So this is,” in a weighty voice, “post about my pension. It takes effect next year.” It is quite a moment, he thinks, when you receive the signal: you are old enough to stop working. “As if they knew,” he continues, “that man has just delivered his most important work.”

Mt Mundane

For that is how Stephen feels about his new album Mt Mundane, featuring fifteen pieces composed by him, which is released on October 11; he calls it impressionistic classical music. When he recorded it with an orchestra in the famous Beatles studio Abbey Road in London, he knew: it doesn't get any better than this. And that was exactly what he needed. Stephen created more than five hundred tunes for programs such as the NOS Journaal, RTL Nieuws, the children's program Waku Waku, RTL Boulevard, and Goedemorgen Nederland. A fan once calculated that his work can be heard on TV or radio “somewhere” in the Netherlands every seven minutes. But he grew ‘increasingly fed up’ with fixed assignments; his creative freedom was curtailed. "I felt like a music bureaucrat, I thought: do I still have a say of my own?"

What was the answer?

"The first evening I crawled behind the piano again for personal work – man. So bad. I looked at my sheet music with disappointment, and then my eye fell on a cassette tape. With work by my nineteen-year-old self. I listened and thought: oh, cute. There were good melodies in it, I understood what I was trying to do back then, but it just wouldn't come out. I decided: I'm going to work with this. Then it all exploded."

His latest work is about his crisis – caused by deafness in his left ear and tinnitus, which took over his life, ‘or let’s say: ruined it’. Mt. is a nod to the abbreviation for mountain, mundane means something like ‘worldly’. The album refers to Stephen’s own mountain to conquer. Grinning: "Thought of it in the shower. I come up with almost everything there. I think it's because there's more oxygen there." He taps his head briefly. "Good for here."

That head, then; there was, or is, something wrong there too. It started with a persistent ringing, ironically enough originating during a hearing test he took ten years ago because the hearing in his left ear was deteriorating. ‘I had to listen to an increasingly loud ringing, and then I had to indicate at what point it became unbearable. I acted a little too tough, said stop too late – and drove home with a ringing that wouldn't go away.’

What was that like?

"Maddening. Terrifying: inescapable. I went to look for it on the piano: it was a B-flat, between the B and the C. A fine sound, mind you, but not continuous and shrill and harsh. The absolute worst part was that I couldn't compose anymore. Everything you create clashes with that B-flat. Everything hit me like a sledgehammer. Later, to my great luck, it became a hiss. Less maddening; I could make music again, albeit in small doses."

How did your deafness in the left ear develop?

"In the eighties, I toured England with The Lotus Eaters. For a gig in Liverpool, we borrowed a sound system from Motörhead. Those rockers were joking around, I pressed a key, heard nothing, and then I saw them nudging each other: 'Try again, mate, try again.'" So I pressed a key – bam. An enormously loud sound, via a side speaker, straight into my ear. They had turned the knobs all the way up. I thought to myself: this is so bad. But nothing was wrong back then. The deafness lay dormant for ten years, and then suddenly came out."

His daughters, in their thirties, sometimes go to those ‘hip pop-up restaurants’ in the city. Stephen really likes them, but high ceilings, industrial pipes: impossible for ears like his. Christmas, birthdays, New Year's, drinks parties: he doesn't go, or only for a short while. "An hour of socializing takes two hours to recover. But the funny thing is: I used to feel quite lonely; I was an only child, we moved to a new town every so often, and sometimes a new country—India, Aruba, Suriname—for my mother's work. To fill that loneliness, I went into my inner world. I had a rich imagination. The fact that I can do that helps me now. I enjoy myself well on my own."

He doesn't go to concerts anymore

"That is what I find the saddest of all. It is, after all… my life." And his youth. His father is the late Fred Emmer, who worked as a news anchor for the NOS Journaal for years, but he grew up mainly with his mother, a ballet teacher; she once danced with the famous Scapino Ballet. She gave lessons at home, sometimes with live music. Stephen would walk down the stairs and see fifteen people dancing very energetically, his mother keeping time with a wooden stick, and a pianist playing. A few years later, Stephen would sit down at the piano during the break of a ballet class, as if by instinct, to ‘tinker, improvise’. "Do you know what you just did?" his mother asked. "No?" said Stephen, shrugging his shoulders. "You just played Bach." That was what she had played in class that morning. Incidentally: his mother is now 93, is in a nursing home, and is suffering from dementia. "I am her brother now," says Stephen, with a sad smile. "She doesn't recognize anyone anymore, but as soon as there is dance class… she takes over the whole show. So beautiful."

Two years ago, he developed another problem: extreme dizziness. On a random day, he got off his bike and thought: what is happening to me now? He went home, lay down, didn't know what to do – and the dizziness persisted. Days. Weeks. Months. ‘The whole room was spinning. Like I had a massive hangover. No doctor could explain it; I received multiple diagnoses, always with the word 'maybe' in front of them.'"

How did you experience that time?

"Impossible. I barely ate, couldn't keep anything down, couldn't do anything. My girlfriend and I live apart; she did, and does, a lot for me, but my friends also said 'you shouldn't burden her too much,' yet sometimes even going out for groceries was too much. Those around me found it difficult to see me like that. I understood it, too. I was in a very dark place. I started letting go of things. Like: with this dizziness, I can never fly again. Never watch TV again. Never read a book again."

"But the dizziness went away. A year ago. No explanation, but around that same time, it was his turn at one of the few—the only dizziness center in the Netherlands, in Apeldoorn—after a long wait. 'Within one day, I had the diagnosis. Not knowing where such disruptive symptoms come from is a very poor motivator to keep going.'"

What was the diagnosis?

"It came down to the fact that the dizziness was caused by a dying balance organ on the left side near my ear. Or, no, the doctors said ‘extinguishing’. They put it mildly. But they also said: the dizziness is probably gone because your hearing on that side is completely gone too, and since your balance organ is completely extinguished now, that dizziness won't come back."

He tells it a little more softly when it comes to ‘coming back’, as if he is afraid of tempting fate. "Guarantee up to the front door," he says, but also: "I have come alive since I found this out. I'm weightlifting, have already been out to dinner thirty times, and can watch TV again, albeit on a small screen. With years of therapy, too, mind you, and there I learned not to be afraid of the sound anymore. That is the most important thing: getting rid of the panic. I think 'acceptance' is too big a word. Someone once said: 'You have to make the tinnitus your friend,' 'well, I haven't gotten further than an acquaintance. But I don't fear that acquaintance anymore.'"

What do you want to convey with your new album?

"I want to offer people hope. There are countless self-help books; consider this self-help music. If something bad happens to you, it is a matter of finding a way to make a fresh start. To find your own path through that."

How would you describe your music?

"The sweet but also the sour, major and minor. Life is climbing and falling, and the constant is actually that you have to keep walking. I tried to express that musically." He looks up for a moment and asks: "I thought about this beforehand; may I read it out from my phone?"

Of course...

"Look at the intensity with which a Paralympic athlete wins: it is often so intense because that person came from so far. My music is deeply felt through what I have been through. I finished what I couldn't yet do back then, as an uninhibited nineteen-year-old. Because of that, my misery has also become an artistic bonus."

[AD Mezza Magazine - Interview]

Listen to Mt Mundane on your favourite music platform here

Buy the Mt Mundane album on CD here