Huba de Graaf - Composer & artistic director
Huba de Graaff is featured with an in-depth studio interview in our magazine “Music & Theatre”
Huba de Graaff studied sonology in Utrecht and composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (Dick Raaymakers/Louis Andriessen/Fredric Rzewski). In her early music theatrical work she developed the theory of sound which is inextricably linked with movement. She wrote an opera for moving loudspeakers: ‘Lautsprecher Arnolt’ in which she presented moving and rotating loudspeakers on stage as personae : as music-theatrical performers. She is fascinated by these natural concepts of making sound and music. In ‘Apera’ she investigated the phenomena ‘singing’ vs speech, which resulted in doing audio research on singing monkeys. Her music has never been polished, she is not afraid of new sounds or new ways of presenting music, both acoustic as well as electronic.
Huba takes an exceptional place in the landscape of contemporary music. She has produced a series of unique music-theatre works in the last 25 years. Her work is not limited to writing ‘notes’. Often she is on stage herself. In the 80's she played violin in bands like The Tapes and Transister. Later she developed self-made instruments, such as a metal dress, which enabled her to control all kinds of electronics. She is always running around with mixing tables, laptops and electronics and gives lectures on her fascinating and extremely original projects. For Huba, composing is also inventing, researching and asking essential questions. Writing good notes is the aim of every composer. But why? What does it mean? Nevertheless, Huba is never pleased with only pure aesthetic standards. Why should it be sung like opera? And what is actually: singing? Nothing is self-evident in her music.
Singers are also actors or devices. There are contradictions, questions asked, topics enlarged and rushed over the top. She is looking for new interactions between acoustic and electronic instruments and creates own software or app’s if necessary to design unorthodox sound systems.
She rarely writes pure concert music for an instrumental ensemble. Rather, she is looking for collaboration with theater makers, designers, artists from other disciplines. But without fixed hierarchy of text, sound and image. That distinguishes her music theater from traditional opera. The traditional concert practice (and the classical way of listening) are constantly put upside down.
Huba regularly chooses the low-fi quality of analogue devices. Noises have a major role: the swishes and buzzing of cassette-tapes or rattling mechanics of old school Revox taperecorders. Or vice versa: in ‘the death of Poppaea’ the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra sounds in an unprecedented surround sound, to illustrate the terror of the sound design. For many years she organized concerts, where composers, musicians and spectators were chased out of their comfort zone. The stage is sometimes placed outside, in the street, in gyms, parks. In large-scale location projects, she used the entire city as a stage. In spite of the experimental approach and the often unusual instrumentation, her work is not ‘difficult’, on the contrary, it has melodic qualities so strong that they are difficult to get out of your head, even after listening only once.
Speakers play a part in many pieces of Huba. In the legendary Lautsprecher Arnolt (2003), the speakers turn, vibrate, swing and jump and transform into credible dramatic characters. In another work Diepvlees (2008), "a tapping opera for soft singing men", microphones and tape recorders perform as lead instruments. In everything she makes she tries to find the essence and to translate this into a musical format. Often she plays with sound reproduction and reversal of perspective. Usually with the necessary humor and irony. In recent years, Huba is doing fundamental research in singing. What is singing, where does it come from, how does it work? This resulted in an opera (Apera, 2013) entirely based on recordings of monkeys and Pornopera (2015) that is not sung but completely groaned and moaned. A recent highlight in Huba's work is the opera ‘The Naked Shit Songs’, which was premiered at the Holland Festival 2017. More than ever the lyrical qualities of Huba's music reach their full potential. Also in this work, an existing audio recording forms the basic material: an interview by Theo van Gogh in 1996 with the British artist duo Gilbert & George. A musical reconstruction of the interview evolves from babbling conversation to a big Gesamtkunstwerk with choir and a virtuoso five men live band. Gilbert & George, who were present at the premiere, praised the work as "... a truly unique opera of great originality. And a real 21st century work of art. "
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