As clear as yesterday, I remember the moment when I rang the doorbell at Piet Swerts in Bertem in 1993. With a camera crew to make an item for the VRT News about this young composer. The reason was simple. He had won a prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition. His "Zodiac" became the mandatory work for the final violin competition. It doesn't happen often that a Belgian composer is chosen by that international jury. That deserved to be in the News.
That memory came back to me when I saw Piet Swerts during the recent final of the piano competition in the BOZAR box during a panel discussion with Katelijne Boon handing her his book: "Moments Musicaux. Piet Jozef Swerts, a composer biography". Just like back then, Piet Swerts beamed. Proud of the work accomplished.
Not a blockbuster, like the autobiography that André Laporte once wrote, but rather a meticulously written diary, a logbook almost, modest in size. It typifies the person, modesty itself. He presents it as a "special look into the inner kitchen of a professional composer". A retrospective then of a forty-year career of composing and - should you want to know - of someone who turned sixty-five on November 14. From a short family history we learn that he was a dreamy child and always wanted to be a writer, which he actually still does: but with music!
The aha-erlebnis came when he heard the second theme from Bach's Wohltemperiertes Klavier at the music school in Tongeren - 10 years old - "an explosion in my head". He wanted to "do music" from then on, go to the Lemmens in Leuven and there "began one of the most beautiful and reckless periods of my youth". It was pure pleasure and it went by itself. His talent was quickly evident, he developed a Lutoslawski craze, peppered with Debussy and began to compose extensively, perform, win prizes: Lemmens-Tinel Prize, Baron Flor Peeters Prize and in 1987 winner of the Queen Elisabeth composition competition.
With the imposed work "Rotations" for the finalists of the piano competition, he gained national recognition, his name was launched. Although he often got to turn the pages with his great role model and piano teacher Robert Groslot, becoming a concert pianist was no longer his dream, composing was his thing. And the crowning achievement came in 1993 with his violin concerto "Zodiac". It was yet another prize with the mandatory work for the finalists of the Elisabeth Competition. A professional turning point, as he calls it, which provided new and international opportunities.
Swerts tells without inhibition where his inspiration comes from, about the power of inspired improvisation, describes how the music sometimes comes by itself: "Musical works have their own living world with their own laws. You have to let that take its course as a composer, even if you wouldn't have wanted that at all." He illustrates this with the beautiful story about his song cycle Les Roses, "...like a big torrent it came out, incessantly (...) the music dictated itself". But composing doesn't happen only in a creative frenzy. Another quote makes that clear: "Sometimes you also learn how technical and with almost mathematical proportions that composition process fits together."
It's not a dry enumeration of how he wrote all those works, no, because you get swept up in the composing mind of the composer. How those 24 "Straight Strung Sonatas" were born on that new Maene piano, how that grand war oratorio "A Symphony of Trees" came about, that ethereal Elegia from his clarinet quintet. By the way, it is little known that he also wrote a lot for saxophone and concert band. They seem like confessions, read the short but moving In Memoriam for Wim Henderickx. One more thing about "Slava Oekraina!" his Peace Hymn which testifies to his commitment together with his Ukrainian wife for the victims of the war in that country.
A very open book in which a humble and sincere musician lays himself bare and his music. With so many fragments that you can listen to with the many QR codes that the book contains. Certainly useful and necessary because we hear far too few contemporary Flemish composers in our concert halls and on our broadcasters.
Product code (EAN): 9789465128917
Publication date: 4 April 2025
Edition: hardcover