Electric Language-ladder Of Escape 16: Wiek Hijmans(El-g)

Wiek Hijmans has set himself the goal of integrating the electric guitar into classical music. So wrote Wiek Hijmans at seventeen years of age in a biography with the earnestness and ambition of a passionate young artist in the making. When asked 35 years later if he feels he has accomplished his target, he answers that he has at least made a contribution to the goal he strived for. With the advance of age, everyone becomes a little more realistic about his ambitions, but an anarchistic flame is far from extinguished in Hijmans. The music on this CD has a narrative quality and is intuitive in character rather than abstract or constructivist, but all individual works share an unruly, or at least willful, edginess; a particular guitar language. The repertoire of this CD shows the traces of the, perhaps now old, 20th century avant-garde which valued experimentation and an inquisitive interest in adventurous musical vistas so much more highly than is common in the mainstream new music of today.