Dreams of madness : for choir with electronic manipulation (1991)
Choir: members of the Omroepkoor
Conductor: Tera de Marez Oyens
The composition is based on the music which was written for the radiophonic play "Lier" (text: Gerrit Pleiter), commissioned by the KRO Broadcasting Company. The voices are manipulated electronically, to give an illustration of the mad dreams of the farmer Lier (a free variation of King Lear), who suffers from the sound of many voices in his head.
Tera de Marez Oyens was a Dutch composer. She graduated from the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1953, where she studied piano with Jan Odé. After graduation she studied composition and orchestration privately for two years with Henkemans. Her earliest compositions included religious works, such as choral songs and psalm settings. Raising her four children stimulated her to write educational works and children's operas, such as Partita for David (1960) and Adventures in Music (1970), both for school orchestras, and the opera Van de vos Reynaerde (1966). She was firmly convinced that acquainting children at an early age with contemporary music would develop their appreciation for this type of music. In 1978 she wrote a manual for school teachers, Werken met moderne klanken, a progressive series of short vocal or instrumental, mainly graphically notated, études. Her own workshops on contemporary music, which she continued to present throughout her career, proved her to be a talented teacher. In the 1960s she became interested in electronic music and studied with Gottfried M. Koenig at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. Many of her works show that she was often inspired by text. She also explored the sounds of words, stripped of meaning. In the choral work Bist du bist II (1973), which uses both graphic and exact notation, only four German words are heard in dramatic, emotional eruptions: 'da', 'der', 'du' and 'bist'. A number of later compositions, such as Litany of the Victims of War (1985) and Sinfonia testimonial (1987), the latter based on texts by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Mexican Rosario Castellanos, express her deep concern with human suffering. She also composed several large-scale dramatic works to texts by her second husband, the political scientist and philosopher Menachem Arnoni, including an oratorio, The Odyssey of Mr Good-Evil (1981). In most of her music the texture is spare. Short rapid motifs are repeated in ascending or descending direction in assymetrical patterns. This style effectively highlights the texts in Vignettes (1986), seven short haiku-like poems she wrote herself and set for soprano, flute, percussion and piano. From the early 1980s until her death she was involved in the women's movement in music, often representing Dutch women composers at international congresses. She also performed her own works for piano, and conducted amateur and professional choirs and orchestras on an incidental basis. Throughout her life she lectured internationally on music education, group improvisation and the role of women in music, and wrote articles on these subjects. From 1978 to 1988 she taught at the Zwolle Conservatory. She was a prolific composer with an output of over 200 works. Many of her compositions were commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and various broadcasting networks. In 1995 she was commissioned to write Unison for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. A few months before her death she married Marten Toonder, a renown Dutch writer and cartoonist.
