Michel van der Aa

(Oss, 1970)

Marco Borggreve

Marco Borggreve

Michel van der Aa is one of the few contemporary composers who manages to merge different art forms in a sublime way. His education speaks volumes, because after training to become a recording engineer at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, he studied composition, where he was taught, among other people, by Louis Andriessen. In 2002, he did courses in film directing at the New York Film Academy and participated in the Directors Lab of the Lincoln Center Theatre in 2007 – an intensive programme in theatre directing.

He likes to broaden his musical vocabulary with dance, film, voices, electronic sounds, actors and theatre. By combining his composing with film and theatre directing, as well as writing his own scripts, Van der Aa has developed a unique style. His music stretches from concrete to abstract, acoustic to electronic and from classical to pop. Van der Aa uses electronics in his music in order to create different acoustic spaces.

In the works Memo and Here [in circles], for example, the musicians operate cassette recorders to change the sound of the space.

Van der Aa now has six operas to his name. This year, the chamber opera for soprano, baritone and 3D film Blank Out (2016) received its premiere, and the musical theatre work The Book of Disquiet (2008) can be seen in England and the United States. Van der Aa is also the house composer of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and he has won many prizes, including the Matthijs Vermeulen Award in 2004, the Mauricio Kagel Prize in 2013 and the Johannes Vermeer Award (the Dutch state prize for the arts) in 2015.

www.vanderaa.net