“Canto Ostinato,” a keyboard piece by the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt made of overlapping layers and repeated patterns, has amassed a cult following — in the Netherlands, at least.
In “About Canto,” a 2011 documentary directed by Ramón Gieling, people talk about the piece’s impact on their lives: a former D.J. who has some of the score tattooed on his shoulder, a woman who gave birth to her second child while “Canto” played and the brother of a man whose suicide note said that “his life was fulfilled” after hearing the piece in concert.
“Canto Ostinato” is the most famous piece by ten Holt, who died in 2012, and it is still extremely popular in the Netherlands. But established histories and concert programs of Minimalism beyond that country tend to congregate around a core group of important American figures — like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young — and ten Holt’s name is routinely missing.
There are clear similarities between ten Holt’s work and compositions by these more well-known figures. At the same time as celebrations mark ten Holt’s centenary —including a Dutch lecture-performance tour exploring his biography and important influences and many performances of “Canto” in the Netherlands and abroad — music historians have been asking if more (and more international) names need to be added to the canon of great Minimalist composers.
After hearing Glass perform in the Netherlands, ten Holt began writing “Canto” in 1976. That same year in New York, Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” sold out two nights at the Metropolitan Opera, and Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” premiered. Both are widely considered seminal Minimalist projects.
While the term Minimalism has often been contested by the musicians it’s been used to describe, by the early 1970s the term had gathered momentum as a shortcut for describing music made with long tones or drones, apparent stasis masking gradual change and an emphasis on repetition. The genre subsequently dispersed, feeding into other genres like pop, noise and ambient.
“Canto” shares a lot of traits with Minimalism’s canonic multi-piano works — such as Reich’s “Piano Phase” or “Six Pianos” — and invites structural comparisons with the overlapping parts and type of group improvisation in Riley’s landmark composition “In C.”
“Between a piece like ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ and ‘Canto Ostinato,’ I find there to be a through-thread of gratifying harmonic development,” said Erik Hall, a Michigan-based musician who followed his solo, multi-tracked Reich album with a similarly constructed “Canto” recording. He added that he found further comparisons in “the pacing, duration and endurance it takes to really sit with it and take it in.”
Ten Holt’s route to a Minimalist style was far removed from developments in America. He was born in Bergen, in the north of the Netherlands, into a family of artists, and ideas from visual art informed his particular route in minimal music.
Before studying in Paris in 1949, ten Holt studied composition with Jakob van Domselaer, an associate of the painter Piet Mondrian and one of the first to transfer the principles of minimal abstraction and strict geometry of the art movement de Stijl into music, in his piece “Proeven van Stijlkunst” (Experiments in Artistic Style). “It’s from the 1910s, and it sounds like Minimalism, it’s absolutely fascinating,” said Maarten Beirens, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.
Like many other European composers in his broad age group, by the late 1950s, ten Holt was incorporating serial procedures into his compositions, prioritizing dissonance over tonality and consonance. Later pieces like “Canto” saw ten Holt abandoning serialism, in a move he called “tonality after the death of tonality.”
“There is no Minimalistic composer who has so much freedom” as ten Holt, said the pianist Jeroen van Veen, adding that ten Holt’s fluid compositions “gave back what had been lost in the classical tradition: being flexible onstage.” But in the wider historical schemes — of Minimalism, and of European classical music too — those characteristics do make him “an outsider,” van Veen said.
As does the lyrical Romantic pianism of “Canto,” which brings to mind Chopin or Rachmaninoff — and which connects to a longer history of European art music tradition.
But ten Holt’s exclusion from the canon was because of more than just this traditional turn. He “wasn’t a composer with the kind of connections that many composers had,” Beirens said. Unlike his compatriot Louis Andriessen, Beirens added, “he did not have steady relationships with certain performers, with orchestras or with the music business until a later point in his career.”
That change came with van Veen, who started the Simeon ten Holt Foundation in 2015 to promote his music to an international audience. Still, today the vast majority of ten Holt recordings and performances remain in the Netherlands.
Language and location played a part in ten Holt being overlooked, too. “The history of Minimalism depends on where you are in the world,” O’Brien said, adding: “If you read a Dutch language history of Minimalism, a Minimalist classic like ‘Canto Ostinato’ would be, I think, front and center.” But such stories have yet to break into Anglophone-focused discussions of Minimalism.
When it comes to understanding Minimalism, “we know how things ended up,” O’Brien said, “and then we look back to history to reinforce the lead-up to that.” And a composer like ten Holt — who bridged musical worlds without ever truly settling in any camp — quietly disrupts those narratives.
