Erik Hall - "Canto Ostinato (Sections 17-30)"
Continuing in the series of reimagining seminal classical and minimal pieces, Erik Hall just released the first “single” of Sections 17-30 from Simeon ten Holt’s composition Canto Ostinato. This project of reimagining Simeon ten Holt’s work comes as a trilogy of Hall’s reworking of of some of minimalism’s most important pieces.
Of the composition, “Canto Ostinato was written for four pianos from 1976 to 1979 by the late Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. It’s set for a February 24th release on Western Vinyl.
An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is Simeon ten Holt’s blissfully adventurous magnum opus. As a solitary Dutch composer of the mid-20th century avant-garde, ten Holt dared to abandon the fashionable twelve-tone language of his schooling for a return to tonality, the simple triad, and shifting rhythmic patterns. Rather than revert to the old laws of harmony, he employed overlapping, freely repeating shapes with a highly distinctive tonal center to manifest an independent ‘musical object,’ liberating the piece’s overall structure from the written page and defining a new Dutch minimal music.
