Boeijenga Muziekhandel | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

I wrote the Romanesque Variations for piano in 1989 as music for a choreography by a dance student at the Rotterdam Dance Academy (now Codarts Rotterdam). The dancer gave me complete freedom and allowed herself to be guided by the music in her dance solo. From this grew an autonomous, concert composition, which was expanded with two variations in 2019. The piece consists of 10 variations on a quasi-medieval, ecclesiastical theme in which bells are continuously projected. The work arose from my great love for Italy and a fascination for bells. The first source of inspiration was the ringing of the ‘angelus’, as it can be heard three times a day from countless Romanesque campanili (church towers) in the hilly country of Tuscany and Umbria, combined with festive bells of the basilicas in Rome and fierce Russian Orthodox bell ringing (rhythmic manual striking on several bells), which can also be heard in Italy. After Variation 7, four beats of a cuckoo clock and an old-fashioned pendulum clock are heard briefly.