"Voorbij Twee Windstreken" – by Emiel Stöpler
“VTW was written in 1995, while I was studying at the conservatory in Ghent, Belgium. Unfortunately, there is no good English translation for the Dutch title, but it refers to the fact that I was living in my third country at that point (I am from the Netherlands, and had also lived in the US before that).
[audio:stoepler_VTW_1_final.mp3]Nowadays, I tend to write with a bit of a groove, based on minimal and pop music and jazz, but VTW was inspired mainly on the music of Frank Zappa (although hard to tell) and especially Astor Piazzolla. It also has elements of film music in it.
Finding musicians to perform it during a school recital proved to be rather difficult. People tended to think it is really difficult to play because of the many meter changes. We had situations during rehearsals where violinists or bassists burst out crying (I hereby apologize to them), but once they got the hang of it, they all found it a fun piece to play and “not as difficult as they thought”.
I never got a good recording, because during the aforementioned school recital, the tape of the DAT recorder ran out halfway during the performance of the piece and it hadn’t been played since.
This performance by the Fauxharmonic Orchestra has all the musical expression and nuances I could ask for, resulting in a very accurate rendition of my composition. I’m taken by how well all the tone-colors are played (harmonics, phrasings and vibrato, spiccato, glissandi, et cetera), as well as the natural feel of accellerandos and ritenutos.”
“I now have a killer performance of my quartet, that I can’t wait to show to everyone!”
– Emiel Stöpler
About Emiel Stöpler
Emiel Stöpler was born in the Netherlands, but lived in the US during his teenage years. After trying out clarinet and drums, he developed an interest in classical guitar at the age of seventeen. He studied classical guitar and (for a brief time) composition at conservatories in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Much of his repertoire is written for guitar, which won him a third prize in at the composition competition of the Accademia della Chitarra di Brescia in Italy in May of 2008 and a first CD with solo works is planned for recording this year. But he also wrote quite a bit of chamber music, much of it for strings or string combinations.
Besides being a musician, he’s also an author, winning a few prizes in Dutch literary competitions. His first book was published in Holland in 2007. He’s now well on his way to becoming a web developer, programming web sites and web applications in ASP.Net.
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