ROBIN DE RAAFF Chalumeau for clarinet and piano 
Raaff was born on December 5, 1968, in Breda, Netherlands.

Robin de Raaff, whose father introduced him to the piano, received his musical education at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, where he studied with Geert van Keulen and Theo Loevendie. He participated in a Pierre Boulez master class and studied with Brian Ferneyhough at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1996. In England, at the Royal College of Music, he studied with George Benjamin, who invited him to Tanglewood as a senior fellow. The Tanglewood Music Center commissioned him to write a piano concerto, which was premiered there. At present, de Raaff is working on a large-scale symphonic work for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to be premiered in 2004. Since 2001, De Raaff has taught composition and instrumentation at the Rotterdam Academy of Music. In collaboration with Pierre Audi, artistic director of De Nederlandse Opera, De Raaff is developing an opera, Raaff, scheduled to have its premiere with the Netherlands Opera and the Holland Festival on June 26, 2004. The subject of the opera is Anton Raaff, the tenor who sang the title role in Mozart’s Idomeneo in 1781. 

De Raaff began developing his own methods of organizing musical structures, which led to his style of musical composition, in which he subjects various parameters to numerical relationships. “I really feel a need to let my intuition be guided by numbers,” he says, “because it forces me to investigate areas I’m not familiar with.”

De Raaff has received numerous awards, including the KNTV Composition Prize, the first prize at the International Competition for Composers of Chamber Music, the Young European Composers Award in Leipzig, and the AG Kunst Prijs.

De Raaff feels that his style has progressively become more concentrated and focused. “My first pieces were influenced by serialism, mainly that of Boulez. I was very much taken by that kind of complexity; you can lose yourself in it totally. But you take the risk that afterwards no one remembers a single note. In order to truly absorb serial music, every listener should ideally have perfect pitch. That’s why I now strive more for unambiguousness. What I write is still complex, but the gestures are more distinct and understandable. The notes themselves have more meaning—on the one hand because I devote more attention to their melodic aspect, and on the other hand [because I create] more points of repose that make the moments of motion more effective.” 

His Chalumeau for clarinet and piano, dedicated to both Céleste Zewald and
Jaap Kooi and commissioned by the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, receives its US premiere in tonight’s concert. De Raaff has explained that the inspiration for the title Chalumeau comes from a specific register in the clarinet, which is at the bottom and is lower and darker than the other clarinet registers. It is also the name for a shepherd’s flute, an instrument akin to the recorder. The dark color, usually in the lowest register of the piano and reappearing in different settings throughout, is a constant factor in the piece. De Raaff uses the coloration in what he calls “structural counterpoint with the development of a bell-like sound in the upper, middle, and lower registers of the piano pitted against the low, slow chalumeau clarinet register.”  This bell-like sound ultimately takes over at the end of the piece.
—Note by Susan Halpern
www.halpernprogramnotes.com
—Copyright © 2003 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation