When the artistic manager and programmer of the Noord Nederlands Orkest (NNO), Marcel Mandos, honoured me with a commission to write a concerto for his orchestra conducted by Stefan Vladar and pianist Ralph van Raat, a number of things quickly became clear. I had a dream shortly afterwards that I was having a composition lesson with the American composer David Lang – whom I do know but have never studied with. In this dream we were sitting at the piano looking over my sketches. Lang showed me in playing how I should write for piano and orchestra. Each time he would play something for me, the sound of the entire orchestra with piano came out of his fingers. An incredibly sonorous sound – at least a fraction of whose depth I hope I have been able to bring back in reality, because such dreams should be taken seriously. Other than this, Aerial doesn’t have much to do with Lang’s music.

Everyone knows that a good title is half the work. It gives you a direction as a composer; even a work that doesn’t exist gets its own character: it is a kind of promise that you still have to keep. The adjective Aerial literally means “(in or from the) air,” in combinations such as “aerial photography” or “aerial roots.” For me, the title refers to weightlessness, to breaking free of the ground, to the unbroken view of the horizon.

When I went to Ralph van Raat with my initial ideas, he was happily surprised by the title. Did I know that flying was a hobby of his? No I didn’t. Van Raat actually took flying lessons in motorized planes and almost has his license. Since then he regularly sends me a photo of himself, grinning broadly, in a plane over Holland.

That evening, we talked a lot about music and what was on our minds: not only the (post) minimal music of Steve Reich and John Adams, but also about Iannis Xenakis, jazz and pop. I played him the track by Anderson and he played me recordings by Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, on their electric piano. We jumped from one topic to the other, all the while listening to music from a wide genre-broadband. Non sequiturs are something Ralph and I are both talented at.

The electric pianos ended up in the first part of the concerto. In the prelude-like part with the same title as the concerto, Ralph imitates a delay on the acoustic grand. In electric music, a delay is an echo machine that takes every attack and repeats it rhythmically. The orchestra in the opening part is actually the reverb of the piano. In the background, harp and celesta play a continuous little motive, like a strummed guitar in the distance.

I couldn’t have written the second part (Here Come the Planes) without Laurie Anderson’s song O Superman. It became a kind of simple music – a melody over a chaconne in the low instruments – a repeated bass line above which the melody slowly develops.

The final part (R & R, which is in part a play on Ralph’s initials) is the fastest. The piano starts and is heard alone for the first time. It doesn’t take long, however, before he is joined by the steadily strengthening orchestra. In this part, it is as if the sound of the plane slowly comes into focus only to disappear from sight in the final bars.

Aerial never really became a ‘concerto,’ in the sense that the piano and orchestra should face each other in competition (as in the original meaning of the word ‘concertare’). It is more like that they amplify and complete one another. I like that. (Translation: Terri Hron)