This year the project week at Codarts University of the Arts Rotterdam includes a worldwide composition project, including students from the global academies for Jazz music, World music and Pop music.

This is a report of day 2 of this project, after a concept of Carlo de Wijs and with a working plan by Paul van Brugge called Instant composing; the team of composition teachers further consisted of Oscar van Dillen and René Uijlenhoet, along with creative producing teachers Theo Janssen and Åke Danielsson. The team was supported in project coordination by Ronald Kool and in organization by Renske Wassink and Wies Peeters.

The students were organized in three bands, with each its own concept and composition:

• global ensemble
• heavy ensemble
• weird ensemble

This time starting from paintings, the pair of composers each selected and brought a reproduction with them, the bands developed and recorded a complete instant composition in one day. When being inspired by paintings, there is a confrontation with a different concept of time through simultaneousness.

• developing the composition concept for the music with post-it papers
• developing elements of the piece to be with musicians
• recording modules and layers of the intended final piece
• a post-producing and creating the final mix of the complete piece

The three paintings chosen by the composers with the creative producers together were:

• Wassily Kandinsky – Freudian Slip
• Joan Miro – Carnival of Harlequin
• What appears to be an imitation of Piet Mondriaan’s painting style^source?

In the photos, taken by me as well as by Åke Danielsson and Efthymis Stavropoulos, we tried to capture the vibrantly creative atmosphere and the energy or synergy of this grand collaboration. These photographs are collectively released under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Oscar van Dillen

The track of the global ensemble can be found here