Guus Janssen

Guus Janssen (Heiloo, 1951) is a Dutch composer and improviser whose output moves with equal ease between written and improvised music. Trained at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, where he studied piano with Jaap Spaanderman and Ton Hartsuiker and composition with Ton de Leeuw, he made his name from the early 1970s through a notable independence of outlook, largely fostered by the improvisation methods he developed with his two brothers during his adolescence.

From the early part of that decade he played piano with the Asko Ensemble, which premiered his Octet in 1978. The following year he founded the first of the many improvisation groups of which he was the core. These groups helped shape a distinctively Dutch style of improvisation, in which written and free elements blend until they are almost indistinguishable.

His solo improvisations, on both piano and harpsichord, share the same play and formal sense that characterises his written music. However, his way of composing has nothing improvisatory about it: many pieces rest on chord tables, numerical patterns and other rules that he imposes on himself. These rational processes function as a mould. At the heart of his thinking lies the idea of approaching diverse musical traditions and phenomena with an innocent ear, much as the Flemish painter Roger Raveel does with reality. Thus his music accommodates everything from jazz chords and Baroque trills to quarter tones, always detached from their origins. The result can be disconcerting and, at the same time, humorous.

His opera Noach, with a libretto by Friso Haverkamp, was his most successful work. It was presented at the 1994 Holland Festival, with Pierre Audi as stage director and Karel Appel as designer, and is conceived for an expanded version of his own ensemble. His legacy lies in having naturally integrated composition and improvisation, and in having helped give shape to a Dutch tradition of improvisation with its own distinct identity.