Nederlands Blazers Ensemble, De Staat

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has developed his own brand of minimalism, taking the DIY approach that Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass pioneered in the late '60s as just one of several musical starting points. Others include his lifelong love of American jazz and his own classical training, reflected in his love of everything from Renaissance polyphony to Stravinsky. But politics is also an important part of Andriessen's music. Not politics as in left-of-center versus right-of-center, but the political nature of working with other people. For Andriessen, the orchestra is politically untenable — all those musicians at the beck and call of a single guy (well, it's still usually a guy) with a little stick. And so most of his works have been for ensembles that take a more democratic approach, like the Orkest de Volharding, which he founded in the early '70s. The Nederlands Blazer Ensemble (that's Netherlands Wind Ensemble to you) is both musically and politically attuned to Andriessen's work — they too have recorded everything from polyphonic Renaissance works to newly commissioned pieces written specifically for them, and in “De Staat” (“The Republic”) they finally tackle one of Andriessen's signature works, composed in the mid-'70s. From a magical, chattering opening, the piece builds to a bruising stomp, kind of like Duke Ellington's orchestra playing a Steve Reich attempt at notating the sound of a freight train.

If the American influence can be felt, perhaps as a distant echo, in Andriessen's music, the reverse is also true: Andriessen's music has been hugely influential on a younger generation of composers, including America's Bang on a Can collective (David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe). Listen to “De Staat” and you're hearing an important step along the road that has led to the free use of rock, jazz and other vernacular music by today's younger classical composers.