source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 06:43:52 -0700 Subject: On Henk Badings From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) >From: COUL@ezh.nl (Manuel Op de Coul) >Subject: RE: Choral music >No, it's true that much too little of Badings' music is recorded on >CD, let alone his microtonal music. I can only speculate why. I just >checked the catalogue of NM Classics and it contains one work only. >The rest can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Eenvoudig: hij was fout tijdens de oorlog. I suspect that Manuel is being polite and circumspect in not mentioning Badings' fortunes during the period of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Following my usual "better blatant than latent" strategy, I'll help out here. Badings was one of the Dutch musicians who, after the end of the Second World War, was judged to be a "collaborator" by his Dutch peers. Unless I'm much mistaken, the judgement against him had to do with a ten-year ban on his works being ah...either published or performed (I don't recall which at the moment. Perhaps Manuel can help out here). The extent of his collaboration was judged to have been rather serious - the only judgement that I can think of which was harsher was the lifetime banishment of Willem Mengelberg from conducting. Unless my memory fails me seriously, Badings' collaboration centered around his being the director of the Royal Conservatory during the Occupation; he replaced Sem Dresden [yes, he was Jewish] and ran the conservatory during the Occupation. The judgement remains a controversial one, in that there are folks I know who argue that Badings' decision to assume the directorship of the KC was a more complex one than can be described as being an embrace of Nazi ideology, and that Badings was, in some measure, attempting to mitigate a terrible situation. But the stigma of his actions pursued him long after the end of the war (as was the case with Mengelberg), and I would have no trouble believing that accounts in some measure for the relative scarcity of his published or recorded output. In recent years, there has been some attempt in a general way to deal in a more nuanced fashion with the notion of what actually constituted collaboration with the Nazis [being "false" (fout), as the Dutch say], and the cases of both Badings and Mengelberg have been reappraised somewhat. So, now you may have another strategy for provoking heated arguments with your Dutch musician friends! Last summer, there was a big festival celebrating Mengelberg's justly praised relationship as a conductor with Mahler's work, and the feathers flew a bit (at least in the press) even then. But Regardless of the extent of Badings' willingness to waltz with the NSB and the Nazis, its difficult to avoid his influence on Dutch musical life as an educator, in his early work with electroacoustic music, and in his pursuit and promotion of things microtonal. Tot ziens, Gregory _ I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 8 Jul 1996 17:42 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA19544; Mon, 8 Jul 1996 08:42:10 -0700 Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 08:42:10 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu