Sander Germanus: “What I want is to mislead people, to play with expectations, both rhythmically and tonally”

Composer Sander Germanus (1972) has been working with microtonality for over thirty years. He used to compose for orchestras and ensembles, but to be able to express his ideas better, he has now founded a microtonal jazz fusion group.

Cool band name, Sander.

“Thank you.”

How would you characterize the Hallucinating Harmonists?

“Well, it’s a kind of microtonal jazz fusion band, with elements from contemporary music. But it also comes very close to entertainment. The music sounds pretty crazy, to be honest. You really have to enjoy it. Adventurous listeners find that easy, but there was also someone who said after one minute: Sorry, but I’m starting to feel a bit sick.”

How did you come up with the idea?

“I’ve been working with microtonality for a long time. When I was twenty, I wrote quarter tones for the first time in a saxophone quartet at the conservatory, because I was looking for ‘a strange moment’. I immediately felt that I wanted to continue with it. That took me some time, and after some experiments I made my first complete microtonal piece at the end of the 90s, for the Noord-Nederlands Orkest. I divided the orchestra into two halves with different tunings. Ernst Vermeulen in NRC was very enthusiastic about it! I have been working on this ever since. Yes, I have sort of become Mr. Microtonality.”

Why did you start making jazz-like music? You were educated as a classical composer.

“That’s right, and I mainly listen to classical music. Although I am also a saxophonist and have played a lot of jazz in the past and arranged for jazz orchestra. But I am really interested in microtonality. What I want is to mislead people, to play with expectations, both rhythmically and tonally. And that works better if you use material that people know and recognize. I used to compose really abstract music, but it is difficult to disrupt abstract music – then it hardly stands out. So the genre was born out of necessity, you could say. For me, the necessity is: to bring my discoveries in the field of microtonality and tempo to the fore.”

Which microtones do you use?

“Almost exclusively quarter tones. Because I am also practically minded: you want to make music that musicians can play, without them needing a completely new instrument, such as the 43-tone tuning that Harry Partch used, or the 31-tone tuning of the Fokker organ in the Kleine Zaal of the Muziekgebouw. ​​That is a beautiful tuning, by the way, for which I have composed several works with fifth tones.”

But you have had new instruments built.

“That is true. At least, we have adapted existing instruments. With the saxophones, that is still quite complex, with an especially developed system, with the guitar, bass and keyboards, the tuning is done partly electronically. The guitar also has extra frets and the bass an extra string. The newly built quarter-tone trumpet is an existing model, but with extra options for tuning.”

What are your inventions in the area of ​​tempo?

“I have come up with a way to let the tempo fluctuate, so that it seems as if the music is endlessly slowing down or speeding up, while in fact the music never really gets faster or slower. You can compare it to Escher’s staircase, which seems to go up and down endlessly. I call it tempo circles. In songs like ‘Stretch your ear’ and ‘Dizzy’, musicians solo over it, with the instruments sometimes running in sync, but sometimes not, with a very strange effect. Those solos are all written out, otherwise it would be impossible. In that sense, it is actually fake jazz, haha.”

View the full program, compiled by Klaas de Vries here. Info and tickets.