“It’s not about who I am. It’s more about how I am being at this moment of my life — in this context with the people around me, in this country, in this world, in this body. I think that will never be not fruitful or interesting to discover.”
Celia Swart
Celia Swart is a Dutch composer, visual artist and saxophonist based in Rotterdam. Celia’s multimedia works embody an in-between experience of realism and imagination, manifesting harmonic colours and melodic expressions reflected in her visual media; her animated visuals blending stop-motion, rotoscope animation, live-action and photographic imagery. Celia studied at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague with Yannis Kyriakides, Guus Janssen, Peter Adriaansz and Martijn Padding; her music has been performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, Nieuw Ensemble, Kluster5, and Xtro Percussion, among others, and showcased at Bang on a Can Loud Weekend (USA), Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ (NL), TivoliVredenburg (NL), and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK). In 2018 her work was nominated for the Tera de Marez Oyens Award, and she received the “recommended work’’ award at the International Rostrum of Composers 2019 (Argentina).
Celia’s recent multimedia work ‘The Mirror in my Room’ — written for Arthur Klaassens & Vincent van Wijk — was premiered in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 2023, with upcoming performances with A-Lab (Amsterdam) and Gaudeamus in 2024. Patrick Ellis chatted with Celia to discuss her multimedia work, illustration software, resonant doors, Dutch architecture, and discovering through multimedia one’s relationship to oneself…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Before you began composing, were you interested in any other art forms? When you were younger did you have an interest in illustration?
Celia Swart: Yes! It was my favourite subject in middle school and high school. I don’t remember if I did it at home — maybe when I was younger — but [at the time] it felt that something was clicking with that [drawing], rather than other subjects like math… -laughs-
What kind of things did you draw?
I remember one painting that my parents still have in my old childhood room. I think [for an assignment] we needed to paint an expression, like sadness or fear. I remember thinking that I wanted to paint something that was based around the four core emotions — happiness, sadness, fear and anger — but I thought “what other states can you be in?” I’m not sure I thought that deeply about it, when I was 8 or 9. -laughs- But I felt like that state itself [of] “thinking” was the perfect expression to paint — nadenkend — and I really enjoyed it, because I worked with the face; and later on I was still doing a lot with faces.
When did you start to compose, were those first pieces entirely musical, or were you already bringing in drawings and visuals?
There were two reasons why I started composing. One of them was that I had saxophone lessons for a couple of years, from the age of 8 or 9. I was also curious about the piano in my saxophone teacher’s room, so I started piano lessons; but I found it really difficult to play the piano — especially being used to treble clef since the age of 6, coordinating the left hand to the bass clef — so the practising was really hard. So I began composing simple melodies… I thought, if I showed this during my lesson, maybe this is something that I could do instead of practising from notation.
When I started piano lessons, I got this big electric keyboard where you could layer five voices with all kinds of sounds — and that was really fun, because I could make beats and record chords, and then with my saxophone on top of it, I could play melodies.
I think when I was 17, I met somebody who was studying at the film school in Brussels, and that really excited me: “Oh my god, can I make music for your film?” I watched a lot of movies when I was younger and I was interested in all of the soundtracks, so that was something I wanted to potentially pursue. I wasn’t super conscious about it, but I thought it would be really cool to connect the narrative of a visual element with live music.
Your first work for visuals and live performers, ‘Brooklyn Statue’, brought together music for a live ensemble [Oerknal] with a video that featured your own drawings of scenes and skylines of New York. What was the impetus to create a piece for video and ensemble?
I don’t remember the drive [to make it], but I remember that the project was to compose a new piece for [Oerknal]. At the time, I was having classes in multimedia composition with Yannis Kyriakides, and we had an assignment to make a multimedia piece. It made me think again about creating a work that had visuals; I was working on the piece and had an image in my head — I also had just got back [from] New York. I started drawing scenes based around photos I took in NYC. I was just at home and I coupled the two whilst I was working on the composition and I thought “why not also present it live?”
With the sketches, were they done casually or were they based off some of the photos that you took? And then made that as part of the visuals?
The piece is divided into three or four parts, and the music travels from one side to the other: at one point you’re in the subway, then you are on the bridge, then at the end you are close to the street, it goes down [the street] a bit… I think at the time, I was just looking for the right visual with the right musical moment in the piece.
Another work of yours that has a similar visual identity is ‘Zoning Out’ (2018) which was written for the Nieuw Ensemble. In that work, skylines are also a central part of visuals — what attracted you to using cityscapes and skylines in the visuals for those two pieces?
There’s a piece that I wrote for Kluster5 — ‘Boven Hoge Gebouwen’ [Above High Buildings]. I grew up in Vlissingen, which is a town/small city where all the architecture is mostly low — only at the beach you have these quite high towers. When I was younger, my family used to go to the mountains in Switzerland or Austria, and I always felt like I was in some kind of cocoon [when I went there]. And [I] had the same feeling when I went to The Hague for the first time for my audition: walking out to the centre and looking up at the high buildings and [being] like, “Yes, I love this so much, this is what I want to be surrounded with.” I had no particular connection with those buildings, they were just there.
Similarly with the skyline, it’s just a bunch of high things. I always felt there was some kind of thing happening within me that made me feel good, but also at the same time it made me feel very small — like you can almost evaporate into a city. So it’s kind of a nice feeling where a lot is possible, but also at the same time you’re just one fish in the stream with many other fish. There was a lot of inspiration with that [feeling].
So with ‘Zoning Out’, the piece is about depression and getting detached from everyone around you; it’s a fictional world and it starts with a view from an apartment that zooms out. Then [the next scene] is a view from [the perspective of] falling down, and then it ends with a birds’ eye view. So you’ve almost risen up again. It’s a metaphor for how you don’t feel attached to life around you; you go through a period of that feeling and then at the end you get out of it and that can be a good place, a bad place, or somewhere in between.
Musically, ‘Zoning Out’ begins with material that overtime alters and subtly twists with refrain, which I notice that you do in some of your other work. When you develop initial material, how do you create variations? Do you use formalised structures or do you tinker with different parameters in a more organic way?
I don’t want to generalise, but I really like to start with a very strong cell of material — and within that it could be anything, like one sound played by one performer, or something in unison, a cluster, a chord, a texture. And then I repeat that a couple of times, but then within each repeat there are small changes that make it fluid. In this way, I create a different colour of the same thread; I like to establish that in a sense that you feel — like, “okay, I get it now” — and then you go onto the next thing. It’s a series of small changes, and then you break it open a bit more, but still that material all comes from the first cells, even if there is something added to it. I never work with a completely new thing.
It’s a very Haagse School, minimalist principle.
Yeah, you can say that. It’s an influence from minimalism, but it’s a different discipline or subgenre of minimalism.
In terms of the relationships between the music and the visuals, how did you consolidate during the process?
I went back and forth. They were updating each other like a feedback loop. This is still the case with my multimedia work today; nowadays if there is not a visual, I will go to Pinterest and look for a lot of images that give me prompts for what I want to do in my compositions. [Using images] is a guide for an atmosphere that I am going for in a piece; it gives me information about what I should do with structure or form, the instruments and texture. If I were to make a visual with it, you can also extract characteristics and elements from the music and then put [them] into the visuals — [that] is something really exciting to do. At the latter stages of the process, to translate them from one to the other. During the writing process, you are almost in the space of the piece — and besides the struggles of writer’s block and these kinds of things, being immersed in the middle of the story is a really nice place to be.
With the illustrations, what is the process from drawing images to putting together the visuals? Do you scan the drawings or do you draw them digitally?
[For] the last projects I did with Kluster5 and my recent collaboration with Lip Stick Percussion Duo, I used the app ProCreate on my iPad — where you can easily layer the animations. But with the older pieces, I drew them all on paper with a pencil and then I scanned them in; I then redrew them digitally on Photoshop, so it was a long, long process. It was a lot of hours of drawing and putting it together, but it was really fun to put it all together. Now however, recent works are more efficient with ProCreate, and making videos on Davinci Resolve and TouchDesigner.
Your piece for Kluster5, ‘elevation of self validation’, is centred around the theme of social media and the impact that it has on one’s self esteem. Could you please tell me about how you built up a relationship with the ensemble and how this project came about?
I met [Kluster5] during my studies in The Hague. They were a new ensemble at the time who had an unusual combination of instruments: violin, saxophone, piano, percussion and guitar. They did a project with the composition department; I made one piece for them [‘Boven Hoge Gebouwen’], which for me was the first time that I had developed a new way for me to write structure and form. I really felt with [that] piece, “this is what I like to make” — before, I made pieces that I liked, but I always felt lost with what I was doing with my structure and form. It is a difficult thing, how to structure things; especially when you are coming from a pop or jazz background.
So that collaboration was really nice. Later on they [saw] what I was doing with visuals and drawings, and they were like “let’s also do that with us!” So I started to think about what I actually wanted to write about: is it other people’s things? Or is it going to be something that’s close to me?
At the time, something I was very busy with was social media. I think I was also busy with it because my self-esteem was on the lower side — so for me it was kind of like an exploration of how I view myself: how do I feel that other people perceive me, and what is happening on social media when I post? Also, when I was working on the piece, it got me curious about other girls who were on social media, especially ones with lots of followers. I was thinking, “What’s behind that wall?” — so there were a lot of things there that I could draw from and work with. So in a way, I could structure these things: I made a story of an influencer that starts out on a social media platform and loses herself, her own identity, and eventually she realises she has lost herself and she tries to be authentic again.
I did this through visuals and music. In the visuals it starts with a “real” image of her — a live action video — but more and more, it starts to get chopped up and animated, and eventually you just see an animated drawing of her to reflect that you are so far away from yourself. That also happens in the music: Isa [Goldschmeding], the violinist, starts [out] playing intricate melody lines that are more variated — then during the piece, the material flattens down into long notes. For me, this was like a metaphor for the fact that social media can flatten yourself; because people are very rich creatures, but if you look for a certain thing on social media and you look at yourself from a certain perspective, a part of you “dies,” or disappears… Things become superficial.
You have Isa facing the visuals face on — what does that signify?
I set it up in a way that there were three screens — like the grid of social media. She [Isa] stands with her back to the audience, but with her face to the screens; she sends out these images, and the other musicians of Kluster5 are around [the screens], so they are like “followers”. At the end, when she wants to reclaim her voice or her face, she turns around and plays fully acoustically.
After the piece was done and first performed, I did not have this urge to be on social media or to post selfies; it got detached from me to seek this kind of external validation. I think in a way, looking at the pictures of myself, it was like “okay, this is what I look like or is this what I want to look like?” I realised, “yeah, but that’s not what I look like in real life” — you know, pictures are just one shot — so after I went through the whole process of writing the piece and sharing it with Kluster5, I had to act it out. I found some kind of closure and resolution from it, I was more at ease with the whole thing. I think I was addicted to Facebook and Instagram… -laughs-
How did the idea for the project ‘Who’s There?’ with Xtro Percussion come about?
I’ve always had this fear around doors when I was young. Even until recently, I’ve worried that somebody is outside the house and is trying to intrude. I always had these recurring nightmares of me trying to close the door, where somebody is wanting to come in and I’m trying to close it, it would always be a fight. But I’ve also really liked watching horror movies, because they give you a nice thrill — you know it’s not real, you know? -laughs- So I thought one day: it would be really fun to turn my own nightmare into my own movie, or a horror performance.
Whilst I was studying, one of the mediums that I wanted to write for was percussion, and I met two of Xtro once at a party and we started talking about music. They had just started their group, and they said that they would like more pieces — I said that I would really like to and that I had an idea about a door… -laughs- A couple of years went by as there was never the [right] moment to do such a thing. So then during covid, New Music Now NL had funding for composers to make a music video for pieces with a visual element; I applied for this funding and got it. Then together with Xtro, I also got an audiovisual team — VidAmir. It was really fun to make my dream come true, to make a short horror movie.
With the visual part and the audio part, two of the performers [Gabriele Segantini and Antonio Bove] are hidden whilst Miguel [Varela] who represents me in the piece is visible; he uses his breath as an instrument.
Although it’s a very theatrical piece, it’s also an incredibly musical piece; a lot of the musicality is hidden behind the door. In terms of arranging it and then presenting it to Xtro, was it shown through a score or a set of instructions or something else?
Yeah, there was a score, quite traditionally. I think they put their scores up by the door. Together with Rob van den Broek — who builds instruments — we made two frames either side of it, and they put the scores up there. While rehearsing it we made some changes to the pacing — “these parts need to be longer, this needs to be shorter” — and we worked out some techniques with Xtro. We put some bouncy balls on sticks, and to create the sounds heard in the piece they were sliding them along the door. I also wanted to get more harmonies out of the door. In this sense, it was an explanation of this sound world that was created against the texture of the door, but it became very theatrical. I think it had to go there, but sometimes I was watching them from behind the door and was thinking, “it’s a pity that the audience can’t see the action from behind the door!” So I have this idea to make a second version of this piece with the door where it is visible, or by placing the work in more of an exhibitional context. That would be really cool.
Xtro are a group who thoroughly enjoy being an active part of the creative process. When you were working with them, was there a back and forth dialogue and were there any ideas that they suggested which had a big impact on the final piece?
From the start [it was] very collaborative. They came to my house and I pulled [a] door out from the hallway that led to a balcony, and so we workshopped [on that] together. They also came with suggestions; with their hands they could produce different textures and sounds by dragging their palms along the door. It was more of a collaborative way of thinking about the door, what it sounds like, how we can perform with it thematically. It was a really fluent process. There was a lot of space to experiment. That’s also a part of their strength, their enthusiasm when collaborating with composers.
How difficult was it to find the right door?
I needed to find a door with very specific dimensions — it needed to be taller than the guys, and the width needed to also be wide enough for two people to fit behind it. It also needed to be hollow and also be an old door, so I googled “old door” on Marketplace and I found this store that was selling lots of old doors called oudedeur.nl. It felt like it was a place in the middle of nowhere. So I went there by train and then bus, I then picked out a door that I liked the look of, and then checked to see if it was hollow — so that it could resonate. It needed to also have four panels, but this door had one big plaque, which had different sounds and textures. I had to rent [this] big van to pick up the door. And then I immediately went to Rob van den Broek to make the two panels beside it so that the door could stand on stage, and then I took it home, which was quite the journey… -laughs-
Last year, your piece ‘Our Patio’ was premiered by RESONANCES XXI in Paris. There are these slow, subtle variations of a core cell of material that evolves and grows. What were the central ideas behind the piece?
I first want to mention that this piece is not about isolation; in fact the opposite, it’s coming together in one big embrace. My publisher Donemus got in contact with the Dutch Embassy in Paris, and I got an email from the artistic director Olivier [Guion] asking me if I wanted to write a piece for a flute ensemble [there]… and I was like, “errrr, yes!” -laughs- I felt like “this is in Paris, this could not be real” — but yes, it was real.
What was amazing was that the address was [at the] Collège néerlandais — which [was built by] a Dutch architect [ed. Willem Marinus Dudok] — and I discovered that the building was part of this whole campus in the south of Paris for international people, where there are a lot of buildings built by architects from around the world. There’s a Brazilian building, a Japanese building… all of these different kinds of approaches. The philosophy of the idea by the curator, just after the First World War, was to create a space in Paris where international people could meet together with French students. They would build these houses for students; 40% was supposed to be for native citizens and then 60% was for all kinds of people — so in the Dutch college, it was 40% Dutch people and then 60% of other nationalities.
How did the Collège néerlandais architecture influence the piece and your composition process?
This building is quite special from Dudok; it was [the] only building that he designed which is outside of The Netherlands. I know with some buildings that he would feature a big patio in the middle, and this is something that you immediately notice. You also notice how the building is constructed. It’s a “transparent” building — not literally, but figuratively, because of the patio.
So I was there, I tried out sketches — I was really interested in the flutter tongue… -laughs- And while I was there, I took in the environment. Afterwards I went back home and this was the period where I wrote the piece. At the same moment, I met my [current] partner, who’s an architect. It was a new love — and you know, when people dedicate all kinds of pieces to loved ones, I was like: “okay, I’m going to write this for us,” because it’s this building and I was also so excited that we could both think about it.
Could you tell me about the form of the piece and the meaning behind it? Does it have similarities to some of your earlier works that you’ve talked about?
The story [behind it] came together quickly. It was like taking a walk around a patio and you get more and more [closer] just like a love story; and then at the end you are together on the patio. At the same time, while you are going to the patio, I imagine there is a heart or lung that is beating and breathing, and this is something that you get drawn towards. It was such a new experience to write something that was not sad, or a depressed feeling, or isolation… -laughs- For me it’s about being alive and living life; life is breathing, enriching yourself and growing. It also maybe got me back to architecture and buildings — just like I did with those earlier pieces that I made for Kluster5, and other pieces like ‘Zoning Out’ and ‘Brooklyn Statue’. When I was young, I didn’t have much interest in buildings or architecture. I wouldn’t call myself an “architecture composer”, but I take a lot of inspiration out of it.
In the video of the piece, the ensemble starts inside the buildings and then moves outside, congregating in this patio…
I wanted to say about the video that maybe you don’t see it as a “multimedia piece” like the one that I did with Kluster5 — but everything you see in the video, I had the whole image whilst I was writing the music. So they do belong together. It is the story of the music; it isn’t just showing fancy shots of the building, it’s telling the story in music and concept.
Your most recently finished multimedia work, ‘The Mirror in my Room’ — written for Arthur Klaassens and Vincent van Wijk — is being performed in May in Utrecht. In the programme notes it says that it explores ambition, autonomy, as well as belonging. Could you elaborate on that and tell me what occurs throughout the piece?
‘The Mirror in my Room’ was a project that was initiated by Arthur Klaassens; we worked together on the concept. It was important for us that we would make something that was personal to us both — not just for me or for him, but for us both — and we came about this with the subject of insecurity.
Later on in the process, I met with Vincent van Wijk and together we talked about what it means to be a performer who practises at home, and what kind of insecurities do you have around that; and then we found some common ground around [getting] fixated on a mistake, and this kind of gets blown out of proportion. So the piece starts out super chaotic — it wants to do everything at once — then there’s an act with a metronome where it becomes more intense. You start to have weird relationships with the metronome; you start to lose a sense of time. There’s a moment where they start to interact with their own self-image — there’s a frame onstage and it looks like they’re mirrored. In this act, they are trying to reevaluate their own playing and their own image; and at the end they finally can be set free from themselves.
Looking back on each of these compositions, there are some connecting themes that occur — with pieces reflecting on isolation, belonging, online friendships and relationships and self-perception. What other themes do you see in your own multimedia work?
There are some overlaps between each of them. They all are some kind of exploration of the self, but each project has its own theme that relates to a different aspect of my life.
The number one theme is the relationship that you have to yourself. That can be catalysed through other people — so you can discover other things about yourself through others — or you can discover things about yourself through your mirror image. I think it keeps on being like these things where musicians and visuals are incorporated, where they are one onstage. In itself, musicians are human beings who are always performing the music — they’re physically there, you can see them. It only feels natural to already use that as a given. So then it’s like: “okay, what does it mean to be a human being?” — and it has this subconcept of what is happening with me: when I practise something and feel professional pressure, what is happening to me when I have low self-esteem and I am active on social media, or what happens to me when I go through periods of isolation and I feel lonely. I think it’s all themed around how I can be.
It’s not about who I am. It’s more about how I am being at this moment of my life — in this context with the people around me, in this country, in this world, in this body. I think that will never be not fruitful or interesting to discover.
What do you have coming next with the multimedia side of your work?
I know what’s next — it’s not confirmed yet, but it’s to continue the exploration on ‘Our Patio’. It’s a performance in a water tower in Axel (Zeeland). I’m working together with a sound artist (Bouke Groen) who does sweep measures of spaces. He gives these frequencies/pitches to composers and they have to make a composition for that place. He always works with a choir; the human voice (without lyrics) fascinates him. There’s some[thing] about giving a space shape with our own human voice. It has been on a list for a while to write for choir, so I’m pretty excited about this project!
Do you have any particular ambitions for your multimedia work?
I have not really thought about [what] my multimedia dreams are. -laughs- I guess I would like to make a new piece where I research the relationship between a physical performer on stage and on screen — I had this idea to make a one woman show with myself and a screen and do something with that, but it’s not a very concrete thing. I want to start to play again and make something with the saxophone, but it’s all just loose ideas.
I’m not just thinking about multimedia. More and more, I’m starting to realise the importance of recording your music and releasing it. I would like [to] build more music videos with my music. I hope to make work that is a lot more playable also, I feel a huge difference [between] pieces that are performed a lot of times, and pieces that are just performed once or twice. With multimedia, it’s a lot of work to bring all of the props — it’s heavy stuff, you need to rent a van — and then it gets performed [a few] times. So this is really exciting; the less things you have, the easier it will get to be performed.
I don’t have a big team like an opera house — who take care of the props onstage, and they have people who ride in the van, they can do this whole production. But for me, it’s just myself and the musicians, so it’s a lot of work. Maybe yes, I would like to make a larger scale project — let’s call it a multimedia opera… -laughs- But it [would] be nice if it was with a bigger production company, rather [than] just a one woman production company. If you asked me this next week, I would probably give a different answer, but there are a lot of things on my mind that I would like to do.
It’s good to dream big. You’re manifesting something, and within that manifestation you are open to it — your antennas are on — but it’s a big commitment to make if you have to do it all by yourself. It takes a lot of time; and sometimes you just want to write a piece, work with the musicians, and enjoy the results while being a part of the audience.
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Learn more about Celia and her practice at:
References/Links:
- Elisabeth A. Bakker-Johnson, biography of Willem Marinus Dudok, 20th-Century Architecture
