For the Golden Spiker Festival 2024 I was allowed to write the compulsory work for the fifth division fanfare and brass band.
Early 2023 I was approached to write a piece for the Gouden Spiker Festival. A festival that focuses primarily on the lower divisions of brass bands and fanfares.
The GSF wants a Frisian connection for their composition assignments. Funny enough, I was just working on Grutte Pier at that time. So that was not an option. Eventually I was given the assignment to use Sterke Yerke as a subject. A unique story about travel, adventure, but also about the environment.
I started working on the subject of Strong Yerke. There was enough information. The whole story starts with seven friends who have a daring plan: we are going to build a raft and sail with it. That is how I also started with a daring plan: a beginning in which everyone plays the same. The exposition of the work is a melody that is played by the entire orchestra. With that, the main material of the work is immediately known.
The work develops further after the intro in three parts. First a fast part in which the daring plan is expressed in the Strong Yerke I, the first raft. A solemn second part in which the mission for a better world is developed. And finally we go to the feat, the Strong Yerke III. The raft that sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and ran aground on the rocks near Bonaire, but years later still completed the journey. That these journeys and adventures all stem from that initial daring plan is made clear by the reprise of the opening melody.
From small principles sometimes great things arise, such is the motto of Sir Francis Drake: Sic Parvis Magna (funny enough also a title I have used before.)
