The composer Jaap Nico Hamburger is featured on the cover of La Scena Musicale magazine this November and a full article is dedicated to him!
Here are some excerpts:
The music just comes to me; I just write down what I hear,” says Jaap Nico Hamburger. Only two years after quitting his full-time job as a cardiologist and devoting his life to composing, Hamburger, 62, has released two recordings and can lay claim to an impressive list of commissions and premieres, including an opera at Lincoln Center in New York, originally slated for March 2020, and now rescheduled for a post-COVID season.
As a composer, Hamburger is self-taught and claims to have no defined style. Listening to his Piano Concerto and the Chamber Symphonies, it’s hard to not think that his music is programmatic. “The first two Chamber Symphonies are deliberately programmatic,” he admits. “I think when I write music, I think about storytelling. The first was about the passing of Ligeti, I read his biography and tried to capture my impressions into the music.
Hamburger then admits his unorthodox creative process. “The other aspect to my composing, I don’t know if it’s a style. I don’t think I’m composing at all. The actual moment that something comes out, I’m not doing anything but receiving something that is complete.”
Click here to read the full article.