Ten years after the death of Luc Brewaeys (1959–2015), organisers, orchestras, ensembles, and other partners are joining forces to present a rich cross-section of the music of one of Flanders’ most remarkable composers throughout an entire season.
Delve into his sound world with this longread by Rebecca Diependaele and Melissa Portaels.
Fasten Seat Belts! · 30.01.2026 · Brussels Philharmonic LAB @ Flagey
With Ilan Volkov at the helm, the Brussels Philharmonic presents the Second and Sixth Symphonies by Luc Brewaeys: in the latter, Brewaeys brings together everything he stands for - the vibrant coloration of 20th-century spectralism, a bold orchestral configuration and a confrontation with electronics. Clearly influenced by that élan, Daan Janssens composed a new concerto for violin, orchestra and surround electronics.
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Unfolding Brewaeys.
An Overview Unfolded
Luc Brewaeys breathed music. He wove everything into his compositions, from the small things he cherished to the profound themes that moved him. He forged a musical language entirely his own, and as a composer he refused to be pigeonholed. Inspiration was never in short supply: music was constantly bubbling in his mind, while somewhere in a corner of his brain sounds, colours and combinations were being tested. Sketches hardly entered into it. ‘If an idea is good enough, it will stick by itself,’ he said.
‘I want to do that too, and better!’
From a young age Luc Brewaeys (1959–2015) dreamed of becoming a composer. His ambitions were sky-high from the outset. He often told, laughing, how as a child he heard Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1911–13) and thought to himself: ‘I want to do that too—and better.’ He began his composition studies in Brussels with André Laporte (b. 1931), who—so he said—taught him some of his wisest lessons after class, in a café. He then studied with Franco Donatoni (1927–2000) in Siena, Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) in Darmstadt (Germany), and Tristan Murail (b. 1947) in Paris. He listened voraciously and combined an exceptionally broad repertoire knowledge with an extraordinary memory. That musical appetite brought him into contact with composers whose work he felt was exploring compelling new terrain. From 1980 to 1984 he had regular contact with Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). He formed a long and close friendship with Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012). At just twenty-six, in 1985, he won the first in an unbroken series of prizes and distinctions. For …, e poi c’era … (Symphony No. 1) (1985), he received third prize in the European Competition for Young Composers in Amsterdam; a year later the same work won first prize in the young composers category of UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. From then on Brewaeys’ career gathered unstoppable momentum, with numerous commissions and residencies at home and far beyond.
For most of his professional life, Luc Brewaeys worked as a sound director at VRT (radio). For several years he also taught at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels (analysis of contemporary computer and electronic music), the Conservatory of Ghent (composition and orchestration) and the Rotterdam Conservatory (composition). In 1999 he received KU Leuven’s Culture Prize; a year later came the Music Prize of the Flemish Community. In 2008 he was elected a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. The broader public first discovered Brewaeys through the performance of Talisker in the concourse of Antwerp-Central station at the opening of Antwerp 93. In 2011 he made headlines with Speechless song, being many, seeming one, his commissioned work for the semi-final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition for voice, which was said to be too difficult. Two years later, in 2013, the radio station Klara named him Musician of the Year.
Luc Brewaeys is a musician of obviously significant and natural capacity. He has a quick mind and a talent with many facets and will, no doubt, develop with time into an artist of power. As a composer he displays both facility and intuition, although it is as yet certainly too early in his career to offer an opinion as to the eventual extent and quality of his devlopment. In any event, he clearly informs all his activities with a great deal of engagement and energy, so that one may happily recommend him to anyone in a position to offer him opportunity to exploit these qualities.
Sounding rainbows
The compositional starting point for Luc Brewaeys’ music is spectralism, a movement shaped, among others, by Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey (1946–1998). The basic principles of spectralism rest on the physical analysis of timbre. Every sound—whether from an oboe, a clarinet or a creaking stair—has its own recognisable colour. That colour is determined by the microscopic make-up of the sound. Beyond a fundamental (the pitch we perceive), every sound contains countless overtones stacked in simple interval ratios: 1:2 (octave), 2:3 (perfect fifth), 3:4 (perfect fourth), 4:5 (major third), and so on. Analogously, white light contains a spectrum of colours that becomes visible when refracted through a prism—or in a rainbow. Put simply, the relative strength of the various overtones shapes the timbre we hear. The richer the overtone spectrum, the more readily we can identify the character of a sound. In analysing an instrumental sound, other factors also come into play: the ancillary noises of performance (squeaks, crackles and rustles), and the envelope of the sound itself—from the attack, through full bloom, to decay. These elements, too, can inform the design of a spectral composition.
In spectralism the overtone structure, located on a microscopic level, becomes the basis for a larger plane: harmony. Concretely, the composer may select an overtone spectrum of interest and use its tones and intervals to build chords and melodies. Different sounds have different spectra and thus yield different pitch stores with which the composer can evoke and explore different atmospheres. A fine analogy for this method stands on Brussels’ Heysel Plateau: the Atomium. Architect André Waterkeyn took his cue from the form of an iron atom—165 billion times smaller, yet precisely the same shape.
Striking in Brewaeys’ music is the way he broke through spectralism’s characteristic ‘slowness’. The earliest spectral works were often fairly static: clouds of colour that unfolded slowly before the listener’s ear, like a landscape photograph seeking to capture a single, extraordinary light. Over time, greater attention went to rhetoric. Yet there is no hard opposition here: the duality between spectralism’s ostensibly abstract technique and the vital, energetic and highly communicative sound of much spectral music is only apparent. Fausto Romitelli (1963–2004), who explicitly sought—and found—new forms of musical sensuality and rhetoric, likewise saw spectralism as a fertile foundation. It is Romitelli, moreover, who spoke of sound as a material to be forged—‘le son comme matière à forger’—like metals worked into countless textures and densities, in an endless array of hue and sheen.
For Brewaeys that journey of discovery began with his Second String Quartet, Bowmore (1995), and OBAN (1996), where rhythm, speed, surprise and pointed contrasts serve to create greater energy and a richer dramatic arc. This mobility would become a hallmark of his music, even as later works bring more lyrical accents to the fore. Brewaeys derives his pitch material primarily from the lower elements of the overtone series, within which lie the whole tones and semitones of the Western octave. He also draws on overtones seventeen through thirty-two. In this region, quarter-tones appear, which Brewaeys uses more as passing notes and colour inflections than as structural pillars; they tint the ultimate look and feel of the music without bearing a formative function.
From bathtubs and oil tanks to a sleepy trumpeter
Eight large-scale symphonies reveal Brewaeys’ deep love of the orchestra—no doubt for its sheer size and inexhaustible store of timbral combinations. Colleagues and friends admired his formidable command of orchestration. Coupled with his legendary enthusiasm, it yielded intensely worked orchestral scores in constant motion. The quest for unique colours led him down adventurous paths.
Time and again Brewaeys engages in dialogue with the space in which his music sounds. Violists surrounding the audience (Utopia (2004)), trumpeters marching onstage while playing (Along the shores of Lorn (2005)), violinists vanishing offstage (Bowmore (1995))—for Brewaeys these are not theatrical flourishes but musically cogent inspirations. In Talisker (1993) for five soloists (clarinet, contrabass clarinet, horn and two percussionists), large clarinet ensemble and eight percussionists, he experiments with ‘resonance’. He wrote the work for the grand opening of Antwerp 93, to be performed in the concourse of Antwerp-Central station. The architectural space—with a reverberation time of some 8.5 seconds—was the point of departure. Scattered across the hall (some clarinettists even on the galleries), the musicians play a dynamic game with the reverberation. You cannot quite trust your ears—sometimes literally, when the clarinet ensemble imitates and prolongs the halo of cymbals and other metal percussion. Brewaeys joked that no one in their right mind would give a concert in such a resonant space—but he, of course, would. In his Fifth Symphony, Laphroaig (1993), he goes a step further, placing a full orchestra with conductor on stage and a chamber orchestra with a second conductor behind the audience. Live electronics, projected from the four corners of the hall, add further resonance via two reverb units, one set to infinity mode, allowing a sound’s decay to be extended indefinitely (see also Stefan Van Eycken’s article, p. 37). In the oboe solo the effect is heightened still further: from backstage the oboist plays with distance to the microphone.
This fascination with resonance also shapes Brewaeys’ choice of instruments: metal percussion, bells and gongs, with their full sonority, are almost always present. His Symphony No. 6 (2000) even bears the subtitle ‘… breathing beyond the shadows of bells …’. But Brewaeys ventures far further afield when it comes to colour: he places an oil tank, a bathtub (Komm! Hebe dich ... (Symphony No. 2) (1987)), a bottle organ (Symphony No. 8 (2004)) and a washing hose (Talisker (1993)) in the orchestra. And where a specific colour cannot be reached acoustically, he turns to electronics. Black Rock Unfolding (2008) is a work for solo cello that at moments sounds like a choir of high and low cellos. By sustaining and prolonging certain notes, Brewaeys stacks sounding layers and thus builds chords. Electronics’ greatest boon is that, without constraint, he can add bell-like sonorities—his favourites. In Ni fleurs ni couronnes (2013) ‘for violin with ghost violins and bells’, the tape comprises a heterogeneous blend of roughly one third violin sounds and two thirds bell-like colours, fused so intimately that they become, as it were, a second invisible instrument in dialogue with the live violin.
Brewaeys asks a great deal of his performers and often probes their limits. He nudges them out of their comfort zone, has instrumentalists sing (Komm! Hebe dich ... (Symphony No. 2)), moves woodwinds into the percussion section (in OBAN (1996) the woodwinds play the water gongs), asks for high notes on low instruments (again in OBAN), has the saxophonist play two saxophones at once and execute formidable techniques such as circular breathing (Non lasciati ogni speranza (1990)). His inventiveness in performance practice seems inexhaustible. In OBAN—for the already unusual combination of bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trombone, percussion, piano, viola, cello and double bass—he has the clarinettist play a timpani head while modulating the head tension with the pedal. The result is an acoustic phasing effect akin to that of an electric guitar. A little later the pianist reaches into the instrument’s body and bows the strings with a coin. Si sentiva un po’ stanco … (2001) reveals seldom-heard facets of the trumpet: a muted solo, sober and lyrical, with extremely slow glissandi that are almost impossible to execute—a virtuosic struggle with the notes. With short melodic breaks, sometimes very rapid, it can even seem as if the trumpeter is fighting off sleep—a composer’s joke underlying the Italian title ‘He felt a little tired …’.
Nobody is perfect!
Striking, too, is that Brewaeys moved both within the specialised niche of contemporary music and in the great classical genres, in Flanders and abroad. For many years he was an enthusiastic participant in Jeugd & Muziek’s music camps. At the founding of the Junior Orchestra in 1980 he became its first conductor, and later he would write Cheers! (1988), Dali’s Dream (1991) and Shadows with Melodies (2008) for the youthful ensemble. In 1988 he helped lay the first stones of ChampdAction and served as its first conductor. It marked the start of many performances and commissions (including OBAN (1996), Painted Pyramids (2009)) and two portrait CDs—An introduction to Luc Brewaeys (Megadisc Classics, 1999) and Luc Brewaeys (Etcetera Records, 2009)—on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Throughout his career he worked closely with many specialised performers, among them the Spanish conductor Arturo Tamayo, who created virtually all his orchestral works; the French saxophonist Daniel Kientzy, after whom he named his Fourth Symphony (Kientzyphonie (1992)); Wibert Aerts, for whom he wrote Ni fleurs ni couronnes: Monument pour Jonathan Harvey (2013); the Arditti Quartet, which premiered his First String Quartet (1989); Ictus, which commissioned Jocasta (2003), Schumann’s Ghosts (1999) and Double Concerto (2009); and SPECTRA Ensemble, which together with the Transit festival commissioned Cardhu (2008). He likewise wrote various orchestral works on commission from the Royal Flemish Philharmonic/deFilharmonie/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra (four major commissions between 1987 and 2007), the Flanders Symphony Orchestra (Along the shores of Lorn (2005)) and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam (… sciolto nel foro universal del vuoto … (2015)).
Programmers, too, eagerly embraced Brewaeys’ music. Even before his internationally lauded Symphony No. 1, the German-American composer Lukas Foss (1922–2009) commissioned Trajet in 1982, which went on to receive multiple performances at home and abroad. In the 1988–89 season he was composer-in-residence at DE SINGEL, which continued to commission works thereafter. He received commissions from BOZAR (including Symphony No. 6 (2000)) and Ars Musica (Symphony No. 8 (2004)), where he served as composer-in-residence in the 2003–04 season, as well as from Antwerp European Capital of Culture (Talisker (1993)), Copenhagen European Capital of Culture (Introduction (1996)) and the Gemeentekrediet van België (Symphony No. 5 (1993)). La Monnaie, under then director Bernard Foccroulle, commissioned Brewaeys’ only opera, L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (2007).
Through masterclasses, courses and his work as a sound director at VRT, Brewaeys continually sought contact with fellow composers and closely followed their work. His sense of kinship with colleagues at home and abroad is inscribed in a series of pieces for and dedicated to professional friends under the telling title Nobody is perfect! It was his way of self-mockery: ‘Nobody is perfect, and I am the perfect example,’ he would say. In these birthday pieces for fellow composers he would quote brief fragments from the dedicatee’s music and bathe them in his own idiom. He wrote six such works in all: for André Laporte, Michael Finnissy (b. 1946), Lukas Foss, João Pedro Oliveira (b. 1959), Jonathan Harvey and Frank Nuyts (b. 1957).
Quotation and Brewaeys’ famed taste for humour and wordplay come together delightfully in Fêtes à tensions: (les) eaux marchent (2012), a composition commissioned by the Transit festival in the framework of the ISCM World Music Days. Brewaeys was honoured to compose for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, founded by Pierre Boulez. He dedicated the work to his friend (and fellow spectralist) Philippe Hurel (b. 1955). The literal translation of the title is ‘Festivities with tensions: the waters walk’, but if you read the French title quickly out loud and drop the bracketed word, you get ‘faites attention aux marches’—‘mind the steps’. Nothing is without meaning in Brewaeys’ work: the music contains many allusions to march music, perhaps the last thing you would expect in a piece for this ensemble. According to Brewaeys’ own note, the attentive listener may recognise fragments of Ives, Tchaikovsky, Berg, Goeyvaerts, Beethoven, Varèse and Stravinsky. And, of course, given the title, a reference to Debussy’s Fêtes could not be absent. As a whole, the work is fairly obstinate in character, with, in the composer’s words, much more to discover besides the cited fragments.
Anyone wishing to unravel the genesis of Brewaeys’ compositions faces a hard nut to crack. Not a scrap of notes survives to reveal anything. Every step—from the first spark to the finished music—was taken in the composer’s mind. All he needed was time to think, and sometimes a calculator. The reach of his artistic life, however, grows more evident with the years. Brewaeys’ infectious enthusiasm, drive and decisiveness had a profound impact on the new-music scene in Flanders. With generosity and a phenomenal network, he made major projects happen. Today his work continues to stir the curiosity and imagination of listeners, musicians, concert organisers and musicologists. The reverberation of his music is far from spent.
text by Rebecca Diependaele & Melissa Portaels
This text first appeared in the exhibition and publication Brewaeys Unfolding. © MATRIX [Centrum voor Nieuwe Muziek], 2022.
