As a child, Stephen Emmer accidentally played a piece of Bach. Now the composer is called “the Godfather of Dutch TV tunes. Deafness and tinnitus brought him a crisis and a new album.
Stephen Emmer (66) waves an envelope in his living room in Amsterdam. ‘So this is,’ with weighty voice, ‘mail about my pension. That goes into effect from next year.’ A moment it is, he thinks, when you get the signal: you’re old enough to stop working. ‘As if they knew,’ he continues, ‘that man has just done his most important work.’
Because that’s how Stephen feels about his new album Mt. , with fifteen pieces composed by him, released 11 October 2024, he himself calls it impressionistic classical music. When he recorded it with an orchestra at London’s famous Beatles studio Abbey Road, he knew: it doesn’t get any better. And that was exactly what he needed. Stephen made more than five hundred tunes for programs such as ‘NOS Journaal’, ‘RTL News’, the children’s program ‘Waku Waku’, ‘RTL Boulevard’ and ‘Goedemorgen Nederland’. A fan once calculated that his work can be heard on TV or radio ‘somewhere’ in the Netherlands every seven minutes. But he became “increasingly fed up” with fixed assignments, his creative freedom was being curtailed. ‘”l felt like a music official, thought: do I still have something to say for myself?”
“The first night I crawled behind the piano for free work again – man. So bad. I looked disillusioned at my worksheet, and then a cassette tape caught my eye. With work by my nineteen-year-old self. I listened and thought: ah, cute. There were good melodies in it, I understood what I was trying to do, but it didn’t come out. I decided: this is what I’m going to work on. Then it burst out.”
His latest work is about his crisis – caused by deafness in his left ear and tinnitus, which took over his life, “or say, ruined it. Mt. is a nod to the abbreviation for mountain, mundane meaning something like “worldly. The album refers to Stephen’s own mountain to be overcome. Grinning: “Conceived in the shower. I think of almost everything there. I think because there’s more oxygen there.” He taps his head for a moment. “Good for here.”
That head, that is, was, or is, also where something was wrong. It started with a persistent squeak, wryly originated during a hearing test he took 10 years ago because the hearing in his left ear was deteriorating. ‘I had to listen to an increasingly loud beep, and then I had to indicate the point from which it became unfeasible. I acted a little too tough, said stop too late – and drove home with a beep that didn’t go away.’
“Maddening. Frightening: no escape from it. I went to look it up on the piano: it was a b-flat, between the B and C. Fine sound you know, but not continuous and shrill and loud. The worst thing was that I couldn’t compose anymore. Everything you compose curses with that pitch b-flat. Everything came in like a sledgehammer blow. Later, to my great joy, it became a noise. Less maddening, I could make music again, albeit sparingly.”
“In the 1980s I toured England with The Lotus Eaters. For a gig in Liverpool we borrowed a sound system from Motörhead. Those rockers were joking around, I pressed a key, heard nothing, and then I saw them nudging each other: ‘Try again, mate, try again.’ So I pressed a key – bam. An enórm loud sound, through a side speaker, right into my ear. They had turned up the volume. I thought: this is so bad. But nothing wrong, then. The deafness lay dormant for ten years, and then suddenly came out.”
His daughters, in their thirties, sometimes go to those “hip pop-up restaurants” around town. Stephen likes them very much, but high ceilings, industrial pipes: impractical for ears like his. Christmas, birthdays, New Year’s Eve, get-togethers: he doesn’t go there, or only briefly. “One hour of socializing takes two hours of recovery. But the crazy thing is: I used to feel quite lonely, I was an only child, we moved every so often to a new place of residence, and sometimes a new country, India, Aruba, Suriname, for my mother’s work. To fill that loneliness, I went to my inner world. I had a rich imagination. Being able to do that helps me now. I have a good time on my own.”
“That’s what I find most sad. It’s still … my life.” And his childhood. His father is the late Fred Emmer, who worked for years as a newsreader at the NOS News, but he grew up mostly with his mother, a ballet teacher, once she danced with the famous ‘Scapino Ballet’. She gave lessons at home, sometimes with live music. Then Stephen would walk down the stairs, and he would see fifteen people very busy dancing, his mother indicating the beat with a wooden stick, and a pianist playing. A few years later, Stephen, as a matter of course, sat down behind the piano at the break of a ballet class, “playing, improvising. “Do you know what you just did?” his mother asked. “No?” said Stephen, shrugging. “You just played Bach.” That was what she had played in class that morning. By the way: his mother is now 93, is in a nursing home, is demented, “I’m her brother now,” said Stephen, sad smile. “She doesn’t recognize anyone anymore, but as soon as there’s dance class … she takes over the whole show. SO wonderful.”
He had an additional problem two years ago: extréme dizziness, one random day, he got off his bike and thought: what happened to me now? He went home, lay down, didn’t know where to look – and the dizziness lasted. Days. Weeks. Months. ‘The whole room was spinning. Like I had a giga hangover. No doctor could explain it, I got multiple diagnoses, always with the word maybe in front of it.”
“Impractical. I barely ate, couldn’t keep anything down, couldn’t do anything. My girlfriend and I were dating, she did, and does, a lot for me, but my friends also said ‘you shouldn’t burden her too much,’ but sometimes going out the door for an errand was already too much. Those around me found it difficult to see me like this. I understood it too. I was very deep. I started saying goodbye to things. Like: with this dizziness, I can never fly again. Never watch TV again. Never read a book again.”
“But the dizziness went away. A year ago. No explanation, but during that same time he was at the only dizziness-center in the Netherlands, in Apeldoorn, after a long wait. ‘Within one day I had the diagnosis. Not knowing where such all-disruptive symptoms come from is a very bad motivator to continue.”
“The bottom line was that the dizziness was caused by a dying balance organ on the left side near my ear. Or, no, the doctors said ‘dying out.’ They still phrased it sweetly. But, they also said: the dizziness is probably gone because your hearing on that side is also completely gone, and your balance organ is completely extinguished now, that dizziness will not come back.”
He tells it a little softer, when it comes to “coming back,” as if afraid to tempt the gods. “Guarantee up to the front door,” he says, but also, “I’ve been revived since knowing this. I’m lifting weights, have been out to dinner 30 times, can watch TV again, albeit on a small screen. Also with years of therapy, mind you, and there I learned not to be afraid of sound anymore. That is the most important thing: to get rid of the panic. I think accepting is too big a word. Someone once said, “The tinnitus must become your friend.” Well, I didn’t get any further than an acquaintance. But I no longer live that acquaintance.”
“I want to offer people hope. There are plenty of self-help books, think of this as self-help music. If something bad happens to you then it’s a matter of finding out how to make a go-around. Finding your own way through that.”
“The sweet but also the sour, major and minor. Life is climbing and falling and the constant is actually that you have to keep going. Musically I tried to express that.” He looks up for a moment, asks, “I thought about this beforehand, can I read it from my phone?
“Look at the intensity with which a Paralympic athlete wins: it’s often so intense because that person came from so far away. My music has lived through what I went through. I have finished what I, as an uninhibited nineteen-year-old, could not yet do. As a result, my misery has also become an artistic bonus.”
[AD Mezza Magazine – Redactie – Oktober 2024]
