SEATTLE — Since its 1979 premiere in Bergen in the Netherlands, Canto Ostinato by the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt (1923-2012) has occupied a peculiar position: a cult classic that emerged alongside the rise of much better-known minimalist masterpieces like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (first heard in 1976) yet developed an afterlife largely outside the mainstream, remaining relatively little performed in North America. That afterlife is itself the subject of a fascinating Dutch documentary from 2011 by Ramón Gieling, About Canto (readily available — at least for now — on YouTube).
The centenary of ten Holt’s birth in 2023 sparked renewed interest in his legacy, and Canto Ostinato has been gaining more attention beyond its birthplace. Meanwhile, it has enjoyed a regular presence in the Netherlands, as well as an unusually abundant recording history since the first live release in 1984.
Among the variants derived from ten Holt’s original conception for four pianos are arrangements for harp, organ and trumpet, and, most recently, chamber ensemble. A version of the last named has just been released on a recording on Western Vinyl and is now being presented on tour. A performance April 10 in Seattle, presented by Emerald City Music, marked the first West Coast stop.
The project is a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist and arranger Erik Hall and New York-based quartet Sandbox Percussion, with an expanded ensemble of winds, strings, and additional percussion assembled through the new-music collective Metropolis Ensemble. The April 10 performance formed part of Sandbox’s residency this season with Emerald City Music under the artistic direction of violinist Kristin Lee.
Like many other process-oriented minimalist works, Canto Ostinato sidesteps the usual markers of musical event and linearity. Ten Holt’s concept creates a space of controlled openness: The piece unfolds as a fixed sequence of 106 short sections, each comprising repeating harmonic and rhythmic patterns.
But this defined structure allows for a high degree of agency and flexibility, with the performers determining the number of repetitions, pacing, dynamics, and alignment in real time. Much more than in the obvious sense, no two realizations are identical. “The piece is not in a hurry,” as ten Holt put it. Canto Ostinato’s variability extends to duration: A performance may last just over an hour — as it did on this occasion — or may continue for several.
Still another aspect of the work’s elasticity is in its capacity to be reimagined across different instrumental formations. Hall has recorded a solo rendition of Canto Ostinato (2023), for which he layered multiple keyboard parts — an approach he also applied to Music for 18 Musicians on his 2020 solo recording. Here, Hall and his colleagues reverse that process, endowing ten Holt’s keyboard writing with a newly prismatic character by expanding the palette to include mallet percussion, winds, and strings. This larger ensemble format was first presented in an outdoor performance at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2023.
At this performance, the ensemble was scaled to accommodate the more intimate conditions at Emerald City Music’s signature venue — a spacious, flexible black-box environment in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. Now in its 10th year, ECM has cultivated a distinctive atmosphere mingling musical curiosity with a relaxed vibe that brings performers and audience into close proximity. Sandbox has played a prominent role in the organization’s history: In 2021, it presented the world premiere there of the staged version of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize).
The ensemble assembled for the ECM performance comprised 16 musicians — including faculty and students from the University of Washington School of Music — with Hall at the piano alongside winds, strings, and an expanded percussion group anchored by the Sandbox quartet.
This fuller chamber setting gave the internal workings of ten Holt’s design a new, more textured dimension. Small dissonances — sometimes absorbed in the keyboard original — emerged with sharper profile, introducing moments of piquant friction, while carefully calibrated swells and ebbs gave the larger ensemble passages an oceanic breadth, like the breathing of a single organism.
Although Metropolis director Andrew Cyr, the catalyst and co-producer of the project, was absent due to a family emergency, the performance retained a strong sense of cohesion and organic interaction. The players interacted visibly — nodding, cueing, and subtly moving with the pulse — as the music took on a shared physical energy.
Over the course of the piece, the breezy, asymmetrical flow of the basic ostinato pattern tilted at times toward a jazz-like groove, while some moments even slipped into a giddily waltz-like gait. The steady unfolding of patterns also had a neoclassical flavor and brought to mind a distant kinship with a Bach prelude and, even more, the iterative, circular logic of a chaconne, with repetitions opening onto new perspectives.
Yet these shifting surfaces resisted facile characterization. Moments of brightness, even a kind of glistening clarity, existed alongside an undeniably darker tone of pathos and melancholy. Just as you seem to grasp the music’s direction — with a temptation to take it for granted — it slips free of that frame and eludes confinement to a single expressive identity.
Ten Holt described Canto Ostinato as “more like a ritual than a concert.” Emerald City Music provided the conditions to make that characterization come to life, with the audience situated on chairs in a circle around the performers and encouraged to move about as desired. Low, candle-like lighting and a restrained palette of gradually shifting primary colors, projected across the space in a design by Christopher Walker with support from the Vera Project, reinforced the sense of simplicity. The visual austerity carried a distant echo of Piet Mondrian’s aesthetic world (to which ten Holt had a direct connection via one of his composition mentors).
The meditative atmosphere wasn’t just projected by the performers but seemed to be shared across the space. The audience settled into a collective stillness — very few actually did take up the invitation to get up and move. It called to mind recent encounters with some other rediscovered minimalists: Stephen Hough’s transportive account of Federico Mompou’s Música callada (“music of evaporation,” as he calls it), as well as the mindful spaces cultivated by Hans Otte’s Book of Sounds, as recently recorded by Conor Hanick.
Listening to Canto Ostinato in performance often felt like advancing slowly through a work of architecture, turning corners and suddenly encountering new spaces whose proportions and light change the perspective without warning. Ten Holt said that “time becomes the space in which the musical object floats.” He also described the work as “tonality after the death of tonality,” a formulation that captures the work’s paradoxical character: Its harmonic basis provides a sense of calming reassurance, yet the music gradually shifts in unexpected directions that resist any fixed sense of direction.
Perhaps that openness is what ten Holt was getting at when he remarked that “Canto Ostinato is the nostalgia of alienation. Nostalgia for a utopia perhaps. To the land of the beloved. To the world where people are not predators to each other.”
