Nobody can accuse Jozef Van Wissem of doing things by halves. The musician, very likely the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, owns a sonic arsenal of eight of the string instruments: some bespoke, and all boasting remarkable features. With them he has created a huge body of work, nearly 50 titles to date. Another album, This Is My Blood is released this May.
Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record. He finds the peace of Warsaw, where everyone has “gone away for the holidays”, more amenable for work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat.
While composing, Van Wissem hears a traditional theme or a melody, and “repeats” it. “It’s stealing, I admit it,” he says. Repeating may be “stealing”, but it is certainly not copying. For one thing, the classical lute repertoire is vast: formed by years of constant travel and re-notation. It is, according to Van Wissem, open to constant interpretation; especially when you consider the lute’s many tunings. His black 14-course theorbo, for instance, (which has “sacrilegious” inbuilt mics and a foldable neck) has reentrant tuning, where at least one string is tuned to a pitch that breaks the otherwise ascending or descending sequence.
Nor does he stick to traditional playing. Van Wissem is best known for his film scores work – he collaborated with indie cinema icon Jim Jarsmusch’s band SQÜRL to soundtrack the latter’s Only Lovers Left Alive – and the music on his new album was composed for film-maker Joaquim Pujol’s documentary Màquina, “about going into the Colorado desert and taking a psychedelic trip as a cure for alcoholism”. The first and last pieces on the album are improvised slide compositions using the bottleneck, which sounds adventurous.
“When I do this at a show, the first people who leave are the classical people. They can’t stand it. The experimental music people love it.”
Van Wissem clearly relishes what is now a four-decades-old battle with accepted, academic thought around the lute. Our interview is peppered with fighting talk about the instrument’s image: “I think people in academic circles are still hiding it, they demean it in a way.” Van Wissem sees his mission as one of making it “a real pop instrument again”, and stating that before its 250-year “disappearance” the lute was “omnipresent”, as likely to be found in brothels and taverns as at court. He sees parallels in the lute’s “direct, stripped-back emotion” with the stark and suggestive sound of Coil, an old favourite.
But the “lute wars” with “traditional people” also get his goat. Repairs, or suggested innovations usually lead to standoffs with the traditionalists: “They don’t want to put a microphone inside.” Van Wissem claims the amount of shows he plays necessitates amplification, as it’s “always a bother” telling a sound person at a venue that a lute “needs” to be loud. For Van Wissem, the lute is a rock instrument, there to blow the audience away.
His nonconformity may stem from his experiences in the febrile Dutch punk scenes of the very early 1980s; an immersive lifestyle rather than a music – shaped by squatting, clashes with authority, daily letter-writing and tape-swaps, listening to Joy Division, or “hopping over” to Belgium and the UK to form cultural alliances. Hair coloured orange, he played in punk band Mort Subite in 1978, and later in new wave act Desert Corbusier, with whom he toured Yugoslavia. In Ljubljana they met Laibach, who had a profound impact on Van Wissem: “They were a big influence on how I do things: the idea of making something based on one strong idea.”
In 1979, Van Wissem was kicked out his Maastricht squat by soccer fans, who then set fire to it. He then moved to the lively northern Dutch city of Groningen which was then the country’s squatting capital. From 1988 to 1993 he owned a riotous bar in the city called De Klok. But he became bored by what he saw as an increasingly mundane music scene: “I saw Nirvana at Vera, Groningen. But I just became bored with it all. It was the perfect time to start playing the lute.”
With his social life also getting out of hand, Van Wissem gave up being a barman and left for New York in 1993: “I got a letter from a producer and I went to Williamsburg. I found peace. And De Klok’s building exploded after I left.”
In New York he studied under lutenist Patrick O’Brien, who was “a very open guy, and a Vietnam vet who had gone to prison for refusing to go back”. Van Wissem found O’Brien’s approach revelatory. But when he tried to study the lute in The Hague he rebelled after one lesson: “It was very boring. You have to play these notes exactly as they are on the page. Which is ridiculous! It’s like listening to a Jimi Hendrix solo, then writing it down in staff notation to play it to your students; why would you do that?”
Will anyone take up Van Wissem’s nonconformism? He cites Miguel Serdoura as a great player, one open to modern thinking. And, more generally, “a lot of kids that do stuff like copy Metallica on the lute”. But he warns: “To study lute you need a good six years, and six hours a day. And lute people aren’t really listening to Nurse With Wound and Morton Feldman.”