Mayke
Nas

Born 1972 in Voorschoten (Netherlands), lives in Tilburg. Studied music (piano and composition) in Amsterdam, Tilburg, Den Haag and Melbourne (with Warren Burt).

Her works have been commissioned for, among others, the Nieuw Ensemble, Asko Ensemble, Schönberg Ensemble, Ives Ensemble, Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bl!ndman, Neue Vocalsolisten, Eighth Blackbird and Calefax. (w)here, a piece commissioned for the Asko Ensemble, was awarded the Matthijs Vermeulen Encouragement Prize in 2003; in 2005, La Chocolatière Brûlée, for the Nieuw Ensemble, received the Anjer Music Award.

Mayke Nas has formulated her artistic credo in ten succinct “reasons to compose”:

1. Stretching time
2. Looking for trouble
3. Number-fetishism
4. Crazyness
5. Promises
6. Neurosis
7. Sex, drinks & well-baked goose-liver
8. Not being good for anything else
9. To have a “außergewöhnlich lustige – exceptionally amusing” idea (free after Stockhausen)
10. Not to sleep

In her compositions, Nas often departs from purely instrumental frameworks to incorporate video, text and choreographic elements, such as in I Delayed People’s Flights By Walking Slowly In Narrow Hallways (2005) for the percussion ensemble Slagwerkgroep Den Haag. The work, based on Peter Handke’s spoken-word piece Selbstbezichtigung [Self-Accusation], is performed by four players using four chairs and four blackboards amplified by live electronics. Anyone can do it (2006), for six unprepared players, was inspired by the aesthetic concepts of Fluxus (George Maciunas) and entails public participation. The players, two of them volunteers from the audience, are presented with (previously unknown) instructions for the piece, live via computer screen. In April 2010, the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart premiered Filter or flip!, a work in which Nas orchestrated more than 300 commands and slogans – “impératifs trouveés” that she collected from newspapers and the Internet – sounding all the registers of the voice.

Several works by Mayke Nas are available on CD and DVD.