Douwe Eisenga: The Search for Inspiration

“Douwe, what keeps inspiring you again and again?”

With a smile and a small sigh, he says, “I knew this question was coming, and I must admit, I was a bit apprehensive about it. When you ask what my greatest source of inspiration is, I always come back to my own head and everything stored there. And I think that’s true for almost everyone. In our previous conversation, we talked about musical influences: from progressive rock, 70s music, to Metallica, from the earliest polyphonic music around the year 1000 to ragas, gamelan, minimal music, baroque, Stravinsky, Bartók… you name it. It’s all in my head, and that’s what eventually comes out in my work. I don’t invent anything new, but I try to bring different influences together in a new way.”

It seems logical that music is his biggest source of inspiration. Yet, I wonder if there are other things that fuel his creative process.

“Well,” he answers matter-of-factly, “it may sound a bit dull to your story, but I keep searching for combinations of notes that have a kind of indisputable logic. Once that logic is found, the composition process should almost continue on its own. So, I often start in a very technical, very analytical way.”

“And when do you know that something has really succeeded?” I ask him.

That, according to Douwe, is the interesting part. “Although the process starts out technically, I ultimately judge the result purely physically. I have to feel it. It has to move me. It’s like bouncing around the room because the music has such a groove. Music, for me, no matter how cerebral the process may seem, is really a primal thing.”

“So, in the end, it’s about feeling?” I add.

“Yes, feeling and repetition,” he says resolutely. “In the book This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin writes that when we hear music, especially repetitive patterns or rhythms, the greatest neuron activity occurs in the oldest part of our brain. From there, other brain regions are activated. It’s a very primitive, physical process. It’s funny: people have been placed under brain scans while listening to avant-garde music by Stockhausen and Ligeti, and nothing happened. There was no response on a basic level to those wondrous sounds from the avant-garde composers. So yes, I’m never really concerned about how I feel on a certain day. It’s more about that primal feeling.”

We return to the idea that he mainly turns to his own mind for inspiration. “But Douwe, how exactly does that work?”

“Usually, I improvise at the piano, and of everything that comes out, 99% stays in the room. But that one percent… that holds the key to a new piece. Boring, huh?” he says, laughing.

I’m curious about what he means by ‘the key’. “Can you tell me more about that?”

“Take, for example, my album Music for Wiek. I wrote that in 2009 for a dance performance. Quite a big project. Three years earlier, I had written a string quartet. The very first (and unused) sketches for that were ideas that I couldn’t do much with at that time. Luckily, I never throw anything away, and later, I suddenly knew what to do with them. It felt almost as if the notes wanted to go in an inevitable direction. Then you’ve found the key to the piece.”

This raises the question for me: how does he know when a composition is really finished? Douwe thinks for a moment. “Stravinsky once said that much music goes on too long after the point where it’s actually already done. Sometimes I can spend days on the last four bars because I don’t know how to end it. Once that movement is set in motion, it’s hard to stop it.”

I relate this to myself and tell him that I sometimes get impatient when finishing a piece and tend to rush things. I notice how calm he stays during this creative process.

He says with a laugh; “So you would say, once it’s done, it’s done?”

“Yes, I think so,” I reply.

He laughs again. “Maybe that works best for you.”

I ask Douwe if it’s sometimes good to let a composition sit for a while.

“Absolutely,” he nods in agreement. “As vague as it may sound, I get bored most quickly with things that, in hindsight, feel too predictable. But sometimes, you get a gift out of the blue, something spontaneous that makes you think: ‘Wow, this just works.’ Maybe you accidentally hit the wrong chords, but that’s what makes it great.”

When I ask him to sum up his influences, he says without hesitation, “It’s a combination of baroque, rock, and minimal music. But the common thread is the constant movement behind it. The pulse that always continues.” As he starts whistling a baroque tune, he laughs: “Once that starts, it doesn’t stop. Whether it’s pop music or rock, that cyclical repetition just keeps going.”

Douwe remains grounded, analytical, and full of humor, effortlessly switching between technique and feeling, logic and intuition. His quest for the perfect combination of notes may be technical in nature, but the end result always strikes at the heart of what music means to us: something you feel, deep inside. And that, as he says himself, is a primal feeling.