Canal Symphonies and Questionable Harmony

Ah, Amsterdam. The city of tulips, bikes, Vermeer, canals, and let’s be honest...very liberal interpretations of just about everything, including art, architecture, and yes, even music.

I've just spent a week there with my wonderful wife and daughter specifically to see the Great Vermeer Exhibition, hoping to soak in the old-world charm, maybe commune with Rembrandt’s ghost, and, of course, eat my weight in stroopwafels. What I didn’t expect was a full-blown existential crisis about the future of classical music, brought on by a crooked house, a techno-infused Bach remix, and a man playing Vivaldi on a kazoo while riding a unicycle.

Welcome to Amsterdam: where the architecture leans more than a tipsy violist, the art blurs into psychedelia, and the question I kept asking myself was: “How much tolerance is too much tolerance in classical music?”

Amsterdam’s buildings look like they were composed by a drunk Haydn on a deadline. Each canal house is slightly off-kilter, like it's mid-curtsy or about to start an avant-garde ballet. Charming? Absolutely. Structurally reassuring? Not so much. Still, there's something inspiring about the way the city embraces these imperfections. No one is frantically trying to straighten the façades. They just are. They lean, they wobble, they hold centuries of history, and still, people live inside them happily. It got me thinking: maybe this is what music needs more of. A little wobble. A little wonk. A little freedom to lean into strange corners and not be condemned for "ruining the purity of the art form."

But then I walked into a concert where someone was playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a modular synthesizer while a projection of melting clocks looped on the wall behind them. I get it: we're pushing boundaries. But Beethoven was already emotionally unstable enough without us running his work through a smoke machine and a looper pedal.

I visited the Rijksmuseum to cleanse my palette. A Vermeer (times 28!), the Rembrandts with the stillest, most luminous light ever painted...it was like sitting in silence after a Mahler symphony. But just as I was getting lost in the serenity of a Vermeer domestic scene, a group of students walked by and one said, “It’s giving The Sims 2 vibes.” I don’t know what crushed me more: the comment itself or how weirdly accurate it was.

Still, the Dutch don’t gatekeep art. Everyone’s invited to the conversation, even if they arrive wearing Crocs and comparing Baroque lighting to video game graphics. I mean, at least they are there. That democratic spirit made me reflect: maybe classical music could benefit from a little less gatekeeping too. But also…maybe we don’t need every performance to include trap beats under Mozart. Amsterdam is famously tolerant. You can smell it in the air. But their tolerance also stretches to art and expression in every form. I saw a man on the street playing the Goldberg Variations on a xylophone made of bicycle bells. He wasn’t bad. He also wasn’t good. But the people around him applauded like he’d just reinvented counterpoint. And maybe he had?

Here’s the thing: as a classical musician, I want people to feel free to interpret, experiment, adapt. But when does “creative freedom” start to feel like “creative gaslighting”? At what point does “reinventing the canon” become “smashing it with a MIDI controller and pretending that’s depth”? Is it when someone programs a concert of Schoenberg and Kanye? (Actual thing.) Is it when a string quartet wears LED-lit bodysuits and plays Mahler upside down on aerial silks? (Not real yet, but give it time.) Tolerance is a virtue, yes. But do we really have to tolerate everything? Maybe it's okay to say: “Actually, I don’t think Mozart wanted to be accompanied by interpretive beatboxing.”

Amsterdam taught me that beauty can be found in imperfection, in chaos, and even in absurdity. I laughed, I cringed, I applauded a man who played Eine kleine Nachtmusik on a didgeridoo (he totally committed, I’ll give him that). But it also reminded me that classical music doesn’t have to warp itself into unrecognizability just to stay relevant. It can stretch and lean like Amsterdam’s houses. If the foundation’s solid, it won’t collapse. And maybe that’s the balance we’re all searching for: tradition that flexes, not fractures.

So yes, tolerate the wild, the weird, the kazoo arrangements of Tchaikovsky if you must. But let’s also save room for silence, structure, and the sublime. Let’s make space for both the crooked and the classical.

And above all, let’s agree: no more harpsichord dubstep. Please?