John Borstlap is a Dutch composer and author on cultural subjects related to music and the visual arts. He claims to be rooted in German musical traditions and is a proponent of a revival of tonal and classical traditions.
After moving to Delft in 1976, Borstlap made a living by private piano teaching and accompanying ballet classes, while carrying out extensive musical studies, as well as studies in art history and Jungian psychology. The American pianist Christopher Czaja Sager, who had shortly before settled in the Netherlands, discovered some of his piano pieces which he performed many times, including radio recordings. In 1981 Sager premiered Borstlap's Variations for piano and string orchestra with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Antoni Ros-Marbà with performances in Amsterdam and The Hague.
Cambridge and beyond
On the basis of two prizes he had meanwhile won with his Violin Concerto, Borstlap successfully competed in 1984 for a year postgraduate study at Cambridge University on a full British Council Scholarship, where he obtained his Degree of Master of Philosophy in 1986. At the music faculty he studied with Alexander Goehr. As Borstlap wrote in his book, The Classical Revolution, "understanding the Schönbergian heritage would mean understanding of the origin of musical modernism". In 1990 the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Hartmut Haenchen performed Borstlap's first symphony, Sinfonia. In the nineties Borstlap was involved in various projects, such as an extensive national concert tour of the Ludwig Trio for which he wrote a string trio, and the production of a CD with his chamber musicHyperion’s Dream. In 1998 he organized a classical chamber music festival in Haarlem. While working on his music, his writings on musical and wider cultural subjects began to be published. The beginning of the new millennium saw various performances of his elaboration of a Wagner sketch, Psyche, in Manchester, the Netherlands and Romania, and the publication of a long essay: Recreating the Classical Tradition in the tome Reviving the Muse in which Borstlap formulated his latest ideas about the possibilities of a revival of the tonal tradition. In 2002–2005 Borstlap campaigned, together with two colleagues, for a reform of the national subsidy system for new music. A court case in 2012 against the national funding body for new music, which Borstlap won, ended a period of public contestation. Psyche received a successful performance by the Orchestre National de Montpellier in 2008. Since then, interest in Germany and Austria has grown, resulting among other things in a commission by the Kammersymphonie Berlin for a classical symphony. In 2013 his book The Classical Revolution was published, followed by a second edition in 2017 by Dover. In 2016 his Feierliche Abendmusik received successful performances by the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic under conductor Jaap van Zweden.
