Désirée Meiser and Merlin Breij
Photo: Désirée Meiser
Désirée Meiser is a certified value-orientated systemic coach according to the St. Gallen Coaching Model (SCM)® and a certified value-orientated syst. Business Coach. Her professional career as an actress/singer, director, founder and artistic director of the Kulturbahnhof Gare du Nord for 22 years, as well as mentoring young musicians at various universities for many years, has allowed her to accumulate a wealth of extremely diverse experience over the years. Intensive dialogue with a wide variety of people, empathy, intuition and an attentive focus on the other person have always been of central importance in all her previous activities. All these experiences and personal skills flow meaningfully into her work as a value-orientated systemic coach.
Photo: Emilien Itim
Merlin Breij is a Swiss composer, arranger and guitarist from Lausanne (*1994 in the Netherlands). As a versatile composer, his creations transcend permeable stylistic boundaries, blending the work on timbre and form taken from contemporary creations with rhythm and pulsating concepts from jazz and contemporary music. His works such as "Strata" for string quartet and electric guitar or "Impulsions" for composite nonet are evidence of this. The artistic goal is always the defense of a radical musical expressiveness. As artistic co-director of the "ÆCAMUS" association, he is currently devising a season of creative concerts entitled "Motions of Creation", in which he invites French-speaking composers to write music that gives free rein to their audacity - with works that will be premiered during a touring concert organized by the association.
Project
« Nocturne »
This project will be centered around a new composition of mine, at this stage called «Nocturne». It will be premiered at the «Ferme des Tilleuls» in Renens on the 15th May 2025, and then played again in Aula de Villamont (Lausanne), Galerie YD (Neuchâtel), and Centre le Phénix (Fribourg) on the days after, alongside compositions of Lenni Torgue and Yves Marcotte. It will be performed by «Ensemble Motions» featuring Lenni Torgue on different percussions, Nina Ramousse-Fuchs on violin, Sarah Fouchenneret on cello, and myself on guitar.
The aim of Double in association with Désirée Meiser is to overcome the classical «musicians performing on stage» concept. Désirée will coach me in imagining the piece crossing different artistic media: redefining how the space is used by the musicians and the public in my work, how the lightning is conceptualized and used in the music, how texts and narrative can be used as a guideline in the music, and more generally speaking, how concerts can become a multisensorial experience for the public.
Because the concerts will take place in different venues, a special accent will be put on the flexibility of the «mise en scene», so that it can be repeated in different concert places or theaters.
The theme of the composition, as the title suggest, is the «Nocturne». The public should feel the experience of the night with the three specific moods that it brings: (i) The peace and the quietness, (ii) The fear and the angst, and (iii) The dreamlike state and supernaturality that the night allows.
The first step of this work (a step that has now begun), is to discuss the ideas and possibilities that I can develop to open up my horizons as a composer regarding the «mise en scene» while composing the music. When the project will be fully written, both musically and theatrically, the next step will be working with the musicians and Désirée as we put those ideas in action before the final concerts mentioned above.
This Double will help me – with the help of Désirée - to open up my compositional work and to be able to grasp a wider range of possibilities as the piece is performed in front of the public, while breaking the traditional «concert schema». These steps shall – hopefully - help my work to connect to wider audience and make their experience more plural.
