From the performance that took place on Friday, November 20, 1998, in the the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, by Het Reizend Muziekgezelschap (The Travelling Music Society)

Chistiaan Bor (see picture) and Kerry McDermott, violins
Giles Francis and Marcus Thompson, violas
Eugene Osadchy, cello
Rien Wisse, contrabass


0:00 III. Elegy - Sas Bunge in memoriam attacca:
7:38 IV. Finale

My sextet for strings, opus 33, dedicated to Christiaan Bor and The Travelling Music Society, is more or less ‘autobiographical’. It is a piece with an ‘idée fixe’ theme, which contains both the initials of my chosen pseudonym and also the beginning of my name: AC-EddeB.

A short description of each of the four movements could be as follows:
I. An impactful traumatic experience
II. On the surface, the damage appears to be not too bad
III. Crisis after all, years later
IV. Regeneration and new strength

III. Elegy - Sas Bunge in memoriam
After my time as a conservatory student, I received a number of composition commissions from radio, regional orchestras, choirs and chamber ensembles. However, the reviews of the compositions I wrote were mostly negative. I was mostly described as a fossil from a time gone by. And so I came to adopt a pseudonym, in Latin, a ‘dead language’: Alexander Comitas. The Latin word comitas means kindness, affability. The idea behind it was: I intend to always remain friendly and sympathetic on the subject of contemporary music, but as a composer I will keep pursuing my own path. The way I compose is not the result of ineptitude, but of a conscious and considered choice. See for example my articles Busoni's Garden (https://www.eduarddeboer.org/busonis-garden/) and Music and Spirituality (https://www.eduarddeboer.org/music-and-spirituality/).

Meanwhile, the crisis, resulting from what is depicted in the first movement, came after all. A crisis on a personal level as well as in my composing, which for some time didn’t go well. Just before that I had met Maaike, my later – and present – wife. Fortunately for me, not always easy for her. She managed to help me out of the depression I fell into at the time, and I will always be grateful to her for sticking with me throughout this difficult period.

The choice of the pseudonym had yet another background. Alexander refers to Ernst Alexander (Sas) Bunge, a piano major teacher at the Utrecht Conservatory during the time I studied there, and also a composer of some very beautiful pieces, including many songs. He attended the premiere of my Five Tolkien Songs and became interested in me, and his knowledge became a major influence on my composing. A few years later, he would become seriously ill. When he knew that he did not have long to live, he asked me if I would like to become a trustee of his musical legacy. Thus, after his death, I got to know many more of his compositions than I had known before, including a beautiful setting of François Villon’s poem Ballade des pendus (Ballad of the Hanged) for alto and orchestra. I created a version of this work for alto and piano that I performed with a singer friend, and had a modest part in having the version with orchestra performed again. In the third movement of the string sextet, the main theme from this Ballad is used as the central theme for an adagio full of grief, culminating towards the end of this movement (at rehearsal number 107, at 4:50) in a quotation of the first bars of Bunge's composition.

7:35 IV. Finale
This movement is about (my) regeneration and recovery. This partly came about through the study of folk music from various parts of the world. I listened to lots of records with folk songs and dances, preferably as authentic as I could find, copied numerous melodies by ear, and I visited places like the Jaap Kunst Etnomusicological Institute in Amsterdam and the library of the musicology department of the Utrecht University, where I spent many hours copying books. As a result, I became acquainted with folk music from the Caucasus, and thus with the Armenian ethnomusicologist and composer Komitas. The last name of my pseudonym refers to him and in the final movement of the sextet some folk melodies from the Caucasus are quoted.

Incidentally, in 2013 I ended the period of my pseudonym with a musical tribute to the Armenian Komitas, in the form of my third symphony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA0DrmYppt8&t=3005s).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmDlSPMFsaE