Since the second half of the twentieth century, art has become consistently more conceptual and hostile. Modern artists sometimes remind me of orthodox preachers, whose sole desire is to hammer into us how depraved the world is. Art is supposedly able to transform suffering into beauty. But what is beauty? The lust for dissonance in contemporary music is hardly what I would call ‘aesthetically pleasing’; dissonance has, in my opinion, been totally devalued as a manner of expression.

It is partly due to this aversion that I have been composing more and more melodiously in recent years. I developed my colour palette of light blue, pink and orange because of the limitless potential for expression that this combination offers. I spice my music with sugar. I am moved by the tragedy of human shortcomings and the suffering this can bring about. But instead of commenting on it with tormented, cynical sounds, I prefer to sublimate that suffering by striving for crystal clear, unearthly and perfect musical beauty that can arouse passion and ecstasy.

The idea arose to write a large-scale multimedia work along these lines, not only as a statement with regard to modernism, but primarily from a primitive need for Utopian beauty and harmony. ‘Paradise’ means literally ‘enclosed space’ in ancient Greek. The human spirit strives to ‘feel good’ and to avoid pain. Paradise is an age-old human invention, an imaginary world where death and pain do not exist. It is a permanent state of ecstasy.

Jacob ter Veldhuis