Just as more guitars kept appearing in the streets of Amsterdam some time ago, they did so in my scores too. In 'To You', there were already nine of them (including three bass guitars). On the streets, however, they were confiscated by the police because of a secret edict of the president-oligarch of the municipal law-courts. (This still happens. Guitarists of all countries, beware of the Lord High Amsterdam Music Thief!). When people realized-partly because of me - the scale on which guitars were being nabbed, they were furious, and so of course was I. Adrian Mitchell found the words as early as 1964, and I chose To You: MY LOVE, THEY ARE TRYING TO DRIVE US MAD. 'To You' had received awards from the Unesco and the City of Amsterdam in the meantime. For the presentation of the latter award - the 1973 Matthijs Vermeulen Prize - I asked for, and was grudgingly granted, permission to give a detailed explanation of the connection between the piece and the legal music thefts on the
streets. The Alderman for the Arts who issued the bull assured me over a drink that there would now be a definite end to the 'wrong policy'. The law of the jungle struck again this summer, completely in keeping with the rules: the street-flautist Sygurd Cochius reported in a newspaper that during the past seven years about six thousand guilders worth of instruments had been taken away from him..... And on July 3rd 1974, on the evening of the day on which our present central-leftish Netherlands government, unprecedentedly and insanely evacuated the institute for the mentally deficient, Dennendal, the musicians, busy with the TV recording in the Vondel Park could do little more than helplessly dedicate the performance to the victims of the deportation........ 'AFRAID OF GOING MAD' .
The topicality of Mitchell's poem had only increased in ten years, and the curse on the godforsaken bourgeois balls-up resounds in 'To You' . - PETER SCHAT

See at Vimeo: To You 

Schat’s non-dramatic works have a theatrical overtone. In To You, composed between 1970 and 1972 on texts by the British poet Adrian Mitchell, the main actors are in fact six man-high humming tops whose instrumental interludes, the so-called ‘Events’ lend the piece its spectral character. To You can be seen as the period document of a hippy culture that moved between the extremes of hedonism and revolt. According to Schat himself, the piece is about the dilemma of the century: the choice between pleasure and critique. But the bizarre instrumentation of one soprano, six electrically amplified guitars, four pianos, two electronic organs, three bass guitars, electronics and the humming tops, illustrate Schat’s secondary intention: to break loose from the straitjacket of standard instrumentation, from the prison of a concert culture that had become stuck in routine. To You, as a consequence, was heard not only in the Royal Theatre Carré and Vredenburg, but also on the surrealistic podium of the so-called Amsterdam Electric Circus, the travelling podium that was the brainchild of Schat and the designer Floris Guntenaar. As an ensemble piece, To You is also one of the cornerstones of the Dutch ensemble culture that developed in the seventies in the wake of the so-called Nutcracker Protests.

Composition Peter Schat,
Poem by Adrian Mitchell (translated in Dutch by Hugo Claus)
Giant Humming Tops by Floris Guntenaar