Composing a triangle
Philippe Vandenbroeck
This summer (30–31st August 2025), I’m curating a small festival in Winterslag, a community on the outskirts of Genk, Belgium, and the site of a former coal mine. It’s part of the performative aspect of my PhD research. The festival will bring together different strands of my action research on the undeveloped slag heap and create space to connect with other researchers and artists working at the site.
I also want to include a musical component. I reached out to a young Belgian composer, Liesbeth Decrock, and asked her to compose music for three of my poems. Each poem commemorates a friend who passed away in recent years. Together, they form an emotional black triangle. I met Liesbeth during her short composing residency at Het Vliegend Varken ("The Flying Pig"), a guest house near the mining site. During a walk on the nearby slag heap ('terril') we chatted about work and life.
Q: How is the work going, Liesbeth?
A: Pretty well! I’m making good progress on the first poem. It’s a funny text—at first, it struck me as nonsensical, almost Dadaist. But as I spend more time with it, I’m discovering deeper layers. It’s not nonsensical at all! This commission has been a real pleasure. It’s rare to have so much freedom—to shape the work, choose the ensemble, and select the performers. The only fixed element is the text, but that actually helps—it provides a framework, an armature for the composition, offering clues about the tone and texture of the music. Also, it feels good to be creating again after a period of lying low due to struggles with my mental health. This commission is part of a larger wave of stimulating impulses lately, which has been really encouraging.
Q: What kind of composer are you?
A: That’s hard to say—I’m still discovering where my voice is leading me. After graduating from composition class, I carried a lot of unnecessary baggage. I approached composition too much from the inside, through a technical lens. Now, I feel I can approach music more from the outside, from its pure sonic presence. I’m also a bit wary of the recherché avant-garde ethos. For so long, we were told the triad was dead, but composers like Caroline Shaw prove there’s still so much to explore in those tonal building blocks. I’m not aiming to be a particularly virtuosic composer. But I do value precision. And I love the intangible, almost evanescent quality of music—the fact that, unlike other art forms, it requires nothing material. There’s no waste, no physical residue, just energy.
Q: What inspires you?
A: Musically, I’m more drawn to folk and prog rock than to the classical tradition. A dream commission would be to write a piece for a full strength prog rock band, treating it as an amplified chamber orchestra! I mentioned Caroline—she’s a real role model. But in general, I draw inspiration from everything. I find that I’m most inspired when, instead of frontloading my day with social media, I just go out and listen to what stirs in myself. One of my greatest pleasures is spending time alone in the mountains. Last year, I did a hut-to-hut hike in the Austrian Alps, and I’m planning to return this year. There’s one walk I did in thick fog that I want to experience again—with more clarity this time.
Q: Do you know your MBTI type?
A: Honestly, I’m not really into that. I see myself in all 16 types. The idea that you can capture the complexity of a person in a single category seems absurd. The world is much more intricate than that. I mentioned precision earlier—these typologies lack it. They obscure more than they reveal. It’s similar to medical diagnoses: there are countless ways of living with a given condition. I’m attuned to complexity, both within myself and in the world around me. I register a lot. While many people seek simplicity, I want to celebrate complexity.
