Grant: RTF 077
Detail: Love Songs, for organ and voice, composed and performed by Amarante Nat, has been co-commissioned by RTF with the Hamel Foundation.
The work explores the vulnerable relationship between time and love, drawing on fragments from the English poet W. H. Auden’s poem As I Walked Out One Evening (1940), and will premiere at Orgelpark, Amsterdam on 4 June 2026.
Amarante Nat is a Dutch composer and singer whose work consists of diverse approaches to musical forms, sound and movement. She describes herself as “feeling comfortable in the poetry of spaces” and as “listening through movement”. One of her views on music is that it has an essentially choreographic quality and only comes to life through an embodied practice which is situational.
Alongside her composition studies with Yannis Kyriakides and Martijn Padding at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and earlier with Willem Jeths and Wim Henderickx at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, she trained as a singer with the contralto Noa Frenkel. Voice plays a central role in her work and can be a point of departure for her compositional process: from the connection to voice, breath and body, she derives phrasing, timing and harmonic gestures. She writes for acoustic instruments, among others for organ, string quartet, orchestra, piano, brass and voice.
Photo: Amarante Nat (c) Boris Peters