Charles Ortjens Straatman during the audiovisual performance at Tempel Amsterdam (2021)
"Music is about how musical gestures can evolve very subtle to very crude. And with these changes, musical emotions change with them"
Charles Ortjens Straatman (May 30th, 1998) is a composer and performative musician from Maastricht, The Netherlands. The surname 'Straatman' is derived from his mothers family of which he thinks it is equally important to mention.
He studied at the HKU in Utrecht and graduated in Music & Technology. As a composer, he mainly focusses on film music, theatre, commercials and his autonomous practice.
His autonomous works can be very diverse. His works differ from Italo-Disco remixes to the more serious compositions in which more research is needed.
Charles Ortjens Straatman likes all kinds of music. Charles is always interested in the narrative capability's of music. How can one tell a story with music? How is it possible that music can showcase complex emotions on multiple levels, sometimes all at once? Those are some of the questions that keep Charles up at night. During the day he tries to answer those questions by experimenting and composing, always in pursuit of the musical narrative. Repetition and iteration are essential.
Charles began his career writing music and live performing for the theatre monologue 'MARA' (2020), written by Ger Bertholet and directed by Guido Wevers.
In the meantime, when "he doesn't have inspiration", Charles made a lot of Italo-Disco or Eurodance remixes of previous hits, like Katy Perry's 'Firework', under the pseudonym 'Tropische Donder'. Charles thinks it's important to give the same amount of attention to this pseudonym, whether it's pure irony or not, because his two 'identities' describe him as an artist and composer.
And "because of my Katy Perry remix I landed another theatre production ('Suicide Sisters', 2021) so I must be doing something right", he says.
Ortjens Straatman graduated with a thesis on pattern perception in music, and how one can use their understanding of musical patterns for composing a musical narrative and finding variations of a small piece of musical material. In Ortjens Straatman's music, his research has a both technical and conceptual value. Ortjens Straatman's music is about how musical gestures can evolve very subtle to very crude. And with these changes, musical emotions change with them.