We’re trying to drum up similarities between Amsterdam and Vancouver, and John Korsrud isn’t being much help. Oh, there are the obvious parallels, chiefly those having to do with combustible recreation, but they’re fewer than you might think. Here, as Korsrud points out, distances are vast; there, musicians can book a 10-city tour and still sleep in their own beds at night. Here, the arts struggle to survive; there, until recently, they’ve been liberally funded. And here the vistas are tree-clad and vertical, while there the landscape is flat and grey.

“I’ve always thought that the most ironic gift you could give an Amsterdammer would be a lawnmower, because it’s a city of concrete and cement,” says the composer and Hard Rubber Orchestra bandleader in a telephone interview. “It’s kind of like Gastown, only spread out to the entire city. And Vancouver is extremely green and mountainous. So they’re quite opposite, that way. But both cities have really great music scenes, and there’s a lot of dialogue between Vancouver musicians and Amsterdam musicians.”

That interchange is the subject of Vansterdam, in which our city’s Standing Wave new-music ensemble looks at pieces by Dutch-trained Vancouverites and their Netherlands-based peers. Korsrud, who spent two years studying in Holland, is represented by a pair of works, Four Notes and Time Waits, that pay homage to Dutch composers Paul Termos and Peter van Bergen, respectively. Also on the bill are works by Korsrud’s mentor Louis Andriessen, Justin Christensen, Robin de Raaff, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra resident composer Edward Top, whose take on the Vancouver-Amsterdam connection is that both cities appeal to free thinkers.

“Amsterdam, as a city, is not the same as Holland,” the Dutch-born Top says in a separate telephone conversation. “It’s very clear that there is a very different culture in Amsterdam, and people who are attracted to that kind of culture will move to the city for that reason. I’m pretty sure that’s similar in Vancouver, that there are a lot of things that will happen here that are not socially accepted in other places.”

There are also more personal connections. It was in anarchic Amsterdam, for instance, that Korsrud learned to properly structure his works. As his teacher, Andriessen convinced him to take a more formal approach to composition, “where everything is meticulously notated”, says the jazz-rooted trumpeter, “which was really difficult, and very time-consuming, but it forced me to really write down what I hear, and not just approximate it.”

Top’s Vansterdam contribution, Pots and Pans Falling, pays homage to a local cultural icon, the late Tom Cone, whose Acoustic Panel grassroots funding initiative paid for its composition.

“Tom was always interested in current affairs and how that affects us as artists: what we do with it, how we reflect on it. So I wanted to do something that had to do with something that moved me, and that maybe moved people around me,” says Top, who notes that his new work is his response to the December 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. “One of the surviving children described the sound of the gunshots as ‘pots and pans falling’, which I thought was fascinating. And because the event was so horrific, it left a huge mark on people, especially if you have kids yourself or you’re involved in teaching in schools.”

The composer adds that Pots and Pans Falling—which incorporates a recording of his own young violin students playing its simple theme—is not meant as an aural depiction of the tragic events in Sandy Hook. Instead, his intent is to comfort. Music, he adds, can be an effective way of coming to terms with tragedy.

“I guess that’s true,” he says, then pauses. “Maybe there’s nothing more to say.”