Holland Festival 2017: democracy, Indonesia, women composers

The coming edition of the Holland Festival, running from 3 to 25 June, features 33 Dutch premières and 17 world premières. The festival celebrates its 70th birthday with an unwavering commitment to the arts.

During the presentation in the Amsterdam Bimhuis on Tuesday 7 February Annet Lekkerkerker, director of the festival, quoted Henk Reinink, one of its founders: ‘We initiate this festival in order to realize something great with joint forces.’

From spectators to ‘introspectors’

This was in 1947. Lekkerkerker stressed that seven decades later this mission statement is still in full force. ‘Shortly after World War II people acknowledged the importance of the arts.’ Unfortunately this is no longer a given in these troubled times, where all former certainties seem to be under attack from populist forces. Lekkerkerker, however, insists: ‘Art forms an essential and indispensable part of our lives. It broadens our perspective and turns spectators into “introspectors”.’

Democracy

The festival has two main themes. The first one is highly topical: democracy in all its different aspects, with eye-catching events such as The Nation, a theatrical thriller about tensions in the ‘multi-culti’ Netherlands by Eric de Vroedt; My Country, a production of the British National Theatre on the Brexit; Octavia. Trepanation, a new opera of Dmitri Kourliandski investigating the mechanisms of the Russian Revolution in 2017, and La Democrazia in America in which Romeo Castelucci probes the function of theatre.

Contemporary music from Indonesia

The second theme is Indonesia, the former Dutch colony that was only granted its independence in 1949, after fierce struggles and under international pressure. Even today Indonesia is a sore point in Holland, where relatives of the train hijackers that were brutally killed in 1977 are still fighting for justice.

To this day Indonesia is often mainly viewed from a colonial perspective, but the festival chooses to zoom in on contemporary art from the sprawling archipelago. ‘A Night in Indonesia’ presents a five hour long mini-festival in the famous pop venue Paradiso on 16 June.

It features underground bands combining elements from traditional Indonesian music with pop, rock, folk, noise and/or electronics.’ The duo Boi Akih of jazz singer Monica Akihary and guitarist Niels Brouwer will première Controlling the Swing, commissioned by the Holland Festival.

The next day Ensemble Modern presents Ruang Suara in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, showcasing music from young Indonesian composers that was crafted in close cooperation with the Germans.

In the infectiously Dah-Dha-Dah by Gema Swaratyagita, the musicians only seem to fill the stage in passing, producing weird & crazy sounds along with purely musical ones. Swaratyagita herself has a vocal part and plays the suling, an Indonesian recorder.

Religions without borders

The Dutch-Indonesian composer Sinta Wullur will realize Temple of Time. She specially designed it for the Holland Festival Proms in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on 24 June. Audience and musicians are encircled by 84 gongs from Wullur’s chromatic gamelan.

The gong players and eight vocalists from different religious traditions will perform both traditional and newly composed music. The texts are based on ancient sacred texts from the four world religions about the passage of time.

At the presentation Wullur mentioned that while at school in Indonesia, her religious classes were evenly dedicated to Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Islam. Librettist Miranda Lakerveld pointed out that this seems less obvious today, considering how difficult it was to find appropriate religious texts that both respect tradition and avoid sensitivities.

Sacred grounds

The Proms also feature the world première of Sacred Environment, a collaboration between the Australian-Dutch composer Kate Moore and visual artist Ruben van Leer. In this oratorio the singer Alex Oomens makes a trip to Hunter Valley in virtual reality, the audience following her to the temple on the sacred grounds of the Australian Wonnarua and Darkinjung tribes.

Theo van Gogh meets Gilbert & George

I look especially forward to Huba de Graaff’s music theatre piece The Naked Shit Songs. It is based on an interview of Theo van Gogh with the British artists Gilbert and George in 1996. The discussion addresses such diverse themes as art, sex and religion, Muslims, fundamentalism and death.

Huba de Graaff set the (almost) complete interview to music. This is the more poignant since Van Gogh – who was very outspoken and straightforward on controversial issues – was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist in 2004.

As is its wont the Holland Festival chooses to walk untrodden paths. Not only does it address topical themes, but it also prominently features  women composers, still too often overlooked in regular concert programmes. It can only be hoped they won’t again be forgotten when artistic director Ruth Mackenzie leaves for Paris in 2019.

#HF17 #AnnetLekkerkerker #GemaSwaratyagita #GilbertGeorge #HollandFestival #KateMoore #MonicaAkihary #RomeoCastelucci #RuthMackenzie #SintaWullur #TempleOfTime #TheoVanGogh

Kate Moore’s Space Junk opens Minimal Music Festival 2019

This year’s Minimal Music Festival in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ Amsterdam opens with Space Junk that Kate Moore composed for Asko|Schönberg. The piece addresses the huge amount of debris floating through space.

Key concepts in the work of the Australian-Dutch composer are movement, pulse, direction and commitment to our physical and moral environment. For example, she plays a specially built cello by Saskia Schouten, with an inlaid peace sign in memory of the Bataclan attack in France. In 2017 she composed the large-scale oratorio Sacred Environment for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Choir, a tribute to the sacred places of the original inhabitants of Australia.

Moore is not only a composer but also a visual artist and performer. She sings, plays the cello and is the founder and leader of the ensemble Herz, in which she plays the bass guitar. She often works with (sound) artists, and builds artful instruments of ceramics and other materials herself. Her ensemble piece The Dam (2015) is based on the sounds of crickets, frogs, birds, insects and other creatures living in a waterhole in the bush. She was the first woman ever to win the prestigious Matthijs Vermeulen Prize in 2017. The following year she was composer in focus at the November Music festival, for which she composed the Bosch Requiem, Lux Aeterna.

This season she is soul mate of Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, because of her ‘elegant, driving and colourful post-minimal music’. In this capacity she was given carte blanche to programme five concerts at her own discretion. It is typical for Moore that she devoted one of these concerts entirely to the work of fellow composers.

Like father, like daughter

In Space Junk she again testifies of her deep concern for the world in which we live. The composition is inspired by the enormous amount of waste floating through space. Millions of fragments of spacecraft and obsolete satellites collide with each other. The fragments shoot away at great speed and in turn damage satellites that we use for communication, navigation, climate observation and safety.

Moore’s concern about this invisible but life-size problem didn’t come out of the blue. Her father Chris Moore is a physicist at the Mount Stromlo laser tracking station in Australia. For this institute he makes visual models of the data collected about the space waste. Daughter Kate translates this data into music; during the performance of Space Junk, images of the debris floating through space are projected.

‘I have selected fifty pieces of junk, which I have divided into five families’, says Kate Moore. ‘The duration of the notes is based on the time that these pieces are visible on the horizon, but then accelerated 200 times – in proportion, of course. I also calculated the pitches in this way.’

Besides the instrumental music she made a soundtrack in surround sound, also based on the data from the laser research. ‘The soundtrack has four layers, which refer to as many times at which the measurements take place. At night you can sometimes see the objects when they’re caught in the laser beams. You think they are stars, but because they make strange movements, you know that they are pieces of space grit, very scary.’

Miserere

For the recording Moore cut up the famous Miserere by Gregorio Allegri in fragments of 127 syllables, which she recorded herself. In each of the four movements she recites one verse, her voice recording triggered via MIDI. When the waste makes a rising movement, the syllables sound in their normal order, when it falls they are played backwards. The Miserere was very deliberately chosen, says Moore: ‘It refers to Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, in which Adam and God try to touch each other in vain.’

The Minimal Music Festival runs from Wednesday 3 to Sunday 7 April. It also features a new piano concerto that Vladimir Martynov wrote for Ralph van Raat and Noord Nederlands Orkest. This will be premiered in Muziekgebouw on 4 April. On the programme, too is Future Perfect by The America-Dutch composer Vanessa Lann, which she composed for Oranjewoud Festival 2017. ‘It was inspired by Schubert’s 8th Symphony’, says Lann. ‘It poses the question how this work from 1822 would have sounded had it been written 200 years later, in a modern, minimalistic idiom. Future Perfect lasts 10 minutes, is super rock-and-roll yet winks at the melodies and elegance of Schubert.’

Further concerts are Eklekto’s double bill featuring soundscape artist Ryoji Ikeda alongside deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Terry Riley and son Gyan play music in which Indian raga meets minimalism and jazz; Sinta Wullur presents Gamelan Clock; Cello Octet Amsterdam perform Michael Gordon’s 8; the Horizon Quartet play Incantatie IV of the Dutch minimalist Simeon ten Holt. – And as a matter of course Terry Riley’s groundbreaking In C is performed by the joined forces of Ragazze Quartet, Kapok and Slagwerk Den Haag.

#KateMoore #MinimalMusicFestival #PaulineOliveros #SintaWullur #VanessaLann #VladimirMartynov