Location: Spiegelzaal, Concertgebouw Amsterdam
Language: Dutch
More information and reservations: www.aaaserie.nl
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is one of the partners in the AAA series, an interdisciplinary art and music collaboration between the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and other Amsterdam institutions. On Friday afternoon, January 27, the Stedelijk and the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest present the program ”Confrontations: Music, Visual Art, Debate”. The theme of the January program of AAA 2011/2012 is “Expectation.” For the full program for the week, see www.aaaserie.nl.
A headline in the NRC Handelsblad at the end of November cried, “Nothing is Certain Anymore in the Euro Crisis.” We live in a time in which expectations constantly have to be adjusted, and often in a negative way. This time, the AAA theme moves between the extremes of broadly social and intensely personal expectations, as well as the points of contact between the two.
The orchestral program concentrates mainly on the personal aspect. The starting point for the theme is Schönberg’s Erwartung from 1909, in which emotions move back and forth between excited, happy expectation and all-consuming fear – not on the floor of the stock exchange, but in a dark, moonlit forest. Music is the perfect medium for evoking such feelings, and Wagner was a master of this: he played around with our musical (tonal) patterns of expectation, and with the famous Tristan chord he managed to create a sound which literally remains hanging in a state of desire. And yet this romantic desire (think of Sehnsucht) is quite innocent compared to the almost pathological forms it takes in Schönberg’s work. Feverish emotions also play a role in the new work Providence by Klaas de Vries, insofar as he was inspired by the delirious state of the main character in the film of the same title by Alain Resnais.
The afternoon program of Confrontations, organized together with the Stedelijk Museum, reflects on the problem of social expectations in times of crisis, confronting us at the moment. Ewald Engelen, a professor of financial geography, will give the AAA lecture, which will cover questions such as: What role did collective expectations play in the development of the current economic crisis? Was there actually a collective blindness, and were there unconscious drives? To what extent can parallels be drawn between personal and collective expectations? Confrontations also includes the film Miami by Sarah Morris (introduced by Hendrik Folkerts, curator of the Public Program at the Stedelijk Museum), in which an entire city wakes up with a positive expectation; Boudewijn Tarenskeen talking about his latest creation; and an astonishing work by composer Nicolaus A. Huber, during which the listener is confronted with his or her fixed expectation.
Expectations play an important role in everyone’s life. They color our observations and critical faculties and are ultimately possibly more important in determining our feelings of well-being than we think. A negative result leads to disappointment. The wisdom of Arthur Japin’s adage, “If you have no expectations, you can’t be disappointed,” may be one way of protecting one’s feelings, but for this AAA we have a different suggestion: allow yourself to be surprised!