Holland Festival: The Disintegration Loops (for Euterpestraat) - William Basinski, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, presented by ANOHNI
Associate artist ANOHNI lived as a child in the Gerrit van der Veenstraat in Amsterdam for a year in the 1970s. She was then unaware of the dark WWII history of that place and is now initiating a ceremonial project that explores the various memories of the street. At the center is an orchestral performance of William Basinski's contemplative masterpiece The Disintegration Loops.
Holland Festival: The Disintegration Loops (for Euterpestraat) - William Basinski, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, presented by ANOHNI
Euterpestraat
The Euterpestraat, a mixed and lively community with many Jewish residents, changed radically in 1942 when the Nazis established their SD intelligence headquarters in the building that now houses the Gerrit van der Veen College. Across the street, the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung organized the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews in the building that now houses the St. Ignatiusgymnasium. Anne Frank and her family were among those imprisoned there before being sent to concentration camps. After the war, Amsterdam authorities hurried to soften the stain of fear on the neighborhood by renaming the street in honor of Dutch resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen.
ANOHNI and ambient composer William Basinski have been working together since their first meeting in New York in the early 1990s. William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops has become culturally linked to the commemoration of 9/11. With an orchestral score by Maxim Moston, ANOHNI has invited the composer to present a unique staging of this work, as a prayer for local lives and memories of those wiped out by the Holocaust and by the Allied bombing of Euterpestraat. The program is also offered as a window to reflect on the nature of the peace and quiet in which ANOHNI could play thirty years later as a 7-year-old in the Gerrit van der Veenstraat.
Stories and events directly and indirectly related to this history will be shared in this afternoon program, and a choir of students from two secondary schools from this street will also present their arrangements of two songs by ANOHNI.