Date: November 25, 2012
Source: The New York Times
News Item: Dutch Composer Wins Grawemeyer Award

The Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, 42, has won the University of Louisville’s 2013 Grawemeyer Award for music composition in recognition of his work “Up-close” for cello, string ensemble, electronic soundtrack and film. Read more

Date: October, 2012
Source: Stage Mom Musings
News Item: A play about play

You make choices for your kids/what they eat/what they wear/what they read/and what they hear and see. These words appear on a graphic for Speeltheater Holland Studio, the latest enterprise of married collaborators Onny Huisink and Saskia Janse — who’ve come to Arizona as part of an ongoing partnership with Childsplay in Tempe. Read more

Date: October 12, 2012
Source: Nothing But Hope And Passion
News Item: Interview: Blaudzun

The Dutch singer-songwriter Blaudzun not only released his new album, Heavy Flowers, shortly, he also played stunning shows at this year’s Reeperbahn Festival. We took the chance to have a short interview with the nice guy in black clothings. Read more

Date: October, 2012
Source: New York City Jazz Record
News Item: LEST WE FORGET: Willem Breuker (1944-2010) by Ken Waxman

Willem Breuker (1944-2010)

The blend of anarchism, precision and humor suggested by Willem Breuker Kollektief (WBK), the ensemble the Dutch saxophonist/composer led for 36 years until his death from lung cancer on Jul. 23rd, 2010, underlined the fascinating contradictions in his music. A collective has everyone on equal footing no matter how skilled, yet this Kollektief had Breuker as the undisputed boss of a group of first-class soloists. Furthermore the sly joke in this wordplay was also reflected in the WBK’s on-stage horseplay. Breuker not only ensured that the unmistakable modern jazz played included themes by notated composers such as Kurt Weill and George Gershwin, but also a large helping of physical and instrumental comedy that might culminate in the vocalizing of a ’20s ditty like “Yes We Have No Bananas”. (Click link to read more)

Source: New York City Jazz Record

Date: September 26, 2012
Source: Clyde Fitch Report
News Item: “Crossing the Line” Best When it Crosses Lines

There was a scruffy prophet harbingering in Times Square for three days last week. The expressive sage was actor Donald Fleming, performing a free-wheeling “happening” in the middle of (the pedestrian plaza on) Broadway. Pleinvrees/Agoraphobia (“Pleinvrees” means agoraphobia in Dutch) is part theater, part performance art and part guerilla intervention in the public space. The performance was produced by Dutch director Lotte van den Berg as part of the “Crossing the Line” Festival and was co-presented by the Times Square Alliance.

To read the entire review, please click here

Date: August 24, 2012
Source: CNN
News Item: DJ Tiesto tells CNN the secret behind his global succes

He’s been called the world’s greatest D.J. With some 18 years behind the deck, the master spinner has hundreds of records to his name, plays sold out concerts all throughout the year and raked in $23 million in 2011, putting him firmly on Forbes list of the World’s Most Powerful Celebrities. But it wasn’t until 2001, he caught the ear of mainstream audiences with his remake of this song by Delerium. Since then Tiesto worked with some of the world’s biggest chart-topping artists including Gotye and Kanye West.

Date: August 14, 2012
Source: WQXR
News Item: The Misfit Pop Art of JacobTV

Jacob ter Veldhuis, the Dutch composer better known as JacobTV, comes as close to pop art as classical music is ever likely to get. Borrowing the “speech-melody” technique of Scott Johnson (John Somebody) and Steve Reich (Different Trains), he loops sampled conversation to form the basis for his music. His music scrutinizes American popular culture, using it as an entry point for an nuanced critique of American democracy and capitalism.

A Reich-influenced Dutch composer with a political agenda, Jacob ter Veldhuis might sound a little like Louis Andriessen — but only on paper. JacobTV is distinguished by his great affection for the subject of his scrutiny, as made evident by his brightly colored, upbeat harmonizations of his samples. An ostensible outsider, JacobTV is in fact at home enough in the culture he satirizes so astutely to have won ardent champions among the highest ranks of American performers, including string quartet ETHEL and the Prism saxophone quartet. The inevitable comparison is to Andy Warhol, who also mirrored the popular media’s mechanical repetitions and bright colors to make larger points about American culture.

But like Warhol, JacobTV focuses his attention not only on the glamor of celebrity and media advertising — as in The Body of Your Dreams (2003-2005), for two guitars and boombox, which samples the phony ecstasies of shilling infomercial MCs — but also on the grim and abject realities of American life. Grab It! (1999), for boombox and guitar, is analogous to something like Warhol’s Most Wanted Men painting; the show JacobTV samples is the old Scared Straight! documentary, where prison lifers tried to intimidate young juvenile delinquents with threats, curses and stories from life behind bars.

Through it all, JacobTV’s music remains surprisingly upbeat. “I pepper my music with sugar,” he’s said, and in fact he can even be shockingly sweet, as in his perhaps willfully cloying oratorio, Paradiso (2000), a relentless stream of lush and pleasant sounds.

His new project is his most ambitious yet: a “never ending reality opera” entitled The News, YouTube clips previewing the work set to music a number of Fox News segments, a Silvio Berlusconi speech and a clip from hip-hop gossipmonger Wendy Williams’s daytime talk show. It premiered in 2012 as a perpetual work in progress, to be updated constantly with new video samples from contemporary media.

Date: August 28, 2012
Source: Wall Street Journal
News Item: Learning to Love Baby Peggy Again

Few people under age 90 might even ask that question; but now anyone can learn the answer, thanks to “Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room,” a fascinating documentary making its East Coast premiere next week at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A debut feature by Dutch director Vera Iwerebor, the film tells the remarkable story of a silent-screen child-star who, circa 1923, was as well-known to movie-fans as Pola Negri, Rudolph Valentino and Jackie Coogan. (Click link to read more)

Source: Wall Street Journal

Date:August 7, 2012
Source: New York Times
News Item: Movie Review: ‘Meet the Fokkens,’ a Documentary on Dutch Sisters

Twin Prostitutes, Growing Old Plying Their Trade in Amsterdam
Movie Review: ‘Meet the Fokkens,’ a Documentary on Dutch Sisters

When Martine Fokkens bustles into the small grocery store early in “Meet the Fokkens,” a 2011 documentary portrait of identical twin prostitutes, she calls out a cheery hello to the man behind the counter. She has a purple hat and orange scarf framing her plump white face and a Chihuahua tucked under an arm, and what she needs, she announces, is a box of condoms. She was 69 when the movie was shot and still plying her trade from one of the picture windows in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Two years earlier her sister, Louise, had hung up her own riding crop because, as the second twin explains in this insistently upbeat movie, “I couldn’t get one leg over the other.” (Click link to read more)

Source: New York Times

Date: July 30, 2012
Source: New York Daily News
News Item:’Sensation’ will bring a Super Bowl-level event for dance music to new Barclay Center

The biggest event in dance music is coming to New York.“Sensation” has been blowing the minds of fans in 22 countries — from Brazil to Spain to Russia and Chile — for 13 years. When the extravaganza arrives at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in October, expect no less if a recent visit to a show in Amsterdam is any evidence. (Click link for more information)

Source: New York Daily News