Imaginary Mirror

Wim Van Hasselt, who learnt trumpet, and Koen Plaetinck, who studied percussion, got to know each other as students, and both played as soloists for the Budapest Festival Orchestra. For a contrast to the rapid, sometimes superficial daily tasks that typify the life of a professional musician, they decided to form a duo: ART’uur. Their mission? To go passionately in search of depth and to link up all the arts.   

ART’uur’s first production, Imaginary Mirror, is inspired by the René Magritte painting Le Faux Miroir. He asserts that when someone looks into a mirror, the mirror image he sees is only ever an interpretation. Therefore, a mirror image is always somehow ‘false’. Wim Van Hasselt and Koen Plaetinck commissioned seven composers each to write a new work on this theme and ordered the compositions around a new arrangement of Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.

Imaginary Mirror would normally have premiered at Klarafestival 2020 but was cancelled due to the coronavirus crisis. However, all of the compositions were recorded and released on the Imaginary Mirror album in August 2020. Two of the seven new compositions commissioned by ART’uur will now have their digital premiere at Klarafestival 2021, as part of the Sound & Vision concert. Which compositions to expect? Parvati by the Antwerp composer Wim Henderickx and Televisioniist by the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée!

Sacred Places III: Parvati, the Remover of bad Energy

Wim Henderickx works as a composer, percussionist, conductor and professor of composition. He studied composition and percussion at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp and sonology at IRCAM in Paris, and at the Conservatoire of Music in The Hague. His compositions are often inspired by other cultures. He wrote works for opera, music theatre, orchestra, choirs and chamber music. Electronics are often an important feature in his oeuvre. Wim Henderickx has been Composer-In-Residence at Muziektheater Transparant since 1996. He joined the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra as an Artist-In-Residence in 2013. He is a professor of composition at the conservatories of Amsterdam and Antwerp. Finally, he is the main coach of the annual SoundMine composition course for young composers at Musica, Impulse Centre for Music in Belgium.

Televisioniist / Season 1 Episode 1

Nicole Lizée (composition and visuals)

Award winning composer and video artist composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance. Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.