 | This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(August 2024) |
Merlijn Twaalfhoven (Wapserveen, The Netherlands, February 14, 1976) is a Dutch composer, speaker, writer, and designer of music projects. In his works he explores latitude, imagination, and a role for art in social issues such as inequality, and the transition to a sustainable society. He has designed numerous unconventional music and theater projects and has worked in conflict areas and refugee camps. He also wrote the Dutch book: "Het is aan ons" (it's up to us), Why We Need the Artist Within to Save the World. (Atlas Contact, 2020).
Twaalfhoven grew up in Wapserveen, the son of musical parents. As a high school student, he participated in the art competition for Dutch youth "Kunstbende", performing his own compositions. He remains a member of Kunstbende Originals to this day. He also performed at the Shakespeare Theater in Diever.
In 1996, he toured Bosnia as a violist with the Ricciotti Ensemble, shortly after the Balkan War. The orchestra was accompanied by Dutch IFOR soldiers and performed for orphans, among others.
Twaalfhoven studied viola and composition (under Daan Manneke) at the Amsterdam Conservatory, with a specific interest in improvisation, ethnomusicology, and contemporary music with South Indian techniques. While still at the conservatory, he designed and organized concerts in unusual locations, often in collaboration with actors and dancers.
For his graduation project, he wrote an interactive essay on Japanese aesthetics, titled "De Veelte", and organised a major event in the former ADM shipyard.[1]
Between 2004 and 2008, he was a lecturer at ArtEZ University of the Arts, where, under the class of PopKunst, he conducted research into how contemporary art can reach a broad audience without artistic concessions.
He is known for large-scale multidisciplinary music projects that often involve dancers, visual artists, amateur musicians, and children. With such projects, he toured Central Europe in 2004 as part of Thinking Forward, the cultural program of the Dutch EU presidency.
That year, he also performed the musical opening of the Dutch embassy in Cyprus. It was there that the idea was born to compose a piece that could be played on both sides of the buffer zone that divided the island. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, it was performed with pupils, students, and professional musicians. Australian filmmaker Adam Sèbire made the documentary Echoes Across the Divide about this project.
Twaalfhoven worked on projects in Palestine, Jordan, and Syria. These projects often involved children from refugee camps or UNRWA schools. Between 2009 and 2012, he organised the hidden festival Al Quds Underground in living rooms of the Old City of Jerusalem. Participants included Dutch theatre makers Laura van Dolron, Gable Roelofs, and Adelheid Roosen. The first edition was initially supposed to take place as part of Al Quds Arab Capital of Culture, but this was banned by Israeli authorities. This prompted the festival to be held underground.
In 2009, he organised the benefit event "Music for Gaza" at Paradiso, Amsterdam, and 013, Tilburg, and in 2013, he organised a benefit concert for Syria at Paradiso, Amsterdam.
In 2014, he composed the musical theater production Postcards from Aleppo, based on handwritten postcards from besieged Aleppo, together with Syrian musicians and writer Abdelkader Benali.
As part of the Holland Festival's "Save the Bassoon" program, Twaalfhoven composed "Grand Subphonia for an immense number of bassoons." It was performed in 2016 by Bram van Sambeek, Pascal Gallois, and 274 other bassoonists during the Holland Festival Proms in the main hall of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.
He is one of the fifty composers in the Kronos Quartet's "Fifty for the Future" project, which premiered at the 2016 Holland Festival.
By invitation of UN SDSN, Twaalfhoven performed at the Concert for a Sustainable Planet event at Carnegie Hall with Yo Yo Ma, Gloria Benedikt, Jeffrey Sachs, and members of the New York Philharmonic.
In 2017, he founded The Turn Club, a collaborative group of artists whose practice is firmly rooted in the dutch society. Through this, he develops projects and methods, such as the Academy for Uncertainty Skills, the Future Election, the Place Consultation, the National Listening Campaign, and Seasonal Conversations.
As a speaker, writer, and trainer, Twaalfhoven regularly gives performances and lectures in which he connects principles from artistic practices to complex social issues.
His works have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Holland Symfonia, the Radio Chamber Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Symphony Orchestra of Flanders, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Dutch Ballet Orchestra, the Asko Ensemble, Percussion Group The Hague, the Conservatory Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Escher Ensemble, the Amstel Saxophone Quartet, the Lendvai Trio and the Ricciotti Ensemble, among others.