Arthur Wagenaar - music composer, director & inventor of instruments
Arthur Wagenaar is featured with 2 video’s in our magazine “Music & Theatre”
Arthur Wagenaar (1982) composes music, plays keyboards (piano, Hammond, Continuum Fingerboard, synths, harmonium), creates
music-theatre, directs rehearsals, and invents instruments.
He studied composition and music technology at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and composition at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.
Since 2000 he has been keyboard player/composer/creator in rock band/music-theatre collective Susies Haarlok. This fall, the new production GROWTH will tour in theaters. A collaboration with Veenfabriek and Museum Naturalis centre for biodiversity.
Arthur creates music-theatre productions as a founding member of the Goed Bezig! Foundation; their recent productions are Stads/Einder (2015), Close Call (2018) and Sounds Like Juggling (2020).
Goed Bezig! creates music productions that pose questions about our daily lives, showing the audience through music that we have a choice, even about things we have done our whole lives and that we take for granted. What if you would do it differently…?
In all of his work, his own or commissions, Arthur is looking for new combinations of music and theatre, of text and performance. Classical ensembles become bands, musicians become actors – and the other way around. The musicians always have more to do than just playing the notes. The story behind the composition is told through music in combination with elements including juggling, the location, live animation and technology.
In 2020 the New Moon Orchestra was founded, a collaboration with Fluxus centre for the Arts Zaanstad and De Sluis, meeting place for newcomers. In this orchestra people of all ages and cultural background play together. Musicians living in the Zaandam area, with roots all over the world, from Iceland to Indonesia, form Brasil to Ethiopia, from the Netherlands to Syria. The musicians bring along music from their background cultures, which Arthur arranges for the group and conducts. By playing together we get to know each other in a new way.
Arthur likes to implement new, often self-built (electronic) instruments. All instruments in Sounds Like Juggling are played through juggling. The app Close Call Live turns your smartphone into a musical instrument. Even the 65,000 kg heavy Cruquiusgemaal was turned into an instrument. Other instruments include the Rampafoon (disasterphone), with strings 9 metres long; and synthesizers for the Continuum Fingerboard, a 3D keyboard.
MOTTO: if it MOVES you, deep and inexplicable, then it’s good. Whether you stop and listen in awe or are brought to uncontrollable dancing.
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