THE HAGUE.- A feast for your eyes and ears! Starting this spring, Kunstmuseum Den Haag plans to make some noise. To mark the 200th anniversary of the Royal Conservatoire, the worlds of visual art and music will be brought together in the exhibition Base Line – Music Meets Art. For the first time in a long while, Kunstmuseum will display a portion of its remarkable collection of musical instruments – and share their sounds. There will be Japanese prints depicting people making music, forgotten female composers will be returned to the spotlight, the audience will be able to smell and feel sounds and the museum will reveal how modern artists were influenced by music. In an exciting programme of public events, various musicians and communities from The Hague will also join the chorus, as it were, contributing to an exhibition that transcends borders and eras.

Music instruments find new life

For the first time in decades, Kunstmuseum Den Haag will display a portion of its remarkable collection of thousands of musical instruments – simultaneously the bass line and baseline for this exhibition. Visitors will be able to admire a selection of instruments from many eras and from all over the world: parts of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, a Persian tar, an Iranian kamanjā, a drum from the Baga people (a small community in Guinea), a theremin, a glass harmonica, synthesizers and harps.

Various specialists and musicians have made it possible to hear the sounds of several of these treasures once more. The displays will also draw connections between the instruments and their depictions in visual art.

A number of these instruments were among the objects from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s collection chosen for inclusion in the long-term research project exploring colonial connections within the museum.

New narratives

Portal (2017), a sonic sculpture by Germaine Kruip, acts as the prelude of Base Line. Visitors enter via the bronze piece and are invited to ‘play’ the work themselves. Sounds and imagery alternate and combine to form a multisensory exhibition that offers space for new narratives to unfold. One such narrative is that of previously unknown artist Eugenia MacFarlane, whose pioneering work deploys colour and form to express movement, emotion and music. Portraits of ‘forgotten’ female makers feature luminaries such as Surinamese composer Majoie Hajary; women’s rights activist, inventor and pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt; dance pioneer Lili Green; and Henriëtte Bosmans, a concert pianist and one of the most important Dutch composers of the first half of the 20th century. Works by other contemporary artists Derrick Ofosu Boateng, Peter de Cupere, Tara Fallaux and Dina Lebbar - who have their own connection to music and the multisensory - can also be seen.

Synaesthesia

Visitors to the exhibition will feel, smell, hear and see the inextricable connections between music and visual art, especially abstract art. They will see paintings and prints based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and on Schönberg’s atonal compositions. The music is visualized in colours and lines, demonstrating the nature of synaesthesia, a phenomenon where the senses ‘overlap’ one another. And if you don’t actually have synaesthesia, don’t worry: you can still experience the music, dance, aromas and colours. Take for instance the ‘scent octave’ by Septimus Piesse, a chemist and perfumer who coined the term ‘smound’.

Visitors will also be invited to move their own bodies, inspired by Kamares, a dancer who interprets the lines of Theo van Doesburg’s painting Counter-composition of dissonants XVI. For the first time in the history of the museum, Kunstmuseum will hang this painting vertically – just as Van Doesburg did a century ago to express the dancing human form.