Deep Seeing Currents

ARTIS is better known as a zoo than a concert address, but its music history runs deep. Founded in 1838 as Natura Artis Magistra, it is the oldest zoo in the Netherlands and one of the five oldest still operating in the world. The park also holds an aquarium, a planetarium, the microbe museum Micropia and the Groote Museum, and it contains 27 listed buildings, bridges and ponds, many still in use as animal enclosures. Within that setting, music has a place of its own. In the nineteenth century ARTIS was one of the main cultural centres of Amsterdam, and before the Concertgebouw existed it was the city's leading place to hear music. People joined the society partly out of interest in nature and partly to meet one another in pleasant surroundings, and membership carried a certain social standing. In 1850 a music kiosk went into use opposite the Main Building, on the spot where the Dutch Polder now lies. Concerts took place there at least weekly until 1936, drawing large audiences, until the kiosk was scrapped in 1941. That tradition has been picked up again. The kiosk now standing in the park originally stood on Thorbeckeplein in Amsterdam and was donated to ARTIS, which let the zoo bring back a piece of its own past. It serves as the stage for the ARTIS Summer Nights, where visitors listen to music among the trees and animal houses. Indoors, the Groote Museum has also hosted chamber music in its Royal Hall, so the venue offers both an open air bandstand and a historic hall.