LOOS — Das war Einmal

After more than forty years of praxis in various forms, LOOS has said goodbye to its last home, the Studio at De Constant Rebecqueplein. The end of an era in which various governmental bodies understood that supporting experimental art was essential.

The most impactful collaborative project for me took place in 1993, with the composition of De Tragische Handeling [The Tragic Act] and its various performances by Ensemble LOOS. Together with Peter van Bergen, the founder of LOOS, I spent hours developing a notation system for the diverse sounds he produced during his improvisations—combinations of glissandi and simultaneously singing vowels, based on specific fingerings. These were fed into a specially designed reverb system by Paul Jeukendrup, creating the effect of a kind of live sampling avant la lettre.

In addition to a number of works I composed for LOOS, I also brought two of my classes from the composition department of the Royal Conservatoire to the Studio: the aesthetics class ‘The Technique of Beauty’ and a lab I founded together with Ivan Babinchak and Maya Verlaak, the ‘Research Concert Cycle’. It was characteristic of Studio LOOS’s practice to support and facilitate such initiatives. The Studio was primarily a laboratory, a place to invent things together, where the risk of failure was understood as a fundamental, inseparable (and sometimes magnificent) part of the process.

The end of this is a consequence of governmental cultural policy, which no longer understands the difference between the beautiful and the appealing, between art and entertainment. Auch das Schöne muß sterben [Even the beautiful must die], but the conditions for creating this beauty should not.

— Cornelis de Bondt, February 1, 2025

Photo head — Willem Minderhout: The performance of my work ‘Einmal’ as part of the RCC by ‘Das Ensemble Ohne €igenschaften’, Studio LOOS, November 7, 2015.