CROSSROADS/AVENUE

2011 (20’52”)
For oboe and humming tops
Oboe: Frank van Koten

On Saturday, April 2, 2011, the premiere of ‘Crossroads’ took place in Dwingeloo (Drenthe). This work for oboe and humming tops was played by Frank van Koten, who until 2005 played with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Königsallee in Düsseldorf, the Champs-Élysées in Paris or 5th Avenue in New York, we walk along an avenue, sometimes accentuated by greenery. The Avenue, stately, splendid, wide, the end not in sight. An inconceivable expanse that makes you feel the unreachable.

The Avenue invites you to linger. But its visit can exhaust you, as the endless length takes your breath away. Finally as if cut off, then the endless escape. Sadly, the runner moves across the avenue. Outward appearances are forgotten, dreams of glory and glory faded.

Aren’t Albert Speer’s and Fritz Lang’s imaginary emptiness also built between paper-machee?

The spinning top is a rotating, rigid body in which forces and movements are bundled. It stores energy. But external influences, such as friction, finally bring it down.

In technology, gyroscopes are therefore used for stabilization and navigation, since the direction of the angular momentum remains the same when no force is acting on it.

External torques dynamically determine its path, its direction.

Then the gyroscope runs, it drives the listener along the avenue that opens up other spaces that are imagined and therefore banish nothingness into the distance.

Together with the artist Pieter van der Veen, our passengers on the bus worked on a special work of art about the cosmos.