Cultural Committee Fortkerk (CCF)

Part of the restoration of the Fortchurch and Museum was subsidized by the 'Meerjarenplan Nederlandse Antillen' - an aid plan financed by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. One of the conditions for this assistance was that the Fortchurch and Museum be self-sustaining when it came to future maintenance of the monuments. For this reason the Church pews were cut in halves and thirds to accommodate a new layout to facilitate concerts and other events which could raise new funds for this objective. And as a result, the Cultural Committee Fortkerk was formed to initiate, organize and administrate the proceeds from such events.

OBJECTIVES

To organize cultural activities such as concerts;
To give lectures in the cultural field;
To hold meetings in the sphere of social welfare and spiritual wellbeing;
To operate a museum, and thereby also to sell postcards, literature, and typical, religious souvenirs;
To hold art expositions such as the quilting or patchwork craftsmanship;

Target group:    The culture-loving local population and foreign tourists;

Criteria:   

NEWS and EVENTS

UPCOMING EVENTS:


JolantaPawlak.com

TaniaKross.com



NEWS UPDATE:

HISTORIC SCHWEITZER LETTER DONATED TO MUSEUM
November 29, 2006 - Curaçao

CCF Chairman Mrs. Millicent Smeets-Muskus is very pleased to announce that Mr. Jan de Boer has donated to the Fortchurch Museum an historic letter written by Dr. Albert Schweitzer in which he gives his blessing and permission to name a school in Curaçao after him. Dutch text and an English translation appear under the photo of the original document. Mrs. Smeets-Muskus and the members of the CCF express their profound gratitude to Mr. de Boer and his family for this benevolent addition to the Museum's historic collection.


Vereniging voor Prot. Christelijk              Doctor Albert Schweitzer
Onderwijs. Postbus 555 Willemstad       Lamberene - GABON
Curaçao, N.A. Nederlandse Antillen      Frans Equatoriaal Afrika
                                    
                                                                      27 december 1958

Beste heer de Boer, beste heer Kort,

U betuigt mij veel sympathie met het uitdrukking geven van de wens de tweede van uw protestants christelijke school mijn naam te doen dragen. Het is uw welwillende wens dat ik u daarvoor mijn toestemming geef. Ik hoop dat deze school aan de leerlingen die haar bezoeken, bekend zal maken met de geest van het Evangelie van onze Here Jezus Christus, dat zij groot respect hebben voor de leraren die hen opvoeden en hen onderwijzen, dat ze met een blijvende vriendschap tussen de leerlingen en hen verbonden verblijven, en dat zij hun hele leven lang dankbaar zijn voor hen die ze hebben onderwezen, zoals ik voor de mijne erkentelijk ben gebleven, al hebben die reeds vele jaren deze wereld verlaten. Wilt u mijn groeten overbrengen aan de heren predikanten, aan de onderwijzers en onderwijzeressen, en aan de leerlingen.

Met mijn beste gedachten uw toegewijd

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Aan de school te Curaçao die mijn naam draagt
Met mijn beste gedachten. Albert Schweitzer
Lamberene, 20 januari 1959

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

Association for Protestant Christian Education    Doctor Albert Schweitzer
P.O.Box 555                                                                Lambarene - GABON
Willemstad                                                                  French Equatorial Africa
Curaçao
Netherlands Antilles                                                 December 27, 1958

Dear Mr. de Boer,Dear Mr. Kort,

You affirm great congeniality by expressing the desire to grace your second protestant Christian school with my name. It is your benevolent wish that I grant you my permission to this effect. I sincerely hope that this school shall introduce the students which attend it to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ, that they may have great respect for the teachers who educate and teach them, that the teachers and the students may be bound together by an enduring friendship, and that the students may be grateful for the rest of their lives to those who taught them, in the same manner as I have remained indebted to those who taught me, even though they have departed from this world many years ago.
Please extend my kindest regards to the ministers, the teachers, both male and female, and to the students.
With my most dedicated consideration towards you,
ALBERT SCHWEITZER

To the school in Curaçao which bears my name,
with my most dedicated consideration.
Albert Schweitzer.
Lambarene, January 20, 1959

"Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him."
Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Albert Schweitzer
Etching by Arthur William Heintzelman
Born	January 14, 1875(1875-01-14) Kaysersberg, Alsace-Lorraine
Died	September 4, 1965 (aged 90) Lambaréné, Gabon
Nationality	1875–1918 German 1918–1965 French
Field	Medicine, music, philosophy, theology
Notable awards	Goethe Prize (1928) Nobel Peace Prize (1952)

Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, (January 14, 1875 – September 4, 1965) was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaisersberg in Alsace-Lorraine, a Germanophone region which the German Empire returned to France after World War I. Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of historical Jesus current at his time and the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus who expected the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "reverence for life",^[1] expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Lambaréné Hospital in Gabon, west central Africa

Schweitzer died on September 4, 1965 at his beloved hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. His grave, on the banks of the Ogowe River, is marked by a cross he made himself.

His cousin Anne-Marie Schweitzer Sartre was the mother of Jean-Paul Sartre.

http://www.albertschweitzer.org.uk/about.php

PREVIOUS EVENTS:

BENEFIT CONCERTS - Chopin in de Antillen
November 29, 2006 - Curaçao
December 04, 2006 - Aruba









Here are some reviews of the book, translated from Dutch by Eyda Butot-Boomgaart:

CHOPIN SOURCE OF ANTILLEAN MUSIC 

From our editors:

HILVERSUM - The well-known Polish-French composer Frédérique Chopin greatly influenced the development of Antillean classical music.

        

This is what Jan Brokken writes in his recently published book “Why eleven Antilleans knelt before the heart of Chopin”. Brokken recounts how, from the second half of the nineteenth century on up to the twentieth century, the composer left his mark on the Curaçao waltz. The author earlier published portraits of musicians, writers and artists. In addition, he also published such literary novels as “The Province”, “The Sea of Old” and “The Tragic Champion”. This last-mentioned book is about a Curaçao table-tennis champion who comes down in life.

The title of the new book points to the presence of Antilleans at the commemoration in Warsaw on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Chopin's death. Brokken discovered the composer's connection with the Antilles at the time he lived in Curaçao in 1993, when his piano music was recognized by a neighbor as “our music”, whereas this was actually a piece composed by Chopin. This composer's influence on the music of Curaçao and Aruba, but also of Cuba and Puerto Rico is unmistakable, says Brokken.

Mazurkas and waltzes are important in the history of Antillean music. In the Caribbean region they did indeed take a different path, but they can still be recognized when compared to Chopin's compositions.

Brokken wondered why nothing is known in the Netherlands about Chopin's influence on Antillean music. He believes this is because the Dutch virtually exclusively devoted their attention to East India.

Brokken believes that Curaçao came into contact with the composer via pianist Jules Blasini. In the late 19th century,  Gerrie Palm sent Blasini to Paris to continue his studies at the Academy of Music  where he was received with great enthusiasm.

Upon his return to Curaçao with scores of Chopin he passed that music on to his pupils on the island. Blasini was also popular in [-illegible-], so that the music continued to spread about. Contemporary music on the islands has taken an entirely unique course, but the influence of Chopin - and also Africa - still resounds for instance in the numbers sung by vocalist Izaline Calister and in the Tumba, so popular during Carnival.

Next to the cheerful dance music, Brokken finds that also melancholic music is composed in the Antilles.

To him, it is a feeling of transience. This feeling also fits in with Chopin because he never quite knew whether he belonged in France or in Poland. Also Antilleans often have the feeling that they do not really belong anywhere, and they find themselves locked in between various worlds, South America, Africa and Europe. 

CHOPIN UNDER THE PALMTREES 

Jan Brokken describes the warm ties the Antilleans have with the great composer  

[Caption:] Jan Brokken: Why eleven Antilleans knelt before the heart of Chopin.

Chopin is alive in Curaçao. That is not so strange for an island where a rich musical culture has always reigned, but devoted traveler and former journalist for a weekly magazine Jan Brokken discovered in the years that he lived there (1993-2002) that the Antilleans keep extravagantly fervent ties with Chopin.

How was that? The answer became a book with anecdotes and conversations, supported by research in the records, a study that was conducted with unbroken enthusiasm, pleasant like a trade wind. He topped it off with the graceful title: “Why eleven Antilleans knelt before the heart of Chopin”.

  

Two Antilleans paying homage, in 1999, before the heart of Chopin which is entombed in this pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsau, Poland: CCF Chairman Mrs. Millicent Smeets-Muskus and well-known Antillean composer and pianist Wim Statius Muller.

Chopin was a Polish national living in France, who until his death in 1948 converted traditional melodies of his homeland into mazurkas, waltzes and polkas, to which he gave their unique rhythm that at times served as a prelude to swinging jazz - this can be experienced in a Dutch concert hall, when a pianist who has this in him comes forward. But here the feet do not get off the floor. That is quite different in Curaçao, as Brokken was quick to notice thirteen years ago. Until recently, it was the custom there to compose waltzes for festivities, but also for funerals.

Zelszowa Wola, the home in Poland where Chopin was born in 1810. It is still the sertting for concerts of Chopin's music. The audience sits in the backyard garden and hears the music through the windows as if Chopin were inside playing the piano himself.

After Chopin's death his scores found their way to the island, and there they impacted a whole series of composers bearing exotic names like Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Joseph Sickman Corsen, Jan Berard Palm, Edgar Palm, Jacobo Palm and Wim Statius Muller. The music they composed often resembled Chopin's like two drops of water, but just as often their adaptations turn into Creole danzas, ragtime, calypso and Latin jazz. On the warm-blooded CD that comes with Brokken's book, that transition sometimes takes place within one composition: the Antillean waltz “Un Recuerdo”, a 1930 composition of Jacobo Palm, starts off as a piano etude, that the moment the small orchestra joins in, invites the listener to get off his chair and join the music in rhythmic movements.

Brokken is a fan, but he did not let himself be “taken in” just like that; the CD contains resounding proof. He presumes that it was precisely Chopin who had such influence because, also in Curaçao, families often hail “from afar” (from Europe mostly) and they were quick in the uptake of his combination of melancholy and traditional dance music.

The old Cubans Ferrer and Gonzales were already approvingly going about the island, playing along in dance clubs on a regular basis before Ry Cooder discovered them and made them famous worldwide with the Buena Vista Social Club. And we all know that one, but who knows Gottschalk, Corsen or any one of the many Palms? Brokken just wants this to be said, and we in this indifferent Holland get a blush of shame because of his enthusiasm.

Therefore, we need to catch up and repair the damage quickly, play the CD and read about Gottschalk (who himself once played for Chopin), the vain virtuoso who played to the whole of South America making many a woman flip her lid, and who tempts Brokken to use an adventurous hyperbole: “Gottschalk sought adoration, not sex, as a result of which he is more or less the only nineteenth century artist who was spared a venereal disease. All the same he did get entangled in a moral scandal in California.” A legendary figure, who used to dress like Chopin and who reached the exact same age.

Things get really exciting when Brokken tells us about the gentleman Joseph Sickman Corsen, poet-critic-pianist, the great-great-grandfather of jazz pianist Randal Corsen (1972) who launched a brilliant CD last year, on which he revived the waltzes and danzas of well over a century ago: “Corsen plays Corsen” - Chopin, Schubert and jazz all at the same time, as Randal himself observed with surprise.

Perhaps the nicest story is the one about Tonie Palm, scion of a sensitive family who refused ever to play a single note again after his mother died: “Born in 1885, he turned his back to music in 1905. By that time he had composed six danzas in the style of the Puerto Rican master Juan Morel Campos, five waltzes, the mazurka “El Desengaño” and the melody of the Antillean national anthem. Tonie would go on to live for another fifty-nine years, but without music.”

Maestro Edgar Palm (1905-1998), whose comfortingly sad waltz “Padu” is featured on the CD, at his great age still remembered that during the opening of a candidates' tournament in 1962 he played for chess players and that nobody paid any attention to him, except for this tall, thin young man. “Your music calms me completely”, he said at the end. Brokken: “The otherwise so very modest Palm was pleased, the chess player who shook his hand was Bobby Fischer.”

Yet another good story. Having read this book, and knowing what became of Fischer - from chess genius to raging eccentric - one cannot but think wistfully that things surely would have turned out differently for Bobby had he listened more to Palm and all those others.

Read more about Chopin
Listen to some of Chopin's music


PREVIOUS EVENTS:


The Amsterdam Topaz Duo
September 27, 2006 at the Fortchurch

Tjeerd Top - violin & Mariken Zandvliet - piano

(Pictured above at the Fortchurch with Mr.Hildo Martina of Het Consocium Martina)

Tjeerd Top and Mariken Zandvliet have made successful tours to India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, The Netherland Antilles, Costa Rica, Argentina and Brazil. The duo's repertory varies from classical to contemporary music. The duo won a prize for their interpretation of a contemporary work written by the Dutch/Argentinean composer Carlos Micháns. In 2002 a CD was released with music of Carlos Micháns, performed by Tjeerd Top and Mariken Zandvliet (piano).

 

This was the second concert for the duo (pictured above in rehearsal) at the Fortchurch, and their virtuoso performances of selections by Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert was very much enjoyed and appreciated by those in attendance. Promoter and classical guitarist, Mr. Hildo Martina performed an opening piece and provided an introduction for the duo and their selection of music for the benefit of everyone.

Coming from Holland to perform in Curaçao's balmy climate presented some small challenges - notably, the effect of the climate change on Tjeerd's Bergonzi violin (built in 1750). He explained, that as well as needing to give it time to adjust to the higher humidity, he has to work harder with more pressure on his bowing to achieve the same level of "singing" the violin is  more easily capable of in a dryer climate.

Read more about Tjeerd Top

Read more about Mariken Zandvliet

Listen to Mariken Zandvliet and Tjeerd Top

"What first captured the audience's attention was the amazing ensemble of violinist Tjeerd Top and pianist Mariken Zandvliet, followed by the their wonderful sense of synchronization. Each phrase played by Tjeerd Top was given an equally beautiful answer by Mariken Zandvliet." - Asser Journaal

Padu Lampe a presenta disco compacto na Gobernador
By Servicio Informativo di Gobierno
Sep 12, 2005, 20:27 UTC

Tabata presente na e ocasion aki señor Selwyn Maduro kende a percura pa pasa e grabacionnan over di disco longplay pa disco compacto y señora Millicent Smeets-Muskus di e Comision Cultural Misa di Forti na Corsou.

Homage To Padu
July 2, 2005 at the Fortchurch



Padu posing for photographs with the young pianists. All photos from the event courtesy of photographer Victor Prince.






Drie Generaties Arubaanse Pianisten 2000



Concierto del Siglo
Organized by the CCF at the Governor's Palace in 1999.



ART & EXHIBITIONS

Fred Breebaart Painting



Exhibition - Philippe Zanolino
1994 at the Fortchurch