Turning East. Turning Exit? Turning to the Music!: Spatial Practice in Choral Evensongs in the Netherlands

Abstract

Since the 1980s, increasingly more choral evensongs are organized in the Netherlands, outside of the context of the Anglican Church. The evensongs attract a lot of people. Sometimes these performances are ‘staged’ as a (mostly reformed) worship, sometimes as a concert, or as a worship and a concert at the same time. Most evensongs are performed in monumental churches, which due to the 16th Century Reformation have been ‘dispositioned’. The changed disposition of the inside of these churches has considerable consequences for the spatial practice of the evensongs. Research questions in this article are: What are the consequences of the spatial practices in the Anglican choral evensong in the Netherlands regarding (religious) meaning making? Four sub questions will be answered: (1) In which church buildings are evensongs performed? (2) What is the disposition in these churches? (3) How is space used in the evensongs? (4) How to interpret this? We will interpret the Dutch spatial practices taking into account the secular-sacred tensions which are so characteristic for the Netherlands as a secularized, or rather: post-Christian country.