I took clarinet lessons at the Arts Centre in Meppel for a good nine years. It was the most well-known music school in the region, which also offered singing, dance and art classes. The rear entrance led to a library. In my youth, it was a subsidised Valhalla of possibilities for self-enrichment and development. As a child and as a teenager, I would often check out their course programme, imagining what it would be like to be able to do pottery or Djembe.
In addition to taking clarinet lessons, I played in the town orchestra for many years, seated in between old geezers with tubas. The Drenthe Youth Orchestra also met once a month. Making music together in an orchestra is an indescribable experience. You must have done it to know what it feels like. When I left my family home, I stopped making music out of practical considerations: having to pay yourself makes it too expensive. And there is no arts centre in Wageningen, never mind a centre focussed on students. In contrast, most university cities do have a student arts centre. Groningen has the USVA, Amsterdam has CREA. My interest in affordable clay and ceramics became so intense in 2019 that I would take the train to Amsterdam every Friday afternoon to take a course in their student arts centre for half of what I would otherwise pay.
Unlike Wageningen, most university cities do have a student arts centre
The cultural centre in Meppel, where I spent many an hour in my youth, went bankrupt. The surrounding municipalities refused to continue the subsidies, thus robbing thousands of adults and children in the region of the opportunity to enrich their lives with music and arts. There are, no doubt, private lessons, but these are more expensive and often unavailable in the region for more “exotic” instruments. The same applies to Wageningen: if you want to learn something other than piano, guitar or singing, you are forced to divert to Arnhem or Nijmegen.
The arts should be accessible not just to children and adults who can afford them but also to students. In light of the success and the diversity of courses at institutes such as CREA and USVA, the lack of something similar in Wageningen is a crying shame. The assumption may be that students of life sciences and ‘beta’ topics are not interested in arts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Check out Uitwaaien magazine or any of the many app groups through which students in Wageningen share their creativity. There are even two orchestras. But a cultural centre in which to follow a course to develop yourself next to your studies is lacking. Even the classical beta-geeks in Wageningen deserve a chance to develop their creativity. I believe there is a demand for a centre in which students can enrich their lives through the arts.
Ilja Bouwknegt is 24, a bachelor’s student of Forest and Nature Management, and an active member of the study association WSBV Sylvatica. She sometimes does bat research at night.