It saddens us deeply to announce that our highly esteemed early music pioneer and programme maker Marijke Ferguson (1927-2024) passed away on Friday 29th November. She was 97 years old, but continued to make radio programmes about early music and other subjects until 2018. In 2016, we celebrated her 50th anniversary as a presenter and radio maker with a live programme in the Amsterdam Public Library, entitled ‘Een leven lang oren op stalktjes’ (A life long ears on stalks).
Marijke worked for the public broadcaster from the 1960s onwards, where she built up a large and grateful audience with weekly programmes such as Musica religiosa et profana and Music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. When her career there ended in 1993, she moved to the Concertzender. She remained active for us until she was 91 and made and presented more than five hundred programmes. All episodes of her weekly Music Essay and the monthly Antiqua versus nova can still be listened to via the links.
Ferguson was not only an original and gifted radio producer, but also a pioneer of early music. For example, she put the recorder back on the map and even managed to introduce this neglected instrument as a main subject at the conservatories. Together with a then very young Frans Brüggen, a pupil of her husband Kees Otten, she formed the Amsterdam Recorder Ensemble shortly after WWII, through which she brought people’s attention to a wealth of early music . A few years later she was one of the founders of Muziekkring Obrecht, in which she started playing the Celtic harp.
Marijke Ferguson became best known for her early music ensemble Studio Laren, founded in 1965. With this ensemble she presented sensational programmes, in which she effortlessly linked medieval music with cultural-historical information. She immersed herself just as thoroughly in the encyclicals of church fathers as she did in the work and life of troubadours. She also experimented with multidisciplinary presentation forms and introduced audience participation long before it became common practice.
Marijke Ferguson was a pioneer par excellence, who enriched Dutch music life enormously with all her different projects. We will miss her!
Our programme maker Thea Derks portrayed her in her doctoral thesis Tussen Luier en Afwas and interviewed her many times for Radio 4.
She wrote an in memoriam on her blog Klassiekvannu.
Thea Derks
Amsterdam, 4-12-2024 for the website Concertzender
