For a few euros, students in Amsterdam can swap the library for one of Europe’s best-known concert halls, open a laptop under the red plush seats of the Concertgebouw, and study while live classical music plays above them.
The sessions are organised by Entree, the youth association of the Concertgebouw. They are designed to help students concentrate while also bringing younger audiences into the historic venue.
In the main auditorium, rows of students sit with laptops and notebooks as violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou perform. The point is not for students to stop and watch. At these events, they are there to study, and the music is meant to help rather than interrupt.
The idea has grown out of an initiative first conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Entree looked for ways to support students studying remotely and introduce them to classical music at the same time.
Since then, the sessions have kept drawing students back to the Concertgebouw to prepare for exams or work on dissertations.
Simon Reinink, the general director of the Concertgebouw, said the format is also part of a wider effort to bring younger people into the building.
“Well, it’s one of the many ways to welcome younger audiences to the Concertgebouw, and it’s such an inspiring place to study with great music in this wonderful, beautiful environment, and it’s one of the ways to more or less seduce younger audiences to discover the Concertgebouw and hopefully they will be enthusiastic that it will come back,” he says to Euro News.
The sessions are cheap by design. Tickets cost €2.50 and include free access to the venue’s Wi-Fi network.
For students who do not usually listen to classical music, the setup can still work.
“It’s actually very calming and helps in concentrating on the work that we have to do, which is something that surprises me because normally I don’t really listen to classical music, so that’s a new experience for me,” says Kyra Mulder, a 21-year-old student of occupational therapy.
Professor Bas Bloem, a neurologist at the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, says background music does not affect everyone in the same way. For some people, it can be distracting, but for others, it can support concentration.
“I think the reason why music in the background can be so soothing almost is that it creates a state of flow,” he says.
He says that state sits in a balance between skill and challenge.
“Flow is this mysterious balance between your level of skills and being challenged, and you want to be in that sweet spot. You don’t want to be overchallenged, you don’t want to be underchallenged, and I think music in the background can help you to reach a state of flow, and everybody knows when you reach a state of flow, you can go on endlessly and be enormously productive.”
Students attending the sessions say the quiet setting helps them handle more than one thing at once.
Thijmen Broekman, a medical student, says the combination of the hall and the performance makes concentrating easier.
“I don’t think it’s difficult to multitask here because it’s a really quiet environment and nice quiet music so that helps me to concentrate and I’m not having any difficulties multitasking,” he says to Euro News.
The study sessions bring together two aims in one format: giving students a place to work and introducing younger audiences to live classical music in the Concertgebouw. The concerts continue in the background while laptops stay open and notebooks fill up.
Tickets for the sessions cost just €2.50, with free access to the venue’s Wi-Fi network.
