The BankGiro Lottery is the national cultural lottery of the Netherlands. Its more than 600,000 participants have the chance to win prizes while supporting all forms of culture in Netherlands – from windmills to concerts and from festivals to museums. Thanks to their participation, the BankGiro Lottery was able to contribute more than € 62 million to culture in the Netherlands. Half of this total will be donated to organizations such as the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and Stichting DOEN, which in turn provide support to the performing arts, visual arts, festivals, cultural projects and concerts. The other half will go to museums, windmills and historic buildings, including the Rijksmuseum, Vereniging de Hollandsche Molen and the Fries Museum.

Music in the Rijksmuseum

At its “Good Money Gala” in February 2017, the BankGiro Lottery pledged an extra €580,000 for the “Music in the Rijksmuseum” project. We plan to use this to create a varied musical programme for a broad audience, in order to give visitors an even richer museum experience.

Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum: We are incredibly happy that the BankGiro Lottery believes in our dreams. Music, like the Rijksmuseum, is for everyone, and it connects people with art and history. We hope that our musical programme will surprise visitors and broaden their horizons.

The Rijksmuseum collection includes over 500 historic musical instruments. Music also plays a symbolic role in many of our paintings. For example, 13 of the 35 known works by Johannes Vermeer depict some kind of instrument. Over the course of this year, the museum will be initiating a variety of musical activities linked to the collection. These include classical and pop concerts, demonstrations of historic instruments, dance events, performances in the museum gardens and a multimedia tour. As part of the project, over the past six months we have been holding a series of very well-attended Sunday afternoon concerts.

Annual BankGiro Lottery grant

The extra funding for our music project comes on top of the annual BankGiro Lottery grant of €7 million for acquisitions, shared with the Mauritshuis, the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Muller Museum. Players of the lottery are also helping us achieve our ambition of letting all Dutch children see The Night Watch by buying special Rijksmuseum tickets, which fund free coach transport from schools all over the country.