- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
In search for a new collective definition of culture expressed in a musical language, I find an important and admirable example in the impressive collection of Hungarian folk music that Bela Bartok managed to record and archive about a hundred years ago. Nowadays his collection is famous and has contributed enormously to the knowledge and especially foreign attention to this cultural musical material. I underline that the strong coherency these songs and themes seem to have today, was not apparent at all in Bartok’s time. The Hungarian culture had been overshadowed by occupation of other cultures uninterruptedly for about six hundred years. Bartok was strongly led by a nationalistic ideal - the ‘togetherness’ of Hungarian heritage. Without exactly knowing what he would encounter he went to document all possible musical sources that were to be found among people that lived within the old geographical borders of what had once been the great Hungarian empire.
In his search he came across many different influences, his collection beholds Romanian, Mid-European, Bulgarian and Slavic musical resources, and in many cases melodies that co-exist all over Europe in different forms, of which the real cultural root is practically untraceable. Clearly Bartok had a Utopian and generalistic perspective on his topic, which was not the collective reality of individual Hungarians and their communities. Probably it is crucial for the musical collector to bring together a collective that is not yet functioning collectively. Otherwise the need for this interference of the collector would probably be superfluous. Only afterward his collection of music was considered to truly express the ‘Hungarian musical soul’ and treated as one of the main columns of the Hungarian identity, binding a large collective together through music.
In this respect the situation in Amsterdam today is somehow comparable. The togetherness of all those cultural influences co-existing in the city might seem doubtful at first sight. But I wish to believe that for many of my generation the pluriformity of influences and freedom of individual life-style is exactly that what we all share and in which we feel ‘together’. To form a musical collectivity out of this presumed ‘togetherness’ could be a next step. What this musical togetherness is cannot be formulated beforehand, as the example of Bartok proves. This collective value of music can only grow out of intensive documentation of the musical resources and repeated experimenting, interpretation and replacement of the musical materials it contains, becoming aware of their characteristics, their similarities and oppositions, the imaginative borders of a cultural spectrum.
As a modern day Bartok from Amsterdam, I started to work as a musical collector, investigating the musical views and materials that are a vivid part of the collective Amsterdam music life. At the same time I worked on compositional models and sketches based on these materials. The composer and the collector take different and important roles in the process of investigating a musical world. The one collects and formulates objectively, the other connects and experiments subjectively. Both roles are essential in the process of understanding a new cohesion between seemingly unrelated and pluriform materials. Bartok indeed involved in both roles as well, but always clearly differentiated between the two. The collection that he formed gained a life in itself, next to his subjective, individual approach as a composer working with these existing musical influences. His oeuvre shows this most interesting ‘in-between space’ of the individual artist connecting and conflicting with the collective musical reality that he himself was part of.
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