- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
I grew up in the old-West part of Amsterdam, a highly ‘mixed’ cultural area. I shared kindergarden with children having ancestors of at least twenty different nationalities, probably more. I have not been raised with any religious conviction, nor with any specific awareness of being dutch, living among not-dutch, and if that should or shouldn’t be the case. If possible at all, to define what is actually my identity in the light of a cultural tradition is highly complex and somehow not appropriate. Certainly I can say I have never felt to be dutch because it is my mother tongue or because I am born in the country. These aspects of my personal reality that I happen to share with other Dutchmen are just one out of a variety of determining elements in life and not necessarily the most influential.
What I remember from my childhood that I can trace back to be a ‘cultural-defining’ element was my mother frequently playing old records of Hungarian gypsy-music, and also playing some Hungarian folk and gypsy-songs on the violin herself. Her story is that she traveled to Hungary in 1980, where she spent three months plucking grapes on the country-side. She met an architect from Budapest, they fell in love, after three months she was obliged to leave the country and they had to depart. What she took with her to Holland was a love for the music that she experienced during her stay. My mother once told me she had already been intrigued by ‘Hungary’ as a small child, not having the slightest notion what it could be like. A seemingly random but nevertheless strong and vivid fantasy of a child, looking over the atlas discovering a place on the map that for mysterious reasons remains an anchor in ones imagination. I remember very well that as a child I could sense clearly the intensity of my mother’s emotions attached to Hungary when she told me stories about her travels. And when I first visited Hungary myself in 2001, I immediately refound this feeling I sensed as a child attached to my mothers stories - in the language, in the daylight, in the way the people, buildings and land looked. I came back several times and in 2006 I decided to move to Budapest where I have been living since.
This story shows a problem of personal identity and cultural generalisation that I assume is more or less present in everybody’s life nowadays. No cultural roots bind me or my mother in any way to Hungary, and yet our lives got intertwined with the place through a highly personal –some might call it accidental- path. The fact that I am not a Hungarian by nationality doesn’t express anything about the cultural significance it has in my life. Hungarian music was a vivid part of my childhood, probably more vivid than for many Hungarians of my age, and has - as this personal story illustrates - most probably guided me to make pretty far reaching decisions in my life. I feel therefore in my full right to state that the Hungarian gypsy- and folk music is, among other influences, part of my cultural heritage, and a living element of my personal identity. If I wish to compose music relating back to the Hungarian folk music I grew up with, am I a composer involved in non-western cultures, or a non-western composer so interestingly engaged in his roots? For most musicians nowadays such questions cannot be answered because their musical perception is not limited by traditionally defined cultural borders. The esthetic discussion of a ‘culture’ seems alien in the light of today, because the morality of the issue has disappeared– to separate your own cultural values from those of others and using this artificial border to define where you belong.
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