This is what it's all about.
Naan and Fried Chicken – that was the name of a restaurant I happened to walk past recently, and it inspired me to create my programme: if there are restaurants that can serve both Indian naan bread and American fried chicken of good quality, then I will serve up an album that fuses Indian, South American, European medieval and (early) baroque music. And in such a way that the individual ingredients don’t just lie next to each other uninvolved, but that they conjure up a menu in which each original flavour can be perceived in a completely new and different way.
950 years of musical migration. Musical forms have always been under the transformative influence of cultural exchange – sometimes imposed in a colonialist manner, but often inspired by friendly admiration. The underlying question that moves me is: How much can you take from another culture without losing yourself on the one hand, and without washing away cultural diversity into a uniform mush on the other?
As we all know, there’s no accounting for taste. The composer Georg Muffat was well aware of this, but in 1695 he wanted to avoid arguing about taste and proclaimed that ’one can have and enjoy both at the same time,’ referring to the French style of the time and the competing Italian style. As a pioneer of so-called mixed taste, he serves as the linchpin of my recording, in which the concept of mixed taste is expanded even further.
Indian Baroque music meets Ravi Shankar (who had a lasting influence on the Beatles) and who is considered one of the first Indians to bring classical Indian music to Europe. South American Baroque meets Astor Piazzolla, who made Argentine tango famous in Europe. And between these poles, the fiery, groundbreaking music of Pandolfi Mealli’s early Baroque exudes a spirit of adventure, as it once sounded somewhere in Europe between India and South America. As an appetiser and digestif? Musical meditations by Hildegard von Bingen on an Indian drone instrument. Naan and fried chicken becomes: Tandoori&Tango.
With: Anna Kiskachi, harpsichord and Gianni Narduzzi, double bass.
My project is special because ...
As a (too…) classically trained recorder player, it is important to me to look beyond the boundaries of the usual recorder repertoire. Indian music on the recorder? Yes. Tango on the recorder? Yes. A harpsichord can sound like an Indian sitar. And Hildegard fits so wonderfully over a tanpura. My album and I embody a spirit of adventure, a love of experimentation and a penchant for the unconventional. Most of the selected pieces have never been recorded for these instruments before; two songs from the Portuguese mission in Goa could previously only be found on paper in a doctoral thesis in the library. The instruments used for this album are recorders of all types and sizes, harpsichord, double bass and tanpura.
This is what I need backing for.
Support provides motivation! With your money, I can finance:
- the recording process with a sound engineer from Bayerischer Rundfunk
- the Old Library Hall in Polling, a popular venue for recordings
- the rental fee for a harpsichord for the recording
- all travel expenses for the sound engineer, fellow musicians, harpsichord and myself
- part of the costs for pressing the CD