Folk It!

fri 5 may 2023 17:00 hrs

In the third episode of Folkit! Mediterranee, we present the compositions of Dutch composer Michiel van der Meulen.

He grew up with a father obsessed with Balkan music and played the accordion in Calgija with ethnomusicologist Wouter Swets for many years. Music with strange rhythms and time signatures was thus a familiar presence, but the focus gradually shifted towards music from even further east and the classical modal approach. However, being a musician is not his profession. “I’m a geologist. You can’t make a living composing music. But I wouldn’t want to be a professional musician or composer either. Working as a musician is not as fun and challenging as the music. I am now very free and do it as well as I can,” explains Van der Meulen. His compositions are performed by other musicians, but isn’t it a composer’s urge to play your work? For Van der Meulen, there are other concerns than this, as his story reveals. “I attended seminars at the Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Choudetsi, Crete, and took composition lessons there with Ross Daly, the great leader of contemporary modal music. Violinist Giorgos Papaioannou encouraged me to make good studio recordings of the compositions written during those seminars. Recordings were made with five leading professional musicians and academy teachers in five days. I don’t play myself. There are much better musicians who I can’t contribute much to. My best contribution to the CDs is composing.”

The core of what would become the Kairo collective consisted of Harris Lambrakis (ney), Giorgos Papaioannou (violin), Manolis Kanakakis (kanun), Yorgos Mavromanolakis (oud), and Marijia Katsouna (bendir, tombak). This remained a more or less fixed group of musicians with minor adjustments and expansions. On the second album, Van der Meulen himself is heard for the first time on tambura. A third CD shows a similar picture: a familiar format but small shifts, both in terms of instrumentation and musicians and the (origin or structure) of the compositions.

More information about Michiel van der Meulen, his motivations and approach to making music, the Kairos collective, and contemporary modal music can be found on the website Toumilou.nl.

Reviews by Piri Reis (https://www.newfolksounds.nl/piri-reis-contemporary-modal-music/recensies/2017), Europe (https://www.newfolksounds.nl/kairos-collective-europe/recensies/2019) and Erato (https://www.newfolksounds.nl/kairos-collective-erato/recensies/2023).