COPYLEFT (UA)| Quatuor Diotima

COPYLEFT (UA) | Quatuor Diotima | Cité de la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris

In “Copy Left,” several approaches I use in my artistic or compositional practice on a daily basis intersect with cultural and political questions that reach far beyond the realm of music and even art.
<br/ I am deeply influenced by my culture, the smells, the materials, the sounds of my childhood. And I have been, already as an early child, trained — and exclusively so — in the European musical tradition. <br/<br/ I am frequently confronted with the fact that I am being taken seriously as a composer only as long as I assume the role of a “mediator between cultures” or, worse still, as a representative of some questionable hyperhybridity with a jetset approach. This expectation usually comes with the best of intentions, but it also seems to imply that, with respect to the culture in which I live, the history within which I write, I remain relegated to an outside — as if I were forever caught in the process of having to “appropriate” a culture, while every European-born composer would not have to do that. Only on very rare occasions has my music been received outside of any framings of these kind.

  Ukiyo-e             vs             Van Gogh