Interview with Yannis Kyriakides
September 2005, Unyazi Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa
YK: Do you consider
yourself an African composer?
RM: (laugh) , I don't know, I think I just grew up here and had a lot
of formative things from growing up in this environment, from the
nature and from having all these people around and kind of the energy
of the people and the energy of the country, the physical nature and
land and also the fact that you had so many different kinds of
people and ... and that was something that stayed with me really
strongly ....
YK: Because you, in a way, your cultural identity is more European,
because you come from a European culture in Africa and its not like you
are an African who can completely identify with indigenous culture
here, so in that sense it's not like, for instance,... I'm like,
I can say my culture is Greek. Because I was born in Cyprus, my first
language is Greek. But then I grew up in England and I live in Holland,
and I'm a bit like now detached, slightly alienated from Greek culture,
even though I like... its in me ...I can ..., if I use some Greek
element ... or I in a way there is a Greek sort of way of
thinking, or let's say middle eastern..., in what I do and I
think that's something that I'm looking for, going back to find an
identity .... but say with you if you, if you're using something like
African indigenous culture, do you feel as though its something that's
really yours or, or are you, there is a kind of a ... you're an
outsider here also in that sense.
RM: Ya, one ends up being an outsider everywhere and an indsider
everywhere, it's up to you how closely you want to connect to a place
so, ...its, I can't take for granted that I'm an insider here,
really completely, ... but that doesn't necessarily mean really mean
that I'm an outsider ... here or in Copenhagen or in Holland, its my
choice somehow, and I feel quite lucky to have a choice, but that also
brings some tricky bits along with it.
I also don't think that its really a question of using indigenous
culture. I think that I grew up in this environment and the environment
kind of opened up certain aspects of perception to me ... like let's
say this whole thing of noise and tuning, and stuff like this,
different tuning systems and having a lot of noise elements in the
music, ... was something that you find a lot here, in the African
music, ...
YK: What do you mean noise elements in the music ?
RM: Like rattles and buzzes, and ... in that way sort of, not like a
Steinway piano which is really a, a really extremely finely tuned,
refined instrument, but really embracing noise elements of all kinds
and then that jumping into electronic music or the whole experimental
music tradition is not a big jump, so it doesn't really become a
problem of saying 'Oh I'm appropriating African music'. It's that
I grew up with these sounds around me so ... that's what shaped me...
YK: But also, not the sounds but also..., the, lets say the language of
the music. You also identify a bit with the language of African music.
RM: Well I became really fascinated with things like hocketing
techniques things like that whioch have a lot to do with the
interaction of people - this kind of see-saw back and forth. And
that's a situation where the technique gives a very specific colour to
the music.
YK: And also the ...
RM: And then it was very easy to make jumps ...