Summary ?  Flash news: new call from MOST Music, artistic selecion of Folk Alliance International announced Brief news from the media, chats and sister projects Talk with Peter Van Rompaey, from Muziekpublique. Open Calls and Professional Events ? Meet me at…

 

How are you? I hope well!

Womex took place again in person, with an atmosphere that almost seemed normal, with close to the usual number of delegates. I have many tasks pending and many emails to answer related to Womex. Life as it used to be.

It was a delight to see so many colleagues again and to finally meet in person some of those with whom I had only been in contact from afar. I have also received thanks, face to face, from some of the subscribers to this newsletter and it has strengthened my commitment to it even more. And it took place the showcase by Hudaki Village Band, my Ukrainian band, that was a success!

I have also missed some people, some who have not come because of the situation of still some uncertainty related to the international travels and others, for a different reason. For example, Leo Ličof, creator of the Okarina festival in Bled, Slovenia. He was our protagonist in this edition. I will focus on him for one reason. Last month I commented on how the pandemic has accelerated some things and made it easier for others to be destroyed. During my stay at WOMEX, Leo warned me that the festival was disappearing, there would be no more Okarina Festival, by decision of the city council. I’m sure there are many similar situations that I don’t know about.

But there is also hopeful news for our community and colleagues who have managed to retake their activities with the usual strength, like today’s protagonist, Peter Van Rompaey. I share with you some of this good news and, as always, if you have any news to share with the community, let me know.

Thank you very much for your attention. As always, if you have any news of interest for our community, let me know. 

Araceli Tzigane | info@mundimapa.com | +34 676 30 28 82 
Subscription is available here.

FLASH NEWS

 

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BRIEF NEWS FROM THE MEDIA, CHARTS AND SISTER PROJECTS

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AND NOW THE FLOOR IS FOR: PETER VAN ROMPAEY

Mapamundi Música: Why are you doing this? What is your personal background? 
Peter Van Rompaey: I am the only son of a family of butchers. As my parents were working everyday from 7am until 11pm, I was much alone at night. So, I listened a lot to the radio. One way or another, I’ve always liked a lot of music. And one evening, on the television, I saw the Flemish traditional singer Wannes Van de Velde. As he sings in Flemish, he is not known abroad. Unfortunately, he has passed away in 2008. In Belgium, we are a crosspoint between many countries and it is a flat country, we couldn’t keep the traditions. Some parts of Europe could keep it easier. Some mountainous regions, or Irland… But in Belgium, we have a lot of influences from abroad, and we had the radio and television, the Beatles and the Stones and everything… So, we’ve lost our musical tradition. But Wannes Van de Velde, who lived in Antwerp, still was real traditional singer, who learned it from his father who also was a folk singer. Wannes sang in the pubs and he met a lot of sailors… He was almost our only living link with the traditional scene. When I saw him on television, he did not perform a traditional song, but he was singing an alphabet: A is America that is governing us, B is the bomb that us threatening us. C is the culture that is dying because of all those laws, D are the thieves (dieven) who are stealing from us the artists. That you could talk about society in a song, a political song, was a real eye-opener for me. I was very moved by it. I realised that you could say critical things with traditional music. It went straight to my heart.

If you don’t know Wannes Van de Velde you can discover this in this video that has been suggested by Peter. And if you know him, you may also enjoy it! The interview continues below.

Mapamundi Música: How old were you? 
Peter Van Rompaey: I think I was like 14 or 13, I don’t remember exactly how old I was. I started to be really interested in traditional music, but more in the topical songs. Every week I went to the library to get new records and to find out about protest singers who sang in the languages that I could more or less understand, like Victor Jara, Atahualpa Yupanqui, some English ones, Dick Gaughan, American folk singers, Woody Guthrie…Some years later, at university in Leuven, I’ve met a lot of friends who were active in music. My neighbour, Bert Bernaerts was a bass and trumpet player. He is still running some very creative musical brass bands. Bert and I discussed all the time about music, discovered artists together such as Charles Mingus (who was also a topical jazz musician), Paul Bley,…  Still another friend, Sam Versweyveld, was a jazz trumpet player, now playing with the Belgian mestizo band Chicos y Mendez. Thanks to him, I’ve discovered Miles Davis, Chet Baker. We went to see the first Belgian concerts of then young jazz artists such as Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman together. Another friend played blues guitar and harmonica and he introduced me to the music of the old folk blues artists such as Robert Johnsson, Lightning Hopkins. We started organising blues concerts together with people like Honeyboy Edwards or Spencer Bohren. Another friend was Piet Maris, the accordion player and leader of Jaune Toujours and Mec Yek. For a very short moment, I was Jaune Toujours sound man, I must have been the worst sound engineer in the world, but at least I was wearing a yellow overall, fitting with the name of the band, which means always yellow in french. Together with Piet I organised concerts in unusual places in student town Leuven such as a solo concert with soprano saxophone player Steve Lacy in a swimming pool.One way or another, all my friends were into music. And also my wife, who I met at university, was playing music and very interested in accordionists and Irish folk music. With them, I starting making radio. I also started writing about music for a student newspaper and a Belgian folk magazine, and I made my first steps organizing concerts of jazz and blues.

After university, I followed my wife to Brussels and started teaching Dutch to people with migrant background. In the class, I was always singing traditional songs to teach them dutch. One of my students was Marisol Palomo, of whom all the family were making Galician music. They also organized folk nights. Marisol knew that I was writing about music for some world music magazines, and that I was very interested in folk music. So, she asked me if I could write the texts for their folk dance nights, which I started to do as a volunteer. At that time, I worked as a freelance journalist, mainly writing about economics.

At that moment, the Palomo family, who were also running the Galician association of Brussels had renovated La Tentation, an old big shop of curtains in art nouveau style in Brussels. They turned it into Galician cultural center with a capacity of 700 people.  They asked me to help them to organise folk music concerts. At the opening night we invited some of the best Belgian folk bands to play, among them my all time hero, Wannes Van de Velde.

Very quickly there was so much work for the Galician cultural center that I had to tell my friend “I have not enough time for my job as free lance journalist anymore. If you want me to continue, you will have to give me some sort of paid contract”. And I started to work for them. We were organizing concerts of traditional music on a regular base, one or two concerts a week, most of it of European traditional music. Little by little, we opened up to other parts of the world. And we added music lessons, becoming a small music school, with teachers such as Didier Laloy, Wim Claeys or Anne Niepold (button accordion), Luc Pilartz (violin), Veronica Codesal (pandeireta),…  But after 4 years they fired me, together with my former student Marisol Palomo, who was the daughter of the president of the Galician association. It was also a family problem. As La Tentation had become a very fructuous concert place for traditional music, with the concerts and the school, we decided to start a new association, which is Muziekpublique.

Mapamundi Música: What was the name of that Galician cultural center?
Peter Van Rompaey: Centro Galego de Bruxelas and the building was called La Tentation. We had people playing there like Kepa Junkera, Breton singer Erik Marchand with Tarab de Caráncebes, the Irish folk band Dervish, also Habib Koite from Mali, Gacha Empega (the first band of Manu Théron from Lo Cor de la Plana)… It was the place to be for traditional music from the world. Mariza played there her first Belgian concert, we had Czech singer and violin player Iva Bittová, the Klezmatics… It was a very nice period but also difficult. First of all, there was the discussion about being mainly Galician center for Galician culture or opening up to different cultures, … They also wanted us to become more commercial than what we wanted to do. They could not understand that it was great to have Alim Qasimov playing there, or Monâjât Yulchieva… that sort of people, and that in those concerts you would do a break even, and not earn a lot of money. They wanted us to make salsa concerts where you can make five thousand or ten thousand euros with the bar instead. That was the discussion all the time: “you should do more commercial things and less those types of concerts”.

Mapamundi Música: And they fired you because of that.
Peter Van Rompaey: Yes. Also the building was very special. When the musicians came, they were impressed. So, when we had to start again from scratch with Muziekpublique, we did not have the charm of the hall. In that building, La Tentation, we had every night 700 people… It was really working a lot, well situated in the center of Brussels and we thought “What we do is great, we have a great program, we’ll do the same type of program”. When we started as Muziekpublique we noticed that in fact there were quite some people coming for the building, that they were used to that place. With Muziekpublique we had to travel between concert halls all the time, because we didn’t have our own hall. And then, we had 100 people for the same artist for which would have come 700 in La Tentation. So, that was a very hard reality check.

Mapamundi Música: Who made Muziekpublique with you at the beginning? 
Peter Van Rompaey: We were four at the start. There was Marisol Palomo, who is one of the singers of Ialma, and two of the other collegues of La Tentation and a lot of volunteers. Most of the volunteers of La Tentation followed us, as did the teachers of our academy, except two. So, we started from scratch but already we had great help.

Mapamundi Música: So you had to work in other places. And what happened with the previous building, La Tentation?
Peter Van Rompaey: They still continued doing some concerts but not with the same taste, much more latin, more commercial music. What was hard was that some people who used to come to the concerts before, from the traditional music scene, were angry on us, considering us as traitors… It was a very hard period. I lost a lot of hair and it became grey.

Mapamundi Música: When was this?
Peter Van Rompaey: 2002. The family didn’t own the building, but had the possibility to buy it for 300.000 euros. If you see the building you know that the real price should be a least ten or twenty times that amount. It is a large, very beautiful building. They could buy for 300.000 euros in the first 3 years of their renting contract of 30 years. The government was ready to give Centro Galego a 300.000 euros grant to buy it, but they had one condition: they wanted to have one observer in the board. Unfortunately the board of the Centro Galego didn’t accept it and they have never bought the building. Now, 20 years later the Centro Galego de Bruselas has gone bankrupt. They don’t have the building anymore. Now the building would have been worth at least 3 million or 4 million euros, maybe double.

Mapamundi Música: Oh, my god!
Peter Van Rompaey: There are many stories. Once with did a concert with Roma musicians and we managed to have the Romani singer from Romania Nicolae Guță. I don’t know if you know the record “La grande voix tsigane de Roumanie”.

This is the album mentioned by Peter. You might like to listen to it while you continue reading the interview.

Peter Van Rompaey: He is a hero for the Romani people in Romania. In our hall, half of the audience were Roma living in Brussels. It was crazy. In a certain moment they started to give him money and he was almost not singing anymore, but always saying “this song is for you, and this is for you” and he got his pocket full of money. But the president of Centro Galego got very angry that we did such things: “We are not a place for Gypsies”…When we left and started Muziekpublique, we had created an association, that was called La Tentation, in order to have government grants to support the cultural activities. We changed the name La Tentation into Muziekpublique. As we had left the building, we needed a new name. Brussels has two official languages. How can you be working with traditional music and be open to everyone and not like the persons who speak the other language? By having a name with the two official languages – Dutch and French – we made a statement of openness, tolerance for the others. However, there is more in the name: of course, “Muziek”, that is music, that was logical, and “publique”, to work with the audience, music of the people. We wanted to make contact between the audience and the music. For us, they are not separated worlds like in most of the concert places, the theatres, where you have artists on the stage with a huge distance with the audience. You come to the concert, you go out and do not get to talk, meet the artists… We want to create links between them… Muziekpublique is music of the people, for the people and with the people. That was the idea. In addition, “publique” means public, something for everyone.

The first years we travelled around Brussels. Next to the concerts, we continued the music school, where you have the smallest gap between the musicians and the audience who become musicians themselves. We grew little by little, first slowly. At the beginning, it was very hard. I think we wanted to stop every two months, because it was so much work every time. We were organizing like every week at least one concert, sometimes two. We had to use gym halls where we had to put up the stage ourselves, install the lights, do everything ourselves. It was so heavy, physically exhausting… Sometimes you think “Why are we doing this, it is crazy”. And after a while we had some fixed partners, halls where we could go. After three years we found a very nice hall in the centre of Brussels, which would be given to us by the city of Brussels. We had a press conference where the city council announced it, etc… But then, which is a typical Brussels thing, the region of Brussels with other political parties in it, decided to break the decision of the Brussels’ city council. So we were still homeless… Our dream of a place where we could have the concerts, the music classes, the rehearsals,… together, fell apart.

Luckily, one year later we found an empty theatre in the African neighbourhood in Brussels, Matonge, which is also the name of a neighbourhood in Kinshasa. Belgian has a diaspora from Congo, as it was a Belgian colony, a dark page of our Belgian history. The renovation of the Molière theatre was a neighbourhood project of the city of Ixelles (other part of Brussels), to restore the neighbourhood. So, thanks to that project and thanks to the city of Ixelles, we finally found our concert hall, where we still are situated.

It was really a big push. Having a fixed place, is much easier for the communication. We are easier identified as Muziekpublique at that place. Before, when were travelling between halls, people often thought it was a program of that hall… It was very difficult to communicate and get known. Sometimes, we couldn’t find a free hall to organize our concerts. That’s the reason that in our second year, a small festival that was born. As we had no concert halls, we decided to go into peoples houses. “Living Room Music” is a festival in 10 living rooms in one neighbourhood. People discover one Brussels’ neighbourhood and can see three concerts of different artists in different living rooms.

Mapamundi Música: In houses? 
Peter Van Rompaey: Yes. It has become a classic in the Muziekpublique program. Every year we go to another neighbourhood in Brussels. It is very nice. It is again linked to the meaning of our name. We tell the people of who live in the house “This day you are the organizer, you are the hall, you present the artists, you welcome them”. Ok, we have volunteers doing the ticketing, etc. It is not that they are all on themselves. But, they also have to keep in mind the timing of the concert and… This small scale festival creates relationships with the owners and the neighbourhood. Afterwards, we have a party together with all the owners and the volunteers. That’s the place where to owners get to see the other artists, who played at another house.  There, the musicians play together in a jam session. For us, Living Room Music is a way to connect with a new audience.

Traditional music represents the 99% of the music of the world, although we only get 1% of attention on the radio or in press in general. However, there is so much diversity in the world… Still it is only that 1% what people get to know. Often they do not know traditional music or have bad ideas about it… We try, with those concerts, to attract people who wouldn’t go to hear traditional music. Because they are curious to discover the apartments in the neighbourhood or discover a new neighbourhood. Sometimes the owners get in contact with music they wouldn’t listen to. In our program, we often try to find new ways of getting another audience.

Mapamundi Música: How did you manage this in the legal side? In Spain, everything is so bureaucratic, and you have to guarantee there is an emergency exit and these kind of things. It is no easy to make that in Spain. Did you have to face any difficulty?
Peter Van Rompaey: Not really. In Belgium, per meter of exit, you can have one hundred people. Of course, you need an emergency exit. As the concerts are for 30 or 40 people, they don’t make a big problem of it. One year, we had a problem with our ticketing system. We always work with three languages, Flemish, French and English. That year, our registration system didn’t take into account the subscription for the Flemish and for the English pages, because of a bug with the website. Before we go to visit the apartment and we estimate for instance that there is place for 30 people. For every concert we give 5 tickets to the owners to invite their neighbours. Because, if the neighbours hear there is music it can be disturb them. That’s why we encourage the owners to invite them. They also make connections; start to know each other better… So, for an appartement of 30 places, there should be 25 tickets. At that time our ticketing system didn’t count the registrations in Dutch and English. So, we were really overbooked. Everybody was packed in the apartments. It was really too much. I remember one person in the public asking for the emergency exit. One of the musicians opened the window behind him, which was on the second floor, and said “It is here, madam”. At the end, the concerts went well. We did not need an emergency exit.

In the first years of Living Room Music, you could go to one concert. After a few years, we have decided that you have to choose three concerts, all of different styles, so, for instance, someone who likes flamenco has to take two others, that could be a Syrian musician or Belgian traditional music, or African… Therefore, the audience has to choose two other concerts they normally wouldn’t go to. In this way, we push the audience to discover. We oblige the audience to be curious and see other things.

We always try to find ways that people go to concerts they normally wouldn’t go to, by combining artists from different cultures, doing a double or triple concerts. For instance, the theme would be violin, but different styles of violin. Maybe you like Balkan music and you would go to hear a Balkan violin player, but you’ll find on the same concert night a solo violin player from Tajikistan or someone from Norway playing hardanger fiddle. We often try to do this. We also do free noon concerts with solo artists, where we put all the audience on the stage around the artist. There we have another audience. People that are older and wouldn’t go out at night, still come to those kinds of concerts. When it is holiday, there are a lot of families coming to that type of concerts.

As I told you, when we had finally managed to find the hall in Matonge, it gave us a lot of opportunities. The hall has great acoustics. It sounds good, it is not difficult to amplify. One day we started recording. We thought “Muziekpublique is now existing for 5 years. We will make a compilation of local artists that we think they are worth to be known. Sometimes they have good recordings, sometimes they don’t.”

When we started, there were still a lot of world music or traditional music concerts in the cultural centers in Belgium. But often it was imported music for me. For instance, you saw the artists who were popular in World Music Chats Europe or Songlines brought to make a tour in the cultural centers. That is very nice but I did not see them develop artists or picking out emerging artists that deserve to be known. In the city of Brussels, there is such a large community of artists from everywhere… Sometimes you have artists that are better than those who come on tour. They might your neighbours, but sometimes you don’t know it and you only see an old man or the lady who is cleaning buildings but in fact he or she is an important artist. That’s why we wanted to work with artists from Brussels or from Belgium, that we think are worth to be known. And we try to get them known outside of Belgium. For the migrant communities is important to see that their heroes are also known outside of their own communities. Sometimes they are stars in their own community. It’s important in Belgium but also in other cities in Europe that people with migrant background can think “In my new city they like the artists of my own community”. It is important, it makes you feel that you, as a newcomer in the country, are also accepted.

The first artist we recorded an album with was Malick Pathe Sow, a Senegalese Fulani (English) or Peul (French) musician. He plays hoddu, what is called djeli ngoni in Mali. It is a small lute, like the one that Bassekou Kouyate plays. At that moment Malick was my teacher of guitar of African Senegalese style. During the classes we discussed lot and I felt his love for the more traditional Fulani music. At that time, he was playing a lot of mbalax music, a mixture of pop, rock and traditional. He was doing that because he didn’t dare to play his traditional music. Malick had made some CDs with quite success before. He had played with Baaba Maal. But he was afraid to do the more traditional things, because he thought he would have more success with mbalax. He was one of the artists we wanted to put in a compilation for the 5 years of Muziekpublique. The recording was done by a musician, Emre Gültekin, who is a baglama player and a sound technician. Malick played one song with his band, and we asked them to play more traditional. It was a difficult process because the musicians were so used to the previous things… They recorded such a nice song and they played another one and at the end we didn’t do the compilation, we made a complete album with Malick Pathe Sow. The album was a lot of work, because Malick himself wasa ready to play more acoustic, more into his roots, although it is not 100% traditional because he plays his own compositions. Not all the musicians were Fulani, something that happens when you live abroad: you don’t find enough musicians from your own community. The other musicians were Bao Sissoko, a Mandinka kora player from Senegal who is not Peul but as he had played with Fulani musicians such as Baaba Maal, het felt the music they were going to record. Another came was from Guinea Konacry, playing balafon and guitar, the percussionist was from Togo… They were used to play the more commercial mbalax and we had to ask the percussionist not to put the accents with cymbals. We wanted to hear the calabash. The recording of our first album ‘Maayo Men’ took a long time, but thanks to the vision of Malick and Emre, it turned out to be a beauty.

This is the album Peter is talking about:

 

Peter Van Rompaey: We did not have the intention to become a record label, because we already had enough work organizing the concerts and running the music school. We tried to find another label to edit it. We had other good musicians in mind we wanted to record and proposed to be a sublabel of another record label that would do all typical label work, printing, distributing, dealing with author rights… We almost made an agreement with Home Records, but at the end we did not agree. They wanted us to have the artists recorded in their studio with their sound engineer and we wanted to continue with Emre Gültekin as sound engineer in our hall in order to be able to follow up the recording process. As we did not find another record label, we finally became one ourselves.Initially we didn’t want to do the bookings or the management of the bands either, but all the people that we found wanted Malick to make again the more commercial mbalax. So, at the end we though that if we left him to another agent, in two weeks he would be playing mbalax again and we didn’t want that. At the end we started doing it ourselves and since then we have a record label and do the management and booking of the artists on our label.

Mapamundi Música: So, why were you working as a freelance in economy? Did you study economics? 
Peter Van Rompaey: I studied Germanic languages. I started to write for a students’ newspaper, a very good one, almost like a professional newspaper. Every week some of our articles got into the national newspapers. Some of the news topics we found or wrote about, they took it over and it went to the national newspapers. I was the coordinator of that students’ newspaper for one year. Afterwards I tried to find a fixed place in a newspaper. I almost got to be hired in one of the two major Flemish newspapers, but at the end they took over someone else from another newspaper, and I felt really depressed, because my dream had felt apart.
I worked a freelance journalist tackling many topics. I wrote a lot for the economic pages of one of our major Flemish newspapers. I did not write about the hard economic subjects such as the stock exchange, but I wrote about weapon exports industry, pollution by the industry and how to clean it, about people having debts… Topics that were still economics but with a social character. Subjects that went a bit broader than hard economics. How Eastern Europe changed from communist system to capitalism. I wrote about the case of Slovakia going from state market economy to free market economy. At that time I used to go to Slovakia very often for a social Gypsy project. When the state companies were privatised the Slovaks received bonds or actions of the big state companies, but after a very short time all the bonds were already owned by very few people, often linked to the government. I wrote about that kind of subjects. I put a lot of time in each of the articles, doing a lot of research and interviews. I liked it a lot but I had to stop because I didn’t earn enough to do it properly. If I wanted to make a decent living, I would have to do a lot of shit articles, go to press conferences that were not interesting and quicly write an article to earn my money. I did not want to do that kind of journalism and I had to find to do something else.

Mapamundi Música: So with Muziekpublique you organize concerts, you are a label, you make management and booking and you have the music school. You also organize festivals, like the one in the living rooms and like Hide&Seek Festival. And about the school, you started when you were at La Tentation? Why? 
Peter Van Rompaey: One of the reasons comes back all the time. There are some sorts of musics that are not well known and, what is the best way to understand them ? I’ll give an example: kora music. When you learn kora music yourself, you have learnt to play a basic song, like Jarabi, you are in a concert and Toumani Diabate plays Jarabi and you will understand much more what he is doing and you will listen differently. So, always the ideas about educating the public so they can understand what they are listening to, is one of the things.

This is Toumani Diabate playing Jarabi, the piece mentioned by Peter.

 

Peter Van Rompaey: A second reason is that the market for the concerts of these musicians is so small that they have to find other ways of earning their living. One of the ways is teaching. We offer them the possibility to make part of their living with the teaching.The third reason is that we want to form new musicians because the tradition can’t get lost. We live in different contexts than you in Spain. You are maybe able to keep more of the rural society with some traditional ways of transmitting the music as it used to be done before in some communities. But we in the city are in a different situation. We have lost that way of living and transmitting music. That’s why we have to find other ways to make the music continue and live on.

Those are the main three reasons. And it is also a way to create connections between the artists and the audience, “Muziek” and “publique”.

I experienced it myself when I was student of Malick Pathe Sow. Even though I didn’t learn to play very well because of my limited talents, it was an incredible experience to have a master musician as a teacher, who also tells you all the stories of his country and his tradition. It was magical. I would advise anyone to study, once in their lives, with some master who is very rooted in the tradition and wants to share his passion about it. It is an incredible experience to listen to the master or to talk a lot with him or her. You do not only learn to play but get lessons in history, live, philosophy… Those moments are magical. That is why we are privileged in our world, because we have those contacts with the musicians and we can learn a lot from them. In general in culture and traditional music, we do not earn a lot of money but the artists pay us with their culture, their experiences… We are very privileged in a way.

Mapamundi Música: Was it easy to find students? What is the profile of the students? 
Peter Van Rompaey: Students are mainly adults. We started with 8 or 9 lessons and now we have 50 classes. It has evolved enormously. We don’t have a lot of children, because we are not specialized on that. Since this year, we are more and more together with schools.

We started mainly with adults. Some people have stopped classe because they though it was easy, because it is world music. People that want to travel with their instrument and that think that in one year of lessons they can travel and play in the streets. That is the extreme example. But most of the students are music lovers. Sometimes they have music education, sometimes they don’t. The ones who have, maybe they want to broaden up their horizons. Some are ambitious and want to become professional musicians or they already are, and some are amateurs. Some of the students just come for the atmosphere. That is not so nice for the teachers when they see these students are not advancing enough.

The profile of age can be from 16 to 80 maybe. Almost all ages, except very young children. It is quite diverse, but it depends on which class it is. So let’s say, diatonic accordion is less diverse or will be another profile that qanun. For qanun they can be more Moroccan people and for diatonic accordion they are more Belgians. In our ideal world there would be a Moroccan playing diatonic accordion or a Portuguese playing qanun, but it is their choice.

Mapamundi Música: So you have 50 classes. 
Peter Van Rompaey: Yes. There are some dance classes but most of them are instrument classes: from bagpipe to ud. We have also ensemble classes, where students get the chance to play together and make bands.

Mapamundi Música: So you have a lot of teachers. What have been the main challengers of working with them as teachers? Were they all already trained as teachers or did some of them start to be teachers in Muziekpublique?
Peter Van Rompaey: Most of them started to be teachers in Muziekpublique. It is out strength but also our weakness: we are not imposing them a method. So about the balafon teacher, in West Africa they don’t teach. You are just sitting there with one of the older people and you do what they do. Our balafon teacher makes a compromise between teaching in Africa and teaching for Europeans. It is difficult to explain but it is not like a method with notes and so.
Others are stricter, with notes and everything written down… It is a little bit free and when we see it is not going well we try to help them. As I said, it is also our weakness that we give them a lot of liberty on how to approach it.

Mapamundi Música: I think it is not easy to give lessons of a skill like that, because in their communities those are learn intergenerationally, you learn in the ambient where it is happening, so, how do they deal with this, do they need support, do they ask to the other teachers how do they do it, how can they assess the development of the students? You mentioned they want the student to learn, sometimes they are not fast enough, and they can get frustrated, so there must be a way of evaluating the progress of the students?
Peter Van Rompaey: We don’t have an exam but once in the year most of the students play for an audience. We have like a students festival for two days and they have to play a the Moliere theatre, where is Muziekpublique, on the big stage, to be seen by the audience. That is the exam. There is some goal, because you have to play.
But sometimes it doesn’t work and we try to help the teacher but sometimes at the end we have to say “Sorry, it will never work” and we stop the class.

Mapamundi Música: Do you need each teacher to have a minimum number of students? 
Peter Van Rompaey: We need at least 3 or 4. It can happen, exceptionally at the beginning, when the class is starting, to start with 1 or 2 and then it grows, but we use to start with 3 or 4 minimum.

Mapamundi Música: So you must have at least 200 students.
Peter Van Rompaey: We have 650. Some teachers have 4 or 5, others have 20.

Mapamundi Música: How do you manage all this in the financial side? You make a lot of things so at the end, some amount from this, form that and from the other… keeps the structure alive. How many people are you working there and how do you support it economically?
Peter Van Rompaey: We are 9 people now. When we started, we were 0 paid. We’ve done two years with all volunteers. But now we are 9 people, equivalent to 7 and a half full time for technics (sound and light), accountancy, production, communication in French and Dutch, the music school, the volunteer coordination, the label and the bookings,…

And how do we pay it? We have grants from the two communities, the French and the Flemish. It more or less pays the employees. The rest, we pay with the tickets sales or the drinks at the bar or all the other incomes. Grants are like 35 to 40% of the income, and the rest is 60%, that is our own revenue.

Mapamundi Música: Which is the total budget for one year? 
Peter Van Rompaey: Around one million or one million two hundred thousand. It is difficult to say with covid. The last turnover I have is around one million, before covid. The first year it was about one hundred thousand, but many artists supported us, playing for free.

Mapamundi Música: And since you started working with these kinds of music, not only since Muziekpublique, what do you feel that is the evolution of the public? Sometimes, I think that many of us feel that world music has been getting weaker, at least in Europe. What you have been doing must have supported the creation of new public, of giving more knowledge to the big and making them appreciated more these musics. How has been this evolution? 
Peter Van Rompaey: Until now (the last year it was different -Covid-) we have been growing every year. More students,… Everything has grown. On Muziekpublique level, it was going very. But in a broader sense, I am sure that world music is losing strength in general. It is very hard to convince people… let’s say, decision makers, the national radio… to show them there is really an audience, with also young people. For them, the young people should be listening to either urban music, hip hop, rap,… But I can show you, when we have a jam session, it is all young people having fun, having as much or even more fun as people doing hip hop… We don’t find a real way to convince of our reality in fact. It is a neverending battle to get into the broader national media.

Mapamundi Música: You have public radio. 
Peter Van Rompaey: We have some exceptions, like Didier Melon, with his daily show ‘Le Monde est un Village’ on La Première (French speaking national radio). And we still have radio programs on the national classical radio. For us it is a gift that Didier Melon is still there. We touch wood to keep him, because we are so lucky that he still has his program every day of the week, and he is also thinking about the musicians and supporting them… He has an exceptional personality, who is not afraid to go against the ideas of some of his superiors. On the Flemish radio it is worse. They are really looking down on traditional music.

Mapamundi Música: And in these radios, they are supported with public money, aren’t they?
Peter Van Rompaey: They are supported with public money but in a way they think very commercial. They interpret their public function in their own way. But we think that radio has a mission to also play other music than the popular music, or classical or jazz. At the moment, jazz is highly regarded, it got some standing that the traditional music don’t have. It is difficult to explain why. The radio directors have the idea that when you put traditional music on the radio, people won’t listen any more.

We’ve had so many discussions with, we have gone so many times to the radio to complain and to suggest them to find other ways… For instance, we have a radio station which main objective is to give news items. We told them to link music to it when they dig deeper into a subject, for instance about what has happened in Kabul in Summer of 2021, “Why don’t you play some Afghan music? You have music to illustrate the news from all over the world, but you play Radiohead or Lady Gaga… Why don’t you try to illustrate it?”. They don’t care.

Mapamundi Música: What are you doing now and what is the future?
Peter Van Rompaey: We are still trying new ways to bring new audience. This Summer, and the next years, we are doing the “Firefly sessions”. In Belgium you can only see the fireflies during three weeks. We go to into the woods in Brussels, we do a walk, it takes around one hour. One of the musicians, Raphael De Cock, who is Flemish and is one of the singers of Voxtra and Toasaves, is not only musician but also a scientist specialized in fireflies. He is the guide. We do into the wood to see the fireflies and he explains about it and about nature until we reach a small lake. There we invite other musicians to play a small concert acoustically. Often they do something together with Raphael. They play or sing one or two songs and then the fireflies arrive and we go back to the woods with all the fireflies. That is really magical experience for the people. It is a way also to have people discovering traditional music but in another setting. Sometime they know a little about nature in Brussels, but they don’t know about fireflies in Brussels. We continue the Hide & Seek Festival, this year it as the 6th edition. It has the same philosophy. By choosing special places in Brussels, sometimes unknown places where you can’t go often and doing concerts there, you attract another audience that wants to see those places and they see a concert of traditional music. For me, it is a way of programming artists that would attract 50 people in the hall. In the context of the Hide & Seek Festival, these concerts will sell out. The audience shows up thanks to the magical setting. With the Hide & Seek Festival we combine the promotion of Brussels and the discovery of new places with the promotion of music.

Of course, we continue the line of our actual work. More and more we try to make connections with schools, with younger kids, because we are aware that they are the future of our society and of traditional music. It is very important. We didn’t do it before because there were other organizations specialized on that but some of them stopped working so we decided now to, little by little, develop this aspect.

For the label, we have just released a new album by Tamala, a trio with two West African musicians, Bao Sissoko, who was already in the album by Malick Pathe Sow, kora player, Mola Syla, who is a singer, and Walter Vandenabeele, Belgium violin player. It is their second record. And for the next year we are planning the release of a group called Toasaves, that means in the dialect of Antwerp something like home port, the port where you feel at home. It is all about the songs of Wannes Van de Velde, his traditional songs, but with the spirit of opening up to all the influences you get into a port. You start from the Flemish tradition but it is often linked to melodies you get from other countries that come with the sailors to the port. It can be combined with an Afghan traditional song or with something from Creta… It is a very exciting project.

And we will do a new album by Refa, that is the new version of Refugees for Refugees. They changed the name because the musicians do not want to keep the label of refugees. They want to be seen first of all as humans or musicians, and leave behind that they were refugees, or are refugees. We are preparing a new album with the band which has evolved a lot. They have done great things together lately but they haven’t done any recordings and we have no way to show it.  We are also preparing an album with the Syrian band, Jawa, the last breaths of Aleppo. The rich musical Sufi tradition has been transmitted orally in Aleppo for decades. Jawa’s mission is to preserve this heritage, which has been threatened by the Syrian war. The Sufi masters, who kept the secrets of this musical tradition, are gradually disappearing from the scene, threatening to lose a treasure of songs forever. As guardians of this rich cultural heritage, Jawa revives the music and does so in a contemporary way. Las Lloronas are working on a second album. We will probably release others.

These are Refa (formerly known as Refugees for Refugees):

 

Mapamundi Música: Do you want to share anything else? 
Peter Van Rompaey: We are working now with a large Congolese project. We have decided to do more about Congolese music, because we are situated in the African neighbourhood. Congo had the statute of a Belgian colony. We should be proud of Congolese rumba as Belgians as well. We have the Congolese tradition and we have big masters of the Congolese rumba, so we are working now with a great friend who is Klay Mawungu, who is like a passionate person about Congolese rumba, he also sings not professionally. We are trying to do things together, we are hosting a large band with Congolese musicians from Brussels and from Paris. The band is called MRCI!, that is like merci, thank you in French, and also Mythique Rumba Congolese International. We are trying to restore the spirit of the old rumba. And with Klay we are also developing projects of teaching the History of Congolese rumba, but with a live band. So they will play the different styles, how they evolved and the links to our past. It is linked to the dark pages of Belgian history, that we had those colonies, the crimes our country did, the reactions of the Congolese, which songs they created to protest… So it is at the same time a music and history lesson and a concert.

 

These are the Mythique Rumba Congolese International band:

 

Peter Van Rompaey: Many things are going on, some of them might not happen… That is also part of the story: sometimes you try out things and sometimes they don’t work out well.
We are also dreaming, for a long time already, of an online music school. If it will happen, you will find out in the next years on https://www.muziekpublique.be

 

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Do you have a call of interest for our community that you want to share? Let me know asap.

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OPEN CALLS AND PROFESSIONAL EVENTS

Just a little bunch of them, the ones I have identified. If you have anything to share in this section in a future edition, let me know. This place is for sharing useful dates and I don’t charge for including news here ? 

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• European Folk Network face to face meeting: Budapest, 17th and 18th of November. Taking place from tomorrow and the registration is closed.

• MOST Music Balkan Explained above.

• PIN Conference, in Skopje, 25-27th November.  The registration is right now open here and I don’t know when is the deadline.

• MusicConnect Italy, in Pistoia, Italy, 2nd-5th December. 

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MEET ME AT…

• PIN International Music Conference, Skopje, North Makedonia, November 26th and 27th. 

According to the website, “PIN is the first and only international music conference and showcase festival in Macedonia. […] Our goal is to enrich the local music sector by bringing the diversity of best practices, up-to-date knowledge and people who will be part of this development in Macedonia and the Balkan region.”

• Lisbon, Portugal, for the second concert of the series of Músicas Escondidas at the Museum of Orient. 10th December: Egschiglen

The first concert of this series two times postponed was on October 15th. It was by the Nouruz Ensemble and it was an outstanding performance in a venue full at the 100%.

 

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WHO WE ARE AND SISTER PROJECTS 

Mapamundi Música is an agency of management and booking. Learn more here. Check our proposals at our website.

We also offer you our Mundofonías radio show, probably the leader about world music in Spanish language (on 50 stations in 18 countries). We produce the Transglobal World Music Chart with our partner Ángel Romero from WorldMusicCentral.com.

Feel free to request info if you wish. For further information about us, get in touch by email, telephone (+34 676 30 28 82), our website or at our Facebook. 

 

This newsletter is open to sponsorship. Feel free to ask for details.