Voices of Ethnicity

Inside of each person is a mixture of blood lines, storylines, of voices wanting to be heard equally, voices with a similar origin, but a different tongue or sound, a different ethnicity.

In music, mankind came up with the beautiful texture of several lines of independent melodies, of independent voices called polyphony. Polyphony is a musical representation of this mixture of story lines, bloodlines, voices.

The roots of polyphony in music go back to some of the first instruments found in archaeology. Before pianos and organs, there were already wind instruments to be found all over the world, that could play more than one tone at the same time, such as the naw from Thailand (a 3rd millennia BC mouth organ) or the Pungi (a 17th c BC Indian double clarinet).

In this project these forgotten polyphonic wind instruments and their stories form the backbone of a musical journey through time and the world, through new compositions and instruments, through a project that will be a life’s work, bringing to the fore the old as original and never-heard before, thereby inspiring the new today.

A showcase for human ingenuity, showing a multitude of creative approaches to how a wind player can create a whole musical world by himself, showing the polyphony of the difference and the similarity between all those cultures, sounding the voices of ethnicity.

The following information is gathered here:
Ethnic instruments and their repertoire

Current recorder repertoire (structurally) involving two (or more) instruments

My own experiments

Historical Western Instruments

For Composers

Other instrumentalists venturing into a similar area