Without A Net

SETTING EACH OTHER FREE

Making Early Music in the early 21st century means taking into consideration a lot of different aspects: matters of survival, musicianship and also the ever interesting question, of whether we really need this stuff:

are there no other important tasks for pricipally intelligent and coherent people in the western world but to do just this?

What is it that apparently makes enough people so interested in this seemingly remote subject of our cultural heritage to let it happen, notheless?

If an answer can be given from the musicians' point of view, it would obvioulsy be this: we feel that music, be it old or new or in any way fascinating, is part of the essence of life:

it is what makes us feel alive, and it makes us present in a capacity that almost no other activity does.

Through music we communicate with each other, with our audiences and with the past --- which, of course, is also the future.

This makes us both vulnerable and free.

To feel the notes streaming out of your instrument can make you aware that because you have this privilege to communicate with the entire universe right here and now, it might, in the end, be all right to die.

Not to be scared of anything, not even death, isn't that what freedom means to all of us?

This band is an attempt to break through a lot of conventions, which a normal, 'studied' musician in the classical scene carries around as a burden and a cross of sorts, simply because the entire business works like that.

On our way to becoming musicians, we all had masters, directors, and we have studied so much history and theory that whatever performances we have given, were directed from lots of faculties that at times restricted us from getting to the core of the music as it lay buried in ourselves.

Obvioulsy, it is absolutely necessary to get to the core of this ancient music by understanding a lot about the way it was supposed to be played. It is like learning a language that must have been the mother tounge of the musicians who played it back then, in the 17th and 18th centuries. But, by becoming close to understanding that language, it also became clear to us that those musicians, because they were so fantasic, must have had a very free and experimental way of dealing with the material they gathered. They were as exposed to different musical influences of their day as we were all exposed to, let's say, the Beatles or Led Zeppelin.

Most of the time we have played this music we were also led and instructed by a directorial mastermind of some kind. We have learned a lot from these masters of today. But we were also restricted, because whoever may be a director also gets to decide to what extent we are allowed to make the music we play our own.