47 f
“I
n Australia 90 percent of the people had never been to an Ethno, but neverthe- less within an hour it was completely the same vibe
as in Europe when you have 80 percent who’ve been before. So it was a very strong practical demonstration that this works by itself, and it’s sort of a human process; it doesn’t need to be forced on people, it just flows when you have peo- ple wanting to share their music and being skilful in what they do. Immedi- ately you have people from Thailand playing with Herman from Austria or whatever. Very exciting.”
It isn’t one long formless jam, of course. “There is a welcome evening where people introduce themselves, so you have an idea who you’re with, and you get the shock of 75 strange names that you’ve never heard before, and all this weird and beautiful music. And we’ll have a whole morning of introduction in which we explain what’s going on, why we’re here, what we’re doing, how it works. And there’s usually a tune that’s played every morning, which has the effect of bringing everyone together each day”.
Then they can all play more together or split into groups, learning and developing music from one another and with leader/ mentors, most of whom first came to Ethno as participants.
“It’s a network of people who stay in touch so some get invited to be a mentor in one place or another. It’s very clear when you have a participant who has the profile to become a mentor, and there’s a lot of space for people to lead even if they’re not officially mentors. That’s part of this open-source-code spirit, it’s com- ing from within, regenerating the whole time. Some people get older and get into other things. For example, I’m not going to an Ethno in Europe this year, out of choice, because it’s enough, it’s time to concentrate on other things, but I’m happy to go again. And that immediately leaves room, and makes a necessity, for new people to get involved at that level. I think that’s very healthy, and keeps it going in a natural way.”
Former or current Ethno participants are now to be found in major world-tour- ing bands. Also, gigging very successfully across Europe and Australia, there’s Ethno In Transit, a band formed in the last cou- ple of years to reach out with the Ethno spirit. “Wherever we go trying to learn some music from, and play with the peo- ple from there. Have an exchange. It’s not a band so much as a project, and that has a strong educational side to it as well.” It includes Nano, Estonian violinist/singer Maarja Nuut, Slovenia’s Matija Solce, Scot- tish fiddler/ singer Kate Young, Austrian trumpeter Herman Haertel, Italian saxist/flautist Daniel Moser, Swedish per- cussionist Stefan Hedborg and Estonian bassist Marti Tärn.
I asked Nano how many participants are at an Ethno camp.
“In my experience, from 30 to 120 or so. It varies very much. Also depending on the production possibilities or the logistics. Like, in Sweden they have a person work- ing in the office the whole year and they have money from the government – at least they used to have, I’m not sure now. So they can really scale it up.”
The exact age range to be accepted on a camp varies, but is within the brack- et 16-30. No specific qualifications are needed to apply, but there has to be a degree of selection.
“My experience working with Matija in Slovenia for example is that people hear about it absolutely by word of mouth, and yet there are many more people applying than there is room for. It becomes a mix of creating a solid group of human beings who are going to be able to interact, so that there’s a balance in terms of national- ity and between male and female, and also a balance instrumentally so there’s going to be an orchestra in the end that makes sense – so you don’t have 70 fid- dlers, two guitarists and one drum or some such. And then again, I think, at least in Slovenia, in the Czech Republic and in Scotland, which are places where I’ve been most directly involved, as it happens by word of mouth you know many of the people, but there are new people who you have no idea what their skills are. It always seems to work out though.”
“W
hen we did the Ethno in Australia last December it was very interesting because out of 50
people I think only six of us had ever been to an Ethno before, and there were a lot from what to us are exotic places like Vanu- atu or the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, all these places in the Pacific which we didn’t really know anything about – the music or the culture or the people. It was extremely interesting to have this wider array of cultures coming together, because from my experience Ethno is a very Euro- pean thing; the approach and the way that things are done very much comes from Europe and works very well in a European context. So it was a very cool experience to take this out into a completely different place in the world, with a lot of Asian par- ticipants, people from India, from the islands of the Pacific, from Australia. And now again it’ll be a big challenge to do it in South America, with all the complexities of the culture here, and the extremely differ- ent scenario in terms of resources. The com- bination of bigger distances and less resources makes it a bigger challenge to bring all these people together, whereas in Europe you can get someone from Bulgar- ia, and someone from, say, Denmark com- ing together in Austria and it’s not really far or expensive for either of them.”
What about funding?
“There are different ways. In Sweden for example they have funding; some peo- ple get their travel expenses paid when they’re coming from places with fewer resources – there were some people from Africa, China and India when I was there. People from Europe are usually expected to pay their own way, and also pay a small fee to participate, which isn’t unreasonable considering you get lodging and food for ten days or whatever, and everything else. Pretty much the programme is for free; the fee is just to help cover expenses.”
There’s information on how to apply and more, at
www.ethno-world.org, latest updates at
www.facebook.com/Ethno, and videos online for glimpses of various Eth- nos; try this one from Australia:
http://youtu.be/kGI448VxPCw
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