"I never thought just playing music was enough." Andrea Voets (34) is a rising star in art, but cannot be pigeonholed. She has now found a form that she musical journalism mentions. And next year, she will come out with For Real, a live concert cum talk show that will generate dozens of new podcasts, as many as she can sell this necessary show about feminism.
"All the things that I value, that I support, that I think are important, they come together in making musical journalism. If I separate something from that practice, for example: I would only do composing, or only interviewing, or only writing, I immediately get a kind of lethargy over me: that doesn't make sense, does it? Honey, why on earth would I do that with other people? It all has to come together and then it makes sense. And I have a kind of sickness that I can only do things that have meaning in my eyes. And that bar is quite high."
Lonely instrument
So in this podcast, meet a Femina Universale who deals in a special way with the choices she made, or that life imposed on her. Like her relationship with the harp, the instrument on which she graduated. In fact, a harp like that turns out to be a very lonely instrument: "Terrible, you don't know that when you're four. It's a terrible instrument. You never get those easy hours of making music with others because it's just a move. So you don't get your ten thousand hours of orchestral rehearsal. And that's really bad and you can't get on a plane with it. And yes, I think that's really bad. That would have been a reason if I had known that not to play it."
The reason for the conversation is 'Millennial History', a project that has become both a podcast and a concert. I experienced it in Den Bosch, during the latest edition of November Music.
About that I wrote: "I saw a journalistic podcast, heard a concert, felt singing and experienced a film that therefore also just makes you wiser. The theme of this cutaway was children who in their own way shape growing up in a world destroyed by adults: Romanian orphans, Northern Irish schoolchildren during the Troubles. It is topical without referring to the news, and immerses you without suffocating you."
Not for my pleasure
Voets himself says of this now, "A friend of mine, Aki, lived behind the highway where Judge Falcone was blown up in the 1990s. I really wanted to talk to him about that. Because I see how frustrated he is about how easily the mafia is laughed at in this country. Let's start there. And then we started doing that. Then that got completely out of control for seven years. It's a combination of: this just has to be there, whether we have listeners or not, whether we have money or not. And then not working on it a little bit, but seven years working on eight episodes. That's crazy. And you do that because it makes sense and not because there is some logic behind it. And I think that's very beautiful. And it's almost impossible to put into words what it is then, because it's not fun either, because I don't do this work for fun either. It's because it has to be done."
Fighting spirit
Listen now to this fascinating woman, who with her latest project, For Real, will take a step further in her deeply felt feminism: "I really found it very difficult to make this tape. Yes very difficult. Also because I keep thinking I hear my foreboding or something. Now I'm 34, maybe I still have fighting spirit in me now. Continue in this field for another 10 years. If there is still a field at all in two years. When will it end? And it's unfair. It's really unfair. There's just no reason to listen to some people better than others. There's just no way that because I'm talking in a higher voice, you can't really hear what I'm saying. Not to mention all the physically sexist stuff. But I don't want to talk about that. It's just about the sexism on the mind, in the soul. So we are making a show about that."
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