HISTORY

Tulip mania
Living on a wet delta by the sea makes for curiosity as to what lies over the horizon. In the seventeenth century the Dutch developed into the fi rst global nation, with the VOC (United East Indian Company; founded in 1602) and the WIC (West India Company; 1621) as the fi rst multinationals. They opened trading posts in the Gold Coast, South Africa, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, but also in Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles. En passant they founded Nieuw Amsterdam - including a ‘Broadway’ and ‘Wall Street’ - better known afterwards as New York. And so Holland was even responsible for the world’s fi rst stock market crash when during the tulip mania of 1637 the value of a single tulip bulb rose to equal that of an Amsterdam merchant’s canal side house! You can still fi nd symbols of this economic expansion on Royal Palace on Dam Square in Amsterdam. The tympanum on the rear of the palace is adorned with the patroness of the City, whose feet straddle a globe. The four fi gures that fl ank her represent the thenknown continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and America. Above her is astatue of Atlas, several meters in height bearing an immense globe on his shoulders.

Foreign music: 1900-1960
One might expect it to be the most natural thing in the world for citizens of such a cosmopolitan nation to embrace foreign musical infl uences. Yet it was not until the twentieth century that foreign musical cultures began to take root in the Netherlands. In the fi rst half of last century the Dutch started to become familiar with Hawaiian music, Indo-rock, jazz, musette, tango and gypsy music. Quite often that ‘foreign’ music, and the dances that accompanied it, met with mixed feelings, such as the fi rst encounter with the tango in 1912 illustrates: ‘In the Princess Room in the Hague a fashionable couple demonstrated a new dance: the tango. There were quite a few reactions. The lettersto- the-editor writers outdid one another to express their disgust at so much indecency. Both parents and leaders of the dance clubs were sworn to take a stand against this form of degeneracy. This had as a result that not only did everyone want to see the dance that had caused such a stir, but even worse, they wanted to learn how to do it.’ (1) By the nineteen fi fties those foreign sounds had become commonplace. At the time there was a popular music magazine called TUNEY TUNES that published an annual reader’s poll. Besides categories such as Best Vocalist of Foreign Repertoire and Best Dance Orchestra, there were also entries for Jazz, Latin and Hawaiian music. In 1958 the top-3 Dutch groups in the category Orchestra in South American style were, (2): 1. Malando, 2. Max Woiski, 3. Laguestra; and for Foreign: 1. Edmundo Ros, 2. Perez Prado, 3. Xavier Cugat. After Indonesian independence in 1949 tens of thousands of Indonesians emigrated to their former ‘motherland’. Here they introduced their sweet kroncong, but also the rougher Indo-rock that laid the basis for the Dutch pop music scene that would be unleashed a decade later.

From cavanquinho to kaseko: 1960-2000
By the nineteen sixties, the rapidly growing economy of the post-war reconstruction period brought many guest labourers to the Netherlands from Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Turkey and the Cape Verde islands. They brought with them their respective instruments such as the guitarra portuguesa, Spanish guitar, ud, saz and cavaquinho. Rotterdam would rapidly turn into the musical capital of Cape Verde, Amsterdam later on into a breeding ground for new flamenco and fado talent. In the meantime, American rock ‘n roll and British beat and folk also arrived in force. Bands such as The Golden Earring and Shocking Blue heralded the start of an indigenous Dutch pop (Nederpop) scene. Surinam’s independence in 1975 brought with it the second large wave of migration from a former colony. Surinamese musicians livened up the hit parades with kasekonumbers; or made names for themselves in the jazz scene, just like the Dutch Antilleans who began settling here from the Netherlands Antilles round about the same time. Moreover, political refugees also started arriving from Argentina, Chili, Iran and South Africa; in the eighties from Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 musicians from Eastern Europe and Central Asia began putting their luck to the test in the Netherlands. Tuvan throat singers and Romanian ensembles added colour to the streets of our major cities. All totalled these newcomers gave an enormous injection of quality to the Dutch musical climate. They paved the way for what in the nineteen eighties would become known as world music. A wider audience begins to change its view of all these ‘exotic’ sounds thanks in part to the influence of the pop stars David Byrne, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon. Music journalists are forced to re-evaluate their own positions. One of Holland’s leading pop music magazines wrote in 1989: ‘For the last year or two world music has turned into the generic term for music that comes from distant lands. That would be from African countries including Algeria and Madagascar, from Indonesia, Greece and Argentina, from the Caribbean, but not Jamaica, since there they call it reggae. The sound of a Russian Tartar string instrument? World music. Pre-Colombian pentatonic music? Also very ‘world’. This trendy attention to this sort of music is suspect.’ (3)

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