Toasaves & Dick van der Harst
Biography Toasaves & Dick van der Harst
Toasaves
is a Belgian music collective with a fascination for medieval Flemish song and its relationship to both Early Music – Trecento, Ars Nova and Flemish Polyphony – and modal music from the East.
Toasaves is phonetic and means “home land” in the Antwerp accent. The ensemble was founded by oud player and musicologist Tristan Driessens and brings together a dozen artists from different countries and traditions, each with a broad artistic background and expertise. In collaboration with Brussels cultural associations Muziekpublique and Seyir Muzik,
Toasaves recorded their debut album in the spring of 2021, which will be presented to the public early next year.
In their first project “Naar de Roots van Wannes” Toasaves starts from the Groot Liedboek of Wannes van de Velde (1937-2008), the singer-artist who breathed new life into the oldest surviving Flemish ballads. Together with multi-instrumentalist Raphaël De Cock, composer Dick van der Harst and modern troubadour Michaël Grébil, Tristan Driessens wrote new arrangements of anonymous medieval songs as well as original work by Van de Velde. It goes without saying that the dialogue with Eastern music culture, which runs like a thread through Driessens’ career, was not avoided. In keeping with the adventurous spirit of Wannes van de Velde, Toasaves sees in the exploration of cultural heterogeneity a wealth of possibilities that can reveal and reinforce the primal power of Early Music repertoires from a new perspective.
The rich instruments in combination with the unorthodox singing styles of Toasaves fulfill a connecting function in this. Thanks to virtuoso performances on Early Music instruments from both East and West – Medieval flutes, drums, cisters and fiddles, Oriental violins, lutes and frame drums, hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes, Indian dilruba and bansuri, etc …, new light is shed on musical traditions that, in time and space separated from each other, translate the same poetic and musical secrets. Starting from the folk repertoire of Wannes van de Velde’s Groot Liedboek, Toasaves joins in with the first masters of Early Music – Landini, Thomas Fabri, Guillaume de Machaut, … and the classical and popular music genres from the Greek islands, the Sephardic Diaspora, the Black Sea and the Ottoman Court.
Dick van der Harst
(1959) is a composer, arranger and musician whose work blends many influences, including jazz, classical and folk music from all corners of the world. He was composer-in-residence of LOD Music Theatre in Ghent from 1989 to 2013. Among other projects, he created musical theatre productions with actor and director Koen De Sutter and Alain Platel of Les Ballets C de la B. His own folk fanfare Banda Azufaifo and the heartwarming House of Hidden Tunes I & II combine various musical styles, from Mozart to Camarón de la Isla. In 2001 he won the Louis Paul Boon prize for "his social engagement and his bond with mankind, evident in his whole oeuvre." Three years later he was awarded the Grand Theatre Festival Prize. Van der Harst was the civic composer of Ghent in 2007 and 2008. He has made various CDs, including ones featuring Christmas and New Year songs from different cultures. At the festival, he will play and create music as musician-in-residence, both making and choosing music for various programmes.
