Codarts students spent a week learning, playing and immersing themselves in this project, exploring musical styles from Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. This performance is the result.

Music in Motion

Music travels with people and is shaped by both origin and destination. Through music, stories of home, change and connection are told.

Students from Codarts worked together on a week-long project titled Rhythm and Routes: an introduction to Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. Three guest teachers were invited: Siegfried Hart, Lidrick Solognier and Roël Calister. Each of them has a personal connection to the islands and shares this through music.

Tambú is one of the most important rhythmic foundations of the islands. The genre exists in different forms and expressions across Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, each with its own character and sound. Tambú is part of a shared rhythmic language that continues to evolve and is passed down from generation to generation.

Over the course of a week, the students immersed themselves in this musical world. Together, they played, learned and made it their own. The performance is the result of this week, bringing together many different voices, backgrounds and stories in one place.

Silk Roads & CaSa

This project brings together two Codarts groups: Maqam and Modal Cultures along the Silk Roads and CaSa (Caribbean and South American). The Silk Roads project is led by Jawa Manla, an oud player, singer, composer and teacher. She was born in Aleppo and raised in Damascus, where she began playing the oud at a young age, inspired by her father’s music at home.

The CaSa project is led by another Codarts teacher: Juliana Martina, a singer, composer and educator. With roots in Curaçao and Colombia, and having moved to the Netherlands at a young age, migration has always been part of her story.