Interview with Wilfried Hanrath

1) Who are you?
My name is Wilfried Hanrath, I´ll be 68 this year, twice a grandfather and a passionate musician

 

2) Can you describe your surroundings?
I live in the outskirts of my hometown, only a short walk to a large forest – like in my childhood,
but also close to a busstation, so it is easy to go downtown...for concerts or exhibitons or my
doctors or shopping
 

3) Where would you like to go?
I do not travel much anymore these days, but going where I can play music is always good
 

4) What would you say are the main features of your creative process(s)?
First of all, I am a spiritual person, so there is spirituality in everything I do.
Second is, I always aim at finding my own ways of expression, and thirdly improvisation
is the basis of my music, and also my compositions stem from and consist of improvisations.
 

5) What do you really want your audience to understand about you/your art?
I would want the audience to feel that my music is authentic and coming straight from my soul
 

6) Does audience matter?
When you play live, your performance would be nothing without the audience. Like playing in
the rehearsal room is one thing, but playing for people is quite another level
 

7) Why Resist?
Oh what a philosophical question! You can resist a temptation, for example, but resisting
becomes essential under certain political situations, I am convinced
 

8) Why do you do it?
You are referring to resisting? You can resist the urge to do things to please people, for example,
or the urge to eat chocolate when you are doing a diet, but what I cannot resist is getting clearer
about what I want to tolerate and what not and taking clear positions
 

9) What drives you?
My need to be the person I am
 

10) What do you do in your daily life?
Being a pensionist, you might think I have so much time. There is a joke that as a pensionist
you do not have time. But you become clearer in how you want to spend your time
 

11) Do you have any strategies for adapting to the challenges of existing in your unnatural
environment? If so, what are they?
There is a wise saying that goes like this: change the things you can change, accept the things
you cannot change and aquire the wisdom to tell one from the other
 

12) What is your favorite animal?
All animals, I´d say, and we should stop mass-production of food with bad conditons for the
animals
 

13) What would your superpower be?
My superpower would be … to see people as they really are behind their personae, and meet
them there, beyond conflicts etc
 

14) What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?
The strangest thing I ever saw is … that mankind apparently sucks at learning from its history.
Well, it is hard on a personal level, I know...I watched a short sequence from a movie (can´t recall
which one it is) where someone explains how easy it could be to stop all wars – by sending all
statemen who declare war and their generals to the first line of the front
 

15) Please tell us something about one EFSPACM project that you took part in, and how you
worked on your piece.
Being a member of the Ensemble for quite some years, I participated in many projects. Like the
one about the Battle of Kortrijk (did I write it correct, I wonder), or the latest one, Alellede.
In the first one mentioned I read a lot of informations about the situation that led to the battle, and
the battle itself, and tried to find a musical expression for it. In the case of Alellede, it was so
strange to me at first, somehow it reminded me of the language Tolkien had developed for the Lord
of the Rings. But also different, so started to learn about asemic writing, and figured out my
personal approach to pronounce chapters from the „book“. I played a laid-back improvisation on
my electric guitar to which I added my recordings of my readings