The Tree Of Musical Influences
This is a project of the Inclusion Committee of the Dutch composers association, Nieuw Geneco.
Scroll down to ‘Navigation’ to access the website.
The Tree shows us the musical DNA of Nieuw Geneco, it exposes our roots. The composers in the Netherlands are influenced by many people and things. We would like to encourage more inclusivity in the future by reflecting on who and what inspires us in the present and considering how that could change. Nieuw Geneco strives to be an open and inclusive organization where everyone feels welcome regardless of skin color, background, gender or sexual orientation.
The investigation of our musical genetic code clarified the following question: How truly diverse are our musical influences? Our Tree invites us to reflect on our references and to work towards a more fair and diverse music scene in the Netherlands. This includes education, concert programming, organization practices, radio and TV policies and the current global artistic and political diversity discussions and debates.
Our Tree consists of 594 unique influences and offers us the opportunity to reflect on our frame of reference in a specific moment of time (the summer of 2021). The musical influences were collected through questionnaires completed by 91 members of Nieuw Geneco. All corresponding data was collected, sorted, and interpreted by the committee.
The Tree is designed by visual artist Mees Joachim and the website was built by Matt Dixon.
This project was realized with many generous donations through Voordekunst.
Reflect with us
Every new perspective on the Tree and its data offers us a new approach to reflect on ourselves and our practices. If you wish to indicate inaccuracies or unclarities, if you’d like to share your findings or if you would like to suggest improvements, please contact us at inclusie@nieuwgeneco.nl. Your contribution is valued and appreciated.
You can access the data spreadsheet here, including all data used in the Tree and more.
Poster
Support this project by ordering an A1 poster for €10 incl. shipping costs. The poster portrays the Tree with all its roots, surrounded by the 594 names of influences on a black background. Just reach out to inclusie@nieuwgeneco.nl and we will help you out.
Navigation
Enter the website after watching this video or reading the text below. Please visit our website on a computer. The website does not work on a phone or tablet.
Explore the Tree of Musical Influences here.
We invite you to explore our influences and their characteristics by interacting with the Tree and the search functions on the left.
Use the search bar to search for something in particular. Here you can fill in names, countries, genres… Give it a try!
- “197” will show you all 29 people born in the 70s; “1970” will show people born in 1970
- “jazz america” will show you that all the jazz makers from the States that are included in our list have years of birth ranging from 1912 to 2000
- “female” brings you all people who identify as female in our Tree
You can also use the slide below the search bar to highlight the influences that occur more than once.
Explore the Tree by moving your cursor over it. Each confetti represents an individual influence. When placing your cursor on top of it, its individual data will appear in the left column. Use your mouse’s scroll wheel or your touchpad’s zoom function to zoom in or out.
Reflections on this project are in our blog. We will be adding to this regularly. The blog is in the column on the right side by clicking on the arrow in the top right. You can close it with the same arrow.
More details about our research and developing process can be found in the Disclaimer section by clicking on What is This in the bottom left.
Explore the Tree of Musical Influences here.
Problem Solving
- You might bump into some English and Dutch bilingual moments on the website. This is the result of the DIY character of this project and a bilingual project team.
- When opening the website, the Tree might be lined up all the way to the left. Just move it to the middle of the screen using your mouse and you’re good to go.
- In some cases interacting with the confetti is slow or unpredictable. If this is the case, some names will still appear when you move your cursor randomly over the screen. We would like to advise you to try a different browser too and cleaning your cache-memory; this might fix this bug.