MUSIC | ARTS | ROLAND BINET | BELGIUM | LATVIA | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED
◊
Editor’s note: At our request, Defending History’s longstanding correspondent Roland Binet compiled this provisional list of his musical and video creations over the years relevant to issues covered by DH. Although Roland Binet has contributed to DH since 2010 there is an aspect of his work perhaps unknown to our readers. He has been a creative musician for more than fifty years playing mostly the flute and has composed more than a hundred pieces of original music. His music is based on modal, pentatonic, Chinese or Japanese scales as well as aleatory contemporary improvisations with periodic jazz influences. He has made his jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s quote on his last album “When you hear music and it is over, you can never capture it again”. But, of course, thanks to the numerous recordings he made, these aleatory instants can be heard on purely musical sites such as Reverbnation or Bandcamp. After his initial visit to Riga in 2009 and the shock he felt when he looked for the first time at pictures of the Liepaja massacre at the Riga Jewish Museum he took to studying the history of the Holocaust in the Baltic States. From there it was only a small step to play and compose music in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had paid with their lives and belongings for the crime of being Jewish in countries that chose to collaborate enthusiastically with the Nazi killers.
◊
