After having lived abroad for 36 years, mainly on the North-American continent, I see myself as a 'mid-Atlantic composer'.  Mid- Atlantic being a fictitious area where many strands come together.  I have also been influenced by the Celtic culture of England and Ireland, their literature and poetry, after having lived there for some years as well, and Celtic culture has remained a constant source of inspiration for my music.  My roots and part of my education (training) are in the Netherlands, the country I left at the age of 21.

 

To me, music and art in general should ideally mirror who we are and what we can be.  In today's society there is a need for new spiritual values, new rituals, a new mythology.  It is not sufficient for me, as a composer, to merely express a Zeitgeist, but to express a spirit of our time as it might be, and intuition and religious considerations also play a part in this.  With religious considerations I mean universal intelligence, not to be confused with the age-old church dogmas and doctrines whose ritual significance in our Western materialistic society is dwindling all the time.  For the rest I believe that a preoccupation with political ideologies is detrimental to the creative mind.

 

Carl Gustav Jung, who was and still is an important figure for me, already warned that much is lost in the world because man does not take into account his individual and collective dark side.  In our time all is directed outwards.  Rationality has intensified, in twentieth-century music as well.  As a result originality has become the aim of many creative figures at the cost of authenticity and this, in turn, has led to the unconcious being supressed resulting in a lack of communication.

 

In my music I aim to express myself in symbols as much as is possible.  In my view this is where my work differs from much contemporary music which appears to consist solely of symptoms and contributes to the growing superficiality of our society.

 

I go my own way.  This is a lonely process, but it is the only way for me to say something that has content.  A content that might have meaning for the spiritual and, to use a grand word, moral development of myself and my fellow beings with whom I wish to communicate.  For me, the latter is a conditio sine qua non for essential creative activity.  I want to be sure that I can listen unhindered by constructivism to my inner world, the dark and deep ocean of the collective unconcious, so that I can dream the dreams I wish to dream

 

Rudi Martinus van Dijk, 1997