The music of the Himalayan Plateau will star at the final event for Horsham's Art Is... festival, the Concert for the Earth.
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Tibetan singer-songwriter Tenzin Choegyal will lead a performance alongside the Horsham Rural City Band, Danny Walsh, and others for a night to finish off the month-long arts festival.
The son of Tibetan nomads exiled from the country, Mr Choegyal spent his childhood in the Indian community of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
His music is a unique blend of Tibetan folk music and contemporary sources, a product of his upbringing.
"My musical influence is from my early imprints of hearing my parents, especially my mother, sing. Also, my father who played the bamboo flute as well," he said.
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"I grew up in an orphanage when my father passed away. I can't really remember his face, but I do remember him playing the flute when I was growing up.
"While growing up there, when I was a teenager, a lot of the travellers would come to the foothills of the Himalayas where the town was situated. The travellers from Australia, America or Europe would bring their music with them on tapes.
"The travellers were from all walks of life, some would bring Beethoven or Vivaldi and others would bring the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley. So many different genres."
After migrating to Australia in 1997, Mr Cheogyal began a musical career, which among other achievements, earned him a Grammy nomination.
Mountains have stability. All things grow and move around it, but the mountain is always there to hold them.
A master of the traditional Tibetan instruments the lingbu, a bamboo flute, and the dranyen, a three-stringed lute, he is best known for his mastery of droklu, the nomadic music of his parents.
Mr Choegyal said he aimed to connect people through his music, and tried to cultivate a global vision through his work.
"I think music and songs have this ability to connect with people. It does not have the geographical boundaries that we humans have created, saying this is my nation and this is my country," he said.
"Occasionally, when people ask me 'what is your music like? Can you describe it?' I say it is like a drifting cloud, where clouds drift from one continent to another continent, unbothered by the human-created geographical conditions.
"I think all music has that."
The Concert for the Earth performance will be a part of Mr Choegyal's Be the Mountain tour, which he began in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic across regional Australia.
He said the idea for the tour came about as a response to the pandemic, and to finding a balance in the disruption of day-to-day life.
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"Be the Mountain was conceived during that COVID time. It is asking yourself to be fearless like the mountains, I took inspiration from a little poem," he said.
"Take the mountain, practice without any sense of movement or change.
"If you are happy practicing with the mountain, trees, bushes, rivers, waterfalls, creeks, windy curves are all magical creations of the mountain. So be the mountain itself.
"Mountains have stability. All things grow and move around it, but the mountain is always there to hold them."
He said the theme of Be the Mountain had a strong resonance with the 'Earth' theme of the Art Is... festival.
"The theme of Art Is... is earth his year. The concert is about the earth and how important the earth is as a home for us. I come from Tibet but now I call Australia my home," he said.
"Tibet, we call it the roof of the world, but for the past 70 years, people have not been giving much of a thought to protecting the roof. All of the glaciers and the rivers are drying up that way.
"We might think that Australia is so far away from Tibet that it won't impact us, but we are all interdependent. We live in an interdependent world. What happens here affects Tibet, what happens in Tibet affects Australia. All the floods, the fire, and elemental obstacles we are facing all impact.
"It is important to raise awareness of consciously living on this planet together."
Mr Choegyal will be performing for the Concert for the Earth at Maydale Reserve on Saturday, June 2.
For more information, visit the Art Is... festival website.
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