Joana Aderi

What did it take in your case for you to develop so beautifully as a musician?

I needed an environment that "let me do it". The freedom of a foreigner came in handy.
I'm generally curious and very hard-working. I sometimes scare myself with my self-discipline. But the motivation has to come from me one hundred percent. My whole learning system collapses immediately if something is forced on me from outside. (That's why a Swiss music academy was far too narrow for me. At the school in Trondheim, Norway, I found the freedom I needed. I blossomed immediately. My late adolescent existence up north gave me the opportunity to try things out uncompromisingly, in other words to fail completely at times, to feel my own limits, to get to know myself. That wouldn't have worked here in the same way. I lived in Norway for eight years and could have stayed much longer. It was important for me to completely disconnect from Switzerland in order to really have the feeling that I was falling into the unknown. A studio scholarship never appealed to me.

Are the conditions in Switzerland conducive or detrimental to musical development?

The Swiss way: Crabs in a bucket mentality!!! I almost couldn't stand it. You don't even have to show action, it's enough to think a little bigger and you'll be told off. I already knew in my first year of music studies that I wanted to be on the experimental stages of Europe, I never wanted to be a music teacher. In Switzerland, my young dream was always perforated, castles in the air were immediately brought down. So I went abroad and just did it. And it worked.
In Trondheim, we often met among female singers, presented our different voices to each other and checked things out together. In a fundamentally benevolent atmosphere, where we enjoyed each other's differences. We pushed each other. No more crabs. I think crabs are really bad and it was one of the main reasons why I had to leave.
Now I'm back in Switzerland and I really like being here. I think it has changed a bit. Or maybe it feels different when you have consolidated your inner attitude towards music and are no longer so dependent on your surroundings?

Is it essential for musical self-realization to go abroad?

I know wonderful musicians who have hardly ever left their small town. I really admire it when people can go through a huge development in the same place, in the same environment. How do they do that? I really needed the friction of the unknown, where I am unknown, in order to feel myself.