Mélisey 2025 - where music refracts reality
12 - 20 July 2025
[Link about Mélisey: Mélisey with Adelina Oprean ]
When I considered writing about Mélisey, I struggled. Which fragments of this layered experience were mine to share? Do I even want to?
The week was filled with layers of emotions and experiences. We went through and exposed our inner selves in the lessons with Prof.Oprean, read poems in various mother tongues to each other, and witnessed our colleagues evolve through daily group lessons. We had sight-reading parties every night all night, wrestling to use our brains to count, read and play at 2 AM in pajamas. We collapsed laughing over the most stupid, absurd jokes, yet spun endless beautiful conversations about life and all till dawn. The days were filled with music and learning, each individual harmonizing with others.
It was my 5th time in Mélisey, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Every time, it is different. And each time, it gifted me what I needed, unexpectedly – needs I never named. l already look forward to Mélisey 2026, to find new dialogues with music, to have another way of connecting with my reality, to fit missing pieces of myself into place.
There are some certain questions I avoid asking, or thinking. But sometimes, I accidentally let myself.
Questions like “what is reality, then?” are like one of them. Once asked, it unravels into infinite echoes, which I'm sure we've all experienced.
Honestly speaking, I wasn't sure if I actually wanted to go to Mélisey this year, I didn't know if I actually wanted to escape reality. Confronting this messy world, confining myself in a tight cage and tormenting myself – strangely, that feels like it might offer escape from guilt. Surely the world has always been this chaotic, and in disorder. It's just, only, now does that truth ache in my marrow.
Privilege drags us under: What do we deserve? Guilt floods the lungs. We shrink before our insignificance, becoming walking contradictions — festering in self-revulsion. Yet we must root against the flood. My silent oath: To meet others with uncovered eyes and skin bare, to hold principles like unbroken bones.
The only thing I am certain about is this: After a week of spending an unrealistic, yet probably the most grounded idealistic music making – demanding only loyalty and faithfulness towards music and people around – reality refracts differently. You return seeing with warmer eyes, giving yourself more space to breathe.
Warm greetings from Basel,
Yuko
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