The De Werfkring restaurant, right next to the canal in the Dutch town of Utrecht, serves what its owners call "earth cuisine". This turns out to be vegetarian food, mainly comprising multi-grains and various types of rice, served with fresh vegetables and soup. Every evening, when it opens for dinner, businessmen, artists, writers, poets and students throng the place, despite the fact that it does not serve alcohol and smoking is prohibited.
But the real story of De Werfkring takes place before it even opens. Music is practised here – day in and day out, whenever owner Namgyal Lhamo is in town. Admittedly, the food is sumptuous, but the music that emanates from behind the closed doors is even more so. And why not? The one who supervises the cooking every evening is, after all, known unabashedly as the Nightingale of Tibet, despite the fact that she has never set foot in her motherland. Like most Tibetan refugees except the very elderly, Lhamo has always lived outside Tibet, but remains nonetheless inextricably tied to her ancestral land.
This is the world of Namgyal Lhamo, born in Nepal, raised in India, currently living in the Netherlands, and devoted to ensuring that the purity of Tibetan music lives on. The danger to traditional music in Tibet, Lhamo believes, comes from Beijing's attempts to integrate the area into the rest of mainland China. Over the past half-decade, however, traditional Tibetan music has found a vibrant new modernist outlet in Lhamo. Today she is perhaps the only internationally recognised proponent of Tibetan music. Neither has the Tibetan community dismissed her: she was recently given the Best Female Singer award at the 2007 Tibetan Music Awards, an annual gala held in Dharamsala.
Lhamo says that she has long sought to connect with her unseen homeland through her music. "Though I have never had a chance to visit Tibet, I have been greatly rooted in my culture since childhood," she says. "My mother influenced me greatly by exposing me to sound at a very young age, singing lullabies and folk songs, and as a little girl I would take to singing at every opportunity."