A good atmosphere is guaranteed at the attraction of opposites event
You shouldn’t be worried about the atmosphere of the Valmiermuiža ethnomusic festival – even last year, when a thicker word was needed to describe the weather conditions, and in a foreign language, everything still went amazingly positively: two stages with good and quality music, various activities, a market, a rest area and a fire sculpture at midnight in the bonus. This year will be the same.
This year, the motto of the festival is “Opposites attract”. “Staticity and movement, earth and air, traditional and modern, fragile and strong – opposites not as irreconcilable contrasts, but as an opportunity to give life colors, diversity and meaning both in art and architecture, as well as in cuisine, landscape and human relations,” – so a measure is applied for. The Valmiermuiža ethnomusic festival is quite rightly advertised as the most ambitious ethnomusic event in Latvia – one of the rare annual events where the main emphasis is on placing Latvian traditional culture in both modern and world music contexts. “The main message of the festival is about the quality of life that can be achieved by living and celebrating in harmony with one’s environment – both with the local, natural environment, as well as the cultural environment and music, from which it is possible to draw inspiration for a modern, open and tasteful lifestyle.”
From Norwegians and Sami yoiks to Ukrainians and folk
Okay, so much prose, but what will be seen and listened to on the outskirts of Valmiera? On Saturday, July 15, such representatives of ethnomusic as our own “Jauno Jāņu ħestris”, “Jakob Noiman Festival Band”, Kārlis Rudra Jürgens and “Rāva”, intertwined with traditional Sami singing and jazzy dark Torgeira Vasvik (he combines the Sami joik singing with resonating throat singing) group from Norway, Ukrainian folk group “Joryj Kloc” sometimes called “Slavic Sepultura” and hot-blooded tarantella group “Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino” from Italy. After the live music program, for the most resistant, the ethno-disco duo Dīvs Reiznieks and Kaspars Zaviļeiskis will play their favorite world music until the last dancer.
The central object of the festival territory is the Spanish artist Jordi NN’s fire sculpture “Opposites attract – the force of attraction”, which will be created in collaboration with circus artists Aleksej Smolov and Lizeti Volka, as well as musician Stanislava Yudin.
Main – Italians with a dance to treat tarantula bites
Among the “imports”, we should highlight the global music stars “Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino” (CGS), which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in a couple of years. “CGS teaches how to turn local music into a global brand,” the British newspaper “The Guardian” once wrote.
CGS is Italy’s leading and longest-running traditional music ensemble, founded in 1975 in Salento. The group of seven musicians and dancers, led by violinist and percussionist Mauro Durante, has released around two dozen albums and performed concerts all over the world. “Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino” translates as “Salento Greek Songbook”, a nod to the band’s Greek roots in their native region of Apulia and the use of the Grecaniko or Griko dialect, which is related to modern Greek. Regular collaboration with other global music stars (Ballake Sissoko, Ibrahim Maalouf, Piers Faccini), contemporary music composers (Ludovico Einaudi) and also freethinkers from the popular music environment (Stuart Copeland from “The Police”) is also important for the group’s musical development. Five years ago, CGS received one of the most prestigious global music awards – the award of the British publication “Songlines” as the best group in the world. “CGS performances are live explosions: full of energy, passion, rhythm and mystery, they connect the past with the present, reviving the ancient legend of the tarantella known in Salento as ‘pizzica’,” – this is how this association is described.
And also – in the middle of the day, there will be a CGS tarantella master class right there on the Small Stage. It should be noted that the tarantella is a fast, trance-like dance that can heal from the bite of the poisonous tarantula spider (so the legend says). The birthplace of the dance is the south of Italy – the port city of Taranto, where the “heel of the boot” begins. There is an opinion that this dance has traveled to the present day from deep antiquity, from the times when the cult of the god of wine, Dionysus, was practiced in Ancient Rome. “The bacchanalian rites were strictly restricted by the Roman Senate, and the dance went underground, reviving again as an emergency therapy for tarantula bite victims. The dance is fast, fiery, and if not the spider’s poison, then the dark thoughts are thrown away as if they were supposed to!” The master class will be taught by CGS dancer Silvija Perone, who will also briefly tell about the history and meaning of this dance.
A skull with an “orchestra” promises novelties and surprises
It is true that many choose to visit the ethnomusic festival in order to hear not some foreign celebrities, but domestic greats – last year their role was “Auļi”, but this year it will be the “Jauno Jāņu orchestra”, which also promises to show some news. “For the ethnomusic festival of Valmiermuiža, we are preparing both the well-known songs of the “Jauno Jāņu orkestra” and lesser-heard music. Continuing to fly on the song festival wave, we have thought about the fact that at the concert we can also dance properly and meet each other, smiling at each other,” says Juris Kaukulis, the voice of JJO. In autumn, the group will release a new album of dance songs, from which they have already played the song “Kur palika muzikanti” for the listeners, which will also be heard in Valmiermuiž.
“Observations show that more and more often people are returning to the roots of their culture and nature, looking for authentic experiences, realness, including in music. Ethnomusic offers this through its fascination with the diversity of language, instruments and music. In addition, ethnomusic is alive – it is compatible with any other genre, for example, the rock that we hear in JJO’s performance. Right next to us, in Europe, there is a great variety of ethnomusic and many ways of making music, which we have no idea about and which often come as a surprise and a discovery. There will also be surprises and discoveries at the Valmiermuiža ethnomusic festival,” summarizes Sabīne Vandāna, the organizer of the festival, head of the Valmiermuiža cultural society.
2023-07-15 02:15:27
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