Like most people reaching 40, I've been to many weddings. I've also had the privilege of having friends from many parts of the world, so I've experienced weddings in many different countries, let's see: Canada (6+), US (2), England (20+), France (2), Germany (5+), Austria (1), Italy (1), Serbia (2), Poland (1) with mixtures of people inside (i.e. two Americans marrying in France, an Italian marrying an English person in Sicily, a Croatian-Serb marrying and Bermudan person in Cambridge, etc.), and different social groups: posh English people, middle-class Germans, down-to-earth French people, etc.
Now I love a good wedding, and I've been to many such, but generally the quality from a guests perspective has varied. Some are great fun, some are boring. English people are the drunkest, Italians/French had the best food, German weddings are probably the most organised on average. But the most striking thing I found is just how similar most western weddings are. The people who speak might change, and the clothing varies slightly, but generally the format (church in the afternoon, evening reception), the drinks before (bucks fizz, champagne, campari & soda), the food (some typcial variant of catering), the entertainment (light jazz before dinner, then a band or disco) and even much of the music (eighties classics and the chicken dance) is seemingly universal. There are, of course, exceptions to these, but this is why they are exceptions: outstanding food and unusual entertainment are, for example, merely minor deviations from established wedding norms.
I felt this way, and indeed didn't think much about it until I attended a wedding in Serbia. I didn't know the couple - in fact, G. and I were replacing her parents at a wedding for one of her fathers employees - and couldn't speak Serbian that well, so I was a bit like a puppy looking out the window of a moving car for the first time. But even in my haze of misunderstanding, this wedding was different from the outset.
For starters, the church. This was an Orthodox wedding, and though one could see some similarities, the singing clergy and their outfits certainly stood out - not understanding the service perhaps also gave an air of mystery to the whole thing (old Slavonic as G. later told me, so probably I was not alone). Then the food: cabbage everywhere, very good, but like nothing I had ever had at a wedding, the drink: rakija (šlivovica, kruškovac, etc.) and wine from a Knjaz Miloš bottle (the ubiquitous home-made, often barely drinkable wine that one gets everywhere).
Then, of course, the music. After dinner we were presented with a pretty typical wedding band - cheesy keyboard, singer, bassist, drummer. - the rather bored-looking, sigh-yet-another-wedding, why-aren't-I-a-pop-star type of group that make there living playing at such events. But what they played! There were a few western pop-songs in there - in fact, I think they even played the chicken dance - but for the most part, these were Serbian or Jugoslav songs I had never heard before. And what was more, the people at the wedding both knew and sang along to these songs, and danced to songs (as I said in my last blog) that I could barely understand rhythmically.
Perhaps the most impressive event was when a woman, who owing to her dress (frankly, a bit slutty to my eyes) I presumed to be a band member, got up on stage, on a request from the guests, and absolutely belted out Mala garava - the gypsy song so popular there - to everyone's delight. G. later informed me that she was the sister of the groom.
On the whole this wedding, and other weddings in Serbia I attended, have been true My Big Fat Greek Wedding experiences. By this I mean that for once, there is an immediately discernable, distinct culture, and at least to my mind, this is - despite the shell-suits, arguably too much cabbage, fairly bad wine, sometimes rather grisly venues - a marvelous thing. The strange thing is that some Serbs find these weddings rather savage, and would opt for a more Westernised, chicken-dance wedding instead of a cabbage one. Understandable, in some ways, since whatever is ordinary appears dreary and common. But I think we would lose something if weddings in Serbia morphed into yet another variant of the chicken-dance, cordon-bleu sort of affairs that everybody in the west is pretty tired of. In my mind, the more cabbage, the better.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Muzika Balkanska
When I first listened to Dave Brubeck seriously a few years ago, I was really impressed by their innovative attempts to break into different time signatures. I had read somewhere - I think on the CD inset for Time Further Out - that they had been inspired after listening to musicians in places like Turkey, but had never really seen the connection. Something about the fact that they had met brilliant drummers, who were outstanding technically, but just couldn't play in 4/4 or 3/4 time - that is the time signatures of 99.9% of all western music, including rock'n'roll, classical music & Jazz.
I never really thought about it again until I attended a wedding in Serbia in 2002. The audience all got up and danced, in some circular fashion, to the Serbian folk song Šano Dušo (a love song: roughly "My Beloved Shano"). I was amazed and impressed that the usual collection of arrhythmic wedding attendees were dancing in sync to this song, who's rhythm I just couldn't figure out immediately. I eventually deduced while watching that it is 7/4 or 7/16 depending on how you count it, though apparently it is also sometimes played in the more western friendly 3/4. Speed it up, I thought, and you start to get towards Brubeck's Unsquare Dance with that infectious, but confusing (to Western ears) 1-2-1-2-1-2-3 beat.
Later on, we met a musician friend of Gs, who played for us music from a Novi Sad (I think) band call Ljube [If anybody knows if they are still around, I would love to know]. They, of course, play Šano Dušo, but they also played a lot of music from the deep south, and by this I mostly mean Macedonia. Here, I heard things like Lihnida: a song about a bereaved woman on Lake Ohrid. It is also mostly 7/4 time, with some odd beats in the middle for effect (4/4 if memory serves). Skipped betas are familiar to anybody who has tried to dance to Chain of Fools (there is a 2/4 in the middle of an otherwise 4/4 song; another is present in Street Life). More impressive, however, are the mind-boggling 9/8 melodies like Čoček Bakije Bakića. The first time I heard that song I thought that the band must have just memorised the whole thing, since the timing seamed so martian to me. Actually, it is just as Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3, and eventually some Bosnian musician just pointed this out to me. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, I'm something of an amateur musician myself.
These beats are yet another quaint surviving influence of the Turks, who have always played music with these oriental time signatures. And as one might expect, there are fewer songs with beats like this in Slovenia or Croatia, where, at least in my humble opinion, the traditional music is more dull or at least more Western and over-familiar, and frankly prone to a few too many oompa beats for my liking. In Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia the Turkish influence lives on, and it always impresses me to see people simply just understand these beats without thinking about it. I mean come on: dancing to 7/4 - are you kidding me? Until I spent more time experiencing the music in its original form, I always thought it was some kind of (all-too-typical) attempt by musicians to appear clever. Yet, in Šano Dušo or Lihnida it just flows beautifully.
Years later, now I find myself tapping these beats, out of habit, and indeed, I taught myself to play Lihnida on the piano, with vague plans to make some Jazz version of it. And I continuously try to redo Jazz standards in unusual signatures (I do a 5/4 version of Summertime, though I note with some envy that Jacqui Naylor does an 11/4 version on her album The Color Five). And I guess if you look for it, unusual beats are around in western music. Think of Pink Floyd's Money (7/4) or Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough (6/4).
And on the other hand, I do like 4/4 songs from the former Yugoslavia. Having seen the film Grbavica I was very taken by Kemal Monteno's Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to yet another linguistic curiosity. A Croatian linguist friend visiting last month, was reading through some of my books on learning Croatian/Serbian, and asked, rightly enough, why they were using the word Grad (city) to illustrate the vocative (i.e. command) case. When on earth would you have to address a city as you would (say) a person or a dog? I immediately began to sing the opening lines to Kemal Monteno's song:
Zajedno smo rasli, grade ja i ti... [We grew up together, my city, you and I...]
More rambling soon... I'm not done with the music, but I need a new train of thought.
I never really thought about it again until I attended a wedding in Serbia in 2002. The audience all got up and danced, in some circular fashion, to the Serbian folk song Šano Dušo (a love song: roughly "My Beloved Shano"). I was amazed and impressed that the usual collection of arrhythmic wedding attendees were dancing in sync to this song, who's rhythm I just couldn't figure out immediately. I eventually deduced while watching that it is 7/4 or 7/16 depending on how you count it, though apparently it is also sometimes played in the more western friendly 3/4. Speed it up, I thought, and you start to get towards Brubeck's Unsquare Dance with that infectious, but confusing (to Western ears) 1-2-1-2-1-2-3 beat.
Later on, we met a musician friend of Gs, who played for us music from a Novi Sad (I think) band call Ljube [If anybody knows if they are still around, I would love to know]. They, of course, play Šano Dušo, but they also played a lot of music from the deep south, and by this I mostly mean Macedonia. Here, I heard things like Lihnida: a song about a bereaved woman on Lake Ohrid. It is also mostly 7/4 time, with some odd beats in the middle for effect (4/4 if memory serves). Skipped betas are familiar to anybody who has tried to dance to Chain of Fools (there is a 2/4 in the middle of an otherwise 4/4 song; another is present in Street Life). More impressive, however, are the mind-boggling 9/8 melodies like Čoček Bakije Bakića. The first time I heard that song I thought that the band must have just memorised the whole thing, since the timing seamed so martian to me. Actually, it is just as Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3, and eventually some Bosnian musician just pointed this out to me. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, I'm something of an amateur musician myself.
These beats are yet another quaint surviving influence of the Turks, who have always played music with these oriental time signatures. And as one might expect, there are fewer songs with beats like this in Slovenia or Croatia, where, at least in my humble opinion, the traditional music is more dull or at least more Western and over-familiar, and frankly prone to a few too many oompa beats for my liking. In Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia the Turkish influence lives on, and it always impresses me to see people simply just understand these beats without thinking about it. I mean come on: dancing to 7/4 - are you kidding me? Until I spent more time experiencing the music in its original form, I always thought it was some kind of (all-too-typical) attempt by musicians to appear clever. Yet, in Šano Dušo or Lihnida it just flows beautifully.
Years later, now I find myself tapping these beats, out of habit, and indeed, I taught myself to play Lihnida on the piano, with vague plans to make some Jazz version of it. And I continuously try to redo Jazz standards in unusual signatures (I do a 5/4 version of Summertime, though I note with some envy that Jacqui Naylor does an 11/4 version on her album The Color Five). And I guess if you look for it, unusual beats are around in western music. Think of Pink Floyd's Money (7/4) or Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough (6/4).
And on the other hand, I do like 4/4 songs from the former Yugoslavia. Having seen the film Grbavica I was very taken by Kemal Monteno's Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to yet another linguistic curiosity. A Croatian linguist friend visiting last month, was reading through some of my books on learning Croatian/Serbian, and asked, rightly enough, why they were using the word Grad (city) to illustrate the vocative (i.e. command) case. When on earth would you have to address a city as you would (say) a person or a dog? I immediately began to sing the opening lines to Kemal Monteno's song:
Zajedno smo rasli, grade ja i ti... [We grew up together, my city, you and I...]
More rambling soon... I'm not done with the music, but I need a new train of thought.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Making do and mending
My mother-in-law is arriving on Sunday, and though it goes against the cliches, I'm actually looking forward to it. For a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is always nice to have her around (I have to say this, but I do mean it). Second, it helps my Serbian immensely, as we now speak this exclusively. And third, she is one of those people who is utterly handy to have around the house - cleaning parts of the house we forgot about years ago, and fixing things that typical Westerners would probably throw away rather than bother trying to repair.
In this day and age of environmental concerns verging on the hysterical, I think we in the west often forget some of the basic principles that our grandparents upheld: waste-not want not, make-do and mend. A lot of this is still alive and well in Serbia, but sadly, as westerinisation creeps in, it is being lost.
This is best illustrated, perhaps by example. Last year our aging digital camera went on the fritz and we then immediately began to consider getting a new one. It was only 3.5 megapixels and when one can get terrapixels with a widgeryflop extension and a billion squillabytes of storage, for just a few hundred Euros - why not? More to the point: it would be impossible to fix it here in Germany. Fixing electronics past their guarantee is hopeless as anybody who has tried to do so will testify. Usually one has to send the thing away for weeks or months, and then the whole process costs more than replacing it - what with the price of technical skills and so on. Anyway, this broken, obsolete camera sat unused and sad and broken and ready for the bin until my Mother-in-law said she would take it and get it repaired. Har har, I thought, how naive she was. In the end, we gave it to her.
I ate my words a few weeks later when I found myself shocked to see her using it. Apparently it was just a loose contact, and was fixed in Serbia in just a few minutes by some bloke in a shop. And what about all those cables that she didn't take (and indeed we couldn't find)? And the charger? Apparently this was all dealt with easily, and in any case, when it was full of pictures, she just had another shop print everything out for her, since pictures aren't pictures unless they're in your hand. The irony is that we, faced with a bewildering selection, and not really having time, haven't even replaced the camera, so we now get pictures from her.
I've had a lot of other experiences like this since in Serbia. I've had shoes fixed that I would have chucked out, and fixed well, for just a few Euros. I've had cashmere jumpers patched that I would have just replaced and used for rags. But sadly I think this is not going to last forever.
Anybody who has been visiting Serbia, or other countries in the region, over the past five years can't fail to see how much things are changing, and I think a lot of the changes mean the end for the kinds of things I've mentioned above. We in the west are so used to the use-and-throw-away philosophy that we readily impose it on the new members of our club, or at the very least encourage them to adopt it. So this means that these little fix-it shops and a rather large cottage industry that makes clothing and other things is disappearing. It is, afterall, hard to stay in business when a mega-giant multinational is offering to replace anything broken or worn-out for so cheap. And these things, unlike the coat that a neighbor made by hand, have logos on them, so they must be better.
I've also found it rather sad that this notion of quality in goods is seemingly disappearing as well. A few years ago there was a great clothing store in Serbia called Zekstra - indeed I still have two coats made by them. What impressed me was that they actually provided quality at reasonable price - not cheap, but acceptable - even if things weren't as trendy as they could have been. Last time I was in Novi Sad the shop had closed down. And apparently (see www.zekstra.com) it has now morphed into something else - seemingly unable to resist the onslaught from Zara and the Gap - it is now a part of MaxMara/Diesel. Young Serbs now want trendy, foreign disposable clothing instead of home-spun goods that last for years.
I don't know if there is a happy ending to this, and maybe this whole little rant is just a function of me getting older, but I was encouraged the other day to see, here in Germany, a fix-it shop run by some Turks in one of the Heidelberg suburbs. Apparently these kinds of things can come back if the need arises, and I hope that I can finally get that busted toaster fixed.
In this day and age of environmental concerns verging on the hysterical, I think we in the west often forget some of the basic principles that our grandparents upheld: waste-not want not, make-do and mend. A lot of this is still alive and well in Serbia, but sadly, as westerinisation creeps in, it is being lost.
This is best illustrated, perhaps by example. Last year our aging digital camera went on the fritz and we then immediately began to consider getting a new one. It was only 3.5 megapixels and when one can get terrapixels with a widgeryflop extension and a billion squillabytes of storage, for just a few hundred Euros - why not? More to the point: it would be impossible to fix it here in Germany. Fixing electronics past their guarantee is hopeless as anybody who has tried to do so will testify. Usually one has to send the thing away for weeks or months, and then the whole process costs more than replacing it - what with the price of technical skills and so on. Anyway, this broken, obsolete camera sat unused and sad and broken and ready for the bin until my Mother-in-law said she would take it and get it repaired. Har har, I thought, how naive she was. In the end, we gave it to her.
I ate my words a few weeks later when I found myself shocked to see her using it. Apparently it was just a loose contact, and was fixed in Serbia in just a few minutes by some bloke in a shop. And what about all those cables that she didn't take (and indeed we couldn't find)? And the charger? Apparently this was all dealt with easily, and in any case, when it was full of pictures, she just had another shop print everything out for her, since pictures aren't pictures unless they're in your hand. The irony is that we, faced with a bewildering selection, and not really having time, haven't even replaced the camera, so we now get pictures from her.
I've had a lot of other experiences like this since in Serbia. I've had shoes fixed that I would have chucked out, and fixed well, for just a few Euros. I've had cashmere jumpers patched that I would have just replaced and used for rags. But sadly I think this is not going to last forever.
Anybody who has been visiting Serbia, or other countries in the region, over the past five years can't fail to see how much things are changing, and I think a lot of the changes mean the end for the kinds of things I've mentioned above. We in the west are so used to the use-and-throw-away philosophy that we readily impose it on the new members of our club, or at the very least encourage them to adopt it. So this means that these little fix-it shops and a rather large cottage industry that makes clothing and other things is disappearing. It is, afterall, hard to stay in business when a mega-giant multinational is offering to replace anything broken or worn-out for so cheap. And these things, unlike the coat that a neighbor made by hand, have logos on them, so they must be better.
I've also found it rather sad that this notion of quality in goods is seemingly disappearing as well. A few years ago there was a great clothing store in Serbia called Zekstra - indeed I still have two coats made by them. What impressed me was that they actually provided quality at reasonable price - not cheap, but acceptable - even if things weren't as trendy as they could have been. Last time I was in Novi Sad the shop had closed down. And apparently (see www.zekstra.com) it has now morphed into something else - seemingly unable to resist the onslaught from Zara and the Gap - it is now a part of MaxMara/Diesel. Young Serbs now want trendy, foreign disposable clothing instead of home-spun goods that last for years.
I don't know if there is a happy ending to this, and maybe this whole little rant is just a function of me getting older, but I was encouraged the other day to see, here in Germany, a fix-it shop run by some Turks in one of the Heidelberg suburbs. Apparently these kinds of things can come back if the need arises, and I hope that I can finally get that busted toaster fixed.
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