Global Village - Free Music University: The World of Kafanas
Educational
Szervezés:
Global Village - Free Music University: The World of Kafanas
This programme is held in Hungarian.
One of the most important – and perhaps most misunderstood – spaces of Balkan urban culture is the kafana. It is not simply a pub or a restaurant, but a meeting point, a refuge, a place of confessions and great resolutions, where music is not background, but the event itself. The songs born in kafanas speak the language of everyday life: about love and loss, homesickness, friendship, many spoken and even more unspoken sentences. In the world of sevdah, starogradska, Serbian and Bosniak urban songs. Musician and audience are not separated by a stage, there is no listener, only participant, and the song is not just a song, but fate as well. In Balázs Weyer’s lecture series, the musician travel companion into the world of kafanas will be Benedek Réti.
"Idemo u kafanu!" – that is, where and how the Balkan soul goes out to have fun. What are the places where live music still flourishes today in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, where the cigarette smoke is so thick you could cut it, the table groans under the weight of the food, the rakija fires up the people, and the accordionist, seeing into the guests’ souls, starts playing their favourite song even before the dinars have migrated into the instrument. What is a kafana, how did this indispensable institution develop in the Balkan countries, what did it mean a hundred years ago and what does it mean today, how did it evolve from Turkish coffee houses into a refuge from social conventions and a place where overflowing emotions are calmed, poured into music, song and drink, how it became embedded in everyday life, which social strata met there, how it shaped 20th-century Balkan music and in what way it remains, to this day, a bond among the people living there after the storms of history. How it fits into the fabric of Balkan music, what patterns it has woven into it and how the world of kafanas continues to keep it alive to this day. These are the questions that accordionist and Balkan musician Benedek Réti and ethnomusicologist Balázs Weyer, a key figure of the world music scene, will be examining and unraveling. During the discussion, singer Veronika Varga and Benedek Réti, the duo BudaPesme, devoted lovers of Serbian, Bosniak and Macedonian music, will offer a musical insight into the musical world of kafanas.
Dear Visitor, We kindly inform you that during the event, photographs, audio recordings, and/or video recordings may be taken. By attending the event, you consent to the recording of such materials through your implied conduct.
