PRESERVING ASPECTS OF COMMUNITY'S LIFE
One of the hardest tasks facing any small cultural group surrounded by bigger and more influential societies is preserving their own identity. In these days of mass transmission of information you can't isolate yourself from what surrounds you anymore in order to maintain your traditions.
Instead you have to come up with ways that will interest the younger generations enough so they will want to take part in helping preserve aspects of their community's life.
SMALL MINORITIES WHO FACED PERSECUTION
It has been especially difficult for small minorities who have also faced persecution over the years. In the countries of Eastern Europe, few communities, aside from the Jewish population in World War II, have faced as severe a persecution as the Roma, or gypsies. They were rounded up and exterminated in numbers equivalent on a per capita basis as the Jewish people during the Nazi pogrom of the 1940's, depleting their small numbers even further.
Post war Europe, especially in the East under the Communist Bloc rule, found them not much better off than they were under the rule of the Nazis. If they were no longer being rounded up and killed, they still faced persecution and continued treatment as a second-class people. Like Jewish people, the closed nature of their society has them looked upon with suspicion by majority populations.
PLAYING FOR THEMSELVES: A PASSION FOR LIFE, LOVE AND DEATH
They have also faced a threat to their culture in another way — the dilution of its essence to something more palatable to the mainstream. The music played by so-called gypsy bands in restaurants or other tourist attractions has been augmented with instruments that were not utilized by the people themselves when playing for themselves.
Like all Roma music, it has a certain raw vitality; a passion for life, love, and death that is missing from so much contemporary music. This is enhanced by the minimalist nature of this style: predominantly vocal, with only guitar, mandolin, and accordion as melodic accompaniment; in place of drums and such for percussion, spoons and sticks are utilized along with vocalizations to pick out a rhythm.
BELA LAKATOS AND THE GYPSY YOUTH PROJECT
Like a lot of rural folk music, the world over the subject matter of the songs is about the stuff of their reality: cabbage cooking, grinding poverty, blood feuds between families, unlooked for good fortune found on the road, and love. Introducing Bela Lakatos and The Gypsy Youth Project is the band's first international recording and it shows off the music and their abilities to the utmost...[continues here]
No comments:
Post a Comment