| A FOLK ARTIST
OR A PERFORMING MONKEY
I often wandered around villages.
Always to meet people.
I wanted to learn something new, to chat, to exchange thoughts. I wanted
ordinary, private meetings.
Without pretending to be a monkey.
Without looking for performing monkeys.
Symmetrically.
I was fascinated by the people who long ago used to be true musicians. These
days, at the end of their artistic career, they had a lot of time. They shared
their experience with a young traveller. I was coming to them from a different
world. I wanted to see whether these worlds are really that different. Some
of those meetings proved that we were really very similar. Today I think
that these were the most important meetings.
How human is the experience of meeting in a mazurka.
I used to go around villages because I wanted to play music.
I met musicians whose musical knowledge was rejected, no official institution
patronised it. These were meetings of humans, face to face, without
institutionalising them, without reducing people to their social role. These
were the meetings that woke me up.
I am, and always will be, against attempts of "helping to preserve" traditional
culture by turning people into performing monkeys.
I wandered around to meet people and from those wanderings I remember great
musicians who shaped my idea of the traditional culture. One day I will write
more about those meetings. I will write about the people of sparkling
imagination, who spoke beautiful Polish dialects rarely heard today. It was
in isolated and almost completely forgotten villages and hamlets in Eastern
and Southern Poland. I have learned to be humble and I have forgotten all
the preconceived ideas that would be useless in this journey. I was entangled
in generations in these wanderings. The generation conflict was absent in
those meetings.
Now I understand how great is the responsibility of those I met. They are
responsible for the traditional culture. It was and still is their life,
but it is now mine as well, because of those meetings.
Later I started another journey: to find a new habitat for growth of those
traditional forms. |
Maciej
Rychly is more a musician than a writer. He studied psychology in Poznan
and later taught it at the very same university. One day, however, he packed
his bags and hit the trail, never to return to the university. He travelled
in the Carpathian Mountains in Poland, Ukraine and the Balkans, learning
how to play music from old villagers who still remembered the real folk art.
With his brother Waldek he started a band called
Kwartet Jorgi.
They became quite successful and now they are one of the most popular folk
bands in Poland. In their numerous recordings they present their own, often
unusual interpretation of Polish and Ukrainian folk music.