Thanks to the Slovaks … and their researchers

I found my way eventually to Baracnicka Rychta, a lovely little pub in Mala Strana, relieved a bit that Joe had only beat me by a few minutes.  Shoot.  We’d both been a bit lost on the way.  Note to self – choose spots you know as meeting places.  The tasty Svijany brew was some consolation.

Joe wrote me the other day to renew the contact we had at the CZ – SK Fulbright conference in 2003.  He is a US phd student in anthropology who is working in Slovakia on l’udova (folklore / folkloric) as well as”folk” musicking.  As in Czech, “folk” means…well, “folk” as in Baez, Dylan, Van Zandt…something more popular than “folklore”….and as with these folks, sometimes a bit of an Americanist spin.  He’s looking at all sorts of interesting things, including a seeming rebirth of this sort of thing, a convergence of urban/cosmopolitan efforts and marginal/rural activity, etc.  (he wrote his master’s thesis on tramping…by the way)

Along the way, he confirmed, a bit, my thoughts and accumulated observations about bluegrass and country amongst Slovak folks – there aren’t as many bluegrass folks, and perhaps more “country.”  He added an interesting thought, one that hadn’t occurred to me:  that Slovaks often think of bluegrass/country (the constellation of musicking I like to lump as US string band sort of stuff) as CZECH.  I’m not sure how the “American” designation or identification fits in there, but it does make sense that Czech performativity on American(ist) themes would impart some degree of distinctive identification…and that it would contain this resonance to the Slovaks, the neighbors just down the road.

This reminded me of a recent conversation with a Slovak who has lived in Prague for years.  He recalled that there were never a lot of Slovaks playing bluegrass and that sort of thing, but there were always great audiences when CZ bands came over to SK to play.   (In the music scene in general, he also talked a bit about how “za totalita” (during totalitarianism…i.e. communism)  bands that weren’t allowed to play in Prague would get shunted farther out from the center of the nation, to Brno, Bratislava, or, if they were really controversial, out to Kosice or something.)

I came across another Slovak item today, reading some articles on Czech national and ethnic identity.  It’s all pretty sociological so far, and I’m not sure how to use a lot of the information.  But one study’s discussion pointed out the narrowing of Czechness, the dwindling plurality of ethnic/national diversity in the sphere of things with the “Czech” label attached to them.  The expulsion of Germans, the holocaust, and…this is the part that was new for me…the division of Czechoslovakia in 1992-3 all were steps that each eliminated another major and distinctive group that increased the cultural diversity  in the world that Czechs live in.

These sociologists’ quantifications help me talk more constructively about Czech national and ethnic identification, and consider performances the intersect with such constructions.  While Czechs are to different degrees responsible for creating the state they live in, it is also….well, a very complicated world out there.

I’m so grateful for these perspective-expanding moments lately.  It’s encouraging to be working with ideas that are coming together.  This last week has seen me working on consolidating and organizing my backlog of audio and video recordings.  Besides being simply a bit of a drudgery, it’s a sort of overwhelming experience to handle all hese records of culture.  There are so many (and in a strange mirror-way so few) directions for my work tied up in all those files.

Running into, and having good conversations with, some old-new and new-old colleagues lately has also been a great encouragement.  It’s good to know that others are working along similar paths.

Ok.  Back to it.  At the suggestion of a professor here, I’m putting an abstract together for the ICTM “music and minorities” study group meeting that will happen here next May.  I have to find a way to encapsulate my thoughts about bluegrass as it plays in Czech ethnic/group identity.  hmm.

Amerika at church

2007-11-4  -  It just doesn’t end, and keeps wrapping around itself.  The issues I’m looking into here just seem to keep coming up.

After the Cirkev Bratrska of Praha 6 morning service this Sunday, Emily and I lunched with some of the young adult crowd, just down Evropská Ulice at the Crocodile baguette shop.  After I finished my soup, and found an open space, I submitted to my music-scholar-ness… and asked the crowd what they thought about the music recording that had been played at “church” during the serving of communion.

Emily and I have talked about how it jars us somehow when Filip, the youthful sound guy in the congregation, plays US contemporary christian music recordings as background music during parts of services. The congregation’s body and worship life are already interestingly multicultural; because of the English proficiency of Czech members, the number of foreign folks who have become involved in the group, and the will of the leadership, there is simultaneous translation of the Czech-language Sunday service into English.  This particular situation is helped by the fact that the congregation doesn’t own it’s own meeting space; we rent and meet in the “kongressový sál” of a 1970s era hotel (the Krystal) which is equipped with headphone outlet boxes at each seat, and an isolated sound booth where the translator does their work.

In the midst of all this Czechness – and in the winter the oppressive indoor radiator heat never lets me forget where I am – it does surprise me to hear such an intensely “American” sound.

(I did some research on the song we heard this week.  Turns out it’s Paul Colman, and…he’s not from the US, but in part Australian/ British.  (He does live in Nashville now, though.)  It was a more standard, recording studio version of the tune behind this performance:

Everyone I have asked from the congregation (I’ve been poking around a bit on this in the past month or so) says that Filip chooses the music himself, apparently governing a lot of important worshipful moments in the communal meeting life of this congregation.  I wanted to know what the Czech folks thought about his choices–in part to help me decide what my personal and professional reactions are.

Around the lunch table the consensus seemed that the music was ok, if a little fast for the liturgical moment of communion … useful data for me, but on the whole a lukewarm engagement with my question.

My friend Irena got things going, responding to the admittedly-partly-present critique in my question: “It was great!”  Seeking support, she interrogated each person around the table, extracting from them a judgement of like/dislike that yielded an almost unanimous “yes” vote.

In reaction to this rally, I think, a few folks chimed in to get more context from me; what did I think about it, why do I ask?  I referred back to my introduction from Irena (she had introduced me as a professional musician who was writing a dissertation on Czech country) and my interest in how “Americanness” works in Czech music cultures.  I said it was jarring for me to hear familiar American sounds in the middle of the Czech-language worship service–maybe because I am so intent on this sort of threshold, the identification and location that attend such decisions about musical performance.

Taking the tack of language and comprehension (a frequent mode of explanation in bluegrass as well), Dalibor and a few others on his side of the table said that they understand the English words well and didn’t find them out of place or distracting–others said that they didn’t understand the words and weren’t disturbed by the style of music…so no big deal…right?

Typing this, though, I realize the root of it: I just don’t like that sort of music.  The mid-nineties-style painstakingly produced soft rock frame, the sculpted,  over-earnest vocals, the performance of faith.  How can this be bad?  It’s NOT, I guess…but I don’t like it, I don’t resonate with it.  This is complicated; I still can’t untangle my aesthetic and ethical concerns and the theological basis that I hope undergirds both.

This talk has given me pause.  A specific pause in which to think about how my personal responses are affecting how I do work on Americanness in Czech musical life.  In this particular case, I had a very different reaction then my Czech fellow-congregants.  This isn’t bad in itself; I’m concerned that my aesthetic response of distaste (“I don’t like CCM”) gave a covert strength to my “threshold-crossing” interculturality response.  (“Hey, it’s wierd that Czechs use this music in their church life.”)

I’m not the only one with actively political agendas here, though.  Some ideas about genre and demographics surfaced when Emily remarked that we were all fairly young folks around the table, and that the CB congregation is much more diverse in age, and perhaps in musical taste, in their ability to worship effectively in response to different musics.  “But!” folks protested, CCM is not the only genre used for background liturgical music.  Although this summer and fall we have only noticed the CCM pieces, apparently Filip draws from an assortment of jazz, classical (“Mozart, etc.”) and other sounds as well.  Irena, glowingly aware of her power (in parts real and perceived) in the small congregation, proudly added that she always gives Filip enthusiastic feedback after a service that included CCM–and says nothing when he uses another sort of recording.

I feel like this is the same standstill I arrive at with bluegrassers.  Somehow these “American” materials and practices come to be just the right thing for many Czech situations.  And it’s hard to get Czech folks to talk about how that Americanness works.  I’ve begun to get some headway in teh bluegrass world on thsi subject, but I think it is harder for the Christian community here to grapple with the cultural as well as spiritual content that Anglo-U.S. Christianity brings here.  Said another way: maybe they don’t want to admit that there are practices that are incorporated into the Christian body here which aren’t as independent of culture/location as people consider them to be.  Hmm.

dílna = the field

10-12-2007 – A self-doubting, Lee-ish suspicion about what I’m about here : “In “fieldworking” I am trying to find and record moments that i can use to argue for my already-formed ideas about what is going on.”

I wasn’t so much trying to foment dissertation-worthy discussion at the “Petr Brandejs Band Fall bluegrass workshop“… but it seemed to happen all on its own. One bit of talking from the weekend was briefly a part of my SEM paper before I had to edit it out:

“Petr Brandejs, banjoist, pedagogue, and one-time president of the Czech bluegrass association, was perturbed when I was telling some other folks at our lunch table that I was writing my dissertation on Czech bluegrass. “It’s AMERICAN bluegrass,” he protested. I posed my typical response to this insistence that the “music itself” is American: the activity is Czech – we were sitting in the middle of a hundred Czech people who were all learning from other Czechs how to perform this music. Conversation stalled….neither of us could really resolve the point, or was willing to concede. I take the standstill as a truce; maybe we are both right…all this activity is somehow both American and Czech.”

It all fits… So much of the weekend in the little town of Malé Svatoňovice was Czech: from the “house of culture” on the square that hosted the big jam on saturday night to the food served at the jidelna (cafeteria) of the local Stredni Odborni Uciliste. (a sort of applied high school where folks train as waiters, hoteliers, mechanics, bodyguards, etc.) …but we were all singing and playing bluegrass.

In the fiddle class I got a sense of more subtle “Americanness” in musicality. (or perhaps it is simply a bit of bluegrass musicality.) Liběna, a student who I have also seen at workshops in Hustopece u Brna, asked Jirka Kralik about some notes that he plays, the “čistě falešní tony.” “Falešní” can mean “fake,” but also “out of tune;” she was asking about dissonance.

*more to follow here – I have recordings from the workshop that I’m still processing.

For now, here’s a preview of the professionally-made video of the workshop’s gala concert on Saturday, Oct 11.