pleiades: 4/27/08

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Art/Muzike

Switzerland and the Balkans

Thomas Burkhalter *
05.05.2007
Source: http://www.norient.com

New Networks for a New Local Music

A plea for more intercultural musical exchanges between Switzerland and the Balkans, presented at the International Symposium «Urban Music in the Balkans» in Tirana 2006.

When it comes to music from the Balkans, most of the concert organisers, music journalists and audiences in Switzerland ask for musical «diversity». They select certain musicians and ensembles, which they believe to be traditional. Or they jump on the latest trends in club culture, and book DJ’s and producers who melt electronic beats with «traditional» Balkan melodies and instruments. The losers are – as elsewhere in the world of music - the musicians and composers who try to create more complex, contemporary, well developed musical languages. And: The musicians who do not know how to sell themselves, how to network successfully, how to contact foreign arts councils.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Art/Muzike

The International symposium “Urban Music of the Balkans“ The Documentation and Communication Center for Regional Music in Durres (Albania), September 28-October 1, 2006

Selena Rakočević
October 21, 2006.
Source: New Sound at www.newsound.org.yu

In the process of intense “Europeanisation”, which for the citizens of southeastern Europe has in recent years gone beyond mere current politics, taking the shape of a distinct struggle for a “better life”, whose outcome is within reach and which, as was formulated in one of the oft repeated phrases, “can and should be led by each one of us”, the idea of the Balkans as a unique cultural area has attained a new vigor. After the winds of war at the end of the 20th century, and in spite of the still unresolved Kosovo issue, the Balkans as a region in which models of multicultural social communities have existed for centuries, has once again become a metaphorical (yet also real) area which has something to offer to Europe and the world.

A Living Metaphor

Culture is not static, culture is a living metaphor, culture changes, culture transforms. We should think about ourselves not simply as memes replicators of a given culture, we are the cultural agents of change. We are not some repository vessels of dusty cultural archeology; we are creators, artists, culture makers and transformers.

Nowadays, the Albanian culture is in complete disarray, in a total chaos. It is waiting for us to give it a new life, and draw again from its infinite complexity and the beauty therein. What would emerge, it should not be a recapitulation of the past, and it should not be a mere identity that has been recovered. What emerges, it should be a awareness of something new, an advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development, which can be called a new Albanian Civilization.

The eXodus, the archetype of liberation and freedom, remains the spiritual landscape, the essence of our times. Although freedom today has become a sort of escapism, myriads of mental arcade games of escapism from the real world, the meaning of true freedom is being connected to the reality of freedom. We have to escape from the narrow constriction of the dusty cultural memes. Now, more then ever, we have a golden opportunity, - a wide-opened window, - to connect us with this reality of freedom. Time should not pass us by; we should be the time travelers.