The Guča Trumpet Festival is a yearly Balkan Brass band festival which takes place in the provincial town of Guča, Serbia. It's entirely free to attend, and a festival promoter estimates that 900,000 people (more realistically 600,000) come to the town of 2000 every year to partake in one of the largest musical parties in Europe, and certainly the largest of its kind. Groups from all over Serbia, and from all over the world, travel to compete, with no monetary prize in sight - only the fame that comes with winning the Golden Trumpet. In the documentary above, it's asserted numerous times that winning at the festival (and even placing well) can make an entire band's career. The documentary follows the life of one trumpet player, then the entire band, as they make their way to the festival, rehearsing in an impoverished town. For a brass group at the festival, the documentary notes that this group is particularly inclusive - the tubist is blind, the group has the only woman competing in the entire festival, and the bandmembers comment that they're a perfect mix of cultures, races, and different experiences to make their fantastic music. While the band doesn't win the Golden Trumpet, their tuba player is recognized as the best at the festival, which is a large victory for the ensemble which hadn't won any awards previously.
It's interesting to hear the difference in musical culture - none of these players can read music, and few of them have studied music formally, instead opting to learn from ear and 'by heart.' The brass playing certainly doesn't fit the orchestral model of the West, but it has its own energy and power which draws people from all around the world to the sound.
The competition itself has four parts - the elimination heats in competitions before the festival, the Friday opening concerts, Saturday night parties, and Sunday's competition for prizes and recognition.
It was founded in 1961. A more in-depth history of the festival can be found on the Wikipedia page, and from numerous official and unofficial websites and articles across the net.
This post is a little more emotional than any of my other blogs. As I finish this semester, the last bits of coursework of my Master's degree stretching out before me, I've got a lot of feelings going around. Putting it frankly, 2019 and 2020 have been ridiculous years. My dad was suffering all of Spring 2019 and died last April, and this March we saw the beginning of the US wave of a global pandemic. I know we all have our struggles and face hardships, but sometimes I don't know how I've been able to do it. I'm just glad that I have. I was diagnosed with depression in 2014, and correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2 sometime in 2016. Getting my undergrad and first grad degrees have without a doubt been the toughest years of my life, and it's hard not to reflect on all that as this degree is coming to a close. I've learned a lot about being a musician, being a decent human, and just kind of life over the past 5 years at Iowa. It's bee
Above is a recording of Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra playing two of their classics, Bella Ciao and Kalashnikov at the 2012 Sziget (Island) festival in Budapest, Hungary. Goran Bregovic, born in 1950, is a Yugoslavian musician with many credits to his name. He's recorded and performed with a number of ensembles, such as his above Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, as well as Kodeksi and Jutro, two bands he participated in during his youth in Naples and Sarajevo. Bijelo Dugme was his main musical gig for a while, but I have him on Trubatalk here because of his involvement with Emir Kusturica on the 1995 film Underground , winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and because he has a massive output of Balkan Brass music deep in the Youtube algorithm. While this sits somewhat off the beaten path of Balkan Brass, I cannot recommend Underground enough. Make sure you're ready to watch it, and do your reading on it beforehand - it's a fairly dark
After digging through older blogs, I've located a few pieces that I want to highlight as some of my favorites. Tomasi's Fanfares Liturgiques features a distinctly 20th-century sound, skirting around atonality and flirting with it quite heavily. However, this isn't in the 12-tone or serialist style, instead being its own impressionist or expressive piece. Anthony DiLorenzo's Fire Dance for Brass Quintet is a fantastically energetic piece, sitting well into the programmatic side of music. It wouldn't be a far leap to imagine this in any movie soundtrack. The Seraph Brass has long been a favorite ensemble of mine, and paired with Jan Bach, one of my favorite composers for brass, you have a winning combination to my ears! (Adding Jeff Luke's arrangement of Hungarian Dance no. 2 for fun.)
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