FROM TRUMPETS TO JAZZ There’s always a good time to be had in Serbia, with year-round music enabling everyone to find something they like, but this August we’re picking three festivals that you simply mustn’t miss 1 st to 4 th August In terms of music, the medie- AUGUST’S MUSICAL MAGIC
“It’s as if the people have been caught by a big wave that carries everyone until the Assembly ends. It’s all in the trumpet, because its sound evokes such feelings. The trumpet represents many things in Serbia. People perceive it as some- thing that’s ours and has always be- longed to us. It has been part of the Serbian nation in various situations throughout history, which is probably why the trumpet is seen as a symbol of both joy and sadness, of victory and defeat. The trumpet is inextri- cably linked to something that lies deep in the mentality of our people. There is something in the frequency of the trumpet sound, in our melo- dies, in our people. Something that causes the heart to race, raising adren- aline, awakening and moving,”says Petrović. The Dragačevo Assembly of Trumpeters, also known as Guča Trumpet Festival, is a traditional event and a unique review of trum- peters that’s held each August in the small Western Serbian town of Dragačevo. It is thanks to this event that Guča has gained worldwide re- pute as the site of the world’s largest festival of trumpet music. Nobody knows the source of Guča’s magic, but everyone is very familiar with the feel- ing of listening to 200 trumpets play the Assembly’s anthem, From Ovčar and Kablar. It’s then that the spine tingles and the hair rises. It is said that experiencing it just once leaves you forever infected by the sound of the trumpet. Be there from 1 st to 4 th August...
val Serbian nation was recognised for the bagpipes and the flute, but it is the sound of the trumpet that has celebrated the vivacious Serbian soul around the world. When foreign- ers say that they feel moved by the sound of the trumpet, and when you see people from all over the world, eyes closed, arms raised high, en- joying the sounds of the orchestra, you have to wonder what’s so mag- ical about that sound. This question has as many an- swers as there are people who’ve attended the ‘Assembly’ in Guča. One possible answer was provided by writer and painter Momo Kapor, who once wrote, in his own unique way, among other things, that: “All the anguish and rage, all the beauty and sadness, all the joy and music that accumulates over the course of a year in Serbia, bursts into the sky in the first week of August, through the glistening pipes of the trumpets at the Assembly in Guča. This is an event that Serbia has spent the whole year awaiting... It turns out that no musical instrument, not even the vi- olin, can better express the essence of the being of this nation. Sometimes through a shriek, often through tears, sobbing or snickering, and most of- ten through the unrestrained beats of folk Kolo, packed with unbridled joy.” Dejan Petrović, who has won every winnable thing at the Assem- bly with his Big Band, once said that Guča is a phenomenon “because of the energy that everyone feels”.
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