Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians

7 Back to the Village

7 Back to the Village About 1:30 A.M., 16 January 1995, on Gubałówka Mountain above Zakopane. For two consecutive nights I have been at the restaurant on this mountain ridge documenting the wedding of Katarzyna Słodyczka and Adam Lassak. This is a traditional Górale-style wedding complete with musicians to accompany all aspects of the ritual. The festivities have been blessed with crisp, cold weather and deep snow, brightened by the sun during the day and the full moon at night. Several horsedrawn sleighs taxied the wedding party, including musicians, between the chapel and banquet hall. A perfect winter wedding in the Tatras. On this, the second night of the wedding festivities, I have videotaped some exceptionally energetic dancing po góralsku by a man who appears to be in his late twenties. As I prepare to leave the party I compliment the gentleman on his dancing and ask him where he gained his skill, expecting a reference to deep family roots in Górale tradition or to a father or grandfather who loved to dance. I am caught off guard, however, when instead he refers me to a zespół (song and dance troupe) named after Klimens Bachleda. There I can learn everything about Górale dance, he informs me. 218 Making Music in the Polish Tatras Weddings and Funerals One reason that I remember this brief encounter with Jan Gutt, the skilled dancer in the Górale tradition, is the way he directed my attention away from the nostalgic and toward the obvious with a simple reference to a zespół, a song and dance troupe. He reminded me that while weddings may bring one back to the village —off the festival stage, away from “worldbeat” fusions, out of the tourist restaurant—one carries a bit of the festival, the experience with the world encouraged by fusions, and some notions of service and entertainment perfected in restaurants back into that village. One always brings souvenirs of one’s travels home to the village. Folklore festivals return to the village in the form of the song and dance troupes that taught the generation now being married how to dance po góralsku. Muzyka Podhala and dance po góralsku mark the wedding as Górale, but most of the time on the dance floor is given over to more cosmopolitan dances such as foxtrots (United States), tangos (Argentina), polkas (Czech Republic), and waltzes (Austria). Finally, restaurant culture finds its way into weddings as they move out of the home and into public spaces, such as the wedding considered in detail below, which happened to take place in a tourist restaurant. I may have been blinded by nostalgia, and nostalgia is an important player at weddings and other village rituals, but Jan Gutt reminded me that nostalgia requires a modern world in which to reside. That mid-January wedding was a nostalgic event in many ways: the bride, groom, and their parties wore traditional Górale costumes , as did many of the guests; Górale musicians were on hand to accompany every event in the wedding sequence; fine horses with specially adorned harnesses drew sleighs over the packed, deep snow. In one sense this wedding was a conscious nostalgic act reminiscent of (imagined) weddings of a bygone era. But in another sense this was a thoroughly modern affair that drew on the past for symbolic power and relied on the present to make it all happen. The same musicians who accompanied the bridal party in their own horse-drawn sleigh as they traveled between chapel and banquet hall later played into microphones to ensure they would be heard for the dances. During a section of the ceremony when guests present the newlyweds with gifts, traditional items like bread and vodka were exchanged, as was an automatic electric laundry machine. In the evenings the horse-drawn sleighs were replaced by Back to the Village 219 automobiles. Future nostalgic trips back to this wedding were guaranteed by the smattering of video and still cameras at every turn. The archaic and the modern mixed freely. The context—ancient and modern props—repeated in the content . Yes, fine góralski dancing took place at this wedding just as I imagine it did at the weddings of this young couple’s grandparents, but we also danced the same cosmopolitan couples’ dances found around the European inflected world. And...