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

4 Village on Stage

4 Village on Stage Some words are invested with particular power. “Village” is one such word. On the one hand, a village is conceived of as a major accomplishment of civilization. One might reasonably expect to find all that is necessary for human life and socialization within a village. The words “country,” “hills,” “outback,” and “mountains” evoke isolation and removal, but “village” suggests commerce, the exchange of ideas, a place to seek a mate, and perhaps even a place to experience good music. All but the most determined recluse will venture to the village on occasion to fulfill social and material needs. On the other hand, a village does not offer the amenities of a town, has none of the urban intensity of a city, and is hardly evocative of sophistication or cosmopolitanism. We prefer the village doctor for some ailments, but we rush to the big city hospital for others. Stepping over the village drunk, switching to the other side of the street to avoid the village idiot, and averting one’s gaze from the beckoning of the village harlot, we note that the village is pure, good, an extension of all the fine things we hope for in 124 Making Music in the Polish Tatras family life. As Hillary Clinton (1996) famously declared, “It takes a village” (to raise a child . . . to heal a society). The concept of “village” has survived modernism and postmodernism as a locus of powerful longing. The village has become a metaphor for goodness and purity, the place where tradition (another evocative and problematic concept) thrives. Of course villages are concrete realities; much of my fieldwork in Podhale was in villages: Poronin, Kościelisko, Małe Ciche, and so on, but I also spent a fair amount of time in towns: Zakopane and Nowy Targ, in particular. In the course of the histories reviewed in the previous two chapters, Zakopane grew from a wieś (village) into a miasto (town, city), an important and clear distinction in Poland. In America , distinctions between hamlet, village, town, and city are less clearly defined, and the term “village” is more evocative than it is descriptive. Is Greenwich Village, New York, a village in any way other than name? And if yes, how much of that is owing to the name itself? Naming has power, after all. And if the name “village” cannot take Greenwich Village out of the city, it can at least dull the sharp edges of urbanization with its power to evoke nostalgia, to suggest something that isn’t, to challenge the pervasiveness of modernity. With Górale ethnicity and muzyka Podhala firmly established by the mid-twentieth century, the play of music-culture within and outside Podhale exploded with adaptations to changing socioeconomic and political realities in the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Playing with the concept of “village” in a number of ways, the remainder of this book considers muzyka Podhala in the ethnographic present, as I have experienced it since 1989. What happens when musical practices associated with Podhalan villages are brought to festival stages? As I mentioned in chapter 1, I first interpreted such adaptations as abominations, pale reflections of “true” village life. Now I understand the festival stage to be a continuation of the very phenomena that helped shape Górale as an ethnicity and helped define muzyka Podhala. Festivals, Folklore, Fakelore, and zespoły At the end of chapter 1 I described some of my experiences during the very first trip I made to a Podhalan village, the village of Poronin .1 I had traveled to witness a folk music and dance festival at Village on Stage 125 the invitation of Polish ethnomusicologist Aleksandra SzurmiakBogucka . The festival was instructive; Szurmiak-Bogucka was able to instruct me in the different music and dance genres, and to point out regional variances between performance troupes, and so forth. Yet, at that time in 1992, I was not prepared to accept tourist festival performances as an integral part of present-day musicculture in the Tatras. The true village, I felt, was not onstage but rather in the back regions, the back yards, the basement rooms of those impressive log homes that lined the village streets and fueled my orientalist imagination. I had seen stage shows in Chicago; now I was in a real village. Show me the peasants! When, in the...