Who could have even thought that the call of the trumpet would be able to gather as much as six hundred thousand people and that a field of tents will emerge on the vacant meadows of Guča, like in some war march? And everybody has forgotten, there is nobody to even mention it, that the entire story started forty nine years ago, in 1960, by a poet, Branko V. Radičević, with the nickname Mačista, whose rhymes and poems made Serbia famous, and particularly his hometown Čačak. Nobody remembers Mač; and it was him and a few of his friends who gathered three or four poor brass bands which were roaming throughout Serbia and were playing at wedding and funeral ceremonies, more hungry than not; he took them to the churchyard of the Church of St. Archangels Michael and Gabriel and had them play there the whole day through, and also in the night, and to do this for three full days.
Coming back to Belgrade, Mač put into his car also the heavy krajputaš (tombstone along the road) from the surroundings of Čačak, the first one which the capital had ever seen, making thus the traditional sculpture become fashionable, and a colored one it was, whilst intellectuals were admiring the holes of the Englishman Henry Moore. Well, it would be nice if anybody among the officials would just mention Mačista, Branko V. Radičević, but this is Serbia: Serbia forgets easily. Anyway, late Mačista can wait to be mentioned.
All hardship and anger, all beauty and sorrow, all joy and music, which are collected throughout the year in Serbia, in the first week of August burst to the sky through the glorious trumpet bells at the Festival in Guča. This is an event which rural Serbia is impatiently waiting to come the entire year. This is when Guča, a small town in the hills, becomes the world capital of the trumpet.
It is not known for sure when and how the trumpets became so rooted in Serbia, which has since ever known mainly gusle ("lahuta"), shepherds flutes, fifes and double-flutes; this probably happened after wars between Serbs and Turks at the end of the 19th century, when the trumpeters accompanying squads and regiment returned to their villages, bringing with them the trumpets, scratched, battered, dented, and often pierced with bullets, which they had been using to launch a storm and played the taps. The wars at the end of the new century have significantly increased the numbers of not only the dead ones, but also of trumpets. This is why their sound is mostly reminding of warfare, like a call for victory or death – the thin brass, filled with the melancholy veil of sunset bugle tunes.
They brought them to their dreary villages like precious things, carefully packed into cloth and cases made of waxed tent pieces. Unpacked and carefully polished, they would glitter in the poverty of poor huts, like a golden horn. They were passionately taking care of them, sometimes at sunset they would play the folk round-dance or the funeral march, until they became true virtuosos equal to, if not even better than, Mexican mariachis. They made their instruments reach even the highest, almost impossible tones, but they were also capable of making their trumpets whisper gentle lullabies to the ears of the debauchee. And just like the plum "madžarka" has found in this part of Serbia the most suitable ground for its juices, so the trumpet – until then unknown to Serbian musicians – found its soil here. It was demonstrated that no musical instrument, not even the violin for which the Gypsies were experts, can better express the essence of the spirit of this people. Sometimes through a scream, often through tears, sobs or hoarse laughter, and most often through frenzy rhythms of folk dance, full with unbridled joy.
And now, from all parts of Serbia people are coming, everyone is gathering in Guča. Those who have just recently blown into the trumpet's mouthpiece, and those who made their living on playing music at weddings, funerals, fairs and faraway pubs. This mass included all kinds of people; those in rural clothes and Serbian opanak (Serb moccasin shoe) with horns, with šajkača (Serb cap) on their heads, and the others, who have already gained a name and put on silk shirts of bright colors and broad sleeves, and patent-leather shoes. Here came ragged orchestras without sharp ears or any talent for music, well trained ensembles which already were performing on television and were having their roles in films, Gypsy orchestras from the Romanian and Bulgarian borders and bands with the names of awards written on their drums with gold-plated cymbals – even an ensemble of the American marines! To Guča flocked many national and foreign film and television reporters to shoot with their cameras yet one more completely unpredictable soars of the Serb spirit. Already on the first night the citizens of the trumpet capital were entangling with their tongues and were walking among the tables in the canvases forming eight-like circles, drunk with the magnificent sound and drinks which were unsparingly poured at every step. Most numerous among them were those who came from nearby towns and from Belgrade, and quite a number of them came even from Europe and America, wanting to search for a week for their forgotten roots. This is the only place where it is possible that bow-ties meet with šajkača, young beauties with famous, drunken old men, ladies dressed in latest Paris fashion attire and peasant women with heads covered with scarves – in the tents which smelled after brandy, roast meat and cigarette smoke, a smell which was simply pouring out from them. Each tent became an improvised restaurant with diverse chairs and tables put together and covered with tablecloths, in which two or three brass bands were alternating and competing. Before dawn, with their eyes popped, they would turn their trumpets face to face, throwing the sound like grenade launchers, blowing out all their accumulated energy and anger, competing to overpower one another and get the other away from the site. Beauties were climbing the tables and dancing on them (they were called table-girls), the man were feeling sorrowful love and untying their ties and unbuttoning their belts beneath their swollen bellies. Namely, nothing fits or intermingles so well like the plum brandy from this region and the music played by Dragačevo trumpeters. Day and night around the canvases piglets and lambs on roast-spit were turned over the fire , and in few places also huge oxen, from which the skillful masters where cutting off the roasted layer while the new one was being roasted, and were selling the still hot slices of beef in split flat bread.
As regards this year's Guča two things struck me. First, there was no case of swine flu, which is threatening the planet, and there are two reasons to this – first of all, because the guests ate all available pork meat, making it impossible for the virus to settle in it, and it was finally proven that this virus dies when getting one meter and seventy five centimeters near to the person who drank three liters of wine or a pack of bear. This is also how the best anti-flu serum was found by accident. The second thing which amazed me for an unknown number of times, are the drunken Slovenes who prove that there is nothing in the European Union we should be looking for, because if it were nice there, they would not be coming to us to Guča to enjoy themselves under the slogan "Life is only one"! How they feel there is best seen from the way in which they drink: they get drunk in a darkish and depressive manner, using anything at hand, only to get away from the way in which they live their lives.
What in Guča is completely illogical is the meal prepared in big clay pots, called "the cabbage for the wedding feast". Sour cabbage in August, this really puzzles me! Is it the mouldy cabbage left-over from the winter times, or was the cabbage brought to sour taste by an instant procedure – this will remain a secret forever. It is really perverse to eat it in the midst of the summer.
I also noticed that Guča, despite its popularity, is slowly but surely losing its original soul, getting nearer to American Woodstock or Novi Sad Exit. Its future disaster began when the saxophone, which was an unknown instrument in Serbian folk music until then, was introduced into the bands; it continued with the ever more present keyboards. To complete this whole situation, missing are only organs and a woman harp player with šajkača. And something else: the repertoire is more and more including evergreen music from the wide world from My Way, to Flight of the Condor – like, we can do this as well. For the next year Guča announced a competition for the first trumpet of the world. What a pity that Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davies died – they would come for sure to compete with the Salijevićs.
And just like the piglet was asking whether there is life after St. Georges Day, we are asking ourselves, is one there after Guča?
Momo KAPOR, writer and painter
NIN, Belgrade, 20 August 2009.