When I was kindly asked to write something about Dragačevo, that is about the Trumpeters Festival (but is this not one and the same!), this caught me by surprise, because this would be like somebody would be asking me to write a love letter! However, there is some logic to it. Dragačevo, Guča, Festival, song and rhythm – these are old loves of mine. When one writes of love, one chooses words which shall be sufficiently nice to make forget the everyday life, to fall into something which resembles sleep, and the word "but" is avoided, because nothing may spoil the joy of the spirit of the festival.
By nature, human beings go back to what they love... One in love with the Festival is lucky to be able to have it every year, lucky to be hardly waiting for it to come each year, and to be able to forget – surrounded by the celebration and the cannonade of sounds - that he is one year older. And so every year there is a washed, smiling and thundering trešteća Guča waiting for him, which gives him sweet tiredness, makes his voice hoarse, breaks up hangovers with reveille songs, makes him feel joyful and spoils him with happiness.
Spending time in stiffling studios in which music is recorded, chewing the hardships of my work, restless, I often recall Guča and its sound coming from the earliest beginnings. This is when I understand how much I belong to this, where I come from, and where I am going to be. In the rare moments of seeming peace I do not even try to find the sound from Guča, it comes by itself like a feature of one people. The Festival in Guča is the mark of Dragačevo and the ring for our wedding with the trumpet. The trumpet in Dragačevo does never play a "wrong tune", because the dignity of the people imposes rules of conduct for the sound, which is in three days heating up to that "Promethean moment", when the magnificent moment of joint playing of the song ''Sa Ovčara i Kablara'' takes the soil from beneath our feet, ignites the blood in our veins and makes our fists clutch in the glory of our love for freedom.