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Written in fRoots issue 346, 2012


VARIOUS ARTISTS
Czech Republic – Music From Walachia, Hornácko and Kopanice
Ocora Radio France C 600024 (2011)

Though little of it shows up in CD awards lists, there’s a lot of traditional music still going on around Europe and having a social value, even while all around it is bathed in the homogenised soup of ‘popular’ X-Factor culture.
     In the Czech Republic, for example, there’s still village music. It’s maintained now more by vocal and instrumental groups than the family and village oral tradition of preceding generations but still has a lot to offer musically and in providing the sense of community and human relatedness that so many people find themselves craving in our mass-culture world.
     The recordings on this honouringly well-packaged release from the always interesting Ocora Radio France label aren’t historical gleanings from the archives; they were made in 2010.
     “In the Czech Republic folk music is pursued more or less in every region”, says the trilingual booklet. This release concentrates on the music in republic’s mountainous Wallachia region. Music doesn’t observe national boundaries, and key to the traditional musics of central Europe is its mountain ranges. Vlach shepherds migrated throughout the Carpathians, between the Wallachia at the eastern end of the Carpathians in southern Romania to this other one at their western extremity in southern Moravia, giving their name to both.
     There’s a continuum between this Wallachian music and that of the neighbouring Carpathian parts of Slovakia and southernmost Poland, including a tendency to the natural-scale-influenced augmented fourth, which gives a striking, suspended feeling to many of the melodies. Music of strong male and female solo and ensemble voices, a wide range of instruments including single, double and natural-scale no-hole whistles, bagpipes, two-string bass, fiddle, cimbalom, jew’s-harp and reed shawm, it makes a good, ear-refreshing and varied listen.

     www.kiosque.radiofrance.fr


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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