Balkan brass music can never get better than Guča

Issue 59-60, August-September 2011

by Bozhidara Georgieva; photography by Anthony Georgieff

"Tra-ta-ta-ta! Tra-ta-tata!" The trumpet solo sweeps over the river valley shrouded in morning mist, bounces off the nearby mountain slopes, and rebounds over the sleeping town. The sound wakes up some of the people in the houses and tents. They start to stir. "What's the time, mate?" "It's seven o'clock; too early." People pull the blankets over their heads, returning to sleep. For some minutes, the early-rising trumpeter proceeds with his morning concert, then tucks away his instrument and goes God knows where.

This is how the mornings start in Guča, near Čačak, in those glorious days in August when the 3,000 or so inhabitants of this Serbian village, plus several thousand participants and spectators gather for Sabor Trubača, or the Trumpet Festival.

The Guča Festival was born in 1961 as a modest competition between four village brass bands. For a decade it was a local affair, but eventually grew to become an event on a Serbian national scale.

Today the Guča Festival lasts a week. It has been dubbed Serbia's SuperBrand, and foreign media refer to it promisingly as "cacophony," "Serbian Woodstock" and the "wildest music festival in the world." Well, it's all true.

The music that for a week floats above the streets of Guča is of the style that, in the 1990s, became popular in the West owing to Goran Bregović and Emir Kusturica. It saw the light during the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans in 1804-1813. The young Serbian army was made up of men who had come together from around the Western Balkans. The soldiers' entire daily military regime (the wake-up hours, the calls for assembly, attack, retreat and so on) was regulated by melodies played on an unfamiliar musical instrument – the trumpet. The trumpet was used not only to transmit orders, but during the hours of rest listeners gathered around every military trumpeter, asking him to play folk songs from the corner of the land they had come from. The musicians obliged.