Long Lost Music with Peter Webb

There must be a law in Krakow against blasting pre-recorded music on cafe terraces. It's a welcome change from the Ottawa norm. In its place are a myriad of street musicians who circle the Rynek Glowny (Old Town Square) playing to whoever will listen at the numerous sidewalk restaurants and bars lining the square's perimeter.

The instrumentation varies: guitars, violins, and the occasional flute.
But the ever-present staple of Polish street music is the accordion.

Accordions come in all shapes and sizes here, and their players perform solo, in duos, even in trios. Along with the traditional Polish tunes you can hear adaptations of piano music by Bach,Liszt or (Poland's own) Chopin performed expertly, often at breakneck speed.

If this sounds a bit hokey, it's worth remembering the particular importance of traditional culture in Poland, of which music is a big part. It's been fewer than two decades since Poland finally became truly independent after the fall of communism, and for the first era in many the Polish people have been free to assert their own identities. No longer do Hitler and Stalin pull at Poland's wings like dogs at a wild bird. No longer does Krakow's notorious communist-era steel mill, on the south bank of the Vistula, spew pollution in the air. No longer does acid rain turn centuries-old stone buildings into blackened, crumbling shadows of faded grandeur.

Despite an overall emphasis on Polish music in Krakow, there's plenty of other music to be heard. In the massive church of St. Paul and St. Peter, just north of the Rynek Glowny, I heard a string quintet play Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." It was particularly poignant to hear such beauty, created by an Austrian, being revived in a town that once shivered beneath the hatred of another Austrian born a century or so later, Adolph Hitler.

Today, for the most part, today Poland's tragic history remains largely in the background, subsumed in the waves of joyful tourists and working Poles who course through the old town. But to say the memory of tragedy is subdued is not to say it is gone altogether, which brings me to my favorite musical experience of all.

Every hour on the hour a lone trumpeter stands atop the taller of the two towers of the majestic Kosciol Mariacki (St. Mary's Church) in the centre of the Rynek Glowny. As the crowds mill below the trumpeter plays a mournful hejnal melody. At a particular point in the tune the trumpeter abruptly stops. He does this in commemoration of another trumpeter who long ago, in the 13th century, stood atop the same tower and played the melody as a warning against the impending Tatar invasions from the east. Legend has it that a Tatar arrow suddenly hit the trumpeter in the throat, silencing him and his tune forever.

Today the trumpeter reprises that same tune. It's both a commemoration of the distant past, and a poignant reminder of a past that is much, much closer. Each hour, as the tune abruptly ends, the silence creeps out over the square and down over the buildings into the nearby suburb of Kazimierz, where the Jews who once populated Josepha and Jakoba Streets no longer sing.
--PW in Krakow

ISSN 1710-6788
Published by: be smith designs
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