Svitanya Eastern European Women's Vocal Ensemble - October 22, 2011

How to review a workshop and concert whose delightful music was not Western?  With enthusiasm and very little technical analysis.  Suffice to say that the typical note intervals are seconds instead of thirds, and the meter is 7/8, not 4/4 for example.  Those of us who sing in church choirs love those easy and harmonic thirds, and they were almost completely absent that day. With this concert a door opened into a completely new musical world for me.

Svitanya is a vocal group from Philadelphia with marvelously talented women of a range of ages who also play instruments such as the Slavic bagpipe (only one drone), balalaika, accordion, a drum called a dumbek, a guitar-like instrument called a tambura, violin, and tambourine.  The songs they sang--the vast majority of which were love songs--were sung in Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Greek, Russian, Polish, Albania, Croatian, Macedonian, and Armenian.  The 15 of us who attended the very participatory afternoon workshop had a head start on these languages, since in an hour we learned two songs, a Croatian song called "Moj Dragane" and a Bulgarian song called "Sadi Moma", both of which we sang in two parts, and then picked up a dance as well.  It was great fun all around.

That evening a good-sized crowd was enchanted by the authentic costumes and instruments as well as the songs, which singers introduced so that we could understand the great varieties of ways to be happy or unhappy in love.  Most were true country folk songs, but a few were contemporary urban variations.  At the end of the concert the workshop participants joined the singers in song and dance, winding up and down the church aisles.  It was a nice ending to a fascinating introduction to Slavic music.