Serb Music Fest Doesn’t Trumpet the Brass Ring

The smells at the legendary Guca brass band festival reach visitors long before the music: smoke from open fires, roasting piglets, seared lamb and stewed cabbage.

“It smells of Serbia,” said Nemnja Nikolic, 20, a university student who drove four hours from the Yugoslav capital to hear the music. “In Belgrade, you don’t smell Serbia. This is the real Serbia.”

Tens of thousands of people of every age mill in the broad streets of this small town in central Serbia whose 42-year-old annual trumpet festival recalls a time before Yugoslavia’s dominant republic was bankrupted by wars and humiliated internationally.

This year’s crowd provides a barometer of Serbia’s mood before next month’s presidential election and at a time when the republic’s future seems increasingly uncertain.

“We are a nation that would spend its last 20 dinars [about 30 cents] to hear a Gypsy band,” said Dragan Dzukljev, 45, who works in marketing. “So this festival is a valve for us. It is psychological food.”

His worried face suggests how much he is in need of such nourishment. Like many people here--perhaps including those rendered incoherent by the plum brandy sold in shot glasses on the street--he is depressed and deeply worried about the country’s economy and politics.

Instead of seeing times improve since the ouster of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000, many Serbs say their buying power has eroded. The economy’s slide has come against a political backdrop of bitter infighting among the 18 parties sharing power in Serbia.

“We live worse and worse as time passes. The politicians who came two years ago made big promises. We expected we would have better lives. There would be foreign investment. But all they have done is to sell everything for peanuts,” Dzukljev said bitterly.

He was referring to the federal government’s first efforts at privatization, which netted the equivalent of $180 million this year.

Even the many young people at the festival have a sense of diminished possibilities.

“People come here to escape their hard lives, but I have the feeling people are less joyful than last year,” said Nenad Stevanovic, 19, whose mother is from Guca and who has come to the festival ever since he could walk.

“There are fewer brass bands, and fewer people are jumping with joy in the streets,” said Stevanovic, who hopes to become a policeman.

In many ways, the three days at Guca are the archetypal Serbian street party. The food, the drinks and above all the music--a mix of fast-paced trumpet and French horn and the periodic lilt of a Gypsy melody--are ingrained deep in the Serbian soul.

For three days in August, more than 100,000 people throng Guca’s streets to hear brass band music in this bucolic town tucked among rolling green hills in the country’s largest raspberry-growing region.

As musicians wander through the crowds, people form the dance equivalent of pickup basketball. A group of four or five revelers will offer 400 dinars (about $6.50) for a song. As the band strikes up, often in the middle of the street, people begin to dance. Soon, another spender stuffs bills into the bandleader’s trumpet, and a second song billows forth.

The music is fast, loud--even deafening. Often, two bands play in tandem at the same cafe, and on a single street it’s not uncommon to hear five or six bands play at the same time. Most bands consist of about a dozen instruments, including at least three trumpets, three French horns, a trombone, a cornet or two, and an accordion.

Some bands are made up of ethnic Serb musicians, while other bands have Gypsy musicians. The two do not mix, but the listeners have equal affection for both.

At the end of the festival is a competition, and the best bands and trumpeters win a prize. Although little else rewards minorities in this ethnically divided country, the prize here often goes to Gypsy bands, as it did this year.

With the contentious Serbian presidential election looming, the people dancing in the streets, working their way through vast quantities of sliced roasted piglet and earthenware bowls of greasy cabbage, have the desperate gaiety of those who want to escape. There is even Serbo-Croatian shorthand for it: Obeznaniti se, roughly translated as “to wipe out all consciousness of daily life, to forget oneself.”

“Guca is the three days a year when Serbs enjoy themselves,” said Miroslav Prokopijevic, who was born near Guca and is an economist at the Institute for European Studies, a research organization in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital. “But it’s not the real face of Serbia. People expected huge improvements after Milosevic, but that hope faded away in a few months, and now people aren’t just disappointed--they are worried about what’s going to happen.”

Many people said they either don’t know whom they will vote for or, more likely, won’t bother to vote because they doubt it will make any difference.

Even among those who said their own lives, though straitened, were tolerable, a sense of precariousness prevailed. And it fueled a rising resentment toward what they view as arrogant pressure from Western governments, notably the United States.

The signal was clear: Politicians who bow to the West risk losing popular support.

“Honestly, I think we lived a better life before the transition. We were not free then, but our standard of living was higher. We are selling ourselves to the West,” said Milan Janic, 20, a student from Belgrade.

Yugoslavia, which was crushed by a North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in 1999 in retaliation for Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s Kosovo province, has officially allied itself with the United States. Since then, the U.S. has used the threat of withholding foreign aid to force Yugoslavia to hand over alleged war criminals to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague.

Such threats are difficult to ignore in a country that was economically devastated at the end of Milosevic’s rule and in desperate need of both the aid from the United States as well as loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which depend on U.S. approval.

Many Serbs have a love-hate relationship with the West. They deeply resent being in a subservient position, but many also hope that either they or their children will find jobs in Western Europe.

“For more than 10 years, we have all experienced a lot of hardship,” said Novka Ilic, 46, a radio journalist at a station in the nearby small city of Uzice, who hopes that her high school-age daughter will find work outside Serbia. “Personally, I’m very disappointed.

“If you ask about freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, it’s better, but everything else is worse. People are frightened. They don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

As for the festival, even though it is harder for her to afford than in past years, she finds solace in being here.

“The trumpet is a very traditional instrument,” Ilic said. “The trumpet is for when a child is born, when you are getting married. When there is a death and when there is a birth; it is the music both for sorrow and for joy.”

The familiarity of the music seems to provide hope at a time when there are few encouraging signs.

“The trumpet raises your spirits. For a while, it was neglected, but now it’s coming back,” she said.