The Klezmer Orchestra of the Sejny Theatre has already been playing for over twenty years. And only now comes the time for their first original album [ZD1] . Earlier recordings they produced with their Masters. Why so late, and in spite of the encouragement of their audiences and publishers? They did not want to, shrugging their shoulders at market laws, they had more important things to do ... They evaded the issue of the final work, one that would finalize the process of creation and research, always the most important features of their work. Instead of encouraging their fans to buy records, they preferred to invite them to musical feasts of song and dance or jam sessions after concerts; they preferred to build a space of an interpersonal meeting or to journey with the living music to places where it was welcome. You didn’t need to convince them much and they would agree to play in a small synagogue or a small village community centre in the opposite corner of Poland. And it all started with the wedding music to the performance of Szymon Anski’s Dybbuk. And then they played at real weddings, including the tzaddik of Bobowa, at the Jubilee of the Sejny Hospital and on the platform of the railway station in Suwałki at the farewell of the rabbi and cantor Max Furmanski, born before the war in Sejny. It happened that they played in front of an audience of several thousand in the Great Synagogue of Budapest or in Szeroka Street, at the opening the final concert of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. With Mikołaj Trzaska they recorded the score to The Volhynia. The greatest musicians from around the world played with them. The music written of them by eminent composers of contemporary music premièred in the rooms of the Sejny Jazz Cooperative. Starting from New Orleans jazz to minimalism and experimental music.
The musicians include members of different generations, including those that can hardly be seen from behind a sax to those with greying beards. Each with a spark of genius. Some remain here, some leave into the world, replaced with the generation which comes after them. The great carmen perpetuum of Wojciech Szroeder and his band. Telling its story could have taken one whole night, starting from places and people, through a sketch of a portrait of the orchestra conductor, musicians, a touch of theatre, work ethos, remembrance, masters, and eventually the very sound of music. And thus, spinning the tale of the Orchestra, one should not limit the tale to music alone, though it is love to it that lies at the foundation of all the rest.
THE VENUE
From the moment when still called the Sejny Theater, they arrived in the Kazimierz quarter of Krakow to stage the Dybbuk and improvised a night jam session at "The Austeria" together with David Krakauer, you could hear the Orchestra playing in all sorts of venues and situations. Their real cradle is still the White Synagogue of Sejny, a miraculous survivor of the Holocaust. The Germans made it into a garage for fire brigade cars, and then, in communist Poland, it was transformed into a fertilizer warehouse. Desacralized, it revived as a venue for cultural activities, first under the management of the Sejny Community Centre, then, since 1991, under the Borderland Center, the institution which has remained its host also after the Jewish commune recovered it as their property.
Jewish merchants and tradesmen were brought here in 1768 by the Dominican friars, and in 1787 were granted the rights of settlement in the town of Sejny. The friars helped them build the wooden synagogue “covered with shingle, frontally positioned and with a colonnade". Survived a record describing the opening ceremony: the rabbi and prior, Wawrzyniec Bortkiewicz, together carried the tablets of Moses inside. The Jews of Sejny established daily prayers in gratitude to their benefactor, which they still recited in the middle of the nineteen century. By that time, Sejny became an important center of Jewish life, boasting its learned rabbis, especially Moshe Yitzhak Avigdor, the founder of the yeshiva which became famous among the Maskils, advocates of the Jewish Enlightenment. Thanks to the school, Sejny became one of major centres of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) in the whole of Lithuania. The tsarist authorities, alarmed by the growing popularity of Avigdor's teachings, condemned him to banishment and closed the yeshiva. The writer Tuvie Pinkas Shapiro founded here one of the first secular Jewish schools. One of the students of the school was Morris Rosenfeld, one of the greatest poets of Yiddish, born in 1862 in the nearby village of Boksze. He became famous as “the tear millionaire” of the New York’s Lower East Side, the author of the poem My Boy/Mein yingele which became a popular song of the proletariat sung in various languages almost everywhere in the world. Rabi Moses Becalel Luria contributed to the construction of a wooden synagogue, completed in 1885, whose late-classicist grandeur with a touch of neo-Gothic testify to the flourishing of the Jewish community here. By mid-nineteenth century, almost 72% of Sejny inhabitants are Jewish. This number rapidly decreases at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of emigration to America. According to the census of 1931, the town had 819 Jewish inhabitants (24%). The Nazis enter Sejny on September 24, 1939. Survived only a small number of Jews that departed East together with the retreating Soviet army. Majority remained in town and very few survived the “night of Holocaust”
Today’s White Synagogue is said to be “our small agora of Sejny”, because it has become a venue of meetings of people of different cultures and of dialogues through art, debate and education. The former yeshiva hosts the Sejny Jazz Cooperative, and the former Jewish high school is currently the Borderland House. That is the short story of the Venue where the music of the Orchestra has been born, and reborn. It reminds of a broken bridge, with its traces surviving on both banks of the river, its image blurred by time, but still deeply embedded in the memory and longing. No music can restore it in its original shape, but it is able to re-create sounds on the matrix brought to light by the archaeology of remembrance.
THE PEOPLE
There would be no Orchestra without its local audience. One can imagine its existence without participation in festivals and without touring other places in the world. No ban, lack of funds or other impediment could silence its music. But if the residents of the borderlands refused to join in “playing” with the Orchestra it would cease to exist.
Who are the people of the Orchestra? Parents, relatives, friends from the schoolyard, neighbours, music lovers from the neighbourhood. A separate group are enthusiasts from other parts of Poland and the world, able to feel at home in the musical space, establish links with the place and its inhabitants, regularly visit here, invite each other, sometimes transfer their homes to the vicinity of Borderland. One way or another, they are no longer a separate group ...
The people of the Orchestra's come from Sejny, neighbouring villages and towns, places like Suwałki or Augustów. Often after the concert, they prepare a banquet table with home-made dishes, hosting the Orchestra. Some of them, first of all parents, participate in the process of educating and training of young members of the band, while others help with organization, setting up stage or handling lights. It happens that - e.g. during the crowning event of the summer program – a concert in the White Synagogue is played especially for them. It is a great festival of the Orchestra, combining into a feast and dances at one common table.
They know the Orchestra through and through. They know perfectly well when there is power, and when there is still some work to do; when the musicians are in top form and when they have to be helped. They would not be able to do that if they did not follow the creative ambitions of the musicians or did not demand high standards, raising their common expectations. They follow the development of each musician with empathy, from the first timid improvisations to an artful ornamentation of each artistically matured piece. Klezmer music has become for them both a meeting with the past and opening to the modern world, cultivation of tradition and participation in an avant-garde experiment.
They come to concerts many times, and can enjoy the nuances of the artistic form, read musical allusions and give the Orchestra a feeling that they can count on them in the most adventurous search for unknown sounds. There is no shadow of conservatism in them, they do not give in to nostalgia for the well done that has already been achieved, they expect one that is to appear, enjoying the new and insubordinate. They are, however, first of all, those who take their habitual places in the former synagogue and listen. The music of the Orchestra accompanies the silent conversation that is held here with those who prayed here and listened to the cantor's song, cut once short mid-word.
THE CONDUCTOR
Wojciech Szroeder perceives the Orchestra as a borderland in which different voices look for alignment, and harmony is a work of collective effort to overcome tension, one’s own limitations, counter-point contradictions, and silence caused by painful memory or an apprehension of the unknown. The borderland needs cleansing and healing of wounds. His orchestra achieves this through music that has a cathartic power, it lets you cry, invites common prayer and as if with a Hassidic whirl pours joy into your heart. Such music can only be made by a man of a multi-vocal soul who can hear the world from different sides, understand the truth of life from the perspective of different people's experiences, and one for whom one culture, even the closest possible, is not enough.
Wojciech Szroeder comes from Kashubia, a borderland folk whose Slav roots got intertwined with the Polish and German neighbourhoods. The Kashubians know the price of being different very well - being a Pole in the German Reich, or falsely accused of collaborating with as a German minority in the communist Poland. They know the price of preserving one's mother tongue, a language with a rich and unique melody, which in the eyes of majority can easily become a subject of mockery. For the Szroeders music has been more than just a passion, it has been something you breathe - through feasts and dances, presence of folk bands at all festivities, parades of wind orchestras, church choirs, mourner dirges, wedding songs, carol singing ... The sound of the accordion has been as natural as a gust of the wind from the mountains for Highlanders. The musical culture in which Wojciech grew up was similar to a Kashubian home, known for its hospitality - one that was dialogic and open to the polyphony of borderlands.
His fate was to become an Eastern Wanderer who finds his home far from his native Kłączna. He quickly and deeply put down his roots in Sejny. Not only because it was yet another borderland. In his case, what mattered was his understanding of artistic creativity as an effort of enrootment per se, consequently, immersion into a place in its dimension of long duration. The development of the Borderland Center, co-founded by him in the former Jewish quarter of Sejny, turned out to be much more than just a communion with the remains of a world of the past. The same has happened with Klezmer music, which initially appeared as an element of a theatre performance, and in fact became the love of his life and a spiritual journey towards learning about himself.
Wojciech Szroeder’s perception of the Orchestra goes far beyond the framework of a strictly musical formation. It is no accident that the Orchestra has preserved the Sejny Theatre in its name, referring to the theatre he started jointly with Małgorzata Sporek-Czyżewska. The theatre turned into an orchestra, and the first concerts took place with the participation of Małgorzata, who sang Jewish songs. Currently, the program of Yiddish songs and poetry is built together with a chamber ensemble of the Orchestra. But the conductor has remained a man of theatre, carefully building the dramatic line of the concerts, attaching great importance to the stage design, lights and the shape of the of the musical meeting.
The Orchestra is to him also a school of education, a community circle, a workshop of work subjected to a regime of discipline and renunciation. He can be overbearing and stubborn, but never towards other people, always towards the Orchestra. He is not interested in short-lived adventures and trips, but only in a long-time developing journey. He knows the secret of building a band ready to meet challenges.
THE BAND AND ITS MASTERS
The Borderland music studio is based on everyday and developing on a long-time scale educational work (music school), research (searching for and documenting historical musical material, still alive in local borderland communities) and creative work (new programs, compositions and arrangements). As a result, various musical constellations are born, such as the Music of the Place, led by Michał Moniuszko (experimental music with elements of electronic and improvised music) or Marycha River Brass Band led by Marian Szaryński (playing New Orleans jazz as the first initiation into orchestra and discovering the youngest talents).
The Orchestra is built based on these various musical constellations, ensembles, collecting and processing experiences gathered in other programs. The unique value of this type of education lies primarily in the practical meetings between the disciple and the master. From the very beginning the Orchestra masters were outstanding musicians, composers and experts working on the cultures of borderlands, such as Michael Alpert, Paul Brody, Stue Brotman, David Krakauer, Frank London, Marcin Masecki, Raphael Rogiński, Jerzy Rogiewicz, Miachael Steinlauf, Deborah Strauss, Mikołaj Trzaska and Jeff Warshawer.
A special person who became a mentor and guide for the Orchestra into the pre-war world of Jewish Sejny was Max Furmansky, the mentioned earlier cantor and rabbi. Unforgettable will remain concerts in the White Synagogue , in which young musicians performed together with the Holocaust survivor, remembering the place where his grandmother held him by the hand, a little boy during the feasts in the shul. The first of these concerts accompanied the ceremony of unveiling the memorial stone at the Jewish cemetery. The last one took place in 2012, when the Orchestra prepared a homage to Max Furmanski, inviting him to sing solo parts in Thee and Thee, specially composed for him by Raphael Rogiński to Kabbalah lyrics and poetry of the poets of borderlands, performed together with Marcin Masecki on the piano.
The Orchestra is a band based on the exchange of generations of musicians. They start their adventure here as a very young people, primary school pupils. Many of them go to university, then commute to rehearsals and concerts, and later set off into the world, following their own path. Many of the musician who play in major Polish jazz, folk and world music bands started their career in the Orchestra. Others come back to Sejny to continue their work with the Orchestra, becoming its nucleus. For years, a close collaborator of Wojciech Szroeder in running the whole Borderland Music Studio has been Michał Moniuszko, double-bass player, arranger and manager. Kacper Szroeder plays a more and more important role in the band, along with playing the trumpet, he takes on the burden of building the repertoire, composing and arranging music for many performances. The drummer Dominika Korzeniecka and the trombonist and sound technician Patryk Masłowski also belong to an older generation.
THE SOUND
The audiences often get the impression that they listen to people from all over Poland. They find it hard to believe that such talented people can come from one small town and the surrounding villages. But each place, just like each human being, hides a genius within and it just takes a way to bring it to the light. It is amazing how Wojciech Szroeder with the help of his co-workers is able to awaken the spiritual and creative energy in people who may have not necessarily managed to pass exams to music schools. Perhaps, it is just due to this overcoming of one's own weaknesses and environmental conditioning, this chance that opens before them, their extraordinary application, but also a life ethos, that a separate quality is born, one that can be later heard in the music of the Orchestra
Many things, usually difficult to notice by outside observers, contribute to the unique sound of the Orchestra. Most remarkable is the way they practice music, which becomes most intensive in the summer. July and August each year, they enter into some kind of trance. On weekdays, they give three big concerts in the White Synagogue, on Sunday one chamber concert at the Miłosz Manor with a première concert in the Sejny Jazz Cooperative on Fridays. Add to it, long, permanent, dragging late into the night rehearsals preceding the première performances. They must be in a kind of alternative state of mind. And they meet outstanding music personalities, the music masters we invite each year from all around the word. All this creates a special creative atmosphere, which undoubtedly later finds its reflection in their music.
I have already mentioned the special character of the place where this music is born and the people of the Orchestra. They are very important components of the Sejny music forge. The sound of this music would probably be different if not the local residents who come to hear the concerts again and again and lend themselves to meditation in the interiors of the synagogue. The past speaks through the music, it accomplishes a dialogue. It is not necessary for anyone to express their grief, it is just the way that the river that releases inner confession flows, helping to take positions in life. It's something completely different than sending children to a music school, it's a conscious choice and conversation with the past. Nobody would say here: “I have already heard the concert at the performance of The Sejny Chronicles. The thing is not to just listen or watch it once, but to get immersed in the story that you know by heart, to go beyond the one-off, beyond the intellectual cognition. The important thing is the completely different dimension, its key deposited in the cyclical nature of time and the ritual of the repetitive rhythm.
On one occasion, the Orchestra invited for collaboration Jerzy Rogiewicz, who brought with him a newly composed minimalist music piece. Its première took place on Lake Hołny, where Krasnogruda is located. The musicians sat with their instruments in boats, their parents paddled, slowly approaching their audience waiting on the opposite bank, at the foot of the Miłosz’s Manor. There was a light drizzle on that day, the audience gathered for the evening in the hope that it would stop soon. But when the concert began, there was a wall of rain, and it poured until the end... And nobody left, until the last note sounded. The coming and going of music from the boats created a form of a natural bolero. Impossible to capture on any recording, even in the best equipped studio in the world. It is just one of many examples of how the Orchestra works on broadening the horizons of its musical explorations.
Composers and musicians coming to Sejny and Krasnogruda, are offered creative cooperation going beyond the possibilities offered by professional orchestras, philharmonics or international festivals. They can work here day and night in a different rhythm, in a special space that resonates with the memory and ecology of the environment, in which silence sounds completely different than in the sterile conditions of concert halls. They will find here as partners musicians wholeheartedly devoted to joint effort, and at the same time free of routine and standard sound. This may prove to be something important, opening new perspectives, also for their own artistic explorations. Even if you need to work with them longer and in a different way, the end result has a chance to be more innovative and spiritually deeper than anywhere else. The music created here bears the stamp of time, light, telluric energies of the place and the peculiar features of the Orchestra itself. In this way, a slightly different type of art has a chance to appear. And many musician say they hear a different sound here. David Krakauer has been cooperating with the Orchestra not because he was brought here by the mission of pedagogical work, which of course is also important, and in fact he became a teacher and master for many Sejny musicians. He is here, first of all, as a musician - co-author of both the Musicians’ Raft, New York to Sejny and the Mystery of the Bridge in Krasnogruda for which he and Kathleen Tagg composed together the last year’s Keepers of the Flame - he also takes part in an exceptional artistic adventure, unrepeatable in strictly professional conditions.
Sejny, a small border town, former shtetl with a miraculously surviving synagogue, in which Klezmer music is sounded by the descendants of the former neighbours, who for centuries, bound by fate, used to coexist with the Jews. This music has always originated in the spirit of the borderlands, it used to be played not only during Jewish weddings, itself being an amalgam of different cultural traditions of this multicultural region. And perhaps, it is just laying bare of the authenticity of this simple fact that ascertains the creation of a new reality in this corner of Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that most decisively determines the uniqueness of the music of the Klezmer Orchestra of the Sejny Theatre, spun on the ethos of dialogue, the threnody of Holocaust and craving for a new sound.
[ZD1] They are authors of everything on it