Musicians' Raft New Generation 2010
THE MUSICIANS’ RAFT
New Generation
“The Musicians’ Raft” is a meeting of the world of the Jewish culture with its modern contexts and incarnations. It is, first of all, a musical meeting, but as always enriched with art and photo exhibitions, literary evenings, film screenings, lectures and discussions. Since its beginnings, i.e. since 2001, the main idea lying behind it has been the exploration of new horizons and alternative artistic spaces, other than those rooted in the past. Hence “the Raft” – a platform for a creative meeting heading towards other shores, always on the move. At first, the direction of its voyage was determined by the “New York to Sejny” vector. In this way, symbolically, we marked on its map both the place of the revival of klezmer music and the place were the borderland music – drawing on the coexistence of many cultures, including Ruthenian, Polish, Romanian and Gipsy culture – formed its roots. Then, Sejny became the destination of American musicians, based mainly in New York, descendants of the Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe who knew the place of the birth of their own parents or grandparents only from family tales. Thanks to “the Raft”, often for the first time, they met with the fragments of the world which once generated the Yiddish culture, including klezmer music, the music they dedicated themselves to creatively merging it with other musical trends, such as jazz or hip-hop, lending it new sounds and sustainable vitality. Klezmers have always been people of the borderland; it is difficult to imagine that living in America they could turn a deaf ear to creative coexistence with their musical neighborhood. The participants of the conducted by them workshops and lectures were musicians from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Hungary – who boarded „the Raft” to reach the world from before the Holocaust, towards the music almost completely erased from the present cultural landscape, and yet one so recently constituting an essential part of the spirituality of the cities and towns they grew up in.
