'MAZUREK VULGARIS' is a musical project that bases on mazurka – the most popular folk music and folk dance genre in central Poland. The tunes have been chosen from Kazimierz Meto's archaic repertoire, a fiddler from the village Glina (the commune of Rzeczyca). They are performed by me playing the fiddle, with accompanying guest musicians playing the frame drum and the folk bass.
The Latin word vulgaris, which means 'ordinary', 'common' or 'vulgar', is a very good explication of the musical phenomenon of mazurkas. Mazurkas used to be a means of communication in the rural community. They aroused the body, the mind and the spirit, and used to be a common public musical code, generally intelligible within a given community. They provided an impulse to dance, an outlet for physical energy and a means of social dialogue. Also, they were a musical background for kuranty - improvised tunes that commented on the reality in a pithy and often sarcastic manner. Mazurkas used to be a strong communal experience that helped escape the drab reality.
Kazimierz Meto's music is a constant source of inspiration for me, and a motivation for my musical initiatives. Hence my consistence in choosing the source, and my desire to work on his particular musical repertoire and style as close to the original as possible, so as to get the gist of Meto's music and make it sound as it used to in the olden days, with all its value and beauty.
The main idea behind the project was to make the recording technique as similar as possible to the recording methods used in archiving folk music in the 1950s and 1960s, and to produce sounds that are closest possible to the acoustic sound of the instruments (especially the natural sound of catgut strings in fiddles and folk basses, and leather membranes in frame drums). To attain this effect, recordings have been additionally filtered through the analogue tape recorder from the olden times.
Album otrzymał nagrodę specjalną w konkursie Polskiego Radia na Fonogram Źródeł 2013 "za wierną kontynuację stylu gry skrzypka Kazimierza Meto".
Mazurek Vulgaris to projekt oparty na mazurkach - najpopularniejszych fromach muzyczno-tanecznych Centralnej Polski, wybranych z archaicznego repertuaru skrzypka Kazimierza Mety ze wsi Glina (gmina Rzeczyca). Na płycie wybrzmiewają w całości melodie w rytmie trójdzielnym, w moim wykonaniu skrzypcowym, z towarzyszeniem zaproszonych muzyków grających na bębenku obręczowym i basach.
Maciej Filipczuk
skład:
Maciej Filipczuk - skrzypce
Mateusz Kowalski - bęben obręczowy
Marcin Lorenc - basy