PROMOTION OF NEW PUBLICATION AND ROUND TABLE

Festival almanac Lirica No. 5 Stories of the Sea

Editor: MILAN KOVAČEVIĆ

Participants:

ZLATA MARJANOVIĆ , etnomusicologist

TINA BRAIĆ UGRINIĆ, prof. of literature

MILEVA PEJAKOVIĆ VUJOŠEVIĆ, Maritime Museum (Kotor)

ANDRO RADULOVIĆ, Maritime Museum (Kotor)

MOJMIR ČAČIJA, President of Expert Jury

JASMINKO ŠETKA , Artistic Director of the Festival

The round tables and several scientific conferences, became useful practices of the Festival in Perast. At these festival gathering participants, members of klapa and their leaders meet experienced authors of klapa music who are members of the Expert Jury of the Festival. They discuss and exchange experiences on their performances, find out the criteria used by members of the jury upon the appraisal work of performances. Open and professional discussions enrich the klapa’s knowledge of their own work, while on the other hand, the leaders of the Festival, can hear opinions and suggestions on organisation works, thus learning for future activities.

“Although it carries the same title, Lirica No. 5 is different from the concert program The Stories of the Sea. Writing work required retrieval of numerous historical books and records, checking of events, dates, and consulting various sources of literature. It is always intriguing to study historical data, political plots and games of great counties that set the destiny of small towns of Boka. For the sake of their own interests, their decisions meant a lot and almost always cost much more. It was also necessary to find the best measure between the abundance of available data and what we, as publishers, wanted to achieve with this Lirica, as it is primarily dedicated to the fans of the klapa song. We wanted to present to them this amazing part of the world - Boka, unbelievably beautiful, its bays surrounded by massive mountains, which were natural shelters for merchant and warships, and thus a strategically important ports of the recent conquerors.

From his beloved bay, skillful Boka sailors had fled to participate in big battles, often facing premature death, slavery, lost of family members. Still, besides the perils, there are still visible traces of artistic and poetic achievment : in longing dreams of lonelky sailors, in their letters and poetry, their promises and vows, art ... in music. All this has been deposited in the being of Boka during past centuries.“

MILAN KOVAČEVIĆ, maritime telecommunications engineer, graduated from the High Maritime Faculty of Kotor in 1972, then sailed with a large merchant shipping fleet from Kotor for 11 years before continuing his career as a maritime manager of the same company through 2010. After a lifetime spent in the maritime industry, he devoted himself to his lifelong interest in art, photography and music. He has had three exhibitions of paintings. He has also been performing for more than 20 years with Biseri Boke, his orchestra from Kotor. He is the author of 26 compositions and lyrics, including the songs for klapa April 1979, Bura and Prayer to Our Lady. He has received multiple awards from the Festival of Children Songs. Since 2009, he has been involved in the International Klapa Festival in Perast, assuming the position of Executive Director in 2011. He is a promoter of the preservation of the musical traditions of klapa singing in Boka Kotorska and Montenegro. He is also the editor of five editions of the magazine Lirica, and of titles dedicated to Ludvik Kuba.

ZLATA MARJANOVIĆ, ethno-musicologist, graduated from the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. From the same university, she gained her master’s degree, completing Vocal Music Tradition of Boka Kotorska, and her PhD, completing Folk Music of Boka Kotorska and the Montenegrin Coast (2013). She explores vocal, vocal-instrumental and instrumental traditions of Montenegro (Boka Kotorska, the Montenegrin coast and its hinterland, and Cetinje and its surrounding areas) and Serbia (eastern, south-eastern and north-western Serbia and south-eastern Kosovo). She is the author of three books: Vocal Music Tradition of Boka Kotorska (1998), Folk Songs of Montenegro upon Audio Records and Music Notes of Nikola Hercigonja (2002) and Folk Music of Grbalj (2005). She is a member of the Serbian Ethnomusicological Society (SED), and the International Council for Traditional Music, (ICTM) an associate in the Ministry of Education and Science of Serbia’s project Tradition of Music and Dances of Multiethnic and Multicultural Serbia and a researcher on the project Common Roots and Cultural Cooperation, organized by the European Union (2012-2013). Since 2005 she has been engaged as a Professor of Ethnomusicology, Traditional Singing, Traditional Playing and folk Ensembles in the Stefan Mokranjac Middle Musical School in Kraljevo.

MOJMIR ČAČIJA is a klapa singing producer, singer-songwriter, composer, and a musician in the klapa Sinj. Since 1982 he has constantly been in a klapa operating both as a leader and a singer (baritone). In addition, he is the musical leader of the mixed klapa Hrvace, as well as the artistic leader of the festival Klape to Our Lady of Sinj and the festival We Don Let You, Our Song, which is held each year at the Poljud Stadium in Split. He is the author of the vocal arrangement for the song “Misery,” which represented Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013. Winner of numerous domestic and international prizes and awards, he is also the author of several acclaimed compositions and works, winning prizes at the Dalmatian Klapa Festival in Omiš and others for such songs as “Lipo Ime” (Jaksa Fiamengo), “Materin Plač” (Lucijan Brumnjak), “Uljenica Moje Matere” (Slavko Govorcin), “Vo Je Naša Zemlja” (Jakov Dukic), and “Umiri se More” (Mojmir Čačija). He has had a long-running and fruitful collaboration with and poet Jakov Dukić from Sinj, about whom he says; “He has a soul and feels the Dalmatian hinterland.” In cooperation with the Croatian musician Nenad Bach, he released the Lipo Ime (Beautiful Name) album with the klapa Sinj for American and European markets.

JASMINKO ŠETKA, Artistic Director of the festival, began his musical education by learning the accordion in primary music school in Trebinje before continuing on to the Department of Clarinet at the Dubrovnik Music School. He graduated in 1991 from the Clarinet Department of the Music Academy of Sarajevo, in the class of Prof Aleksije Radan. Since 1999 he has worked with a number of klapa groups as the artistic leader. From 2006 to 2012, he led the male klapa group Šufit from Split, with which he was the absolute winner of the Festival of Dalmatian Klapa in Omiš three years in a row. Since 2010 he has been working with the International Klapa Festival Perast, and regularly leads winter seminars for Montenegrin klapa groups. He has been teaching clarinet at the Lovro pl. Matačić Music School in Omiš since 1996 and Director of this school since 2016.