{"id":409,"date":"2026-02-23T17:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T17:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mmdc.pl\/?page_id=409"},"modified":"2026-03-05T10:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T10:15:17","slug":"tance-zaduszne","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mmdc.pl\/en\/tance-zaduszne\/","title":{"rendered":"The album All Souls\u2019 Dances"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There are adventures that cannot be foreseen.\nTrue Adventures\u2014with a capital A.
To prawdziwe przygody przez du\u017ce P<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When, at the beginning of the present millennium, Marianna Kowalska from Przysta\u0142owice\nMa\u0142e agreed to sing mazurkas accompanied by Jan Gaca\u2019s violin, she set one condition: \u201cFirst\nI will sing three devotional songs, and you will record them.\u201d \u201cNot an excessive price,\u201d I\nthought\u2026 I listened to her singing with amazement and delight, but even had I ventured into\nthe wildest territories of my imagination, I could not have predicted that I was taking part in\nthe beginning of a new, incalculable journey into the unknown\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Ten years after meeting Marianna Kowalska, the bag of religious song recordings that my\nfriends and I had collected\u2014from Roztocze to Podlasie\u2014was bursting at the seams. We\nfounded a small amateur confraternity (still active today) to make use of this \u201cbag,\u201d singing\nprayer-songs once a week according to the liturgical year. After two years of regular\npractice, we had mastered the repertoire sufficiently to focus on the true sense and meaning\nof the songs.\nAnd then it appeared\u2014the \u201cvirus of rhythms.\u201d I do not know whether I was patient zero or\none of my colleagues, but as a result of this \u201cinfection,\u201d I began hearing rhythms and dance\nphrases in well-known devotional songs. I could neither pray nor sing properly\u2014my mind\nwas absorbed entirely by the analysis of meters and measures that seemed to resonate\nwithin the flowing, rubato singing. At the time, we knew little about contrafactum, nor that\nthe practice of fitting religious texts to popular dance melodies dates back to the\nRenaissance. Thus, with each rhythmic discovery, we felt ever stronger gusts of the winds of\nadventure\u2014the same winds that once filled Columbus\u2019s sails\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no way out\u2014we had to play the songs. Music resounded, and after several years\nof evolution, in December 2025 it took the form you hear on this album. At times there is\nnostalgia; at times Swedish dances; at times a raw mazurka dance phrase; and sometimes a\nfondness for Californian punk rock (the domain of myself and Marek Szwajkowski). It is the\nresult of the deeply rooted experiences of the ensemble\u2019s members.\nAfter years spent with chant (Wolfgang Niklaus and Serhij Petryczenko) or club jazz (Jacek\nMu\u017ca), years devoted to studying mazurkas with Radom-region musicians, led by Jan Gaca,\nand learning songs from the finest singers of the Polish lowlands (the rest of the ensemble),
we feel deeply grounded\u2014even at home\u2014within these priceless cultural patterns.\nTherefore, we dare to respond creatively to their call, which might be expressed in the\nfollowing words:\n\u201c\u2026[W]ell then, sons and daughters, how will you play and sing the eternal music today so as\nto preserve its spirit and place it in contact with the world?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet no matter how wild our response may seem, and how far beyond the frames sanctified\nby tradition the sounds of our instruments may venture, these songs remain for us songs of\nprayer\u2014just as the singers who gifted them to us would have wished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maciek \u017burek<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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