I know people that are honestly revolted by Guca and the sounds of the trumpet! But I also know people who say that the top of the world isn’t Mount Everest but is mountain Jelica and that the scream of the trumpet from Dragacevo is music to their ears! They are even more honest!
I also know people who speak only the best about the trumpet, even though they don’t like it that much, just to annoy those who despise it!
I know people who talk about the trumpet from a high and with a solid dose of contempt, but after midnight they are glad to see the gypsies, placing their sophisticated ear underneath the destructive crater of the trumpet, with their arms and feet fleeing from their control, and out of nowhere they find themselves on a table. But tomorrow they feel ashamed and ask themselves: Dear God, what happened!
But I also know some people that make their way from the other side of the planet to rollick in Guca, and those who would rather emigrate these lands to places where they haven’t even heard about the trumpet!
But let’s reduce the interpreters of the Dragacevo fair to the two basic rivals: the ones who in these seven days of August only see the triumph of the most bestial in us, the esthetics of drunkenness and primitivism, the Sodom and Gomorrah of distaste of all kind! They would gladly ban Guca and the trumpet all together!
And those who would, without a doubt, take it into the Belgrade philharmonic orchestra, so you can at least hear the crowd saying “That’s my song!”
And in between the noncritical apologetics and the angry haters I would put the phenomena of the Serbian (sub)culture, which we can even be proud of , but at the same time can find a lot of faults in. But, nonetheless, you can never deny its magnetic attraction, pertinence of duration and even its planetary popularity. And let’s not be cruel, the fair in Dragacevo hasn’t always been a festival of drunkenness, pap and genocidal pig-slaughter, but something much more honest, nicer, more natural and in accordance to the fine meaning of the word fair, which means – to gather; a moment of escape from the hard everyday life for the Serbian peasant. And in that sound of the trumpet history is kept, bringing back the memories of wars and false truces, when it warned us on dangerous, called us to gather and go into battle. With its cry men died and conquered…
In the old days only four orchestras performed, and today we have hundreds from all over Serbia, but also the world. Guca has outgrown itself and has become not only a music but also a social phenomenon, difficult to explain even to the experts who would want to look at it from a social and a cultural point of view.
Divna Vuksanović PhD, a theoretician of culture, still concludes, with a remark that it would be better not to think about Guca because everybody has an opinion about it, be it good or bad, that, from a musical point of view, Guca doesn’t have much in common with our tradition, so she said in one interview: „It is a question of a over-globalization, but in any case of import of culture, so that Guca isn’t an ordinary music competition festival, but an eclectic post-modernistic phenomena. Foreigners are getting interested in the festival more and more, and not your “everyday Joe’s”.
I personally know that a lot of artists are interested in Guca. A painter from Milan insisted on coming to Guca, in order to feel something of that cultural phenomenon… I hear that they introduced some sections in the program which do not fall into the brass music genre, the gypsy one or the music that reminds you of a Kusturica’s movie, which made us world famous. In that way Guca became a place for everything, or a table where there is room for everything, popularly known as “the train”, that kind of barbecue which can satisfy your appetite in any way!”
Be it as it may, almost half a million people rushes every year to this remote Dragacevo village, and among them thousand of foreigners for which it is difficult to conclude whether they come only for the hillbilly fun embodied in the loud brass music and alcohol that runs in rivers, or for the consumption of the specific cultural content and atmosphere which is pretty foreign in places they come from.
A reporter of the British “Guardian” still wasn’t effusive about the party side of the story when, after visiting Guca, he wrote that “the festival depicts perfectly the great, brave spirit of the Balkans where everyone is welcome, regardless of nationality, sex or age….
(The entire text in our printed edition)