EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 20 - Mazurka
Genre of the Day - Marzuka
Album of the Day - Mazurki niepojęte (Incomprehensible Mazurkas) by Kapela Maliszów (2015)
May 20, 2024
On her 2023 epic “Kintsugi”, Lana Del Rey ponders a personal future as uncertain as a fleeting familial past as she observes her relatives singing to some old folk tunes. “They sang folk songs from the '40s / Even the fourteen-year old knew, "Froggie Came A-Courtin'" / How do my blood relatives know all of these songs? / I don't know anyone left to know songs that I sing.” It’s an affecting reminder that while our cultural obsession with personal music consumption produces a notion that music is above all personal, music was and covertly remains the stuff of connectivity. It’s a building block in our relationships, and a memory tool to bond with others.
Most folk music, after all, was performed in its original forms among families and small gatherings of people. Among all the overarching musical categories, folk music is the one that could most readily claim to be an exercise in community. I touch upon these themes because today’s album is the first that I’ve come across that was performed by a family band. It’s a potent reminder that most of the music that has been passed down in human history was from grandparent to grandchild, mother to son, father to daughter.
Jan Malisz of today’s family band likewise expressed that sentiment: “My father always told me: play whatever you want. And if you have nothing to play, just make up new tunes. When you know how to create melodies, you will have as many of them as you want, and you won't need to learn from anyone else.”
But although a marzuka can be passed through families like an heirloom, like yesterday’s genre it’s a pivotal form of song in Polish cultural history and a rhythmic oddity. It’s in triple time, like a waltz, but with the second and third beats emphasized rather than the first and third, creating an unusual but distinctive bounce. A marzuka is a mishmashed form of various Polish folk dances with that rhythm. It took on greater sociocultural significance as its peak popularity intertwined with a period of strong rumblings of Polish nationalism against the ruling Russians.
Marzuka also had a great mind in its corner in the form of famed composer Frédéric Chopin, who had grown up in Poland before spending most of his life in France. Chopin expressed his love for his Polish heritage via his obsession with the marzuka. Over the course of twenty years, he composed nearly sixty marzukas, though combining them with musical classicism in a way that limited their function as dance music.
Though Chopin may have mastered the art of composing a marzuka that suited the Romanticism period, today’s album is more representative of marzukas in their rawer, more traditional form, even while dating from less than ten years ago. You don’t even need to know that a marzuka is a folk dance before listening, because it musically excels with movement: on second track “Na Piecu Łoroł” the strings themselves seem to jump, spin, and gallop on the track. There’s musical complexity complimenting the unique, consistently ensnaring rhythms of the album, such as the underlying, darker strings and the variety of the drumming of “Mazurek Dziki” providing a base for the strings above to explode into melodic firecrackers. To imagine one’s own family dancing to mutually beloved songs makes this album a lovely reminder of music’s bonding potency, so go open Spotify and send a tune to someone you hold dear.