Video: Pioneers of the folklore beat: the secrets of the popularity of "Pesnyars"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
September 1 - birthday VIA "Pesnyary", the peak of its popularity in the USSR fell on the 1970s-1980s. "Alesya", "Belovezhskaya Pushcha", "Vologda", "Mowed Yas Stables", "Belorussia" - these songs performed by "Pesnyars" were all-Union known and loved. Despite the incredible popularity of VIA, the attitude towards them has always been ambiguous: someone accused of violating the ethnic purity of Belarusian folk music, someone - in the execution of a state order. What was the secret of Pesnyary's success?
The Lyavony ensemble has been the accompanying group of the singer Nelly Boguslavskaya since 1968, but their birthday is considered September 1, 1969, when, by the decision of the artistic council of the Minsk Philharmonic, the Lyavony group received the right to be called a vocal and instrumental ensemble. At first, the team had problems. As drummer A. Demeshko recalls, “officials began to find fault with costumes, long mustache and hair. We allowed ourselves liberties: we played forbidden music, did not pay attention to censorship. Once during a concert, Vlad Misevich announced: "Now listen to the song of the great Beatles … And the artistic director of the Philharmonic Anichkin suffered a heart attack from horror. We were forbidden to sing the Beatles for a long time. And the name Lyavony too." They changed their name to Pesnyary”And already in 1970 shared with Lev Leshchenko the second place at the IV international competition of pop artists, and also won the All-Union competition of political songs in Moscow.
At that time in the West, guitar ensembles were incredibly popular, the party leadership was apprehensive about the VIA genre, and in the USSR they began to decide what could be opposed to them. The Pesnyars had to prove that the big beat has the right to life. They sang Belarusian folk songs in modern arrangements, complementing national traditions with modern musical tendencies, in particular, activating the rhythmic basis. This direction was called "folklore beat" and thanks to "Pesnyars" gained incredible popularity.
The founder and artistic director of the collective, Vladimir Mulyavin, said: “We had to go our own way. I was not satisfied with the stage in the form in which it was then. This was not our path. We took folk songs. I listened to them a lot, absorbed all the best. We succeeded because we were not like anyone else. Officially, we became the first group with which the VIA genre began."
Young people were attracted by their music with modern arrangements and a clear, tense rhythmic basis, the older generation - by loyalty to national traditions and the opportunity to hear familiar songs. The rhythm of beat music has given the folklore compositions a modern sound. Bari Alibasov said: “I never liked all these patriotic songs written“on special order”, it was all too insincere and feigned … But I did not feel any rejection, listening to Mulyavin. Even knowing that both "Birch sap" and "My youth - Belarus" were written by order "from above", it was a pleasure to listen to these songs."
Pesnyary became the first collective in the USSR to go on tour to the USA in 1976. They performed in front of American youth, together with a local folk group, and had incredible success. In the same year, Pesnyary took part in the MIDEM International Recording Competition in Cannes, to which only those bands were invited that released the maximum number of records in their country in a year. They were called the best folk group of the century. There is a legend that George Harrison himself, admiring their work, said: if the Beatles have a concert in the USSR, then only Pesnyary will play as opening act.
The crisis came in the perestroika times and in the 1990s, when the composition of the group underwent significant changes, and new requirements were imposed on musical groups: it was necessary to pay for rotation on the radio and shooting in musical television programs, and the artistic director did not want to put up with the new reality … He refused to perform in restaurants. The popularity of the ensemble gradually faded away. After the death of the band's founder Vladimir Mulyavin in 2003, several Pesnyars teams appeared, actively claiming the title of "real" ones, but it was already impossible to compare their success with the first team.
Now it is difficult to see something seditious in the beat music of VIA, but in those days, completely harmless musical directions could earn a reputation as "bourgeois" and socially dangerous: foxtrot as a "new kind of pornography" and other dances banned in the USSR
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