From Fantasy to Fantastic Folklore: New Shifts of Moravian Folklore Music. The Case of Jeden Kmen Collective
Abstract
Moravian and especially South Moravian folklore music is a big part of the regional identity and is very well-known throughout the whole country. The so-called "cimbálka" (a folklore band, in most cases consisting of a cimbalom, two or three violins and a double bass) became an indispensable part of any kind of celebration, often even outside the South Moravian region, and it's become something of an
"export commodity" of this region. This kind of music is also very well-known to ethnographers (Úlehla 1949; Jančář 2000; Popelka 2005;...) and ethnomusicologists (Jurková et al. 2009).
But what are the modern and non-orthodox shifts of South Moravian folklore music? This paper focuses on the musical collective Jeden Kmen ("One Tribe" in English) from Brno, Czech Republic's second largest city located in South Moravia. Early on, Jeden Kmen gained popularity by depicting and impersonating an orc tribe of J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. For this purpose, they also made up their own fictional language in which these songs were sung. However, their latest album Basnj (Fairytale in
Interslavic) from 2022 is rooted in the Moravian folklore, even though with some original shifts. During their shows the collective wear highly stylized Moravian folk costumes and all their lyrics are in
Interslavic - an artificial Slavic language developed since 2006. Although their whole concept is original, their lyrical themes, songwriting and also individual musicians (e.g. the female singers who sing in a traditional Moravian folk choir) all have strong ties to traditional folklore.
The main goal of this paper is to explore the artists' motivation to abandon a purely fantasy topic in favour of pursuing a traditional Moravian folklore roots-inspired direction, and also to try to discover and describe the particular connections, similarities and dissimilarities of Jeden Kmen and traditional
Moravian folklore music.