FORFEST 2001
Kroměříž, 17th – 24th of June 2001His Voice 2001
Festivals of contemporary music in this country can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and most of them are held in large cities over just a few short days. This makes it all the more surprising that the small Moravian town of Kroměříž hosts a festival which this year took place over a full eight June days, and involved almost twenty concerts!
The festival is, moreover, quite specific in its orientation - which is to contemporary music with a spiritual, religious focus, and is also unusual in presenting music in the context of contemporary visual art. Since today the festival has twelve years of existence behind it and so is one of the patriarchs among our contemporary music festivals, we decided to ask its organisers Zdeňka and Václav Vaculovič for a short recapitulation...
The first FORFEST festival took place shortly after the revolution, in 1990, and initially it was more of a “domestic” festival...
We are not ashamed of our humble beginnings, since underground activities in Eastern Europe in the Eighties had by today’s standards an incredibly geographically limited range of communication. Even just within the borders of our small country we knew almost nothing about each other. Recently I was putting my old correspondence in order and found an invitation and programme for an event that is legendary today. It was written on yellow cyclostyle paper. For spreading these innocent, non-political cyclostyles you could get into the kind of trouble that our western colleagues would find hard to imagine. ...We used to hold a sort of party in our garden and house for a full ten years from 1980 – we used to call them “soirees”. They were a kind of foreshadowing of the festival now, although I admit that they were some way off our present well-defined concept.
But it should be added that in the twilight of the Eighties this kind of thing was (as we all found out after our “awakening”) a widespread phenomenon.
What does the title “FORFEST” mean precisely?
It’s from the Latin words “FORUM” and “FESTUM” meaning a festival of the public. Our idea was really that in a free society at ought to be interesting to everyone. It was an explosion of enthusiasm that is hard to get across no. After that, the Nineties (right across the world) meant a turning-away from cultural values and a painful sobering-up. Yet art has never been a mass phenomenon - the things of the spirit naturally involve selectivity. And that is all in order. In this sense the FORFEST remains a festival of the public.
What kind of public do you get at the festival? Has attendance at the festival changed in any way from the beginning?
Naturally the public that comes to the festival consists of people interested in contemporary art in general – music and visual art – both professionals and laymen. They come not only from this country but also from abroad, Europe and overseas. Teachers in secondary and university-level schools follow our activities and often come with their students. We are particularly pleased that the festival has found a public among laymen as well. Some of them already come every year, and some of them don’t even miss a single concert.
Has the festival managed to attract students from the local conservatories (there are 3 in Kroměříž alone!), whether as performers or audience?
Over the last maybe five years students of the Kroměříž Church Conservatory in particular have been collaborating with us every year. They are involved in some concerts as performers, and naturally this has meant growing interest in us from their fellow students who would like to be involved in the same way in the future. But it’s not an easy matter. Contemporary composers write difficult pieces.
The charm of the FORFEST seems to have something to do with its “family” character, with the same musicians and public constantly returning. This can mean a danger that the festival may begin to stagnate, and its programme will always contain the same old names. How do you cope with this danger?
The concept of the festival as primarily a composer-based event requires performers of a specific kind. The original idea of presenting Czech music against a background of world music has grown into a systematic search for lines of creative development that definitely do not figure among fashionable articles on the international festival scene. To ask composers for specially written premiered programmes to be presented by top performers, or exhibitions for just one occasion, is something that in the Czech Republic requires courage not only on the part of the organisers, but also on the part of performers, composers and artists, and ultimately all interested institutions. A festival has a justified place on the international scene if it brings to it something that has not been there before. I certainly don’t want to be bringing coals to Newcastle. Even of they have famous names, musicians who see festivals just as touring stations where they can fit in a piece performed elsewhere don’t interest us at all. Obviously, there are not many artists who fulfil such demanding criteria even on the world level, and this means we work on a regular basis with those that fulfil them, and this means deeper continuity and visible good results. It is this approach that creates the “optical illusion” of the festival as family affair, but we feel a family affinity with colleagues from as far away as Paris, London and Los Angeles. The festival figures among world scenes for new music, we get dozens of offers from around the world from Moscow to New York and so we don’t feel we are some kind of closed enclave suffering a shortage of information. If we choose something, we have a reason...
Do you already have an idea of what visitors will encounter at the festival next year?
Not just an idea. The provisional programme draft is already ready, but we are planning some surprises that we wouldn’t want to reveal in advance. These involve particularly demanding projects, with new use of space (the exterior of he Undercastle Gardens) and multimedia (Czech-American international co-operation). As far as famous performers are concerned we shall be inviting the violinist Marat Bisengaliev (with support from the British Council), and we are planning more appearances by Estonian musicians in collaboration with the Estonian Embassy and the Music Information Centre in Tallin.
TEREZA HAVELKOVÁ