TEOFILOVIĆ TWINS - IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY
about the songs on the "Winds of Dawn" CD

Once upon a time, and a very good old time it was, if we are to believe the story, the ancient Greek poet by the name of Stesichorus composed a song in which he cursed beautiful Helen because her beauty brought misfortune to the Greeks. Hurt by this insult the Goddess of Beauty, Aphrodite, blinded the poet! The poet immediately realized the horror of his fault. Blind and punished, he composed a new song about his penitence and his realization that it is the Beauty that gives a sense of purpose to human life. Blaspheming Beauty is blaspheming Life.

In their serious, purposeful and diversely inspired search for a new ethnovoice, the Keepers of the Dream - the Teofilović twins, Ratko and Radiša - offer us a new musical voice, on their latest compact disc. This time their songs come not only from Kosovo and Metohija. All Serbian lands, with the exception of Vojvodina, are now represented. This time their voices have excellent instrumental accompaniment. The rhythmic beat of a wooden drum gives the musical voice a strange, supernatural, magical third dimension.

Teofilovići’s new musical voice is not only a continuation of their search for a contemporary ethnovocal expression; it is also a search for beauty and purpose of life. Sixteen songs, each in its way, testify to this. The purpose of life as a sense of beauty is contained in love and reflected in the effort to realize a biological equilibrium in the union of man and woman, in their longing to ennoble and continue human life on this earth. The songs express in their unique way the longing of a young boy and his girl, their craving for a union which will give beauty and purpose to their lives. All these songs - from the initial Black Grapes, Listen, My Black Forest, and all the way to the nostalgic Sing to Me, Emperor’s Servant - spin the same tale. A young boy, a shepherd, begs the forest, his friend and his protector, to take care of his flock of sheep, so that he can go down to the plain, to a village, to find a girl - either for himself or for his brother: the joy of a newborn human communion is superior to individual, inevitably slightly selfish, happiness. Then the boy will call the girl, he will try to lure her by promises of black grapes and yellow flowers. Fascinated by beauty, he will watch supernatural powers - “the winds at the crack of dawn” - mould, develop and aggrandize the girl’s beauty. He will acknowledge that he is paralysed when faced with the wonder of feminine beauty and the power of the life principle it contains. In his helplessness he will acknowledge her magic abilities: he will say that her beauty, like the Sun, shines on the earth, that it makes him forget everything else, his hunger and his thirst (“I cannot touch the bread, I cannot sip the wine”). Sometimes he will remind himself, and sometimes he will be reminded, that everything comes in due time, that one should not ask for anything before its time, that Nature itself has assigned a time for everything (“Ripe raspberries fall off by themselves”). In the moments of the search for happiness, for some purpose and beauty in life, the subconsciousness is sometimes haunted by the horrors of times gone by, times which, in some form, may come back (“Night, dark night”). But the Woman, the ancient source of energy and the giver of life, will bring optimistic tones back to the song. The girl will weave pearls into the horse’s mane as decorations for her brother’s wedding, because his wedding paves the way to her prospective marriage, to her path to happiness. In some of the songs we will listen to the echoes of voices and thoughts of ancient times. The love song of the Heroine Magdalene and “the best ram” which was taken from her - is a distant echo of ancient Christmas carols in which an unknown rider appears from the skies or from the fog. The rider takes the gifts which are offered to him, or which are within the reach of his hand, and in the course of the coming agricultural year he will pay back lavishly for what he had received. The bell on the nine-year ram, which has been taken away by the unknown rider, will ring divinely (as “the bell of a thousand”), and in the divine bell there will be a divine grain (“Davin’s grain”), which is, ultimately, identified with a girl’s eye, the sublimation of eternal beauty and the source of life.

Some lines - like Go down, go down, clear Sun, / Go down, let darkness set in,/ And you, alas, clear moonlight, run away and drown - embody a wonderful and deeply sad dialogue with the well-known, favourite folk utterance full of hope in the future and in survival: “As long as the Sun shines,/ As long as the Moon is there”. So long will the world persist, so long will life go on. The end, or the destruction of the sun and the moon, symbolize the opposite to human persistence, “the grief for lost young days”, which was a nightmare for Bora Stanković, one of the greatest writers of Southern Serbia. In this song, this grief finds its finest and most complex expression. For the song is not only about the lost young days, the years of weakness which follow, but also about the waste of young days in which no beauty and no purpose has been found.

Sing to Me, Emperor’s Servant marks a natural end to this, and perhaps, all other, human searches. It is a deep and finely woven, almost a filigree utterance about the inevitable discrepancy between the creative wishes and intentions and their ultimate realization. Insufficiently aware of his short time on this earth, or perhaps even more frightened by his awareness of how short it is, man begins his search in too many directions and starts to build too many edifices. Finally, he comes to the awareness of the limits of all his efforts. Sing to Me, Emperor’s Servant is a song about the creative act, but also about the creative predicament of mankind.

The Teofilović twins have made an important step in the direction of moulding a new musical voice, a modern ethnovocal orchestration. Their approach to our musical heritage shows how new generations of young people - living in sky-scrapers, in a video and computer environment - can accept the challenge of their musical and vocal roots, and, in a sense, turn them into a starting point for their creative abilities. On the other hand, by their choice and sequence of songs, the Teofilović twins tell us their version of the eternal tale about human search for purpose and beauty in all their diversity. Pondering for ages on the purpose of life, man has discovered the beauty of this search.

Professor Nenad Ljubinković

 

concert at Dom Omladine Hall, Belgrade, April 17th 2003