The countries of Eastern Europe are filled with many things: lingering reminders of the Soviet Union, hard consonants, cabbage ““ and then there’s the music.
“Prague was filled with jazz,” said Dana Malinick, a third-year communication studies student. “There were jazz clubs all over the city, and there were bands on almost every street corner.”
Malinick made a three-day trip to Prague during her time at King’s-Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge in England, where she studied art, British cinema and political theory. She bonded with Prague over a mutual love for jazz, most memorably at the city’s famous Charles Bridge.
“The bridge is famous for its art vendors, and in the center of the bridge there was a five-man jazz band,” Malinick said. “The sound was very New Orleans-esque, and there were always groups of folks crowded around them, listening intently.”
Over 900 miles to the northeast, in St. Petersburg, Russia, Susan Freese has encountered a similar abundance of tunes. Freese, a recent UCLA alumna, is currently at St. Petersburg State University studying the Russian language for the nine-month Russian Flagship Fellowship. She’s seen a Finnish orchestra concert, the Russian Philharmonic playing Mozart and Beethoven and a performance of “The Magic Flute” in Russian.
But she’s also noticed, like Malinick did in Prague, that music can be found anywhere.
“Every day while I commute to my university I usually see at least two or three street musicians, ranging from younger people to older babushkas,” Freese wrote in an e-mail. “Usually they are either singing and playing the guitar or the accordion. I hear a range of music, usually rock or Russian folk music.”
This active street scene also seemed unusual, at least to Malinick, in the way it was received by audiences. The street musicians in Prague sold recordings and collected donations, which onlookers bought and offered generously rather than skeptically ““ a far cry from an American public who failed to notice world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell playing in a Washington, D.C. subway station in 2007.
Of course, the Eastern European music scene is not restricted to outdoor public areas. Stephanie Milano, a recent UCLA alumna who is now, like Freese, engaged in the Russian Flagship program in St. Petersburg, has had her most memorable musical encounter in the relative privacy of a cafe in Ukraine. She was sitting across from her Ukrainian boyfriend, when a song by the Afro-Ukrainian pop star Gaitana began to play.
“I remember as we were looking into each other’s eyes for a long time this song was playing at the cafe,” Milano said in an e-mail. “I thought this song was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I asked him what this song was about ““ I only speak Russian, not Ukrainian ““ and he explained that it was about love. It was the perfect moment for that song.”
Milano was introduced to Russian music long before, however; she took an Intermediate Russian course at UCLA in 2006 and was required to learn perform two Russian songs. To this day, she still remembers the selections, Russian pop star Valeriya’s “Chernyi beli svet” and the traditional folk song “Valenki.”
As she’s spent time abroad, however, Milano’s musical tastes have changed. Her interests have drifted away both from the saccharine accessibility of Valiera and from the deep history of the customary folk music.
“I’m watching a lot of ballet, going to operas,” Milano said. “Pop music just doesn’t touch me anymore. I think its because my main interest in pop music stemmed from my desire to learn new vocabulary through the lyrics as I was studying Russian. Now I, more or less, can understand the lyrics right away.”
Freese’s experience, on the other hand, has been one of Russian music changing rather than her own preferences. She studied abroad in Moscow in 2004 and returned to the city in 2007 for the Alfa Fellowship, and noticed that in only three years the musical landscape had changed significantly.
“In Moscow there is a popular street called New Arbat, and in 2004 over the speakers I always heard rock music in Russian,” Freese said. “But by 2007 all of the music played there was in English. Now, in particular at restaurants and in clubs, almost all of the music is in English. Even on the Russian radio station that all Russians have in their apartments, I hear music both in English and in Russian … a wide variety ranging from Ray Charles to ’80s and ’90s rock, in both English and Russian.”
Yet back in Prague, Malinick found that knowledge of American music could still be quite shallow. In her short time in the city she’d heard jazz music that ran contrary to what she’d expected from the Eastern European music scene, but as an ambassador of American music, she seemed to be representing a stereotype more than anything else.
“Every time someone would find out you’re American they’d be like, “˜Do you like Michael Jackson?'” Malinick said. “And I’d be like, “˜Yes,’ and they’d be like “˜Of course you do, you’re American.'”