Akord Festival Maribor

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Akord Festival Maribor

Ljubljanska 4, SI-2000 Maribor

http://www.mkc.si/

Organised byMKC Maribor Youth Culture Centre

Frequencyannual

The Akord festival was established in 2010 by the MKC Maribor Youth Culture Centre. A continuation of the former cycle of open-air ethno music concerts organised in the old city centre of Maribor, the festival narrowed its focus and put its emphasis on the accordion, which holds a very ambiguous position in Slovenia. It is, on one side, a focal instrument in the commercially successful, critically disputed and polka and waltz based oberkrainer music (called narodno-zabavna glasba). While this is more present in rural parts, there are also the more modern, jazz and world music influenced, urban uses of the instrument, that have recently also gained much popularity. All this in mind, the festival is also called the Festival of accordion music with a difference.

Programme

The first edition of the festival hosted the more modern, hybrid sounding musicians like the jazz oriented band Bratko Bibič & The Madleys and the innovative accordion players Jure Tori (he is also playing in the rock band Orlek) and Lothar Lässer (who has collaborated in the ensembles Deishovida, Budowitz, Sandy Lopicic Orkestar, Bukowina Club Orkestar and writes music for theatres in Graz, Klagenfurt and Vienna). The course of the programme later changed and placed on its programme more opposing musical visions (like the rock inclined [[Kvinton] and the more traditional accordion virtuoso Klemen Rošer), thus accentuating both sides of the accordion's cultural positioning.

In terms of timing, the festival curiously chose the morning hours for the concerts and as such also figures as a way of urban revitalisation. Besides the concerts, there are also screenings of films, that one way or another deal with accordion, like the documentaries Harmonikarji ([The Accordion players]), which presents various Slovene accordion players of different musical credos, and V ritmu volovske vprjege ([In the rhytm of harness]), that deals with the artistic path of the musicans Uršula Ramoveš and her husband Janez.

Also, in the course of the festival in 2010, the Slovene and European hymns were for the first time adapted for accordion and a year later, when the festival again took place, the notations were freely distributed to the interested public.

See also

• MKC Maribor Youth Culture Centre

External links

• Akord Festival on Myspace