Urban Songs

Egon Bondy (Zbyněk Fišer, 1930–2007), legend of the Prague underground and lyricist of the Plastic People of the Universe, moved to Bratislava in 1993 in protest against the division of Czechoslovakia. He attended every concert of VENI, VAPORI del CUORE and Požoň, often the only member of the older generation in the audience, and asked questions afterwards. His flat in the Old Town, and later the reading room of the Music Centre, hosted “Fridays at three at Bondy’s”: listening to music (Georgian chant, Philip Glass, Italian brass bands playing opera arias) and talking. They were led first by Juraj Beneš, then Daniel Matej and finally Marek Piaček. “Bondy was glad to have found something like Agon in Bratislava,” Piaček recalls. And he kept insisting: “Mr. Marek, we must do something together.”

Bondy’s novella Epizóda ’96 was a revelation for the ensemble (“we rejoiced that Epizóda was our manifesto”); a whole page of the booklet of the first CD Venované Hansimu is taken from it. Bondy in turn argued that the song folklore of the big European cities is more homogeneous than any national folk music, and admitted he had his own cassette of Prague songs – lent to the painter Laco Teren and never found again. So he proposed to record them anew. Over several evenings Piaček recorded Bondy extemporizing coarsely and with relish to pub and salon tunes in Czech and German, and composed accompaniments and instrumental interludes (arrangements by Piaček, Lenko and Zagar; Hřbitove, hřbitove by Bondy himself).

Premiere and travels

Urban Songs premiered on 14 November 2000 at the Stoka theatre during the New Slovak Music festival, followed by a very long lecture by Bondy on globalisation. Then came concerts at Stoka and the CC Centrum in Bratislava, Trenčín, the Summer Film School in Uherské Hradiště, HaDivadlo and the Alternativa festival in Brno, Ponec theatre in Prague, Olomouc, the Bohemia festival in Budapest (2002), Wien Modern at Café Heumarkt (2003), the Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava (2004) and the last concerts in Bratislava in 2005. Every journey meant long conversations in the car: “Bondy’s influence was permanent.”

The CD Urban Songs was released in December 2001 (Music Fund / Atrakt Art, recorded at Solid Studios in January 2001, with the support of Karol Frühauf of Baden): Marek Piaček’s first profile CD, with the cycle Kindermusikverein on themes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the Suite in the Manner of Požoň (“Boris plays the drone and the rhythm, Ľubo and Marek play the melody in fifths, and Peter adds some fast broken chords”) and Urban Songs, 35 tracks in all, with the Middle-class Chamber Choir Požoň Sentimental.

Bondy stopped performing a few years before his death (2007). The cycle has not been performed with another singer since: only he could give it that absurdist tone. Their second Bratislava collaboration was the opera The Last Flight – Twelve Views of M. R. Š. (libretto Egon Bondy and Elena Kmeťová, premiered at Stoka on 14 December 2001).

Folk music from all over the world, and music inspired by ethnic music, affects me intensely: from Janáček and Stravinsky through Messiaen up to Požoň Sentimental. What Požoň Sentimental does is in my view an important link in the development. It is already a movement worldwide, whose representatives rightly realise that the notion of ethnic music must be extended to the folklore of the big cities – music that arose from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, before mass-media hits and discos drowned it out. I am fascinated by the Central European tradition of urban folklore, uniform from the Baltic to the Adriatic. … I love music terribly, and I owe much to my young Bratislava friends.
— Egon Bondy: Music I Like (Hudobný život 5/2001)

In the nearby Café Heumarkt the orchestra Požoň Sentimental from Bratislava ran to top form … supported by guest Egon Bondy, a Czech philosopher of indeterminate age, exiled to Bratislava in protest against the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, who – picturesquely embedded between one or two mugs of beer and the never-ending smoke of his Petra cigarettes – took the vocal part of these shirt-sleeved modern workers’ songs. The audience went wild – 1:0 for Slovakia!
— Falter (Vienna), 1/2004