Russian Guitar Nights

 

Coming Up:

The next one will take place on Friday, November 20 at 7:30 - 10:00 PM in W20-407 (MIT Student Center, 4th floor).

A $5 donation will greatly influence the future quality of food at these events!

See our Facebook event page.

Event Description:

This event will combine two amazing features of Russian culture: Russian guitar songs and Blinchiki - Russian-style pancakes.

Amateurish guitarists/singers from different MIT, Harvard, Northeastern and other schools will perform songs of famous Russian rock-bands and “bards” (independent singers-songwriters of the Soviet period). Everything will be performed in Russian, as most of the songs are impossible to translate.

The short concert will be immediately followed up by tea with Blinchiki – Russian-style pancakes. In Russian one can build up a whole meal around pancakes, serving them with meat, cheese, sour cream, caviar, as well as with fruit preserves, condensed milk and chocolate.

You will enjoy Blinchiki with a variety of toppings (including famous Russian caviar!), Russian desserts and tea. After this we’ll spread around the room and continue playing and singing all kinds of music in smaller groups. 

If you can play the guitar – bring it! We’ll have fun.

Background information:

Guitar songs are the essential part of Russian culture. Created by Russian rock-bands and independent singers-songwriters, these songs are often performed within students, tourists, on parties or special music festivals. Most of the Russian songs are sung with fairly simple guitar accompaniment and focus more on lyrics and meaning. These songs can be easily played by the non-professional musicians, and sung by almost everyone.

Many of these songs where written during the soviet and early post-soviet era. At that time songwriters often where not permitted to perform or record music due to political nature of their songs. As a result songs where distributed underground as tape recordings or simply by copying texts and chords of a song. This created a whole culture of singing songs in small groups that still persists in the Russian society.