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Watch Golosá sing "Rasti da Rasti"—which translates to "Grow and Grow"—at the February 13 Folk Festival.

“Crunchy dissonance” is how Golosá choir leader Tammy Ghattas, AB’03, describes the sound of the group’s pre-Soviet, Russian folk-music repertoire. “Nobody would have written these folk songs down at any time,” she says in February 17 interview for WBEZ’s Worldview. They were passed on orally: “People learn them from their friends and people in villages." Two individuals might sing the same part in a song, but they each interpret it slightly differently. "So if they are singing the same part, and then one person thinks it’d be nice to go up, and the other person thinks it’d be nice to go down, then you get a really tight harmony.”

Started in summer 1997 after cofounder Noel Taylor, AM’99, SM’04, returned from studying German in Freiburg—home of one of the oldest Russian folk groups still in existence—Golosá performs around Chicago, nationally, and internationally. Interviewed on Worldview following the 50th annual U of C Folk Festival, at which Golosá sang, Ghattas and Taylor explain the group’s past and present.

Their next performance is April 9, singing with Georgian-music choir Alioni at an ethnomusicology conference hosted by Chicago’s DePaul University.

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

March 4, 2010