Mazurka Festival

The Mazurka Festival is a celebration of folk dance and music originating in Poland, a region on the European continent on Earth.

This festival is annually celebrated at the Federation New Berlin colony.

The mazurka is a stylized Polish folk dance in triple meter with a lively tempo that has a heavy accent on the third or second beat. Its folk origins are the slow kujawiak and the fast oberek. It is always found to have either a triplet, trill, dotted eighth note pair, or an ordinary eighth note pair before two quarter notes. The dance became popular at ballroom dances in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The Polish national anthem has a mazurka rhythm but is too slow to be considered a mazurka.

Mazurka in Polish is mazurek, derived from the word mazur, which up to nineteenth century referred to an inhabitant of the Mazovia region of Poland, and which also was the root of the term Masuria). Mazurka is the genitive and accusative case of mazurek.

Several classical composers have written mazurkas, with the best known being the 57 composed by Frédéric Chopin for solo piano. Henryk Wieniawski wrote two for violin with piano (the popular "Obertas", op. 19), and in the 1920s, Karol Szymanowski wrote a set of twenty for piano and finished his composing career with a final pair in 1934.