Magi Kapllani is continuing the legacy started by her parents, two classically trained musicians in Albania who established a music school and cultural center that’s now the namesake for Kapllani’s own franchise, DEA Music & Art.
“My parents have accomplished in my country what governments would not do, establishing a music and arts and cultural center,” Kapllani said of her parents’ DEA Center of the Arts. DEA stands for Dizdari Educational Academy, after Kapllani’s mother’s maiden name.
Kapllani’s mother started teaching her piano at the age of 4. When Kapllani immigrated to the U.S. in 1999 to get her master’s degree in piano performance at the University of Illinois, she ended up performing all over Chicago and eventually moved to New York. She taught piano in her living room and had eight students who would put on small performances.
Kapllani, though, worried her music lessons weren’t being taken seriously enough. “Maybe the fact that we were in a living room was a factor,” she said. So she and her husband decided to lease a commercial space and establish a full-blown school. Then in 2003, Kapllani opened DEA Music & Art in Staten Island.
Albania’s past as it is transmitted to us in popular songs is therefore more relevant than might be thought to present-day questions, and in any case it is always interesting to see the lower classes encountering the challenges of invasion and exile without losing anything of the qualities which give strength to a sense of national identity.
Mr. Hahn the Albanians are descendants of the famous Pelasgi. The Pelasgi would have formed the pre-historical population of Epirus, Macedonia, Illyria, Greece, the Peloponnese and large Italian territories. In Greece, the Pelasgi would have adopted the Hellenic language, when the Hellenic population came to dominate the Pelasgic one
16The struggles of the Eastern Empire against the Slavs did not improve the situation of the Albanians. However, the Pelasgic nation, which had survived so many invasions, was not bound to disappear faced with the Serbian population. Part of Albania went so far as to embrace Catholicism so as to establish Albanian nationality in the face of Serbian nationality.
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