Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia 0415939666, 2002017879

Citation preview

C u r r en t R esearch E t h n o m u s ic o l o g v O u t s t a n d in g D is s e r t a t io n s

Edited by

Jennifer C. Post Middlebury College

in

C u r r en t R esearch in E th n o m u sic o lo g y J e n n if e r C. P o s t , General Editor 1. N e w l y C o m p o sed F o lk M usic Y u g o sla v ia

Ljerka V. Rasmussen

of

NEWLY COMPOSED FOLK MUSIC OF YUGOSLAVIA

Ljerka V. Rasmussen

~ ~ ~~o~;~;n~s~:up NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2002 by Routledge Published in Great Britainby Routledge This edition by Routledge: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to digital printing 2011 Copyright© 2002 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this bookmay be reprinted or reproduced or uti, now known lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means any informain or recording, and photocopying including , invented or hereafter tion storageor retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the publish er. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rasmussen, LjerkaV. Yugoslavia I by Ljerka V. Rasmussen. Newly composed folk music of p. em.- (Current researchin ethnomusicology; v.1) . ) and index. Includes bibliographical references (p Discography: p. ISBN 0-415-93966-6 1. Folk music-Yugoslavia-History and criticism. 2. Popular musicYugoslavia-History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. ML3610 .R37 2002 2002017879 781.62'9 182-dc21

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

For Joseph and Anton

CONTENTS

M usical E xamples on the C ompact D isc N ote on Language and P ronunciation A cknowledgments

xi xiii

Introduction

xvii

Newly Composed Folk Music as an Eastern Cultural Model Newly Composed Folk Music as a Product of Westernization The State and Spontaneous Folklore Popular Music and Identity Newly Composed Folk Music into Politics Fieldwork C hapter I T he E mergence of N ewly C omposed F olk M usic

xv

xviii xx xxii xxv xxvi xxviii

3

The Historicity of Music The New Cycle

5 11

C hapter II L aying the Foundations: T he Practice of A rrangement

15

The Early Obrada Performance: Folk Orchestra Song Form Neotraditional Song: the Case of Sevdalinka The Estrada Context: Zabavna Music

20 29 31 34 39

viii

Contents

C hapter III T he M arket B reakthrough

51

Songwriters’ Perspectives On the Festival Stage

59

C hapter IV T he F olk E stra d a : P roducts

53

and

A ctivities

67

Media, Record Producers and the Social System

79

C hapter V S tyle an d R egionalism

95

B osnian Stream

99

Serbian Stream

108

“N ew W ave” Oriental Stream

123

117

R om R esp onse

132

C hapter VI N ewly C omposed F olk M usic

on

R adio

141

Organization of Music Broadcast Music and Radio Narrative Musical Geography: The Principle of Diversity International Perspective National Perspective Folk Music Programming Derdan

141 145 147 147

151 154 161

C hapter VII The P ow er o f th e M ark et: P ro d u ctio n

169

Structure of Production Record Sales

174

169

C h apter VIII T he P ower

of the

M arket : P atterns

Newly Composed Texts Lament Satire Alternative Reclaiming Differences A Note of Conclusion

of

R eception

183 185

186 189 191 194 199

Contents B ibliograph y S e le c te d D iscography Index

ix 205 213 217

Supplementary Resources Disclaimer Additional resources were previously made available for this title on CD. However, as CD has become a less accessible format, all resources have been moved to a more convenient online download option. You can find these resources available here: https://www.routledge.com/9780415939669 Please note: Where this title mentions the associated disc, please use the downloadable resources instead.

Musical Examples on the Compact Disc CD materials can be found at https://www.routledge.com/9780415939669

. Tanasijevic). Used by permis1. Od izvora dva putica by Lepa Lukic (P sion of PGP RTS. . Zdravkovic). 2. Sta ce mi iivot [bez tebe dragi] by Silvana Armenulic (T Used by permission of Croatia Records. . Used by 3. Voljela sam oCi nevjerne by Hanka Paldum (Mijat Bozovic) permission of author and artist. . Samardzic-N. Borota). Used by permis4. Zbog tebe by Hanka Paldum (S sion of Sarajevo-disk. 5. Voleo sam devojku iz grada by Miroslav Ilic(0. Pjevovic-D. Eric-arr. D. Aleksandric). Used by permissionof PGP RTS. 6. Hocu, hocu by Miroslav Ilic (D. Aleksandric-D. Todorovic). Used by permission of PGP RTS. . Gljiva-N.Gljiva-D. Stojkovic). 7. Necu, necu dijamante by Halid Beslic (N Used by permissionof author. M. Ilic-M. M. 8. Zumro, Zumro by Kemal Malovcic and "Juzni Vetar" .(M and author. Juvekomerc of permission Ilic-arr. P. Zdravkovic). Used by 9. Nemafajde by Sulejman Ramadan Ramee .(SFazli-S. Fazli/ S. Zubanovic-R. Ramiz). Used by permissionof Sarajevo-disk.

xi

Note on Language and Pronunciation

I

AM A SPEAKER OF THE SERBO-CROATIAN LANGUAGE, AS WERE OR ARE THE

majority of the citizens in the former Yugoslavia. Other languages that were used within respective republics/provinces were Slovenian, Macedonian, and Albanian. At present (1999), Serbo-Croatian speakers speak what are officially recognized as three distinct languages: Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. This differentiation does not change the fact that all three constitute a single language, reflecting differences previously referred to as eastern and western variants of Serbo-Croatian: the ekavijan andje.kavijan dialects, some lexical features and, in the case of Serbian, the use of Cyrillic over the Latin alphabet. Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian use the following letters which do not have equivalents in the English alphabet or are pronounced differently: Cc

as in cats

Lj U

as in million

C c

as in church

Njnj

as in canyon

C c

as in witch

Rr

rolled, close to Italian “r5

Dz dz

as in George

Ss

as in shock

Dd

as in jeep

Zz

as in pleasure

Jj

as in yes

Acknowledgments

y g r e a t e s t d eb t g oes t o my ad viser, M ark Slobin, o f th e M usic

M

Department at W esleyan University, for his guidance and continued support during the work on this dissertation. Ankica Petrovic of UCLA, my undergraduate mentor at the Sarajevo Academy o f Music, deserves special gratitude for taking up on my fa it accom pli request to improve on the ethnographic validity of portions of the text. It was a very special occasion to have both Mark Slobin and Ankica Petrovic as members o f my defence committee. In different places and at different stages o f my studies, they have shown, by their example, the value of scholarly openness and critical thinking as they helped me find my own way in the diverse field o f ethnomusicological inquiry.

The presence of my Nashville-based editor, Christina Ferreira, is literal­ ly and otherwise inscribed throughout this work. Christina’s editorial astute­ ness, combined with her unabated interest in the subject and well-timed proddings coalesced early on in the writing process into a true collaboration. I am grateful to the many musicians, the music industry and the media professionals as well as colleagues in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade, who shared their knowledge and candid views on Yugoslav music and its mean­ ings. Given the heightened political sensitivity to some issues discussed here, however wide or narrow the spectrum of ideological positions they might project, I cannot overemphasize that the interpretative responsibility of com­ mentators’ views lies, for the most part, with me. I am hopeful that I have not usurped their trust by conveying their pointed criticism as well as the strength

xv

xvi

Acknowledgments

of conviction (and passion) that characterized the real life debates on newly composed folk music. Compiling a sound recording of “formerly Yugoslav” music, if only in the modest format of an illustrative compact disc accompanying a scholarly book, represents an act of faith (enthusiasm and persistence are helpful too). I am delighted to acknowledge the assistance of record producers and indi­ viduals who have either directly granted licensing permissions or helped secure them: Ms. Ivanka Butkovic of Croatia Records (Zagreb), Mr. Dusan Stojanovic of Production of Gramophone Records of Radio-Television Serbia (Belgrade), Mr. Miodrag Ilic of Juvekomerc (Belgrade), and Mr. Muradif Brkic of Sarajevo-disk (Sarajevo). A special line of support came from artists: Mr. Mijat Bozovic, Mr. Nazif Gljiva, and especially Ms. Hanka Paldum, who graciously gave their permissions for the inclusion of two recordings originally issued by Diskoton, a major Bosnian producer which suffered complete devastation during the Sarajevo siege. Thanks also go to Maja Baralic-Mateme who diligently helped with a permission during the last stage of this work. Finally, the proper acknowledgment of institutional support singularly goes to Wesleyan University and its Music Department which provided the ideal conditions for my graduate work.

Introduction

I

n W e ste r n p o lit ic a l d isc o u r se , Y u g o s la v ia w as fr e q u e n t ly referred to as a “buffer zone,” its independence from the Soviet bloc being the single most salient factor making it politically atypical. Another enduring metaphor, that of a crossroads between East and West, was often invoked to describe Yugoslavia’s heterogeneous culture, owing as much to its geographic position in central/southeast Europe as to its multinational makeup. Yet, if not solely for its socialist brand of communism, the BalkanSlavic identity o f Yugoslavia’s traditional culture shaped the perception of the country as a part o f the east European cultural bloc.

Like other cultures on the map of Slavic traditions, Yugoslavia present­ ed the casual observer with a colorful variety of village music, ethnic customs and a proliferating national folklore engendered in festival re-enact­ ments of rural life. Rapid social changes following World War II profound­ ly affected the country’s largely rural-based culture. Despite enormous evidence of vanishing historic practices, the music rooted in the socioeco­ nomic milieu of peasant society remained the main focus of ethnomusicological research interest. Yugoslavia’s contemporary culture, originating in such modem institutions as mass media and the market place, did not receive comparable attention. “Yugoslav culture,” a much-debated notion in the recent past, is used here to evoke the broadest scope of expressive culture of the Yugoslav peo­ ples— rural and urban, local and mass-mediated— that evolved along with post-1945 Yugoslavia. Within this national framework, the present study addresses one of the most popular musical forms: a commercial folk-based

xviii

Introduction

genre commonly referred to as novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly composed folk music; henceforth NCFM).1 This inquiry highlights several methodological issues that derive from the twin difficulties of defining Yugoslavia’s culture in terms of a single cultural tradition and casting it in conventional terms of the European east/west cultural distinction. In particu­ lar, NCFM raises the issue of Western researchers’ proclivity to define east European cultures in political terms. The following addresses these perspec­ tives. NEWLY COMPOSED FOLK MUSIC AS AN EASTERN CULTURAL MODEL Far from remaining an evanescent phenomenon of post-1945 social transi­ tion, the cultural impact of NCFM (which continues unabated today) led to an agreement that this indeed was a “unique and autochthonous product of mass culture on Yugoslav soil.”2 Underscoring this mass culture definition were related factors: the enormous popularity of the music among a broad cross-section of the audience, and its largely negative aesthetic evaluation by both commentators and a part of the public. For both detached and involved observers, the reach of this music in the public space felt total, from buses to fine hotel restaurants, from village drinking joints to New Year Eve’s national television specials. The music’s social presence was unavoidable, blurring boundaries between private and public space and thought: from apartment privacy violated by a neighbor’s radio to television debates on the deeper meanings of the “phenomenon” of NCFM. This particular concurrence of visibility and marginality extended to the music’s aesthetics. Song lyrics tended to be realistic representations of existentialist and romantic sentiments that thrived on the condition of emotional unfulfillment, typically unrequited love. Because of their focus on longing and destiny, for detractors, newly composed folk songs represented incoherent statements on suffering that indulged a listener with a luxury of personal doom. Social commentary songs pointed to a variety of other topics and communal con­ texts of the music, among them, family, patriotism, emigrant life, and satire. NCFM was a modem epic of the everyday and a catalyst for emotional pain. It was also, and perhaps essentially, an entertainment. Its musicians were nationally recognized star-singers and countless kafana (cafe) performers in the provincial, semi-urban milieu of Yugoslav towns.3 NCFM iconography, rich in details of gender-based modes of representation, conveyed images of both localism and popular culture excess: ordinariness, depicted on cassette covers in the undistinguished facial expressions of little-known male singers,

Introduction

xix

and worldly glamour, visualized in the female body and dress. Sentimentality, naive mimicry of modernity, artifice in music, vulgarity of text: for critics, these were the stylistic surfaces of the construction of a “newly composed culture.” From its beginnings, NCFM underscored not only the difference between traditional and commercial folk music as between folklore and kitsch, but another set of institutionally and psychologically maintained boundaries reinforcing perceptions of culture-core differences between Balkan and (western) European culture. It undermined the very notions of culture and good taste, and inspired a notion of anti-culture. It was also the Yugoslavs’ most vividly expressed social commentary on change. These dualistic concepts defined the discourse on the music’s social origin. The emergence of NCFM is commonly viewed within the context of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Yugoslavia after World War II, and in particular, the migrations of the rural population to the cities. It was often said that NCFM met the cultural needs of this transitional majority seeking to rid itself of the baggage of rural origin while psychologically unequipped to accept models of urban culture. Sociological explanations clearly recognized the mediating role of NCFM in the formulation and expression of migrants’ identity. Implicit in this evolutionary conception of change was the existence of a primary model; i.e., traditional music and the culture of the village. Musically, NCFM was similarly described as a hybrid creation: it retained rural symbolism and ambience, appropriated the techni­ cal language of arranged folk music, and turned to the commercial resources of the pop market. Because it was essentially a commercial product, it was placed at the far end of musical folklorism, at the threshold of homegrown mass culture. At the same time that NCFM prompted issues of the homogenization of folk music’s regional and ethnic diversity, it crystallized internally divisive issues, chief among them the distinction between Yugoslavia’s east and west. The dominant position, that NCFM embodied an “eastern” cultural model of Yugoslavia, drew on two facts of regionalism: the greatest concentration of its audience (and commercial production) in the southeast (Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro), and its “orientalist” features, most prominently expressed in singing styles. The eastern image of NCFM, advanced in par­ ticular by commentators from the northwest, implied a need for cultural dis­ tance from this populist, commercially assertive, and aesthetically inferior musical language whose national reach threatened cultural dominance. Some writers adapted the often-debated technical qualification “newly composed” to describe the broad field of contemporary folk music, which

XX

Introduction

included genres as regionally varied as Slovenian polka, Croatian kajkavian song, and Dalmatian klapa (male-group) singing.4 This attempt at a broad operational definition clearly used a festival and mass-media “second life” of folk music to point to similar processes of musical change in the whole of Yugoslavia. Finally, a few authors refuted the shared view that NCFM was a uniquely Yugoslav, and specifically regional, phenomenon, noting the com­ parable musical changes observable worldwide.5 Just as NCFM helped mediate the rural/urban social transition, it served as a dramatic expression of the cultural gap between village and city. Distinct from both typically village and urban music, it demonstrated continuities as well as breaks with tradition, which leads to another perspective in its study— Westernization. NEWLY COMPOSED FOLK MUSIC AS A PRODUCT OF WESTERNIZATION During the 1950s-60s in Yugoslavia, as elsewhere in eastern Europe, radio and television folk orchestras epitomized the process of technological and aesthetic modernization of folk music. The project of orchestral arrangement, aimed at harmonic enrichment of “crude” izvorna (literally, wellspring) music, produced a new model suitably called muzika u narodnom duhu (music in the folk spirit). But, while arrangement standardized the language of folk music and became the focal point of folk music policy and practice, it also helped prepare the way for a proliferation of new genres. The origin of NCFM lies in this process. It was characterized by coexistence, not, as is sometimes assumed, by the replacement of one model of music by another. Izvorna music, “music in the folk spirit,” and “newly composed folk music” emerged as paradigmatic genres in the national systematization of folk music around which the debate of authenticity and cultural value could revolve. By the later 1970s NCFM was established as a distinct genre and eco­ nomic entity. Its market at that time reflected its maturity, evidenced by high record sales and greater experimentation with music beyond the regional sty­ listic pool. The subsequent process of the “folklorization” of Yugoslav main­ stream zabavna (pop; literally, entertainment) music was recognized as a direct result of NCFM’s increased influence in the national music scene. During the 1980s, the interchange of stylistic elements of choice between zabavna and narodna music established a trend that would be followed by folk, pop, and even rock musicians. After three decades of stylistically and economically well-defined markets for zabavna and narodna music, this was a confusing and aesthetically disruptive development. Clear boundaries

Introduction

xxi

between folk and pop music, and the different (sub)cultures these genres symbolized, became compromised. It is possible to argue that the NCFM’s rise to national prominence was a result of a delayed process Edward Larkey terms “re-ethnification”; a final phase in the model of the adoption of Anglo-American popular music pre­ ceded by imitation and linguistic nativization.6 While there may not be a sin­ gle explanation as to why “folk” asserted itself as the most exploitable lan­ guage on Yugoslav estrada (entertainment industry; literally, stage) at this time, the World Music surge in 1980s Western markets may have played an indirect role. An additional answer lies in a greater assertiveness of folk ide­ ology along with the rise of nationalism, and, as a consequence of military conflicts, the wholesale ethnification of Yugoslav expressive culture. Finally, folklorization itself is a misnomer, in that “folk” has always stood for “pop­ ular” in Yugoslav culture. If one follows the arguments that NCFM was Westernized local music or folklorized pop, perhaps the notion of a parallel culture might better describe this symbolically contested cultural space. Suitable as Westernization is as a general argument of acculturation, its relevance should be assessed in the context of the culture under study. The argument of Westernization, and by implication, modernization, appears par­ ticularly problematic in commercial settings of folk music. The decline of rit­ ual music throughout eastern and central Europe, often associated with the misguided policies of orchestral arrangement, has only recently been linked to such diverse factors as the economy of music, the rise in regional “popu­ lar” styles, and the exposure to Western pop music that, in some regional set­ tings, began long before the political changes of the late 1980s. The emer­ gence of a transnational market for Bulgarian folk music sheds new light on the assumption that state folklore conflicted with the “interests of tradition.” Bulgarians’ longstanding practice of combining classical and folk music idioms has now become a more complicated issue of (self)-appropriation than previously suggested by the association with official folklore.7 The com­ plexity of the issues stems chiefly from the fact that the music is being fur­ ther re-contextualized in the Western market, validating in very concrete terms Bulgarians’ arrangement efforts, and, in a sense, exposing the aesthet­ ic miscalculation of ethnomusicologists. The linkage between communist ideology and cultural practices in east European contexts raises another methodological issue: the assumption of a structural link between political system and musical culture.

xxii

Introduction

THE STATE AND SPONTANEOUS FOLKLORE Researchers’ interest in the ideological underpinnings of cultural practices in eastern Europe reflects the inherently political nature of many folk music uses. The role of communist ideology in shaping a folk culture suited to the new society has been well documented, and its effects critically assessed, typically against the pastoral backdrop of peasant and ethnic communities. In contrast to these small-group settings, music practices that involved the “col­ lective” have been approached in suspect terms as a state folklore. A number of Yugoslav ethnologists decried the homogenizing impact of festival folk­ lore on the stylistic distinctiveness of local music, while outside students of Balkan traditions have generally shied away from institutionalized forms of village music. Implicit in these approaches is an assumption of the corruption of tradition by outside forces; in the former case, by folklore enthusiasts and the tourist industry, in the latter, by the state and its cultural bureaucrats. Even though these attitudes reflect divergent theoretical concerns— commer­ cialization and state interference— they are conceptually close in their implicit trust in the intrinsic superiority of historic, peasant-based, practices. Recognition of the distinction between the official and unofficial domains of culture has been one of the central theoretical tenets of east European music scholarship. The tendency towards formulaic applications of this model of hegemony is particularly evident in writings on the topic of musical change. If the synthesis of folklore and national ideology is approached as a specifically east European experience, this is because changes in folk music are invariably seen as the result of the communist ide­ ology of progress. In framing the Hungarian folk music revival movement with a number of politically progressive movements and those that support­ ed fascist ideology in nineteenth and twentieth century Hungary, Judit Frigyesi questions this position, noting that political use of folk music origi­ nated not from official ideology alone, nor was it unique to the communist period.8 In the south Slav context, the Illyrian movement of the first half of the nineteenth century is but one event exemplifying the symbiotic links between national ideology and folk art. As Josip Andreis noted: “Illyrians saw in music powerful means which had to fulfill two tasks: awaken and strengthen patriotic feelings and help the cultural affirmation of Croats by creating a new Croatian art music.”9 In furthering the goals of an oppositional “people’s renewal” movement, the Illyrians sought linguistic nativization and folk art as sources of cultural empowerment as well as of political mobilization. Not

Introduction

xxiii

until the next century were their ideas realized in the official discourse of south Slav Yugoslavism. National movements, steeped in nineteenth century romanticism, culti­ vated an idea of the spiritual superiority of folk that has endured until the present. Despite official and popular attitudes that alternated between affir­ mation and condescension in recent Yugoslav history, the longstanding cel­ ebratory view of the folk and its traits— purity of language and artistic expression, noble simplicity and wisdom—provided an affirmative model for the twentieth century concept of narodna, or people’s, folk culture. Historically then, folk art was not only “the embodiment of a national desire in the social sense,” but also “the manifestation of communal thinking” (Frigyesi 1996, 57). Clearly, the extent of overlap between national ideology and artistic expression is bound to remain the subject of historical interpretation. Looking at the political contexts of folk music in earlier periods, we see the persistence of national ideologies in the creation of official discourses that continued in elaborated cultural policies in recent periods. This requires ana­ lytical sensitivity to the historical perspective when assessing the impact of dominant ideology on folk cultures in the post-1945 period. In other words, probing into musical changes in the communist period is not the same as explaining them away as products of the ideological excesses of state poli­ cies— policies which, as is too often the case with east European cultures, are dealt with as primary ethnographic texts. The ideological interpretation of musical structures can illuminate, but can also obscure, the social dynamics of music that may, but need not, show “the system” at work, particularly those aspects of the everyday that can be explained neither by orders from the central committee nor by the dissent of a disciplined village musician. As Martin Stokes argues, observers often tend to uncritically assign explanatory power to official discourses, whether by identifying them with social reality or by discounting them as mechanisms of control with little relation to social life. “Discourses are above all things which are used and manipulated by people at a local level in particular situations, and their inher­ ent ambiguities and tensions are a critical factor in their operation.”10 While the official/unofficial paradigm is helpful in understanding NCFM’s contro­ versial status in Yugoslav culture, it cannot explain this music’s entire soci­ ocultural field. There is a particular aspect of the disjuncture between cultur­ al policies and practice that reflects (perhaps characteristically for the statemanaged cultural systems of eastern Europe), the popular as culturally ille­ gitimate. This implies on one hand, the nominal value of the official critique

xxiv

Introduction

of NCFM, and on the other hand, the actual power of this music as a “dom­ inant cultural model” of post-1945 Yugoslavia (Dragicevic-Sesic 1988, 95). The NCFM debate illustrates what is seen today as a relational ethnomusicological achievement in proving that music is not only reflective of social life but constitutive of culture.11 One may argue convincingly that, because NCFM provides an insight into systemic contradictions, it acted as both a reflection and a structural extension of Yugoslavia’s unique political system. We might explain the growth of its market in the 1970s as a direct result of society’s efforts at political liberalization and the decentralization of the economic system. In this sense, the music is a product of the political sys­ tem that allowed it. Yugoslavs’ occasional reference to NCFM as a “mirror of our society” suggests this perspective in tacitly non-complimentary terms. Depending on the context of its use, this metaphor may evoke a disorderly, unregulated, or corrupted state, but also a free-willed, grass-roots, or entre­ preneurial condition. Similarly, the notion of “newly composed culture” rec­ ognizes the music primarily as a formative system of values, and secondari­ ly as a social class associated with these values. The question remains whether NCFM should be treated as a self-explanatory social text. While for an analyst, a song that contains the motif of a tractor may provide an insight into agricultural modernization, it seems harder (following the dictum of homology), to read in another song the motif of modem love as a reflection of social liberalizations induced by self-management. Music’s meanings should be sought in terms of articulating culture rather than fixed social structure. State ownership of cultural institutions is often seen as the single factor determining what and how musical practice is maintained. One may rhetori­ cally question its analytical value by noting that in the societies in question, including Yugoslavia, almost everything was owned by the state. Should this imply, then, that there was no culture outside the reach of the state? And if there was, was it by definition oppositional? Of course, as recent accounts of musical changes in eastern Europe demonstrate, these questions cannot be answered unequivocally.12 In the area of popular music, recent ethnographically-based studies have brought to light the actual histories of popular music in the region, though the focus of interest remains on methods of state con­ trol and co-optation.13 These studies have also indicated a need for re-assess­ ment of previous approaches to the past as well as to the events of the late 1980s, a case in point being the overly enthusiastic reading of the political significance of rock that “smashed the Wall.”14 This leads to insights from popular music studies.

Introduction

xxv

POPULAR MUSIC AND IDENTITY Far from supporting the thesis of cultural gray-out, ethnomusicologists’ increased study of popular music demonstrates both the endurance of local traditions and the powerful influence of Anglo-American popular music worldwide. The prevailing tendency has been to see non-Western popular music as a stylistic synthesis between local music idioms and Western music and technology. The dominant contextual consideration has been social change, almost universally expressed in processes like urbanization and migration. These processes are suggested as the forces behind the emergence of diverse genres such as musica mizrakhit in Israel, arabesk in Turkey, musica sertaneja in Brazil, and bouzouki in Greece.15 The transitional nature of popular music and issues of identity figure prominently in this framework of modernization. Popular music is viewed as giving voice to socially marginal groups, caught as they may be in class struggles, rural-urban transitions, conflicts of regionalism, and resistance to dominant ideologies. Social or political conflicts of cultural status that are often crystallized around popular music genres tend to be viewed in terms of negotiation and mediation. While, in many societies, popular musicians occupy a marginal social position, ethnomusicologists often note that music for them is the means for cultural empowerment. At the same time, analyti­ cal focus on identity tends to reduce musical meaning to a function of repre­ sentation; that is, it renders the aesthetic function of music relative to social formations, or denies its autonomous aspects altogether. The present study also argues for the culturally empowering role of NCFM, from giving voice to the cultural underclass of urbanized peasants to becoming a fashionable subject of post-modern discourse by receptive com­ mentators. Specifically, I attempt to demonstrate that NCFM embodied the inherently pluralistic makeup of Yugoslav culture, and that regionalism was one of the forces behind its popularity. This is it not to suggest functional equilibrium mirroring the national composition, nor to discount recognition of the “easterness” of NCFM and its similarly amorphous “ethnic” ground­ ing. Rather, my intent is to examine cultural dichotomies (rural/urban, Eastern/Western, Serbian/Croatian) as the basis for laying claim to the incompatibility of cultural models stemming from categories of identity. Toward this end, I attempt to resurrect the aesthetics of NCFM by looking at musical structures and performance sensibilities as coherent markers of a “cultural style.” Identity invariably involves understanding of tradition. Tradition is often approached as an ideological construct perpetuated as an instrument of power

xxvi

Introduction

by privileged groups, typically intelligentsia and cultural policy makers. Timothy Rice revitalizes the usefulness of this notion, rich in meanings and social relevance, in the context of Bulgarian music practice. As he notes, tra­ dition is not just talked about, but experienced; it is not only acted upon to serve some ideological or personal interest: it “takes on the appearance of objective existence.”16 Yugoslav musicologists saw NCFM as either a misappropriation of tra­ dition or a direct negation of the historical legitimacy of this concept. Yet debates illustrated the complex ways in which an understanding of tradition as a codified repertory of songs, images, and ideas of the past, determined the boundaries of their discourse. As Rice points out, multifaceted meanings of tradition do not stem solely from the different positions of those who, in arguing, reveal their interests as the interests of tradition; tradition has sever­ al “objective” meanings. Because tradition signified something “of the people,” the mass audience allowed many musicians to lay claim to NCFM as the true people’s music. Tradition, understood in terms of history, translates into cultural worth. Yugoslavs would often say for a popular song of traditional appeal, “The song sustained itself among the folk” (Pjesma se zadrzala u narodu). This validating statement means that, despite the song’s creation by a known songwriter, not the anonymous folk, the “popular” song has become “tradi­ tional” in the sense of acquired historical value. Like tradition, the related notion of authenticity remains a “discursive trope of great persuasive power.”17 Critical interpretations of this notion range from dismissing it in celebration of syncretism to recasting its socially diffused meanings as experiences of truth, and, lately, locality.18 While authenticity is often used as a means of social exclusion, and as the ongoing Yugoslav conflict exemplifies, the cultural cleansing of Otherness, authen­ ticity still remains a potent way of claiming “minority” difference. NEWLY COMPOSED FOLK MUSIC INTO POLITICS The Yugoslav wars have obviously exposed the chauvinistic potential of eth­ nicity. Journalists’ accounts of the physical and musical violence, of cap­ tives’ being forced to sing captors’ nationalist songs, have documented a model of musical behavior in which folk singing, warfare, and alcohol were redefined as cultural virtues. Yugoslavia’s violent demise, which showed how a noble desire for group-identity bonding can turn into a tyranny of blood-and-soil ethnicity, raises the issue of humanistically grounded scholar­ ly benevolence toward identity.

Introduction

xxvii

The editors of Fear, Death and Resistance, a collection of ethnographic essays dealing with the 1991-1992 war in Croatia, suggest that moving from the point where music occurs in the cataclysmic state of war to the level of theoretical contextualization represents a greater philosophical challenge than does the experience of violence itself.19 For the editors, the moral-intel­ lectual dilemma of writing “from inside,” and inside the war reality, over­ rides the modem issue of representation. As a commentary on the apparent necessity of the genre of war ethnography, they find a “morally questionable . . . [thread] in the incentive for the culturological ‘scientification’ of the war.” Their anxiety relates to the very process which demands a detached outlook on the war as a cultural situation. As they see it, analytical scrutiny and reflections render definitions into euphemisms, implying legitimization of the war condition: “thus a failure for a discourse which counts on its anthropological dimension.” Their decision to speak, arrived at, as they con­ fide, through their encounters with crime, individual confrontations with death, and return to the “peacetime experience of culture as the sensemaker,” marked a “passage from fear to resistance” to the politics of war (Feldman, Senjkovic, Prica 1993, 1-3). Violence in the name of ethnicity is a testing ground for any ethnogra­ pher of culture, who ideally must assume both a detached outlook on the sub­ ject of the study and a sensitivity to the views of culture-bearers, including their political views. Events since 1991-1992 demanded that the relatively coherent picture from the time of the conception of this study— late 1980s— be tested against the subsequent chaotic developments. Specifically, the breakup of Yugoslavia called for a re-examination of a key perspective on the ethnographic past: the national framework of NCFM. Today, to argue for the cohesive impact of this music on Yugoslav culture is an ideologically challenging position. For this reason alone, there may be an expectation that a researcher’s pre-1992 views should accommodate post-Yugoslav discours­ es which have produced, albeit confrontationally, the academic ideal of a multiplicity of voices. The dominant discourse, and in many regional comers the official one, questions the very concept of Yugoslav culture, or negates it altogether. The current intense rebuttal of Yugoslav identity pertaining to almost anything produced and consumed in the past nicely suits the argument often posed by Western observers, that Yugoslavia was an “artificial” cre­ ation, a patchwork of disparate regions, peoples, and cultures, which for half a century managed to maintain itself as a nation-state chiefly because of the communist centralist grip. It follows then that Yugoslavia’s cataclysmic end was a natural event of sorts. The intent of the present study is not to fight this cliche of totalitarian-induced unity with the similarly ideologized concept of

xxviii

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“brotherhood and unity.” Rather, I take as a point of departure the position that Second Yugoslavia (1945-1992) presents us with both the high points of the quest for “multiculturalism” and the failure to sustain it by the classbased, meta-ideology of “brotherhood and unity.” This study concerns the development of NCFM until 1991-1992. Subsequent political changes, the military beginnings of which I witnessed in the summer of 1991, allow me to comment on, rather than engage in detailed analysis of, the fate of NCFM in the post-1992 period. In the end, looking back to peacetime culture as a “sensemaker” proved to me the relevance of the starting position of this study. Briefly, the time and place of my original field research provided a relevant theoretical framework for the ideas devel­ oped here. On a more practical level, this explains my use of the old nomen­ clature of Yugoslavia and its republics, and the names of institutions and media outlets as they were known before the breakup of the country. The study is inevitably informed by my experience of living in Yugoslavia. In a personal retrospect, this experience paralleled the stability of the political environment and economy of the 1970s, the emerging eco­ nomic difficulties and political cacophony of the early 1980s, and the flour­ ishing of popular culture throughout these periods, during which I have been both participant and occasional commentator. Witnessing the disappearance of a culture through internal “ethnic conflict” tends to sharpen one’s sense of research responsibility— under the anthropological microscope of insider bias— more keenly than the less extraordinary changes most culture observers undergo within the period of several years. Given this radical shift in the perception of the ethnographic past and the present, the experience of living in the culture can be as elusive a category as any detached reporting, insider or not. FIELDWORK The main body of ethnographic material for this study was collected during fieldwork undertaken in the summers of 1987, 1989, and 1991. The field­ work focused on three main regional centers of NCFM production: Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Zagreb. The interviews were conducted formally and infor­ mally with musicians (song writers, performers— both singers and band members), record company officials, producers, radio officials, music jour­ nalists, and to a lesser degree, NCFM audience and non-audience. In retrospect, my field-work provided the opportunity to learn more about Yugoslavs’ perceptions of inter-regional distance than about political cleavages. A person I contacted to help search for a catalogue of Bosnian

Introduction

xxix

music, issued years ago by a Slovenian producer, was astonished to learn that “Slovenians recorded Bosnian music.” It may come as another surprise that the Croatian producer Jugoton (now Croatia Records), the major producer of pop and rock music in Yugoslavia, started as a folk music producer. This is important in view of the pop/folk divide, contested as a Croatian western cul­ tural orientation and a Serbian “Balkan,” i.e. eastern, cultural identification. On the economic side of regionalism, extracting politics from business was something that many Yugoslavs mastered skillfully. This approach seemed to be at work as late as the summer of 1991, when, responding to a question about a possible shift in his company’s program, the official at a Belgradebased record company replied matter-of-factly that his company would “nor­ mally” continue producing Slovenian polkas: the conversation took place against the background of a radio voice announcing the arrival of the first Yugoslav People’s Army tanks in Slovenia. And there was a regional reci­ procity that illustrated the power of profit over politics. In 1989, some of the first releases of explicitly nationalist Serbian recordings were made by a Slovenian producer after a Belgrade producer had rejected such projects, finding them ideologically inappropriate and politically dangerous. * * *

NCFM has presented Yugoslav ethnomusicologists and folklorists with the problem of theoretical accounting; at best, it called for the re-examination of existing theories; more often, it inspired negation. The majority of culture commentators saw NCFM as musically worthless, though sociologically worthy subject of inquiry. Because of their polemical value, the commenta­ tors’ views have inspired many issues addressed in this study. I should mention a particular lexical feature when writing or talking about NCFM; the convention of referring to it as a “cultural phenomenon.” This catchy phrase, often a distraction from a serious analysis, in fact reveals an aspect of phenomenological understanding of NCFM. The observer’s interest (and judgement) lies in appearances of style: iconography, symbols, metaphors. Images are thus conceptualized (kitsch, ahistoricity, mimicry) and turned into social categories (dual identity, hybridity). The concepts then become the reality of the music. In other words, debates about NCFM were by and large removed from the practice of the music. Economics and the social organization of the music, for example, received only cursory atten­ tion. The present study not only emphasizes the industrial basis of this cul­ tural phenomenon, but looks at the music market as the principal framework for the discussion of topics such as aesthetics and cultural values. Furthermore, the production and consumption of NCFM have, as a rule, been

XXX

Introduction

left out. If audience views were taken into account, it was mainly for the pur­ pose of giving some statistical validity to the pre-conceived sociological con­ struction of their class and demographic identity. In the case of this music’s producers, there has been a similar understanding of theoretical illegitimacy. Few published pieces offer specific information on the business practices of record producers. Typically, comments on this subject tended to be negative assessments of producers’ role in the promulgation of musical sund (art trash). If this study is to yield new insights into NCFM, it will be because it has relied heavily upon the views of music practitioners. Musicians, as well as record producers and broadcasters, provided both the basic information on the largely undocumented history of NCFM and interpretative insights that helped shape the present approach. Throughout different chapters I have attempted to touch upon a set of basic analytical perspectives: policies, dynamics of the regional and nation­ al, and aesthetics. The issue of NCFM’s aesthetic value, for example, rein­ vigorated by the oriental controversy in the late 1980s, was the key issue among early songwriters and radio policy makers in the 1960s. Similarly, the reception of music needed to be addressed in terms of the changing sensibil­ ities of the NCFM audience in the 1970s, when it was socially stereotyped as newly-urbanized, and in the latter 1980s, when the demographically and subculturally differentiated audience began to represent itself through its nation­ alist core. I begin this study by situating NCFM in a historical context: after a crit­ ical survey of the writings on the music’s historicity, I examine the emer­ gence of NCFM within the system of arranged folk music and its principal institutional setting— radio. I then trace the music’s development as a com­ mercial genre through music festivals, pioneering songwriters, and singers. A discussion of the institutional organization of NCFM focuses on the media and record producers. In a musical analysis, organized around several region­ al and stylistic “streams,” I explore the dynamics between regional and national elements and the issues of aesthetic evaluation of the genre. Finally, addressing the construction of “newly composed culture,” I focus broadly on the patterns of reception and the permeation of NCFM aesthetic into Yugoslavia’s popular culture as a whole. NOTES 1. This is the most common, Serbian and Bosnian, spelling of the term, with the Croatian variant: novokomponirana narodna glazba.

Introduction

xxxi

2. Mata Bosnjakovic, “Neka opazanja uz diskografsku produkciju ‘lakih zanrova’ u nas,” in Diskografija u SR Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske, 1984), 101.

3.

Kafana is a drinking establishment, a cross between coffeehouse and cafe/bar.

4. Alenka Barber-Kersovan, “Tradition and Acculturation as Polarities of Slovenian Popular Music,” in World music, politics and social change, ed. Simon Frith (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press 1989), 76-78; Grozdana Marosevic, “Narodna glazba: Proizvodnja tzv. narodne glazbe s posebnim osvrtom na probleme i oblike prezentacije folklome glazbe,” in Diskografija u SR Hrvatskoj (1984), 19; Jerko Bezic, “Contemporary Trends in the Folk Music of Yugoslavia,” in Contribution to the Study of Contemporary Folklore in Croatia (Zagreb: Institute of Folklore Research, 1988), 55-56. 5. Milena Dragicevic Sesic, “Publika nove narodne muzike,” Kultura 80-81 (1988):95-96; Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, “Traditional Culture, Folklore, and Mass Culture in Contemporary Yugoslavia,” in Folklore in the Modern World, ed. Richard Dorson (The Hague, Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1978a), 169. 6. Edward Larkey, “Austropop: Popular music and national identity in Austria,” Popular Music 11 (May 1992): 153. 7. See Donna A. Buchanan, “Review Essay: Bulgaria’s Magical Mystere Tour: Postmodernism, World Music Marketing, and Political Change in Eastern Europe,” Ethnomusicology 41/1 (Winter 1997): 131—157. 8. Judit Frigyesi, “The Aesthetic of the Hungarian Revival Movement,” in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 57. 9.

Josip Andreis, Povijest glazbe (Zagreb: Liber, Mladost, 1974), 178.

10. Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992a), 21. 11. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 6. 12. Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 13. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994); Timothy W. Ryback, Rock Around the Block: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 14. Jolanta Pekacz, “Did rock smash the wall? The role of rock in political transi­ tion,” Popular Music 13/1 (January 1994):41-49. 15. Jeff Halper, Edwin Seroussi, and Pamela Squires-Kidron, “Musica Mizrakhit: Ethnicity and Class Culture in Israel,” Popular Music 8/2 (May 1989): 131-141; Martin Stokes 1992a; Suzel Ana Reily, “Musica Sertaneja and Migrant Identity: the

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Stylistic Development of a Brazilian Genre,” Popular Music 11/3 (October 1992):337-385; Peter Manuel, “Europe: Greece; Rebetika, Modern Bouzouki Music,” in Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 126-136. 16. Timothy Rice, May It Feel Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15. 17. Martin Stokes, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music,” in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Oxford/ Providence, USA: Berg, 1994), 7. 18. Martin Stokes, “‘Review’ of Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop, and Rap in Europe and Oceania by Tony Mitchell,” Popular Music 17/3 (October 1998):349. 19. Lada Cale Feldman, Reana Senjkovic, and Ines Prica, “Poetics of Resistance,” in Fear; Death and Resistance (An Ethnography of War: Croatia 1991-1992), ed. L. C. Feldman, I. Prica , and R. Senjkovic (Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 1993), 1-4.

N e w l y C o m p o s e d F o l k M u sic Y u g o s l a v ia

of

C hapter 1

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

CFM EMERGED AT A PARTICULAR HISTORICAL JUNCTURE OF YUGOSLAV folk music. In the early 1960s the neotraditional model of arranged folk song was institutionalized into a “new folk” music. Rather than an attempt at a historical reconstruction, the following is a portrayal of events, institutions, and personalities that helped NCFM to rise as an identi­ fiable genre. While the potential historiographic value of the present account lies in the record of musicians’ views, especially those of pioneering song­ writers, my intent is to add historical depth to the musical ethnography of the 1980s. Writing NCFM’s history, a project in great need of undertaking, goes beyond the scope of the present study. It may appear paradoxical that NCFM has not been a subject of histori­ cal inquiry, since its comprehension and, more apparently, its critique, are rooted in the historical concept of folk music. This conceptual paradox is compounded by the ubiquity of the music’s historical record, which speaks to its thirty-year long presence in Yugoslavia’s culture: millions of record­ ings sold, hundreds of radio and television shows broadcast, and perform­ ance practices that permeated the broadest scope of musical activities. Yet even today the very idea of a “history” of NCFM represents a dubious propo­ sition.1 In my conversations with experienced musicians, this topic did not arise spontaneously; a certain unreadiness to discuss stylistic changes over a longer period of time suggested an implicit understanding that NCFM had a past, but not a history. Two interrelated issues help explain the uncertainty of the music’s historical identity: its footing in the marketplace, and its cultural value. 3

4

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia Perhaps the single most critical factor that made this music unsuitable for

conventional historical narrative is its origin in the commercial market. The fact that NCFM has been often euphemistically defined in terms of a com­ mercialization of narodna music involved understanding of the folk as an ideal type, and commercialization as an event with no history. Few authors noted the professionalization of folk music and its commercial uses in kafana long before the advent of the mass media, yet a majority of commentators have perceived a causal relationship between folk music changes and NCFM market growth in terms of conflict. It can be argued then that the linear con­ ception of music history, seeking continuation of tradition in the changes it records, stands in conflict with the economic logic of market growth. Even though in the Yugoslav context “growth” has hardly been a sustained eco­ nomic experience, the NCFM market did experience an ascending line of expansion, reaching its peak in the early-1980s. That the economic progress of the NCFM market signalled a cultural decline for the larger social field is an issue to which I will frequently return. Noteworthy here is the widely-held notion of the music’s self-induced demise, tangibly expressed in the dramat­ ic decrease of record sales since the mid-1980s. It provoked a range of issues, from culturally unintelligible musical language due to excessive borrowing, to internal quarrels among the musicians, that all were attributed to a single, causal factor: NCFM’s overproduction (hiperprodukcija). Furthermore, one should recognize a subtext of legitimacy that guides music history projects. It is expressed in the value-loaded rationalization that music must “deserve” history. The fact that developments in Yugoslav art, traditional folk, and even pop-rock music had been comparatively well doc­ umented in both scholarly and popular publications, gives some credibility to the notion that writing NCFM history would raise this music to the level of respectability of these other genres. One may explain the ahistorical percep­ tion of this music as symptomatic of a modem ethnomusicological praxis that, as a whole, privileges synchronic over historical research. Yet it is an illustration of a culture-specific intellectual environment, in which history is about musical values. The fact that the music of NCFM has been the least addressed topic merely reflects the reductionist approach inherent in the social construction of musical values. Similar to sociopsychological analyses that drew on the most tangible components of NCFM— song lyrics and iconography— musi­ cologists’ probing into song repertoires relied on the most identifiable, often caricatural, elements of performance style. Further, the association of NCFM with kitsch eliminated the need for a serious consideration of similar phe­ nomena in the past. The fact that kitsch is an immanently aesthetic experi­

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

5

ence did not put in question the suitability of using analytical models derived from historical traditions of both Yugoslav folk and European art music for evaluation of this conspicuously “syncretic” genre. Another perspective tying aesthetic reproach with the issue of historical legitimacy had to do with commentators’ fascination with the music’s contemporaneity. Briefly, its loud, here-and-now presence, coupled with its suspect aesthetic value, cemented the synchronic view of NCFM and, by implication, the absence of history. Yet few authors have engaged specific ethnography to illustrate its historic dimensions. THE HISTORICITY OF MUSIC It is worth noting that ethnologists’, rather than ethnomusicologists’, research on the historical basis of modem folklore provides a broad frame­ work for many of the issues raised by NCFM. Particularly useful in this regard are studies by the Croatian ethnologist Dunja Rihtman-Augustin that place a complex of contemporary folklore within a political framework of Yugoslav cultural history. Rihtman-Augustin’s critical understanding of the distinction between German folklore and folklorismus led her to sketch out three distinct “waves” in the evolution of Yugoslav attitudes toward folk­ lore.2 To show the extent to which political ideologies, nationalist as well as liberal, were implicated in both the practice of folklore and its scholarly interpretation, she views nineteenth century romantic nationalism as the first wave that set the stage for the twentieth century’s rationalizations of folklore as a cultural model and symbol. The second and third wave occur “between and after” the major political events in this century: the two World Wars, and the creation of two Yugoslavias— royalist (1918) and socialist (1945). The south Slavs’ “discovery” of folklore in the nineteenth century is part of a larger, well documented, east European quest for national unification that would achieve new heights of political significance in the programs of a nationally conscious intelligentsia in the late 1930s. As Rihtman-Augustin argues, it was in the period of the 1930s, during which “national and class differences . . . were exacerbated,” that folk authenticity begin to be defined by its performance on stage. Her probing into the interwar period reveals folklore as a “model of the social tradition” that evolved, as a distinction between living and representational folklore, within the space of its cultural­ ly edifying uses and the stark reality of social inequalities. She does not fail to note that it was an economist who felt compelled to comment critically on the ethnographic concept of peasants “parading around in pretty folk cos­

6

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

tumes [and] dancing wildly as if in Arcadia” with a third of the actual peas­ ant population “not even having a bed of their own” (1988, 12-16). The activities of “Seljacka sloga,” a peasant cultural union and an exten­ sion of the Croatian Peasant Party, represent a locus classicus of folklore policies that foreshadowed some of the salient aspects of the “third wave” socialist approaches to folklore. It is worth looking in greater detail at an example of these policies as spelled out in a 1941 booklet on festival pres­ entation of Croatian peasant culture by a leading Croatian ethnologist. No memorized plays, recitations, speeches or the like belong in the fes­ tivals. . . . There should be no obvious foreign influences from the cities or neighboring nations (Germans, Italians, Hungarians, etc.). Likewise, there should be no false patriotism. . . . The following do not belong in a festival by any means: A) Composed songs (e.g., urban, the above mentioned patriotic, or those popular songs learned from a book or sheet music). It would not be well for relatively recent songs, e.g. love songs, to be included either. B) Foreign dances (e.g. the Hungarian czardas) or urban dances [foxtrot, waltzes, polkas, schottische]. C) Accordions and harmonicas [mouth organs], and factory-made tamburitzas, especially not tamburitza bands of any kind.3 The last items on this list of undesirable elements referred to visual presen­ tation: “no” to urban garments, foreign styled clothes, and “hair parted on the side and styled.” While the ethnographer’s puristic demands can be taken as the blueprint for future bureaucratic controls of folk knowledge and per­ formance, we can only speculate if his dislike of “false patriotism” was shared by the sponsoring party officials. We can also read into some of his instructions a critique of the modem concept of festival beautification, e.g., the tourist notion of “folklore treasure” and its image of colorfully and impeccably dressed peasants who have never toiled in any field. The false patriotism of the 1930s and the festival peasants of the 1970s may be seen as related expressions of national ideology in culture, but they also reveal a historical experience of the aesthetic attraction to izvor and soci­ ety’s ambivalence toward it. Emphasizing the notions of coexistence and interaction between folklore and folklorism, Rihtman-Augustin concludes that the nineteenth century models have not disappeared. Stage folklore developed between the two wars is interpreted and promulgated as authentic as in the past. Similarly, urban influences and commercialization represent continuing concerns within the seemingly insular world of musical folklore created and controlled by experts.

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

7

In contrast to ethnologists, Yugoslav ethnomusicologists were, for the most part, less inclined to formulate a historical perspective to account for the unprecedented popularity of commercial folk music. Thus, ethnomusi­ cologists ’ few attempts to situate NCFM historically should be seen in part as their response to the extreme claim that this music negated the very con­ cept of folk. These authors’ writings reveal two related analytical concerns: dualism between old and new music, and underlying continuities in Yugoslav folk music. Because authors approached newly composed folk music as an analytical concept, helpful in reconstruction of broad historical patterns of musical change, they used ethnography in a limited, illustrative manner. Thus the historical depth, projected into specific issues of style, social uses, performance or attitude, varied from one commentator to anoth­ er. Jerko Bezic, for example, sketches out a historical origin of NCFM by tracing the shared attitude of distrust by earlier commentators toward novel elements of music practice in their time (1988, 53-56). He juxtaposes two illustrations of such attitudes from the early part of this century, from Serbian and Croatian perspectives respectively. “Today singing among our national masses is in a terrible state. Not only is it not developing, it’s even withering away. Just any old rubbish is sung. . . . In the villages folk singing . . . is spoiled by influences from the towns.”4 Bezic goes on to note that: “Ten years later, in the minutes of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the ‘Seljacka Sloga’ organization . . . in Zagreb (February 16, 1936) we read: ‘There are two problems in connection with the tamburitza orchestras: 1. The musicians are, at least in part, professionals; they play for money, 2. They play more and more urban . . . slageri [German schlager\ hit song], especially dance music’” (54). These statements provide a valuable insight into the musical life and ethnographic practice of the 1930s, the period when, as previously noted, the concept of “genuine” (i.e., izvorna) folklore took firm institution­ al hold. Dragoslav Devic, on the other hand, refers specifically to the year 1944 as the threshold of the production of the song repertoire, at the time of his writing variously referred to as “popular songs,” “the newest songs,” and “new narodna songs.” Noting that the songs were disseminated through the mass media, stage performances, and pocket songbooks, Devic raised ques­ tions that kept troubling the following generations of musicologists: “how to classify such creativity, whether it has artistic values, and whether folk mass­ es are adopting it?”5 Other authors went further into the past to explain NCFM’s emergence in generic terms of reference. Andrei Simic describes the “commercial pop­ ular folk music” he observed in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s as the “lineal

8

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

descendant of earlier village and urban forms.”6 Notwithstanding the whole­ sale replacement of traditional instruments with factory-made ones, Simic is categorical when stating that this music grew from the “ashes of a dying, archaic musical culture [while maintaining] a stylistic continuity with the past.” Simic remains faithful to the structural view of tradition by identifying a “revivalistic variety” of arranged folk songs in the middle of a continuum with an archaic model of village music at one end and composed folk songs at the other end. In her summary of musicological perspectives, Maja Povrzanovic simi­ larly outlines the continuous process by which, since the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury, the izvorna song was stylized (i.e. simplified), urbanized, and Europeanized to fit the mold of central European popular music of that time.7 She resorts to idiomatic terms of reference by citing two defining moments that gave rise to the post-1950s model of folk music: After World War I in Serbia and Vojvodina the kafansko-narodnjacka (cafe-folk) song appeared,8 which is the immediate predecessor of today’s “newly composed folk song.” On the eve of World War II, the attitude that the “izvorna folk song” needed to be cultivated because it was crude, was increasingly widespread. Stylizations were undertaken, and were based on standards of popular (zabavna) and old-town song. Thus emerged the first forms of “newly composed folk song.” Old-town songs (starogradske pjesme) should be singled out as an important stylistic site of historical convergence. Their historical significance ties into the factor of great popularity with the specific social milieu implied by Povrzanovic’s term kafansko-narodnjacka song, a somewhat pejorative label, although perhaps a semantically “truer” predecessor of the academic old-town songs. Ankica Petrovic similarly sees in old-town songs a histori­ cal model, by referring to them as the “newly composed folk songs of the day.”9 The evolution of this genre, popular and highly regarded to the present, is commonly linked to the rise of the middle-class in the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury, particularly in Serbia. Not unlike popular forms of art song that cap­ tured the aesthetic of nineteenth century romanticism, old-town songs still project the image of folk sophistication. Perhaps because of this genre’s asso­ ciation with the old-time kafana entertainment, rather than its class origin, it has played an important role in the early development of urban folk, indeed, “popular” music.

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

9

That narodna music provided the source material for urban varieties of Yugoslav music has been a part of canonical reading since its early docu­ mented history. Historiographic research by Stana Duric Klajn shows that, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, artistic adaptation of folk songs in Serbia gave rise to a distinctly national gradska (urban middle-class) song.10 Klajn points out the historical bases of the interplay between rural and urban music, oral and literary transmission, and especially between anonymity and author­ ship. Her use of the phrase “anonymous gradska song” is illustrative in this regard (1981, 19). It indicates that just as the folk identity of village songs had been premised upon the anonymity of their creators, so was the class and artistically conscious gradska song embraced by urban Serbia as unmistak­ ably “folk” because of its broad appeal that, over time, “buried” the identity of its creators. The surviving songs as well as the few written documents on music of that time point to what can be described as an axiom of later-day folk music change: the folk supplied the tunes and well-known poets wrote the lyrics. Less straightforward methods derived from a variety of sociopo­ litical circumstances in which existing (“anonymous”) lyrics would inspire the addition of tunes by composers/arrangers who often were also collectors. Noting that the lyrics were frequently intended for the singing as well as the reading voice, and moreover, that “music dictated the creation of lyrics,” Klajn affirms the view of intrinsic musical properties in much of Serbian lyri­ cal and poetic writing (16). But as she argues, the anonymity of these songs was a direct effect of a low level of musical literacy in eighteenth century Serbia, spontaneity of oral transmission notwithstanding. The fact that Serbia at that time was an agrarian society with hardly any existing music institu­ tions of the European type, makes the synthesis between narodna and grad­ ska songs appear not only natural, but, perhaps, the only possibility for con­ scious “artistic expression” modelled on the western European tradition. Historical studies on nineteenth, and especially on early twentieth cen­ tury music, provide much more ethnographically detailed insight into this process of the transformation of authorized song into the narodna public domain. That many songs written in the early twentieth century continued to be popular until the present made the anonymity of their creators an appar­ ent fact of history. This contingency of written text upon oral transmission helps explain why later copyright regulations could not essentially undo the perceived power of the collective to authorize a song as being narodna; that is, its own. This is clearly illustrated by the understanding, shared among NCFM musicians and commentators alike, that “newly composed songs of yesterday are today’s traditional songs.” As in the more distant past, the songs that remain feed tradition, and it is the “folk,” the audience who deter-

10

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

mine its continuation. From this vantage point we can say that, just as the first newly composed folk songs were “barely noticed” (Bezic 1988, 56), so was its history. The views cited above suggest that, historically, NCFM was unique nei­ ther in its appeal of assertive eclecticism nor in its negative aesthetic impli­ cations. At the basic analytical level, NCFM emerges as the cumulative effect of an ongoing processes of appropriation and popularization of folk music in urban environments. If in this process of change we recognize an aspect of historical determinism, the same may be said for attitudes toward novel musical practices. Recorded voices from the past tell us that each new layer of folk music has threatened the structure of tradition made up of pre­ vious ones. The overlapping of historical perspectives, whether selectively evoked to solidify old patterns in contemporary music or to denounce others, helps explain why the issues raised by NCFM could be projected easily onto the past. The value of longue duree interpretation of NCFM lies in the basic premise of continuities discernible even in instances of apparent systemic changes within a music culture. By introducing a temporal distance, such interpretations dilute the shock-effect of new styles, often expressed in com­ mentators’ claims of the corruption of tradition. By the same token, this approach cannot fully account for structural breaks with models from the past. Clearly, in many important respects, NCFM had no antecedents in the past, chiefly in the market-place. Among other variables that necessitate sit­ uating this music within a specific time-frame is a unique body of repertoire that casts idiomatic meaning on the paradigmatic “newly composed” folk music. Along with these attempts at historical interpretations, there should be mentioned the antithetical argument of discontinuity. While not declaring the death of folk music, a number of commentators maintained that NCFM had nothing to do with folk music, thus leaving it on the cultural sidelines with the ahistorical creations of mass culture. Because this attitude represents the major issue of value to be discussed later, I should note here only a sort of solipsistic play underlying this argument: NCFM was an ahistorical creation and the negation of narodna music; it follows then that this music was judged by that which it did not possess (history) and by that (extraneous to it) which it negated.

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

11

THE NEW CYCLE A cursory glance at writings on NCFM since the 1960s reveals that each new trend or stylistic configuration of hit-making potential inspired a revival of the more or less pejorative meaning of the label “new folk music.” What were referred to as “new folk songs” in the early 1960s indicated both conti­ nuity and one profound change: radio’s acknowledgement of the names of the songwriters. This policy change undermined one of the pillars of folk music definition, the anonymity of folk song creators. The alternate terms, composed- and newly-composed folk music, that came into wide use in the 1970s, hardly hint at the new kind of internal dynamics of change: expansion of the market, stylistic possibilities, and most visibly, the appearance of folk singers as stars. That some “new folk” songwriters from the 1960s made a point of disassociating themselves from the “composed music” of the 1970s shows that a ten-year cycle can provide sufficient historical distance for lay­ ing claims to the superiority of an older practice. Even though in debates on NCFM, the opposing concepts— old/new, tra­ ditional/modern music— often appeared formalistic and devoid of specific cultural content, it must also be acknowledged that these oppositions retained analytical validity as well as rhetorical potency. In a broader sense, concepts of folklorism and invented tradition essentially rest on the very dichotomies they were meant to deconstruct. This is suggested by Dunja RihtmanAugustin, who was among the first Yugoslav ethnologists to address the issue of disjuncture between folklore theory and the changing reality of folk culture. Following in the footsteps of German volkskunde scholarship, [e]thnology and folkloristics in Yugoslavia were eager to deal with the remnants of Slavic and Balkan heritage or yet with analyses of cultural influences in the past. All this fit well the notions of izvor, traditionality, antiquity. Infrequently projected in this antiquity—which at times suggests centuries ago and at others clearly represents memories of older contemporaries on their youth and childhood—was a past social model, about which no one could have said that it in fact ever existed.11 Probing into the mass appeal of Yugoslav new folk culture in the late 1970s, Rihtman-Augustin recast dualist notions in terms of the elusive quality of tra­ ditionalism: the opposition is discounted, yet the contrast between folklore and fakelore is implied. In the struggle to achieve success in the society of consumption, some old tunes are given a new shape, some traditional words, phrases, and

12

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia figures are seen as perhaps the only source of badly needed security, a reminiscence of something true and firm that existed in the past. These important features are sometimes hidden in a clumsy rhythm, in a com­ bination of old and new elements in the melody, in the rhyme. No one can be certain precisely where these features are located, but they do exist, and they evoke a sense of tradition without actually being tradi­ tional. (1978a, 171)

Ines Prica similarly suggests a level of the transcendence of folk meaning by pointing to the persistence of patterns of old folk music that survive in the highly stylized language of NCFM. It is precisely the native local color, an intimate knowledge of it and thus its recognizability, that constitutes NCFM’s differentiae specificae}1 In order to account for the increasing national prominence of NCFM in the late 1970s, Gorana Doliner and Koraljka Kos adopt a more formal view o f folk music taxonomy, and identify NCFM as an important vital layer, coexisting with a number o f older strata of narodna music. Thus Doliner pro­ poses a model of systematization with the inherent structure of music tradi­ tion: 1) village, orally transmitted music in its izvorna (original) form, 2) village music somewhat transformed through acculturation (performance folklorism), 3) small-town (urban), orally transmitted music in izvorna (original) form, 4) small-town (urban) music somewhat transformed through acculturation and 5) new/composed music folklore (written).13 By the very fact that she places NCFM within the folk field, she views it as a historical, though “hybrid,” creation, a point reinforced by Kos, who sees it as a “tran­ sitional form between genuine folk music and pop.”14 If we adopt the view that NCFM engendered aspects of folk music con­ tinuity simply by transforming bits of historical experiences of music into its own language, there still remains the fact of its historical uniqueness. To account for this uniqueness it is useful to evoke Fernand Braudel’s concept of conjuncture, for it derives from most historians’ practical necessity to “knit together ‘cyclical’ history and short-term traditional history.”15 The economic basis of the concept of conjuncture ties in Yugoslavia’s industrial­ ization, specifically the growth of mass media, with a new cycle of profound cultural change within which NCFM was only one most picturesque product. First, I focus on the early post-World War II period that foreshadowed, according to most historical accounts, a new era of folk music in the 1960s.

The Emergence of Newly Composed Folk Music

13

NOTES 1. The exception in this regard is a recent article by Sanja Raljevic which deals with NCFM’s historic development within the newly-nationalized musical culture of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The study offers little information on the cross-regional links, an approach which indicates a post-Yugoslav conception of parallel histories of the music: Serbian and Bosnian. (Raljevic, “Historijski aspekt nastanka novokomponovane narodne muzike u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Muzika 1/4 [1997]: 125-135). 2. Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, “Folklore: Models and Symbols,” in Contribution to the Study of Contemporary Folklore in Croatia (Zagreb: Institute of Folklore Research, 1988), 9-22. 3. B. Bratanic, quoted by Rihtman-Augustin (1988), 16. 4. Vladimir Dordevic, quoted by Bezic (1988), 54. 5. Dragoslav Devic, “Nove ‘narodne’ pesme,” in Rad 9. kongresa Saveza folklorista Jugoslavije (T963), 545-546. 6. Andrei Simic, “Country’n’Western Yugoslav Style: Contemporary Folk Music as a Mirror of Social Sentiment,” Journal of Popular Culture 10/2 (1976): 157. 7. Maja Povrzanovic, “Drustvene vrijednosti izrazene tekstovima ‘novokomponiranih narodnih pjesama’” (Zagreb University: Faculty of Phylosophy, 1982), 4-5. 8. Narodnjak (adjective, narodnjacki) is derived from a noun narod and connotes folksy, “hillbilly” meanings. Though not without pejorative connotations, narodnjak is less derogatory term than seljacki (in peasant manner). Narodnjak is also colloqui­ ally used in reference to a newly composed folk song. (Its equivalent in the pop zabavna field is zabavnjak). 9. Ankica Petrovic, telephone conversation, February 1997. 10. Stana Duric Klajn, Akordi proslosti (Beograd: Prosveta, 1981), 7-21. 11. Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, “Od ‘naroda’ do folklornog kica,” Zvuk 3 (1978b): 14-15. 12. Ines Prica, “Mitsko poimanje naroda u kritici novokomponovane muzike,” Kultura 80—81( 1988):81. 13. Gorana Doliner, “Folklor i novokomponovana narodna muzika,” Zvuk 1 (1978):22. 14. Koraljka Kos, “New Dimensions in Folk Music: A Contribution to the Study of Musical Tastes in Contempporary Yugoslav Society,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 3/1 (1972):63. 15. Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 30.

CHAPTER II

Laying the Foundations: the Practice of Arrangement

I

F ONE WERE TO ISOLATE THE SINGLE VARIABLE ESSENTIAL TO THE TRAJECTO-

ry of folk music changes in most of east Europe after World War II, it would be the concept of arrangement.1We can outline two basic perspec­ tives of this issue as it is discussed in Western, and to a lesser degree, in regional ethnomusicological literatures: ideological manipulation of “folk” (state folklore) and cultural modernization (folklorism). The basic premise of arrangement— recreation of folk music through the use of European com­ positional techniques— can be traced in most of the region to the nineteenth century. Yet it has been frequently argued that, under the communist condi­ tions of culture production, an unprecedented massive institutionalization of folk music had, for the most part, obliterated the tradition-steeped practices of the largest marginalized group of “informants”: peasants. In post-1945 Yugoslavia, as elsewhere in the communist realm of Europe, the ideology of social progress had far-reaching implications for the formulation of cultural politics. The Yugoslav approach to folklore was inspired by the Soviet vision of culture, a culture that was to be neither bour­ geois nor peasant, but new in both style and meaning as well as in the broad democratic base of its reach. Underlying this socialist concept of culture, which assumed accessibility, humanistic ideas, and, above all, artistic value, was a requirement that art be ideologically suitable. Simply put, the ideolo­ gy of progress stipulated that the revolutionary peasantry, which was evolv­ ing into the working class, was in need of modern cultural institutions. The necessity for the shift from peasant-based traditional culture to urban models became self-evident with changes in the larger social arena: rapid industrial­ 75

16

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

ization, urbanization, and rural to urban migrations. It is customary to illus­ trate this dramatic social change by statistical figures: for example, prior to the World War II, four-fifths of the Yugoslav population were rural, but by the beginning of the 1970s, only one third remained in villages (RihtmanAugustin 1978a, 163). Because folklore presented a symbolically powerful component in the shaping of a new Yugoslav identity, its institutionalization was consistently pursued, first through amateur “collectivization” by the cre­ ation of a local network of “houses of culture” (Dom kulture), and later, increasingly professionalized work within “cultural-artistic societies” (Kulturno-artisticko drustvo). Many forms of folk music that emerged in the early post-revolutionary period— most notably folkoristic troupes— may be seen as quite crude reflections of an overall project aimed at both the physi­ cal and ideological building of the Yugoslav nation. In the process, many old customs ceased to be enacted; moreover, ethnic and geographic localisms so inherent to south Slav music were subjected to new aesthetic standards. In the realm of music, these standards were embodied in the concept of obrada (arrangement) and, along with the foundation of the national structure of radio, its principal performance medium— the folk orchestra.2 We will see, however, that the goals of the modernization of folk music were not as straightforward as the reading of arrangement policies may suggest: the sys­ temic replacement of the village practice with some already existing model. The changing fate of arrangement in later periods allows it to be examined in terms of a process riddled with conflict and experimentation. Historically, arrangement can be analyzed from three different perspectives: as a vehicle of musical homogenization (the 1940-50s), a subject of dissension (1960s), and a framework for narodna music taxonomy (the post-1960s period). A number of recent ethnomusicological studies have addressed the issue of cultural damage caused by the state institutionalization of folklore. It has been argued that various forms of social-musical arrangements— orchestra­ tion, mass choirs, festival troupes— reduced folklore to artistic displays of national homogeneity and social collectivism.3 Timothy Rice’s probing into the bond between communist ideology and folk music change in Bulgaria can be read as a classic statement on this issue. Many of the formal elements of Bulgarian folk music, particularly meters, modes, tune structures, and ornamentation remained largely intact under the Communists; these, after all, defined the national style. But certain elements of performance style and technique were altered as aesthetic ideology conspired with political ideology. From a political point of view, the prewar folk music tradition was too closely tied to a

Laying the Foundations

17

supposedly dim, benighted, feudal past believed to be on the verge of transforming itself into hated capitalism. A peasant had to be made a “new man” capable of full participation in the Communist vision of the future. Since the precise details of the mechanisms of that transforma­ tion were not spelled out, this left room for an aesthetic intelligentsia to apply its standards to all art, including those of the working classes. In fact, one of the most important actions of these aesthetic ideologues was to resurrect music as art, since, as social practice linked to traditional economic practice, it had been squashed by the state. They decreed that literacy and refined appreciation of great art would help create this new man, and the classicization of the folk tradition was a step on that path. (1994, 230-231) This analysis provides a vivid analogy to the Yugoslav official attitude toward folk music in the early post-war years, the basic premise of which was a seemingly contradictory objective: preservation of narodna music and artistic license to reconstruct the very idiom. Yet the argument for political system and musical culture functioning synchronously raises the issue of an interpretative approach that places at a starting disadvantage an analyst of what Anna Szemere calls “specifically Eastern European cultural condi­ tions.”4 It is not the self-evident hegemony of the socialist state over culture; rather, it is the implication of the perfect workings of the ideology-culture homology, i.e., the potential of the model to explain everything: perform­ ance, structure, meaning, aesthetic, even personal emotions invested in musi­ cal activity. When ambiguity or contradiction is hinted— as when the intelli­ gentsia supplies explicit rules for new musical behavior that the state failed to put “in writing”— it is explained as a result of cracks in the system. Because Rice’s analysis of music (which rests on a highly fluid category of “experience”) is tightly framed around an abstract concept of ideology, the effect is one of mutual determinism: the interpretation becomes a mirror of the ideology being criticized. It seems precisely at this structural (dis-)juncture of ideology/practice that Donna Buchanan finds folk orchestras’ consti­ tutive function within the socialist state “valid as a cursory model of Bulgarian cultural development,” but incapable of accounting “for the dynamic, entangled collection of stylistic nuances, musical concepts, atti­ tudes, and experiences” in the everyday practice of Bulgarian musicians (1995, 382).

Interpreted as a reflection of the political system, the traditional/modem opposition poses similar problems of interpretation. Referring to its feudal past, the historian Robin Okey critically addresses the notion of traditional east European society.

18

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia Abstracted to suggest some timeless realm, where the common people live out their lives beyond the reach of government or ideas, responding only to the wishes of local lord or priest and the rhythm of the seasons, it can imply too one-sided a view of developments in the modem peri­ od, in which everything is explained in terms of new forces and theories breaking through the crust of custom. In reality, no society is ever whol­ ly static or uninfluenced by political vicissitudes.5

To place the issue in the Yugoslav context, it is useful to turn again to Rihtman-Augustin’s survey of approaches to folklore, specifically within the socialist period. Her use of the pendulum swing metaphor captures the Yugoslav experience of change more accurately than the lineal perspective that draws on ideologically qualified opposition: pre-communist continuity and communist damage. The point to emphasize here is the change of per­ spective: rather than searching for Tradition in the rubble of state folklore, Rihtman-Augustin is impressed by the signs of its continued relevance in the contemporary culture of Yugoslavia. She sketches out four phases, starting with the World War II period (1978a, 164-166). Because the cultural environment of the Yugoslav war of liberation was predominantly rural, with peasantry its main carriers, the ide­ ological program of social revolution was rooted in traditional values (for example, themes of heroism, fighting spirit, and equality were prominent in oral poetry and prose created during the war). The second period— early post-war years— witnessed a specific kind of rural-urban mobility that brought many people to the “centers of cities as representatives of new polit­ ical and social power.” Folklore— still characterized by “revolutionary men­ tality” and visually presented in images of young people dancing kolo (circle dance) in town squares— was an important ingredient of national value ori­ entation at the time. The decade of the 1950s brought quite a dramatic change of attitude: real folklore revealed itself in the shape of “traditional primi­ tivism.” The dominant social sentiment at the time— denunciation of peasant origin, especially among the young— was informed by a political backdrop of centralism, with its goal of molding regionalism into Yugoslavism. The late 1960s brought the “democratization of social life,” a process supported by the self-management system, the decentralization of political power, the emergence of market economy, and popular culture. While many aspects of tradition continued to be negated as socially regressive remnants of the past, others were embraced by folklorists, media authorities, and musicians alike, all of whom were now working within the ever expanding social field of folk music.

Laying the Foundations

19

This sketch of changing social attitudes toward tradition reveals homol­ ogous patterns, but it also suggests the complexity of the relationship between the modem and the traditional under which many other relevant per­ spectives of cultural conflict or “match”— state/folk, rural/urban, ideology/practice— can be summarized. From the perspective that recognizes a sociopolitical dynamic of change, rather than the reversal of a natural his­ torical process, seemingly “innate” homologies become “‘associative’, that is, products of historically informed social learning, cultural activity and con­ scious manipulation.”6 Yugoslavia’s experience of modernization challenges the notion of the state folklore monolith, in at least three specific respects. Folk music never became a part of the formal educational system; as a dominant aesthetic mode and policy orientation, arrangement was a period-specific project; and finally, the very ideology of modernization promoted the rise of NCFM. As a commercial product, NCFM may be seen independently from all other forms of state-supported music. At the same time, historical insight reveals that this music originated within the very system of institutional patronage; specifically, the arrangement canon paved the way for the emer­ gence of NCFM. This position is categorically articulated by Ines Prica’s assertion that “new folk” music was inaugurated by the “official culture” in that arrangement introduced the practice of composition, the very concept implied in NCFM critique as the antithesis of traditional music expression (1988, 87). I would argue further that, rather than seeing its significance per­ petually limited to the historical function of “classicization” or “interven­ tion” into some basic, presumably original, folk text, arrangement itself needs to be re-evaluated in the relationship of production and consumption of music. This is not to suggest a single line of evolution, from the arranged folk song to the newly composed song, but rather to emphasize both the historical point of synthesis and subsequent parallel developments. This differentiation is supported by the fact that numerous genres that fit into the classical form of arrangement continue to make up the tradition-indexed narodna music broadcast in the successor-states. At the same time, NCFM still tends to be seen independently, as a qualitatively different, “commercial” genre. Similarly, as much as the arrangement project may have undermined the social maintenance of music in the rural milieu, the folk-art music synthesis should be understood as a fact of long historical development; a case in point being the legacy of east European “national schools.” The folk-inspired clas­ sical composition and the complex of arranged folk music are clearly inter­ twined, but they also need to be seen and evaluated as independent develop­

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

20

ments in specific historical and institutional contexts. We turn now to the early institutional setting: radio. THE EARLY OBRADA The origin of obrada, a policy specifically formulated to govern the presen­ tation of folk music on Yugoslav radio in the early post-World War II peri­ od, can be traced back to the formative years of radio broadcast.7 Academic musician and Belgrade Radio insider Petar Bingulac provides a valuable insight into the “politics of radio toward folklore” in the interwar and post1945 periods from the perspective of the late 1960s, a time when festival dis­ semination of new folk music was in full swing. Already in the 1930s, with the first radio broadcasts, there were plans regarding folklore, still unclear, indecisive . . . , but characteristic attempts were made to tame, “channel,” “put in order” alive and luxuri­ ant folk music, to write down the tune “finally”. . . . Ah, how this word “finally” sounded naive and absurd in the life of folklore. I myself even saw two to three dry, stiff, correct solutions to that “final” form .. . . But after the war, those were not indecisive and individual attempts, neither naive nor accidental. There was a system there, hard determination and rigid directives—but we didn’t know their authors. . . . It was just said in short: remove sevdah [love, yearning], mehanska [inn, tavern], and kafanska [cafe] music, and for broadcasts was only asked “ordered,” nicely “lined-up,” and “combed-out” music in the form of latter-day well-known“tf£rada.”8 This is a time, according to many informal accounts, when pagan and religious elements of music, with their attendant associations of “traditional primitivism,” were eliminated from public presentations. As a radio-affiliat­ ed ethnomusicologist told me about her fieldwork experience in the 1960s, the maintenance of customs that contained these elements was discouraged by cultural workers at the very source, that is, in villages. As an illustration, only after repeated requests did the informants in a Bosnian village reveal to her that they had a dodole (rain-invocation ritual) but would not perform any of it because is was “forbidden.”9 Historically, obrada represented a continuation of the artistic appropria­ tion of folk music of both rural and urban origins that, in many instances, was already “cultivated” in the song-books by the transcribing methods of songcollectors. As noted below, this body of written repertoire served as one of the main sources for arrangement work in the 1950s. The pillar of the obra-

Laying the Foundations

21

da project was the idea of the artistic treatment of folk material with a basic requirement of musical literacy. An arranger’s starting position was the recognition of the artistic value of both a folk tune and an arrangement; ide­ ally, the arranger was to come up with a synthesis of the “best” from the two musical canons. The early activities revolved around ideas of the harmonic “enrichment” and stylistic “cultivation” of folk tunes in the instrumental set­ ting of folk ensembles. This practice evolved into a loftier aesthetic goal: the “enhancement” of idiomatic (izvorni) features by various, increasingly com­ plex, arrangement methods. While the compositional technique was aesthetically unquestioned, the value of the folk material at hand was not self-evident. At the basic level, obrada pitted the artistic conception of folk music against its “raw,” prima­ rily village, forms. According to Bingulac, at the early stages of obrada work on Radio Belgrade, the criteria for differentiating good material from bad were not clear (1968, 531-532). One position demonstrating systematic con­ sistency of a policy was that any music performed by an “authentic folk singer” did not qualify for arrangement, let alone broadcasting. Instead, the major source of folk material was found in song-books by folksong collec­ tors and early ethnomusicologists such as the Czech Ludvik Kuba and Serbian Vladimir Dordevic. In practical terms, this meant either that radio would supply the arrangers with tunes for arrangement from the song-books, or it would commission pieces directly from composers, in each case with the appropriate payments. The results of early obradas were mixed. The arrangers essentially fol­ lowed the path of volkslieder which was, for the majority of radio listeners, a remote aesthetic model to be enjoyed as “their” music. The engagement of opera-trained singers in performances of these songs proved the didactic and aesthetic intentions of radio and further alienated its listeners. Their quietly growing dissatisfaction with the artistic garb of narodna tunes gradually took the form of action— listeners began sending letters to radio editors. The next step taken by reluctantly responsive officials was a step backward: from writ­ ten to live sources of music, that is, to musicians. Performers who were entrusted with the new repertoire— under the rubric improvizacija (improvi­ sation)— came from the ranks of narod. Though subjected to a process of rig­ orous auditions and carefully screened for enthusiasm toward further training and work within the radio institution, they became, indeed, folk artists, in society’s sense of “deserving citizens.” Many of these musicians— singers, instrumentalists and leaders of folk ensembles— have attained legendary sta­ tus in the eyes of successive generations of musicians and radio officials alike.10

22

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

Still codified within the obrada canon, “improvisation,” as the term sug­ gests, allowed for a greater flexibility of rhythmic and melodic articulation in the performance setting of the recording studio. The core of such repertoire, however, grew to be identified with sevdalijski (Bosnian-oriental) perform­ ance style. As the type of music most favored by listeners, it had the poten­ tial to become the main category of folk music broadcast by Radio Belgrade. Although, or perhaps because, it reflected popular taste, improvised music was not the radio editors’ choice. According to Bingulac, the officials coun­ teracted public demand by a co-optation of sorts, that is, by introducing a new category: “obrada was saved, camouflaged in ‘compositions on folk themes’” (1968, 532). In other words, improvised music appeared to have dissolved into a new arrangement context that was to become known under the all-inclusive and stylistically ambiguous label muzika u narodnom duhu (music in the folk spirit). Finally, there appeared stilizacija (stylization), a more complex approach to arrangement involving large folk orchestras, vocal groups, a conductor, and music scores. The addition of new terms, however, indicated not merely semantic but also structural change. Tendencies toward both simple and complex obrada involved stylistic differentiations that would result in the formulation of rel­ atively independent subgenres. By the 1960s, a flexible and complicated tax­ onomy was in place that reflected, in the commonly held opinion of Yugoslav commentators, progressively higher degrees of compositional intervention into folk material: obrada, harmonization, improvisation, styl­ ization, music in the folk spirit. From izvorna music to complex stylizations, obrada yielded to the coexistence of different layers of narodna music. As will be discussed in Chapter VI, izvorna and newly composed folk music grew to represent two opposite ends on the spectrum, or value hierarchy, of folk music. But if the obrada mandate reflected a policy consensus on the method of folk music modernization— premised upon the exclusion of the village sound— the same could not have been said about the selection of musical material in general. Even in the early days of this apparently monolithic sys­ tem, the broadcasters’ list of idioms considered undesirable for public airing reflected a number of distinctions involving criteria of both style and region. High on this list by Radio Belgrade, as already indicated, was sevdah singing, combining an image of Bosnian musical indulgence for a particular sentiment of love and desire, with a reference to a generalized “Oriental” style of music in the wider southeastern region. Most vulnerable to non­ inclusion were the village forms of polyphonic singing, in particular those featuring the interval of a major second. Branded by policy colloquialism as

Laying the Foundations

23

“crude” and “raw,” this folk music remained aesthetically stigmatized even after it made modest inroads into ethnomusicologically conceived special programs. A Belgrade radio insider remembers the repertoire policy. In the 1950s, only izvorna songs could be subjected to obrada. The arrangers [obradivaci] were Dorde Karaklajic, Professor Devic, Voja Petrovic; probably there were more people, but these were the orthodox arrangers from the generation I remember, led by Karaklajic. He approved every single song which would then be recorded by the Big Folk Orchestra of Radio Belgrade. This was one line of arrangers; anoth­ er one, which gravitated toward the Vojvodina and Slavonia regions, for example, worked with tamburitza orchestras. There was the famed tamburitza orchestra “Aranicki” from Novi Sad while on Radio Belgrade we had the Orchestra of Maksa Popov. Therefore, Srem, Zagorje, and in general Slavonian or, as we say, Banat songs, were recorded. All were purely izvorna songs: they had a folk tune and text, and no author.11 The 1950s were the heyday of obrada production and, for many like Bingulac, symbolized ideological rigidity, institutional control, and the falla­ cious premise of folk as a (classical) art idiom. Yet others already saw the signs of declining aesthetic standards during this period. In this regard, “improvisation” continued to be a problem because of its orientalizing impact on other arrangement models and, equally disconcerting, its associa­ tion with the kafana social milieu. In the late 1950s we find the main stylis­ tic issue, arranged versus improvised folk song, projected onto the conflict between old and new folk music. In his personal recollections on broadcast policies, the classical music composer Mihailo Vukdragovic offers a historic interpretation of NCFM in a nutshell. Until 1948, when I left Radio Belgrade . . . Radio commissioned around five hundred artistic arrangements of folk tunes. After my departure, there was an acceleration of giving in to subscribers’ taste and wishes. The number of shows of artistic arrangements kept decreasing, almost entirely disappearing from the programs in the last few years. Improvised folk music, and soon after, its catastrophic pendant—in terms of both lyrics and music—newly composed folk song, were being established on Radio Belgrade as the only form of folk music, (in Prica 1988, 84) According to Vlado Milosevic, a specific point of contention about the stylistic direction of folk music broadcast on Radio Belgrade was Bosnian

24

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

sevdalinka (love song). Citing Serbian ethnomusicologist Miodrag Vasiljevic, Milosevic provides a valuable insight into the controversy. Persistent efforts were made on Radio Belgrade of the new Yugoslavia to reduce the spreading of the wave of Bosnian sevdalinka. At the begin­ ning some work was done in regard to melisma, but in a short period of time Bosnian music conquered the program of Radio Belgrade. All singers in line learned the singing technique by way of sevdalinka; the nature of this technique permeated Serbian folk song to such a degree that folk shows at the radio stations in the republic of Serbia lost their Serbian character. Belgrade kafana had surpassed the kafana in Sarajevo, from where sevdalinka of former bey harems came to us.12 Arrangers’ efforts at the stylistic reshaping of this genre via orchestraarranged versions (which reduced improvisation) had only produced more listener demand for sevdalinka-style performances. We learn of the contin­ ued popularity of this music from a commentator who, in the late 1950s, warned of its “destructive influence on real izvorna and healthy folk music: Its beauty is in simplicity and monumentality, and not in the ballast of the complicated and confused Muslim world, language, expression, and mental­ ity which is not ours” (in Milosevic 1964, 9). Mihailo Vukdragovic’s view that this type of music gave rise to an aes­ thetically inferior model was clearly echoed in the argument about the loss of the Slavic identity of Yugoslav music under the impact of the oriental surge three decades later. More importantly in a historical sense, the issues raised by Vukdragovic hint at the inter-generational friction between the keepers of the obrada method and those that sought new approaches, a friction that would express itself more openly by the early 1960s. For one of the most acclaimed singers, Predrag Gojkovic Cune, the peri­ od referred to by Vukdragovic and Vasiljevic represented the first cycle of significant change in the redefinition of traditional folk music.13 Paradoxical as it may seem, the change was embodied in the absolutist authority of a few music editors at Radio Belgrade, most notably, Vlastimir Pavlovic Carevac, a violin virtuoso and orchestra leader. He nurtured a generation of singers, including Gojkovic, who achieved wider public recognition in the early 1960s. Even though Gojkovic credits Carevac for “shaping folk music more freely than musicians before him,” the high performance standards set by Carevac were not easily met by singers aspiring to radio affirmation during and after his tenure. Because of radio’s authority which combined a con­ trolled audition and learning environment, performance excellence, and

Laying the Foundations

25

social prestige, singers’ access to this media bastion was extremely limited at best. Yet among the singers nurtured within this system, were the first stars of folk music, including Gojkovic himself, who were soon to chart a new course in the development of narodna music. One remark by Gojkovic is illustrative of the cyclic view of folk music change marked by generational shifts: “You [this writer and future researchers] have very little work to do in the period of the 1950s. From the 1960s on, and especially from the 1980s, you have much work to do.”14 That another similarly respected singer from Gojkovic’s generation, Mile Bogdanovic, saw in the 1950s a golden age of true folk music, only rein­ forces Gojkovic’s differentiation between the 1950s period and “afterwards,” that is, between the arranged and popular concept of narodna music.15 References to the 1950s as the “golden age” of true musicianship should not be dismissed as nostalgic expressions of musicians’ tendency to idealize the past. Bogdanovic recognized institutional constraints, but also social val­ ues associated with them: society’s respect for folk singers and the status of kafana as a “cultural institution.” These were social benefits that came with the willingness of singers to emulate carefully and closely traditional ele­ ments of folk music under the guidance of radio. This involved not only knowledge of song repertoire, but also proper delivery of melodic phrasing, diction, stylistic nuances, and dynamics, as well as behavior and dress codes, all geared toward expressions of artistic integrity that invited social respect. This ability to emulate folk music lyricism by performance refinement made for an “elite” line of radio singers on Radio Sarajevo.16 The names of Safet Isovic, Zaim Imamovic, Zehra Deovic, Nada Mamula, Beba Selimovic, and Himzo Polovina evoke the classic ideal of sevdalinka rendition. Their per­ formances, widely recorded and preserved in the archives of radio and tele­ vision stations, set the standard for the sevdalinka tradition we know today. It is necessary to emphasize the significance of this recognition of the lyrical sensibilities of arranged folk songs that counteracted the aggressive­ ness with which NCFM was often associated in the 1980s. Jerko Bezic writes: “The first better known authors after World War II modelled their composition on traditional tunes from lyric folk songs, both from the towns and the countryside (1988, 55).” Similarly, Dragoslav Devic notes the essen­ tially lyrical quality of these songs, given the dominance of love motifs, but he also indicates the common components of the traditional and new folk songs, that is, those based on “lesser worthy art music models”: the arrange­ ment was dominated by improvisation, solo or duet performance was accom­ panied by the accordion-dominated ensemble, and the stanza form of songs was based on different verses. Devic, however, is highly ambivalent about

26

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

the value of the “new folk” songs: “the mass scope of this kind of creativity testifies to suspicious talents and individuals’ abilities who look ror the ‘new’ in music at any price”; while “these songs bring certain freshness into our tra­ dition . . . the negativity we see is, above all, in the overproduction of this music for the narod.”17 We can gain much insight into aesthetic issues that appear as major ref­ erents among the commentators. However, another factor at play in this con­ tentious space of artistic imperatives was hardly acknowledged— financial gain. Like Bulgarian producers of arranged folklore, whose “aesthetic argu­ ments matched their economic interests” (Rice 1994, 301), for Yugoslav musicians, arranging provided a modest but secure source of income, and, since the 1960s, has become a lucrative profession within the emerging field of new folk song production. One arranger from the period phrased the issue humorously: “we should not say [folk song] u obradi (arrangement) but u zaradi (payment)”; in other words, arrangement meant payment (in Bingulac 1968, 532).18 The prestige and enthusiasm of musicians in the 1950s had to do with the mandate to rebuild the country, expressed in various forms on all levels of social activities: among them, musicians’ institutional self-organizing. Numerous professional associations and societies were founded throughout Yugoslavia to promote activities of their members, and to further and protect their “social status.” After 1954, Sarajevo, for example, saw the foundation of the Society of Music Artists, with its own concert agency, and the Society of Composers, with its own publishing operation.19 The later establishment of the Society of Estrada Artists, national in scope, was motivated by simi­ lar objectives, but with more urgency because of the generally lower social prestige and legal protection afforded to entertainment musicians compared to their conservatory counterparts. A political backdrop to this social dynam­ ic of building (izgradnje) was centralism. This was reflected in the intensi­ fied inter-republican linking of cultural institutions, including, most signifi­ cantly, the broadcast media. Besides the expansion of radio broadcasting within the centralized regional networks, the introduction of television in 1958 laid out the national structure of the Yugoslav Radio and Television network, JRT. The blurring of stylistic boundaries, encouraged by the increased com­ mercial value of arrangement, extended to the legal realm of ownership rights. Some musicologists raised the question of the protection of “original sources” from commercial exploitation, which illustrated a set of new issues involved in the institutional systematization of folk music: “no professional control exists . . . to distinguish [between] genuine and ‘composed’ folk

Laying the Foundations

27

music nor [between] arrangements of folk tunes and compositions ‘in the folk spirit.’” Kos also addresses a human component of the issue: a conflict between old and new arrangers: “numerous nonprofessional ‘composers’ and arrangers of folk music get the same treatment as the most serious students who spend years studying the expressive features of folk music and prepar­ ing arrangements of genuine folk tunes in accordance with the inherent laws of their structure” (1972, 65). While many conservatory trained arrangers have masterfully performed the task of recreating the “inherent laws” of folk song structure by intricate treatment of orchestral parts, the possibility of arrangers failing to achieve a happy blend of traditional and classical idioms was hardly recognized. Instead, in a discourse saturated with statements on respect for tradition and excellence of musicianship, we find numerous references to the musical incompetence of songwriters. A senior songwriter provides us with a rarely recorded rebuttal of this commonly held view, pointing to the core problem of the arrangement project: the clash between arrangers’ education and the skills of performing musicians. I can justify the media people insofar it was difficult for them to follow and absorb the virtuosity of musically illiterate [folk] musicians. They could play incredibly fast, especially kolo, and radio arrangers would not dare to get involved in such material, let alone make possible correc­ tions. The arrangers were prepared to deal only with “potato” notes [notes of longer duration]; they hid behind their diplomas.20 This reference to the technically demanding kolo music as illustration of the ineptness of arrangers in conveying true narodno musicianship underscores greater concerns raised by an institutional grip on “living” folklore. Yet even the strongest critics of arrangement practice did not question its rationale, often cast in historical terms as part of the inevitability of change. As illus­ trated above, the main subject of critical scrutiny was arrangers’ success, or lack thereof, in emulating the izvor, itself a problematic concept whose meanings varied with its discursive contexts. Izvor was often referenced by an essentialist “feeling” for it, which, in fact, described an aspect of its nor­ mative understanding, shared among the established musicians and the com­ mentators: the arranger was not to destroy the izvorni essence of music or turn it into something else (i.e., another idiom), but to preserve its structure and aura of authenticity. As can be expected, in practical terms there was considerably less consensus about the realization of this norm.

28

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

Commentators as well as musicians’ themselves differed in many details as to what constituted a good arrangement premised on izvor. Writing recently about the songwriting, rather than the more common arranging work, of Jozo Penava in the post-1945 period on Radio Sarajevo, Miroslava Fulanovic-Sosic notes that Penava’s songs were highly regarded by Radio officials and the audience alike. This critical and popular accept­ ance begs the question of why his authorship was not rightfully recognized. Fulanovic-Sosic offers a revealing part of the answer: “Not only did narod accept Penava’s compositions, but it also adopted them, often not knowing who was their author. Many editors of radio folk music programs classify Penava’s songs as narodna songs, thereby the impression of traditional folk music expression is not disturbed.”21 Policies at Radio Belgrade seemed even more drastic. According to Mica Dordevic, people were making new songs, but if they were accepted by Radio at all, the songwriters were not allowed to claim authorship. This approach effectively resulted in a policy of a “ban on new folk music.”22 Thus, by keeping authorship information internal and thereby negating it publicly, Radio Belgrade similarly maintained an outward appearance of izvor. The debate produced occasionally interesting commentaries on the cross-cultural appreciation of orchestra-arranged folk music. In his dual role as a critic of obrada and a supporter of its improvisational offspring, Petar Bingulac was not alone in referring to Russian, and particularly Romanian and Bulgarian musicians, as superior to their Yugoslav counterparts. Radio officials, taking as an example Romanian musicians, pointed to their superi­ or conservatory training, the very factor seen by critics like Bingulac as anti­ thetical to “brio and the freshness of improvised and delighted play by naro­ dna musicians” (1968, 534). It is interesting to note the cyclic path of the argument: “real” narodna music versus “correct and stiff’ arrangement. The musician who launched the oriental trend in the early eighties attributed its popularity to the fact that his group “corrected” the radio version of the improvisation-styled arrangement, thus showing “how it was done among the n a ro d ” presumably at some pre-media point in time.23 In this context, izvor is evoked in reference to two essential values of narodna music: historicity of style and spontaneity of performance. It can be argued that the disagreements around aesthetic issues only proved the strength and coherence of the system. To examine the degree of unity between music practice and concept of value, it is necessary to look in some detail at the basic components of “classic” arrangement as it had evolved by the 1960s: folk orchestra performance and song form. From now on I use the term neotraditional song to describe the period of parallel devel­

Laying the Foundations

29

opment and transition: the peak of arranged song and the emergence of new folk song. Afterwards I will focus discussion on sevdalinka as a case study of neotraditional song. Performance: Folk Orchestra The prototype of the radio folk orchestra (narodni orkestar) was the folk ensemble made up of instruments conventionally dubbed melodic— one to two accordions, two violins, clarinet, and flute— and rhythmic: double bass, rhythm guitar, and tambourine. Among the very few folk instruments that found their way into ensembles were the frula (flute) and darabuka (goblet shaped, one-headed drum). The tamburitza (long-necked plucked lute) and instruments from its family provided the basis for the formation of the earli­ est type of radio orchestra, in Yugoslavia still the widely popular, tamburaski orchestras. The orchestral repertoire consisted of instrumental pieces and songs per­ formed by solo singers (occasionally, duets) with orchestral accompaniment. Structurally, the lead instruments (violin, accordion) closely followed the singer’s part (unison, heterophony) while the remaining wind instruments provided harmonic texture, typically doubling at the unison, octave, third and sixth.24 The interplay between a solo singer and the lead instrumentalists was expressed by the tradeoff of brief melodic phrases and solo entrances. The arrangement of instrumental pieces similarly invited a measured display of technical virtuosity by the soloists, most commonly accordion and violin players, who emerged as both the leaders of the ensembles (many were named after soloists) and their principal arrangers. This aura of stylistic ele­ gance of performance was particularly maintained by large folk orchestras. Housed in all regional radio-television centers, these orchestras thrived as the major exponents of narodna music well into the 1980s. The emphasis was on acoustic timbre and a full and dynamically well balanced sound. This ideal of mellow orchestral color was apparent not only in live performance, but in the approach to recording. Despite subsequent changes in instrumentation and technological advances in recording, the overall monochrome timbre of folk orchestra recordings remained in favor over a standard mix of clearly discernible individual parts. This can be explained by a combination of technological and aesthetic factors. The conventional tutti organization of orchestra recording during the 1950s and 1960s was obviously conditioned by the only available mono tech­ nique of recording at that time.25 A songwriter recalled a typical situation in a recording studio at Radio Sarajevo: “Ten people would enter the studio; the

30

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

singer and ensemble players would all perform one composition at the same time. The recording engineer applied what we called ‘fake stereo.”’26 Technological limitations in the musical shaping of the orchestral sound notwithstanding, recordings made in the 1970s suggest a similar aesthetic of the sound balance as producers apparently attempted to mute, if not conceal, the sonority of individual (and newly-introduced) instruments. For example, an attentive listener is likely to have difficulty distinguishing between the sounds of an acoustic and an electric bass, or a tambourine and the high-hat of a drum set. Again, musical judgments help explain this apparent prefer­ ence for a homogenized orchestral sound: it was consistent with the basic function of accompaniment to solo singers. As was the case with instrumen­ tal pieces, the desired effect was a blending of the melodic and timbral char­ acteristics of the ensemble and vocal soloists. The aesthetic significance to producers of this sound coordination was hardly acknowledged by ethnomu­ sicologists, who saw in it simply the suppression of the soloistic expressive­ ness of folk musicians, especially, as we shall see, in sevdalinka vocals. The aesthetic bias toward a warm acoustic quality of performance was compromised, during the 1970s, by the appearance of such “un-folk” instru­ ments as the organ, saxophone, and trumpet. However, in the typical per­ forming ensemble of this time— accordion, string and wind instruments, electric bass guitar and a drum set— the acoustic surface of the sound was not drastically altered. Further, ensembles retained the melodic/rhythmic setup of an earlier format no matter what combination of traditional/modem instru­ mentation they adopted. This holds true even for live performances by the fully electrified folk bands of the eighties, typically consisting of electric lead and bass guitars, drum set, and accordion and/or synthesizer. For example, while the function of rhythm was accentuated by electric bass guitar and drum set, structurally, the rhythm was not foregrounded: the accordion and lead guitar retained the function of the earlier melodic instruments. Similarly, the NCFM bands appear exclusively as accompaniment to singers. Studio recordings, on the other hand, show quite a different configuration of parts and timbres. Generally, there was a trend towards economizing the instru­ mentation: simulation of conventional instruments by synthesizer, and a dra­ matic increase in the use of electronic effects. Similar changes occurred at the local level of ensemble performance. Grozdana Marosevic makes a case for a type of grassroots modernization among the well-known guci players from the Croatian Karlovacko Pokuplje region.27 Their earliest described setup of two violins and bass was expand­ ed during the nineteenth century to include tambura (long-necked lute with four strings), and, in the post-1945 period, accordion, which took over the

Laying the Foundations

31

lead role of violin. Most recently, the tambura was replaced by electric gui­ tar, and the acoustic bass by electric bass guitar; the occasional use of violin, along with accordion seems more symbolic than functional. Indeed, among all instruments, the accordion emerged as the single most powerful symbol­ ic and material link between traditional and commercial varieties of music. The accordion survived all the tribulations of recent modernization, becom­ ing an icon of stability within the rapidly changing world of folk music. As the prime performance medium of arranged folk music, the folk orchestra undoubtedly had a homogenizing impact on local activities, ren­ dering many types of solo and small-group performances all but extinct. Overall, orchestral music induced an equally visible cumulative effect of change. Looking at the performance world of folk music in Yugoslavia of the 1980s, one could find numerous ensembles, old and new, playing both inde­ pendently and side by side in a variety of local and institutional contexts: typ­ ical radio-television orchestras, amateur tamburitza orchestras, old-time kafana ensembles and NCFM bands along with established regional forma­ tions such as Serbian brass bands, Macedonian calgija, and Slovenian polka ensembles. Generally, it can be said that modernization in instrumental music proved a far less contentious issue than changes in singing repertoire. Song Form As already noted, many of the early arrangers drew on written source mate­ rial— songbook collections. Classification of these songs as izvorni had to do with their apparent antiquity, but also with the formal features of folk song structure, including melodic styles associated with distinct geographic and social (rural/urban) origins of genres. Open-ended narrative organization of verses characterizes much of Yugoslav oral poetry, epic as well as lyric forms. Thus the strophic structur­ ing of lyrics is generally considered uncharacteristic of rural folk songs. Another main feature concerns the length of verses and melodic patterns: while ten and eight syllable verses are the most common feature of SerboCroatian folk poetry, the melodic stock shows great variety of formal struc­ turing. This “contradiction” is logically conceptualized as melostrophe, a “conception of the organization of a verse within melody.”28 Used conven­ tionally by ethnomusicologists as a basic unit of analysis, melostrophe implies semantic and formal coherence between a line of text (verse) and a melodic pattern. According to this analytical concept, several types of organ­ ization are common for Yugoslav folk songs: repetition of melostrophe (A A) or its variation (A A 1), reordering of textual segments to create musical con-

32

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

trast and extend melostrophic pattern (e.g., Aabb, Aabc), and introduction of new material outlining a new melostrophe (e.g., A A 1 B). Work by the eth­ nomusicologists Cvjetko Rihtman and Radmila Petrovic in particular pro­ vides detailed insights into this essential aspect of ethnotheory among Bosnian and Serbian folk singers.29 The concept of melostrophe, deduced from narodno musical thinking, also tended to be applied formulaically, giv­ ing rise to the characterization of songs with no apparent melopoetic “match” as incoherent and illogical. To illustrate this point I will consider two analyt­ ical variables central to the analyses of izvorni and new folk songs respec­ tively: verse organization and refrain. Numerous ethnomusicological studies have established that beneath much venerated local and ethnic diversity of folk expression lies a single principle: repetition. Radmila Petrovic writes: “By repeating the same verse in melostrophe, by repeating segments of the verse or by ordering them in particular ways, the folk have created, sculptured models within which melodic and poetic contents are conjoined” (1989, 75). Like arrangers, early folk songwriters generally followed (some suggest intuitively) principles of repetition, variation, and contrast, while exhibiting much individual variation in interpreting formal coherence. Unlike the kind of microanalysis applied within a single melostrophe to traditional material, new songs are conven­ tionally analyzed on the basis of larger analytical units— groups of verses. Surveying a sample of lyrics from arranged and early new folk songs, I found that their formal structure is based on a loose organization of verses, typically two to three lines of text that make up a formally separable narra­ tive unit, or strophe. In performances, musical continuity during transition from one to another strophic unit is emphasized; in some cases singers bare­ ly pause before continuing with the next strophe. More typically, the groups of verses are marked off by brief orchestral interludes, with a minimal effect of interruption. In other words, both older and newer performances leave an overall impression of formal unity and narrative as well as musical flow. Further, at least three folk models discussed by Rihtman (1962, 231-232) easily apply to groupings of verses in these songs: A A 1 (repeated melostro­ phe), A BB1 (melostrophe, second melostrophe, and its repetition), and AA*B (repeated melostrophe, second melostrophe). Structurally, melodic variations within different melostrophes in newer songs show greater contrast, gravitat­ ing toward full fledged strophe; for example, A-Av (variation), B-Bv, B-Bv, where repeated B melostrophe assumes the function of refrain. It seems clear that the new folk songwriters recognized the basic concept of melostrophic organization of tunes, and redefined songs in more standard (musicological)

Laying the Foundations

33

terms of short and long musical sentences; i.e., eight- and sixteen-bar sec­ tions. Structurally, the refrain became the most significant element around which the new folk song form began to be organized in the early 1960s. The use of refrain helped to crystallize the loose strophic design of neotraditional songs into a stanza-refrain relationship, indeed a model for the future pro­ duction of newly composed folk song. But this change did not result, as is often assumed, in a wholesale replacement of traditional models with a strophic formula. One can argue that the general principle of repetitiveness within village songs gave rise to the refrain. Its structural equivalent is clear­ ly found in pripjev, a verse or short formulaic phrase which occurs repeti­ tively at specific places within a song.30 The shift from narrative to strophic organization of verses had profound implications, both ideologically and practically. Music analysts were inclined to deny folk identity to newly composed song specifically on the basis of melostrophic canon. Povrzanovic writes: “NCFM is non-izvorna: on one hand it is based on izvorni musical patterns, on the other it adopts the ele­ ments from 4zabavna music,’ the form A ABA and ABAB, instead of the tra­ ditional AAAAA” (1982, 8). The tendency toward an analytically indiscriminate application of the concept of melostrophe to diverse musical material had an important value implication: minute variations within a melostrophe were appreciated as folk creativity, while stanza-refrain form signaled a descent into the uninventive­ ness of the mass-produced new folk song. Jerko Bezic critically addresses an issue similarly raised by Dalmatian urban song. [I]n the broader public there is a prevailing opinion that in the singing of folk songs there is an absolute unity between the text and melody, that is, the complete match of accents and other elements between a text and a tune. However, this is not always so, especially not in urban folk songs; and this is because there is clearly a dominance of melody over text.31 Within an overall pattern of change, there was a great degree of overlap between variation and standardization. The songwriter, Damjan Babic, con­ veys the feeling of the excitement of innovative approaches: Around 1964 a new form of folk song emerged—ABAB—patterned after the stager of that time. By emphasizing the function of refrain, the people came to realize that the melodic development could be better. They relied on musical intuition, feeling for music; but, music does not

34

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia endure cliches. There were also AA1 song forms, little pripjev followed by refrain.32

This view suggests that the strophic model did not eclipse the older forms. We see from the present perspective that two factors underlay this pattern of simultaneous transition and stability: continued work by earlier established songwriters, and the demands of the local markets. The output of Miodrag Todorovic Krnjevac, the preeminent guardian of the Serbian folk song tradi­ tion, illustrates this. Beginning his song writing career in the late 1940s, Krnjevac helped shape the identity of Serbian folk music by supplying songs for some of the most popular singers, among them Predrag Gojkovic Cune, Mile Bogdanovic, and Silvana Armenulic.33 He did not diverge from the aes­ thetic of “music in the folk spirit” even within the pop-dominated production of the 1980s, as illustrated by his 1988 cassette collection of Serbian wedding songs and kolos; in all pieces he achieves the narrative and rhythmic effica­ cy of folk expression by applying the basic ABB model of melostrophic organization. Similarly, the enduring popularity in Bosnia of village dancebased and satirical songs among local audiences owes, in great part, to the functionality of a straightforward folk model: the tune is repeated until the “song is through.” Such, for example, is the locally unique musical practice named after the Kalesija region in northeast Bosnia, which features fastpaced singing and energetic kolo fiddling, aptly termed by a Globestyle pro­ ducer, the “Bosnian breakdown.”34 Orchestra musicians, arrangers, and songwriters intervened in the tradi­ tion, but they also made its continuation possible. The twin effects of this mediation were clearly demonstrated in the case of Bosnian sevdalinka. Neotraditional Song: the Case of Sevdalinka Much of the scholarly and popular literature on sevdalinka conveys a mod­ em orientalist image of indigenous Bosnia’s high culture: solo singing or singing accompanied by a saz (a Turkish-derived long-necked lute) in the intimate settings of Muslim middle-class households. In sharp contrast to vil­ lage styles of polyphonic two-part singing, stylistic and performance traits typically associated with sevdalinka point to the distinct urban culture that evolved during Bosnia’s Ottoman period: melodies of broad range filled with melisma, slow tempo rubato, “free” rhythm dependent on expressive deliv­ ery of lyrics, subtle accompaniment by saz in unison with the voice and by improvisational interludes; briefly, sophistication of expression within which the many-faceted love sentiment of sevdah is sublimated. Particularly noted

Laying the Foundations

35

as an attribute of sevdalinka authenticity is the non-tempered tonal basis of songs. At the same time, musicological analyses reveal that sevdalinka's tonal framework is related to the European scale system, most characteristi­ cally, the mixolydian and harmonic minor scales, because of the prominence of that magic interval of the Orient— the augmented second (Milosevic 1964, 32).35 This harmonic latency in the melodic stock of sevdalinka repertoire helps explain, from a practical point of view, the ease of translating sev­ dalinka into an orchestral setting of functional harmony. The historic precedent to orchestral harmonization of sevdalinka was the addition of accordion accompaniment to solo singing, a practice introduced in Bosnia at the beginning of the century and followed even by young privi­ leged Muslim women, despite the social conventions which discouraged them to play instruments. At the time, as Ankica Petrovic notes, this was clearly a statement of cultural modernization under European influence.36 The post-1945 changes introduced by folk orchestra accompaniment of sev­ dalinka singers are usually described in terms of two dramatic aspects of transformation. The songs were shortened, thereby eliminating the ballad flow of the narrative, and the vocal part was rhythmically regulated by a steady ensemble accompaniment, thus creating tension between a voice seek­ ing flexibility and an ensemble tending toward rhythmic punctuality. An equally conspicuous aspect of the dominance of this neotraditional model was that in the capital, Sarajevo, one could only occasionally witness public performances of soloist sevdalinka in the historic ambience of the Bascarsija quarter. As in other cities, such as Banja Luka, Tuzla, and Mostar in which sevdalinka singing was historically cultivated, there were only a handful of available players of saz. Few of them had opportunities to record for Radio Sarajevo and Diskoton record producer. While many radio singers distin­ guished themselves by singing sevdalinka in the company of folk orchestras, the view that the genre had been deconstructed to the point of losing its “soul” seems to have prevailed among both sevdalinka experts and discrim­ inating audiences. One finds historical parallels on the themes of change and loss by revis­ iting writings by the Bosnian composer and prolific ethnomusicologist, Vlado Milosevic. Milosevic establishes that, historically, the main impetus for development of traditional, saz-accompanied sevdalinka was ravna pjesma (plain; literally, “flat” song), or the old-time Bosnian varoska (small­ town) song. He paints a picture of the evolution of ravna song with two dis­ tinctive aspects: syllabic singing within a narrow melodic range evolving into a “broad and quiet melody, plain even when it arises from ornaments.”37 Therefore, the term ravna does not merely imply the singing of simple tunes,

36

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

but rather a particular emotional state of those who sing, especially at festive occasions— a relaxed and carefree mood. At the turn to the twentieth centu­ ry, this ravna song seemed to have accurately depicted the social environ­ ment within which early sevdalinka singing thrived, unhindered by the imperatives of performance understatement that gave rise to the notion of the urbane sophistication of this genre. M ilosevic’s reference to Ludvik Kuba’s observation that ravna singing was most loved among the BosnianHercegovinians at the time of his fieldwork (the end of the nineteenth centu­ ry), also suggests a peasant contribution to the social origin of early sev­ dalinka style. In his seminal work, Sevdalinka (1964) Milosevic is careful to distin­ guish between the older and simpler sevdalinka styles of singing, closely related to Bosnian small-town song, and the more evolved oriental and his­ torically “perfected” model, itself symbolic of distinct performance settings: domestic and public. Although he does not hide his personal bias toward the early domestic form of “pure” sevdalinka, sung by women in the privacy of their homes, he believes that ultimately, the manner of singing, rather than formal musical traits of the genre, defines its classicist perfection. Inextricably linked to this notion of perfection and expressive decorum is sevdah, romantically codified as the yearning, an “anxiety of the soul in love.” But that sevdah was open to the “modern” subjectivities of a changing Bosnian society was not always a readily acknowledged fact of the social his­ tory of the genre. Milosevic himself was ambivalent about the value of the new “slager sevdalinka” he saw emerging at the turn to the 1960s; one per­ formance aspect he chose to note we have seen adopted by folk orchestras. As accompanists to singers, accordion players do not deviate much from what they learned from their predecessors. It is striking that they accom­ pany ravna songs and songs in the slow tempo with a sharp rhythm, per­ haps in order to provide some contrast between stretched singing and rhythmically brusque accompaniment. (1964, 42) Milosevic was also atypically open to the examination of the music’s social milieu, which from early times was populated by professional performers, including Gypsies. Having tentatively established that the very word sev­ dalinka is of relatively recent origin (second half of the nineteenth century), he adds to the speculation that the term was invented by the Gypsies, the principal carriers of the specific (oriental) type of urban song in the larger area of the Balkans. Not unwittingly, he expands the class and ethnic basis of

Laying the Foundations

37

the artistic model of sevdalinka by locating the song where it “belonged,” in its everyday performance context. I hold the view that sevdalinka is just that which flourished in kafanadrinking and aksamluk-becar ambience.38. . . Let’s not look for sev­ dalinka in . . . the old mahala [narrow street] and homes of those who, in the times past, led a patriarchal way of life. What was created in this environment was young women’s love song. . . . Sevdalinka emerges with the first kafana. ( 1964, 40- 41 ) Two points need to be emphasized concerning Milosevic’s reading of sevdalinka: the diffusion of sevdalinka-style performance beyond the domes­ tic female environment within the Muslim cultural order, and an undercur­ rent of professionalism, particularly encouraged after the Austrian annexa­ tion of Bosnia (1897) when sevdalinka entered the public space and the kafana. An examination of sevdalinka as an artistic text, isolated from the larger context of social change, will inevitably suggest a decline of its traditional features. The view that the medium of the orchestra had in fact made it pos­ sible for sevdalinka tradition to continue recognizes a social dynamic of change not unlike the one witnessed early in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important factor in critical evaluations of orchestra-arranged sev­ dalinka was overlooked: the audience. Although one can only speculate about what kind of response radio listeners in the 1960s would have had to a ten minute broadcast of a single sevdalinka— an idea implied by the critics— it is much more certain that the radio audience was increasingly attuned both to new folk and zabavna music. Similarly, describing the fatalistic reflexivity of much of NCFM narrative in terms of sevdah may be a somewhat sacri­ legious proposition, especially within the strong literary discourse on sev­ dalinka poetry. Yet it is also the case that different, often conflicting, per­ spectives arise when historic and geographic boundaries are crossed. It has been noted already that early Serbian commentators tended to problematize sevdah singing as an issue about aesthetic (non-Slavic) Otherness, and like many Bosnian commentators, to disparage its association with kafana in terms of declining musical values. The notions of kafana and commercial vulgarization of sevdalinka performance constitute a line of ori­ entalist argument we see entrenched in NCFM critique. * * *

38

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia, as elsewhere in east Europe, the importance of the post1945 modernization of folk music through explicit policies of arrangement and professionalization of performance cannot be underestimated. Folk orchestras in particular provide researchers with a vast amount of musical ethnography imbued with official ideas of cultural progress, national her­ itage, and symbolic struggles for musical territories at the local level. One perhaps central point of this body of work has been articulated by commen­ tators cited in the previous pages: that the stylized and collectivized form of arranged folk music was a direct negation of the spontaneity and individual play of folk musicians. By focusing on obrada, the principal musical means through which folk music was aesthetically redefined and bureaucratically controlled, I have highlighted its ideological legitimacy, if not its political suitability. At the same time, it is obvious that, beyond its embodiment of the official cultural policy, obrada revealed more complex issues of long-term change. At this point, the ethnographic material requires a shift of focus, away from the seemingly self-contained world of narodna music toward other sociomusical contexts. A starting point may be Antoine Hennion’s sim­ ple proposition: The song is nothing before the “arrangement,” and its creation occurs not really at the moment of its composition but far more at the moment of orchestration, recording, and sound mixing. The elements, with their somewhat classical musical grammar, are looked upon chiefly as raw materials to be assembled along with the voice, the sound, the “colors,” and the effects of volume and density. The real music of the song hides behind the melody and gives it its meaning.39 The following question can be raised rhetorically: should NCFM be evaluated by analytical methods suited to popular music, or by those suited to historical folk music? Following the line of this dichotomy, it appears that if arrangement is a constitutive part of pop song definition, in the folk song setting it interferes with the preexisting “original” text. If in the pop song set­ ting, arrangement is a natural process of the simultaneity of production and performance, in folk song recording it eliminates the spontaneity of both cre­ ation and performance. A senior folk songwriter once remarked that it was the arrangement that made a “dry” folk tune “beautiful,” and it was “abnormal” that, through time, the arrangers had begun to stand in the shadow of songwriters. The context of reference for this statement was Yugoslav zabavna music, the closest available model for folk musicians to emulate, following the end of the obra-

Laying the Foundations

39

da reign. I would argue that zabavna music, specifically its festival phase, helped to create both a musical and institutional environment for the emer­ gence of new folk music. THE ESTRADA CONTEXT: ZABAVNA MUSIC In his brief historical survey of popular music in Yugoslavia, Slovenian musicologist Andrej Rijavec points to foreign music influences and regional interactions early in the twentieth century. At the time of the first political union of the south Slavs, due to the different cultural orientations of individ­ ual regions, popular music . . . comprised nearly everything from the coffeehouse sentimentalism of the Austro-Hungarian operetta music down to French chansons and Russian romances. The first American influences came indirectly through the German Schlagermusik, especially in the form of sheet music from popular publishers such as Jovan Frajt in Belgrade and Srecko Albini in Zagreb. In the late twenties the first, mostly German, magazines arrived, writing about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the like, and—the first records. At Bled [Slovenia] which was in those days the summer residence of foreign diplomats accredited to Yugoslavia, ensembles . . . played mostly German commercial music. However, in 1934 . . . Bojan Adamic from Ljubljana, proceeded to more contemporary American “hot” ways of performing (clarinet, tenor saxo­ phone, two trumpets, trombone, piano, drums), whereas Trio Jurkovic in Zagreb was already following Benny Goodman’s musical examples (clarinet, piano, drums). Purely musical resistance to German commer­ cial music was for understandable reasons soon accompanied by politi­ cal motives, so that the American models were now sought mostly through listening to the BBC. . . . [I]n the autumn of 1941, ten local orchestras took part at the festival in Ljubljana—half-legal because of Italian occupation: hardly anything besides American popular music was played in big-band style.40 Although American music fell out of favor during a brief post-1945 period due to Yugoslavia’s eastward political alliance, it would return most directly through jazz and rock and roll in the latter 1950s. First, we need a critical perspective on Yugoslavia’s “openness” to for­ eign music, and its particularly problematic nature in the early post-1945 period. As Petar Lukovic has graphically illustrated through the personal accounts of pioneering actors of Yugoslav estrada, the issue of the ideolog­ ical suitability of popular music tightly shaped the political climate of estra­

40

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

da's formative periods.41 The centrality of radio in the creation of this climate was self-evident. Before the advent of festivals of zabavna music and the rise of television in the late 1950s, radio served as the only accurate barometer of the volatile intersections of political ideology, music and musicians, and institutional media policy. Lukovic’s historiographic account also reveals that, with the exception of Yugoslavia’s Cominform period of 1945-1948, none of the subsequent periods have offered the convenience of being viewed in static terms of a state/popular culture opposition. Even though Yugoslav estrada was, literallv. the stage on which issues of ideological import were often exposed, the social dynamic of popular music was more complex than political interpretations have tended to suggest. The clearest case of political prohibition of popular music can be seen by following the controversial inroads made by jazz-styled music in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Jazz,” at that time broadly defined to include cover versions of the American pop repertoire as well as popular music of the day (both converged in dance orchestra music), was disliked by the officials not only because of its Western and capitalist associations, but also as an aes­ thetic that stood in sharp contrast to any domestic style resembling “popular” in the Western sense. The ideological antidote to this liberating music were Russian songs, and the Yugoslav staple of mandatory revolutionary and arranged folk songs that dominated the airwaves in the late 1940s. Even though much of the new, conspicuously Western, music was not approved by radio authorities, some practicing insiders of the day speak of the 1950s as the “golden age” of Yugoslav jazz, not least because of the struggle and enthusiasm that were the key driving forces in these musicians’ simultaneous conquest of strong ideological biases and creation of new musical territories. As in any other aspect of social life after Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet leadership in 1948, these developments were made possible not only by loosening the ideological grip on bourgeois cultural imports, but more so by the activities of musicians, their institutional self-organizing, and an ever­ growing audience for popular music forms. During the 1950s and 1960s one form above all evolved into a formative system of Yugoslav popular music within which its many different strands developed and found a secure niche in radio programming: slager. As Edward Larkey notes for the model, German schlager, this capacity of absorption is an inherent feature of the genre, for it is based on a “construction principle which is easily syncretized and exploitable for commercial purposes in a variety of diverse styles.”42 It is worth noting that the early evolution of Yugoslav slager, followed by the peak of its popularity and prestige at festivals and on radio during the 1960s, historically approximated the heyday of German schlager which, in 1956,

Laying the Foundations

41

was the “most successful genre in the German-speaking market” (Larkey 1993, 99). Yugoslav slager moved in different directions, influencing and influ­ enced by many other popular styles of the day, from brief but marked Mexican and Hawaiian “waves” in the 1950s, to the lasting impact of rock and roll since the latter 1950s.43 During the 1950s and early 1960s, festivals of zabavna music emerged as the single most powerful public forum for the presentation, production, and definition of Yugoslav popular music. Both literally and symbolically the center-stage for the affirmation of songwriters, arrangers, and, above all, of singers, festivals were the measure of popularity as well as legitimacy in that they defined the stylistic parameters of the domestic hit and estrada pres­ tige. Not until the emergence of recognizable rock scenes during the 1970s (most notably in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo) was there an organized alternative to a popular taste dominated by the festival slager aesthetic. During this time festivals thrived because of their ability to accommodate to musical change, increasingly dictated by the pop market. By introducing “pop night” in festival programs, for example, organizers formally acknowl­ edged the significance of pop and rock artists, who already had a visible pres­ ence on the festival stages. Some critics saw this co-optation as symptomatic of the enduring power of the festival-centric mainstream to legitimize (or compromise) the rock alternative, which fully came of age by the beginning of the 1980s. The first in a series of “great” festivals of zabavna music was the Zagreb Festival, founded in 1954, and organized by the Croatian Society of Composers. Its programming tended towards the singer-songwriters, espe­ cially the so-called “Zagreb school of chanson” which the Festival helped create, thus adding a distinct Croatian contribution to Yugoslav popular music.44 The Opatija Festival was founded in 1958, and grew into the major all-Yugoslav manifestation of popular song. Substantial support by Yugoslav Radio and Television ensured that the media networks of all republican and autonomous provinces had their singing representatives. The Split Festival was close in stature, and distinguished by its Mediterranean image of the Dalmatian style of popular song. Initially organized in 1960 as Melodies of the Adriatic, it was a Yugoslav response to the Italian San Remo Festival. On the Serbian map of major festivals, the most influential was Belgrade Spring (Beogradsko prolece), first organized in 1961, while the Bosnian addition to this national network was Your Schlager of the Season (Vas slager sezone) initiated in 1966 by Radio-Television Sarajevo. Numerous other festivals, some local, others with national ambitions, were founded in these and later

42

Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia

periods in almost all regional comers of the country. It is safe to say, how­ ever, that Croatia was the major contributor in shaping zabavna music on the festival front, followed by Serbia, and to a lesser degree, by other republican centers. As we shall see, Serbian and Bosnian festival organizers in particu­ lar would excel within the folk field. Even though Croatian singers distinguished themselves by canzona and chanson singing, and Serbian singers by Russian-styled romance, to take an example of a somewhat stereotyped distinction, musically, zabavna music festivals tended to transcend regionalism. The popularity of certain styles at any particular time was a determining factor in the overall programming of a festival, and, increasingly by the end of 1960s, in profiling individual singers’ repertoires. If the stylistic focus of some festivals implied limited regional appeal, television’s live coverage turned them into national events. Many commentators associate the peak of festival music— the latter 1960s— with particular qualities of team spirit, collegiality, and enthusiasm among participants who shared similar artistic ideas and the excitement of involvement in creating something new. The theme that permeates insiders’ accounts of these festivals is prestige. Festivals were truly “cultural manifes­ tations,” and, even more significantly, Yugoslav cultural manifestations. They entertained, but they also enlightened. As one source in Petar Lukovic’s portrayal of the makers of popular music put it, singers were popular then, but it was a different, “serious” kind of popularity, in contrast to the star pop­ ularity enjoyed by individual acts of the modern estrada. Lukovic’s preference not to recast the personal narratives of musicians, many of whom “played for Tito,” to fit the mold of intense criticism of the socialist past which prevailed at the time of his writing (the late 1980s), leaves an impression of a nostalgic voyage into the social tranquility of fes­ tival life. Yet all musicians appear unapologetic in articulating the sense of community and the festivals’ significance in strengthening interregional links. In a practical sense, this cohesiveness did help the formation of estra­ da and its growing institutional power within the society at large. In addition to radio and television, increased popular press coverage of festival events helped create the basic media framework for estrada's func­ tioning. Yet another key component in the music’s diffusion, and the most direct link with the audience was the fledgling record industry. Initial responses were weak, and the concept of production and role of diskografija V;