Music in the Balkans 9004250379, 9789004250376

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Music in the Balkans

Balkan Studies Library Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinović, University College London Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University Alex Drace-Francis, University of Amsterdam Jasna Dragović-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin Advisory Board

Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University Radmila Gorup, Columbia University Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh Robert Hodel, Hamburg University Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary, University of London Maria Todorova, University of Illinois Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

Music in the Balkans By

Jim Samson

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

Cover Illustration: The bridge on the Drina at Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samson, Jim.  Music in the Balkans / by Jim Samson.   pages cm. — (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; 8)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-25037-6 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25038-3 (e-book) 1. Music—Balkan Peninsula—History and criticism. I. Title.  ML3600.S26 2013  780.9496—dc23 2013012191

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-6272 ISBN 978-90-04-25037-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25038-3 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To Efi, Richard, Vasilis and Stefanos

CONTENTS List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... List of Maps  ......................................................................................................

xiii xv

Introduction  .....................................................................................................

1

PART ONE

BALKAN GEOGRAPHIES 1 Exodus ......................................................................................................... Sarajevo: Little Jerusalem  ................................................................. Two Peninsulas: The Sephardic Diaspora  ................................... Singing the Community: Music of the Sephardim  ................... Opening Out: Themes and Developments  ..................................

13 13 17 21 28

2 Ecologies ..................................................................................................... Music and Place ................................................................................... Ringed by Mountains: The Oaş Country ...................................... On the Voice: The Dinaric Alps and Other Mountains ........... Deep in Šumadija  ................................................................................

35 35 40 44 51

3 Displacements  .......................................................................................... Investing in Place  ................................................................................ Migrations: Serbs in a Habsburg World  ....................................... Trading Places: Greece and Anatolia  ............................................ Tallava Rules: Kosovars in Macedonia  .........................................

58 58 63 69 75

4 Ecumenes  ................................................................................................... In the Minority  .................................................................................... All Together in Vojvodina  ................................................................ Orchestrating Thrace  .........................................................................

80 80 83 91

5 Centres  ........................................................................................................ All in the Family: Mapping Montenegro  ..................................... Finding the Centres: People and Traditions  ............................... East – West  ...........................................................................................

101 101 110 115

viii

contents PART TWO

HISTORICAL LAYERS  6 A Makam-Echos Culture ..................................................................... Grand Narratives ............................................................................... Byzantine Reflections  ...................................................................... Ottoman Canons ...............................................................................

133 133 142 150

 7 Eastern Recessions  ............................................................................... Allahu Ekber  ...................................................................................... Coffee Break  ....................................................................................... Turning West  .....................................................................................

160 160 173 180

 8 Infrastructures ........................................................................................ Littoral Balkans: Venice and the Adriatic  ................................. Mitteleuropa: The Reach of the Habsburgs  .............................. Reciprocities: Modernising the Peripheries  ............................. The Principalities and Beyond  .....................................................

189 189 196 202 208

 9 Nations  ..................................................................................................... The First Steps  ................................................................................... Two Nations  ....................................................................................... The Berlin Balkans  ........................................................................... Yugoslavism  ........................................................................................

220 220 228 235 240

10 Inspirers  ................................................................................................... Building the Pyramids: Reflections on High Culture ............. Greeks . . .  ............................................................................................. . . . and other Agents  ......................................................................... Either/Or: Reflections on Modernism  ........................................

249 249 254 261 266

PART THREE

MUSIC IN TRANSITION 11 Mixing It  .................................................................................................. Discourses of Transition  ................................................................. Nuts and Bolts: Elements of Popular Music  ............................. On the Record: Surveying the Legacy  ........................................

275 275 281 287

contents

ix

12 Join the Club  .......................................................................................... Following the Leader: Manolis Kalomiris  ................................. Drawing the Circle: The Greek National School  ..................... Another Way: The Failure of Greek Modernism  ....................

302 302 313 325

13 Moderna  ................................................................................................... Garlands: Stevan Mokranjac  ......................................................... One People, Three Names: The First Yugoslavia  .................... Late Arrivals: Croatian Modernisms  ........................................... Parallel Tracks: Bulgarian Advances  ........................................... Transit to Prague  ..............................................................................

332 332 338 344 351 358

14 Serbo-Croat  ............................................................................................. Who Owns Slavenski?  ..................................................................... From the Balkans . . .  ........................................................................ . . . to the Cosmos  ..............................................................................

369 369 376 383

15 Placing Genius  ....................................................................................... A Tempting Comparison: Locating George Enescu  ............... Closing In: Enescu’s Journey  ......................................................... Wider Again: In the Modernist Canon  ......................................

391 391 398 407

PART FOUR

EASTERN EUROPE 16 The Curtain Descends  ......................................................................... Left, Right . . .  ...................................................................................... In Extremis: The Singular Case of Albania  ................................ Administered Music: Performing Communism  ...................... Composers on Message  ..................................................................

415 415 424 431 437

17 Diverging Paths ...................................................................................... Traffic with Moscow  ........................................................................ The Acolyte: Bulgarian Bridges  .................................................... The Zealot: Albanian Austerities  ................................................. The Maverick: Romanian Renewals ............................................

444 444 451 456 459

x

contents

18 Another Try ............................................................................................. Politics versus Culture: The Second Yugoslavia  ...................... The Dark Decade: Mainly Serbia  ................................................. In from the Cold: Mainly Croatia, a Little Slovenia, and Back to Serbia  ...................................................................... Catching Up: Other Republics  ......................................................

468 468 474 479 489

19 Birthright of the People  ...................................................................... Orchestras: Classicising Traditional Music  ............................... Newly Composed Folk Music  ....................................................... Simulacra: Wedding Music and More  ........................................

495 495 503 513

20 One Got Away  ........................................................................................ Popular Art Music: Theodorakis at Large  ................................. Art Music: Modernism is Official ................................................. Popular Music: Rebetika and Beyond  ........................................

519 519 527 540

PART FIVE

GLOBAL BALKANS 21 All Change  ............................................................................................... Brave New World .............................................................................. Another Balkans: The Diasporic Imagination  ......................... Composers in Exile  ..........................................................................

549 549 555 563

22 Conservation  .......................................................................................... Who Needs Classical Music? ......................................................... Has Modern Music Really Grown Old?  ..................................... Where Have All the Folksongs Gone?  .......................................

573 573 580 589

23 Balkan Beat  ............................................................................................. Heroes  .................................................................................................. Re-Inscribing Yugoslavia  ................................................................ Divas  ..................................................................................................... Greek Mythology  ..............................................................................

595 595 599 605 611

contents

xi

24 On Boundaries and Events ................................................................. In Theory  ............................................................................................. Greece and its Neighbours  ............................................................ Music Partitioned . . . ........................................................................ . . . and Not Quite Partitioned ........................................................

616 616 621 628 636

25 Endgame  .................................................................................................. Degenerations  .................................................................................... Generations  ........................................................................................ Balkan Ghetto: The Story of Kosovo ........................................... Are We There Yet?  ...........................................................................

642 642 649 655 660

Glossary  .............................................................................................................. References  ......................................................................................................... Index  ...................................................................................................................

669 673 705

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Part I 1–2. The Croatian Musical Institute, Zagreb, exterior and central staircase  .................................................................................................... 3. Gaida player Paschalis Kitsikoudis from the village of Patagi, Evros in Western Thrace. Singer Stratis Laboudis from the village of Poimenikon, Evros ............................................................. 4. Cham Albanians dancing before the opening of the Folklore Festival ‘Oda Dibrane’ in Peshkope, Northern Albania in 1999  ........................................................................................................... 5. National Folklore Festival in Gjirokastër, Albania in 2004. Male dance from Korçë  ...................................................................... 6–7. Teškoto dance from Macedonia, performed by Tanec, the National Folksong and Folkdance Ensemble of Macedonia  ... 8–9. The Theatre of San Giacomo in Corfu. Exterior and stage  .....

8 9 9 10 11 12

Part II 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

Christmas celebrations in Topola, Šumadija, pre World War II. The men prepare to collect ritual oak branches. Traditionally the priests and the families burn the branches on Christmas Eve to invoke sunlight and heat for the coming year ............... A photograph of the Serbian composer Ljubica Marić (1909–2003) taken in 1933  .................................................................. Iconic performance of Mozart’s Requiem amongst the ruins of the National Library in Sarajevo. Sarajevo Philharmonic, Sarajevo Cathedral Choir. Conductor Zubin Mehta, Soloists José Carreras, Ruggero Raimondi, Cecilia Gasdia, Ildiko Komlosi. 19 June 1994  .......................................................................... Folk music group from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with performers on zurna, drum, accordion. Tešanj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, mid-20th century  ............................................... Markos Vamvakaris and his Piraeas ensemble, Athens, 1968 

126 127

128 128 129

xiv

list of illustrations

15. A photograph of the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris (1883–1962) from the late 1950s  ........................................................... 16. Little-known photograph of the Romanian composer George Enescu (1881–1955)  .................................................................................. 17. The Căluşari from Vlaşca at Moşilor Fair .........................................

130 130 131

LIST OF MAPS* Map 1. Map 2. Map 3. Map 4. Map 5.

The Ottoman Balkans in the mid-16th century  ..................... xvi The Military Border in the 17th and 18th centuries  .............. xvii The Balkan states in the 1880s  .................................................... xviii The Balkan states after World War II  ....................................... xix South East Europe in 2013  ............................................................ xx

* Maps 1–4 are from Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Balkans. New York: Macmillan, 2001. Reproduced with permission from Palgrave Macmillan.

Map 1. The Ottoman Balkans in the mid-16th century

Map 2. The Military Border in the 17th and 18th centuries

Map 3. The Balkan states in the 1880s

Map 4. The Balkan states after World War II

Danube R. Bratislava Vienna Budapest

AU S T R I A

Iaşi Trieste Venice

SLOVENIA Ljubljana Rijeka

Cluj

Zagreb

C R O AT I A

BOSNIAHERCEGOVINA Knin

Timişoara

Vukovar

Bihać Zadar

Kishinev

HUNGARY

ROMANIA

Novi Sad

Bucharest

Belgrade

Constanţa

SERBIA

Sarajevo

Danube R.

Nis̆

Mostar

̆ Turnovo Shumen

MONTENEGRO Dubrovnik

Priština

Podgorica

I TA LY

Prizren Shkodër Skopje Durrēs

Edirne

MACEDONIA Tiranë

ALBANIA

Varna

Sofia B U L G A R I A Burgas Plovdiv

KOSOVO

Naples

Silistra

Ohrid Thessaloniki

Kavala

THRACE

Istanbul

Vlorë Ioannina Larissa

GREECE TURKEY Patras

Athens

Tripolis

0 0

50

MILES 100 150

100 200 KILOMETERS

200 RHODES

300 CRETE

Map 5. South East Europe in 2013

INTROduCTION South East Europe resides in the margins of music histories, a footnote at best. Most music lovers know little of the art music from this region. Although it is part of Europe’s cultural heritage, it has been all but written out of the European story. There are obvious reasons for this, to do with the political, social and cultural consequences of Ottoman rule. The familiar scenery of European modernity appeared late in South East Europe. There was an element of catch-up involved, though putting it in that way (placing coeval cultures on different symbolic time lines) begs a few questions. Chauvinism also played its part: the chauvinism of nation states in the region itself, and the chauvinism of ‘the West’, to use a term that will be scrutinised later. One task I have set myself is to address these questions head on. This means exploring centres and peripheries. It means setting little stories alongside grand narratives. And it means analysing the singular counterpoint of politics and culture that is everywhere manifest in this part of Europe. If the art music of the Balkan peninsula is little known, its traditional music has long been a hunting ground for scholars from without, and especially from the North American college circle. This asymmetry is striking, and it exposes the other side of the modernity coin. Pre-modern rural music-making survived longer in the Balkans than in many other parts of Europe. Its distinctiveness, closely tied to place, has made it an easy prey for appropriation by local nationalisms, by state socialism and by exoticist agendas in the West. I will address these questions too in what follows. To do so I will need to cross conventional scholarly divides between musicology and ethnomusicology. Indeed, since I am really attempting a panorama of music, culture and politics in the region, I will cross several divides. There are commentaries on art music, church music, traditional music and popular music in this volume. I am best qualified to discuss the first of these, and the neglected art music of the region does indeed lie at the heart of my narrative. But in the interests of a rounded picture I have no compunction about having a go at the other three. Even where I rely heavily on existing scholarship, I aim nonetheless to advance a point of view. the book is written for outsiders, to whom this whole field remains arcane, but also for insiders, whose knowledge of their own musical traditions may be comprehensive, but who often know surprisingly little

2

introduction

about the music of their immediate neighbours. this brings me straight to nationalism, a topic that looms large over South East Europe and its culture. nationalism is part of the history, of course, and as such it will be interrogated in the book. But it also distorts the history, re-inventing the past in its own image and then freezing that past into ossified figures. Partly, then, I engage in an act of recuperation: an attempt to rescue some aspects of music history that have been either suppressed or distorted by nationalism. I hope to do adequate justice to empire (ottoman, Habsburg and other), and to the legacy of empire; in other words, I try to highlight the commonalities rather than, or as well as, the divisions. But I want also to present some of the music that exists or existed on the precarious edges or in the darker corners of nation states: the music of so-called minorities. there should be a word about the two major labels used to classify this region, neither of which is entirely neutral. ‘South East Europe’ suggests an accommodation to the European project; more than that, it implicitly recognises that all these modern nations may in due course become part of the European union. the term has a modern ring, rehabilitating a territory that was once thought to be either part of the East or an aberrant part of Europe: an orient within. ‘the Balkans’, in contrast, signals the darker past of this region. outsiders have gone so far as to generate a pejorative verb from the label, while insiders have cultivated an ethos of denial; the Balkans is always further south, further east than our present location. So how are we to understand the Balkans? If we seek a working definition, we could do worse than follow Maria todorova, who equates the term with ottoman presence and legacy in Europe. Politically speaking, this suggests that the term may soon outlive its usefulness. But as a pointer to the cultural commonalities that have resulted from that presence and legacy, its day may not be done. As to geographical boundaries, it is best not to be too specific. If we treat ‘the Balkans’ as a metaphor, we will leave the question of boundaries entirely open. If, on the other hand, we try to mark out the peninsula with precision, we will cut across recognisable culture areas. neither approach is satisfactory. In this book there is a core region of ottoman territory, but there is also a shaded surround to this core, and it will be drawn into the narrative from time to time. none of this is an exact science. Anatolia, poised precariously between Europe and the Middle East, has been largely excluded, for example, though the overlapping concerns are obvious, and some ottoman basics naturally need to be set out. Hungary has likewise been left out of the picture. despite the ottoman presence there,

introduction

3

it is more closely aligned to central Europe or East central Europe, to use two labels that carry their own ideological burden. And Slovenia makes only a marginal appearance, precisely when it is drawn into the political communities of the two Yugoslavias. not everyone will be content with these decisions. I can only hope that they will be justified by the internal coherence of the narrative.1 I write as an outsider looking in, of course. the advantages and disadvantages of this have already been intimated. there is a wealth of detailed knowledge and understanding of music history in South East Europe among the scholarly communities there; indeed one of my aims is to bring some of this knowledge – available for the most part in minority languages only – to wider notice. However, the tendency of insider scholars has been to write discrete national histories, even where this is not the ostensible aim. An outsider can take a wider view, and can make connections that are not always apparent from within. the drawback is that this can only be done at some cost to specialised knowledge. It is in the nature of a book like this that it will do some injustice to detail. I see no way of avoiding this if I am to identify helpful patterns in the cultural history of the region as a whole. My portrait of the Balkans is both synthetic (drawing together a wide range of existing published scholarship) and reductive (forging bold figures from a mass of detail), but I offer it in the hope that it might be examined critically and adjusted accordingly. Quite simply, it has seemed to me worth making some attempt, however imperfect, to write an account of music in this region that cuts across the familiar national borders, even if this guarantees offending just about everyone. there should be a word here on more practical matters. For ease of reading, Greek and cyrillic names and titles have been transliterated throughout, though this carries certain obvious penalties. As to spelling, it is all but impossible to be consistent in dealing with this region. this is a minefield. the working principle I have adopted is to spell place names, proper names and genre titles according to the appropriate context. thus, it is ilâhi in turkey, but ilahija in Bosnia and Herzegovina, zurla in Macedonia, zournas in Greece. With place names it would become laborious and even pedantic to give all possible versions in every case. the most

1 the five states or former states at the heart of this narrative are Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, romania and Yugoslavia, exactly the territories covered by Barbara Jelavich in her history of the region (Jelavich 1983).

4

introduction

contentious area is Kosovo, and it illustrates just how hard it is to avoid the charge of bias. Already in the above I have elected for a compromise by choosing the familiar ‘Kosovo’ over the Albanian ‘Kosova’ or ‘Kosovë’. this seems right to me, but it will not necessarily seem right to Albanians. And it is trickier still with towns and cities. Given Kosovo’s proclaimed independence, backed by a substantial number of states, it would seem reasonable to go for Peja, for example. But if we are describing the Serbian orthodox Patriarchate in that city, how can we use other than Peć? For similar reasons, you will find both Priština and Prishtina in what follows. there will be many inconsistencies of this kind within the book, and not all of them are the result of carelessness. Plurals are another problem. With most European languages I have opted for the native plural. But for non-European languages I have anglicised plurals with ‘-s’ (makam-makam-s, rather than makam-makamlar). And where the term now seems familiar in English, I have simply given the English plural (sevdalinka-sevdalinkas). Finally, I have included a very rudimentary glossary of recurring terms (genre titles, instruments and the like) for ease of reference. they are minimally defined, and only one version of each term is used (versions in other languages should be easily recognisable). It goes without saying that I have innumerable co-authors. Many of them have become friends. Indeed some are now close friends. they are included in the list below, and they know who they are. But more generally, people were invariably generous with their knowledge as I cornered them during my wanderings in South East Europe. In fact I have been offered so much help over the last few years that it seems invidious to single out individuals. I must do so, however. Among those whose thoughts and insights are written into my own text are the following, presented in alphabetical order. I am grateful to all of them. Eralp Adanir, Sofia Aggelidou, Ardian Ahmedaja, Bülent Aksoy, Engüle Atamert, Mehmet Atun, Felicia Balan, Marin Marian Bǎlaşa, Maja BaralićMaterne, Iannis Belonis, Valton Beqiri, nada Bezić, Milena Bojikova, dimitrije Bužarovski, Ivano cavallini, Ivan Čavlović, Valia christopoulou, Mihai cosma, octavian cosma, Mihail cozmei, dan dediu, nicoletta demetriou, Aleksander dimitrijevski, Zoe dionyssiou, Markos dragoumis, Arbnora dushi, Myrto Economides, Mustafa Elmas, deniz Ertan, nice Fracile, Ana Gaceva, Ertem Gal, Panikos Giorgoudes, Asli Giray, nikša Gligo, dimitrije Golemović, Basak Güler, Andri Hadjiandreou, Anastasia Hasikou, Marc Heeg, Aida Islam, trena Jordanovska, Jelena Jovanović, Vasilis Kallis, tamara Karača-Beljak, Kostas Kardamis, Athena Katsanevaki, Pavlos

introduction

5

Kavouras, nicos Kokkas, Sofia Kontossi, rreze Kryeziu, Valon Kryeziu, Krisztina Lajosi, danka Lajić-Mihajlović, George Leotsakos, Katerina Levidou, claire Levy, Alexander Lingas, Besa Luzha, Stathis Makris, tatjana Marković, Linda Meriku, Vesna Mikić, Biljana Milanović, Melita Milin, Pirro Miso, Irena Mitevska, Ivan Moody, Iva nenić, John neubauer, Zymer neziri, Muhamed nezirović, Jelena novak, Yiannis Papadakis, Anna Papaeti, Igor Paspalj, Sara Peno, danica Petrović, Svanibar Pettan, Mirsad Pinjo, Eckehard Pistrick, Ioannis Polychronakis, Speranţa rǎdalescu, Sanja raljević, Amila ramović, Andrej rijavec, Marko rogosić, Katy romanou, donika rudi, Margaritova rumiana, Albin Sadiku, Kibris Sanat, Eva Sedak, dardan Selimaj, Velika Stojkova Serafimovska, Sokol Shupo, Biljana Sikimić, Vasiliki Sirakouli, Kenneth owen Smith, Angelina Sotiriou, Leon Stefanija, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva, Ivona tatarceska, Katarina tomašović, dafni tragaki, Ioannis tsagarakis, Effie tsangaridou, Panos Vlagopoulos, Pëllumb Vorpsi, Haris Xanthoudakis, and Susanne Ziegler. closer to home, I am very grateful to John tyrrell for his unfailing support of the project and for immensely useful suggestions, to Stephen Lovell for sharing thoughts, to Adrian thomas, Zoran Milutinović and danijela Śpirić-Beard for helpful advice, and to two anonymous readers who commented constructively on the manuscript. And I am especially indebted to Efrossini Spentzou and richard Alston for intellectual stimulus, moral support and warm friendship. It is to them and to their two children Vasilis and Stefanos that the book is dedicated. thanks also to theodora Lebesi, my guardian angel in nafplio. I am also grateful to Ivo romein , tessel Jonquière and Zoran Milutinović at Brill for their initial interest, subsequent enthusiasm and unfailing efficiency, to dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. cox for permission to reproduce maps 1–4 (from The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Balkans), and to Zoran Milutinović, Milena Bojikova, Ardian Ahmedaja, Mihai cosma, Efi Spentzou and Valia christopoulou for helping me to negotiate the difficulties presented by transliteration, diacriticals and so on across a range of different languages. needless to say, they should not be blamed where I have fallen short. And finally, I extend my thanks to the Leverhulme trust, the British Academy, the onassis Foundation and royal Holloway, university of London for generous financial support. Jim Samson London and nafplio 2013

PART ONE

BALKAN GEOGRAPHIES

1–2. The Croatian Musical Institute, Zagreb, exterior and central staircase (photographs Damil Kalogjera). © Courtesy of the Croatian Musical Institute.

3. Gaida player Paschalis Kitsikoudis from the village of Patagi, Evros in Western Thrace. Singer Stratis Laboudis from the village of Poimenikon, Evros (photograph Haris Sarris).

4. Cham Albanians dancing before the opening of the Folklore Festival ‘Oda Dibrane’ in Peshkope, Northern Albania in 1999 (photograph Ardian Ahmedaja).

5. National Folklore Festival in Gjirokastër, Albania in 2004. Male dance from Korçë (photograph Ardian Ahmedaja).

6–7. Teškoto dance from Macedonia, performed by Tanec, the National Folksong and Folkdance Ensemble of Macedonia. © Courtesy of Tanec.

8–9. The Theatre of San Giacomo in Corfu. Exterior and stage. Watercolours by M. Pieris. © Courtesy of the Music Museum “Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros” of the Corfu Philharmonic Society.

CHAPTER ONE

ExODuS Sarajevo: Little Jerusalem If you stroll around Sarajevo today you will see a modern, feisty European capital. You may need to remind yourself that this was a city under siege in the 1990s, and that many of its inhabitants carry vivid memories of what is usually just called ‘the war’. For some, the memories are no doubt suppressed. Even where events are less strident, our memory sometimes prefers to leapfrog the more immediate past. It seeks a safer territory. unlike Mostar to the west or the Drina valley villages to the east, now in Republika Srpska, Sarajevo retains relatively few physical scars from the war. What has been destroyed – is being destroyed – is the toleration of difference, for no Balkan city had been as multinational, multireligious and multicultural as Sarajevo. Present-day divisions are palpable, and they remind us that the rebuilding of tolerance, here as elsewhere in South East Europe, will be a daunting task. The memory of co-existence haunts the city. As for the violence, this is now encased in commemorative symbols; it is rendered into history. The Dayton accord held in check some of those same ethnonational energies that had triggered an earlier war, when Gavrilo Princip stamped Sarajevo indelibly on the history books. Again there are symbols, bookmarking the infamous date: 28 June 1914.1 Princip’s target was an Archduke, but a dynasty fell: more than that, an entire dynastic system. And the dynasties are inscribed in Sarajevo’s urban landscape. As you stroll down Ferhadija, now a pedestrian walkway thronged with shoppers, the Habsburg scenery at the upper end yields to the Ottoman ‘old town’, with its medresa and bezistan, a tourist trap for sure, but still charming. History is peeled back in layers as you walk. You will pass the Catholic cathedral, and you may glimpse the spire of the Franciscan church and monastery across the river Miljacka, all built after the Habsburg occupation of 1878. You will walk within a block or two of the Saborna Crkva, the ‘new’ Orthodox Church on Trg Oslobođenja [Liberation Square]. You might then make 1 Snel 2004.

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a short detour to visit the ‘old’ (sixteenth-century) Orthodox Church on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije. Either way, you will end up in the Turkish quarter. Here you will find the Gazi Hüsrev Bey mosque, and on the hillside directly ahead the Muslim cemeteries overlooking the city. This is now a predominantly Muslim town. One thing you might easily miss is the Jewish museum (the old synagogue) on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije. Today there is a community of around seven hundred Jews in the city. But you will find few visible signs that right up to World War II Sarajevo was a leading centre of Sephardic Jewry in the Balkans. The Sephardim arrived there mainly from Salonica [Thessaloniki] in the mid sixteenth century. We learn snippets about their life in Sarajevo under Ottoman rule from passing references by Turkish and European travellers, including the seventeenth-century writer and traveller Evliyâ Çelebi (1611–82),2 and there is also factual data in the archives of the Jewish Sephardic Community as recorded by Rabbi Moritz Levy,3 and in the kadi records of the local Muslim court. All this is supplemented by retrospective accounts of the Ottoman period in Jewish magazines from the early twentieth century. We learn that the new immigrants settled initially in a large building known as Čifuthan [the Jew house] by locals and Il cortijo [the courtyard] by the Jews themselves, but that in due course they established other residential districts on the edge of Muslim districts. They were a close-knit community, largely self-governing, and they integrated reasonably well with the local community, serving as treasurers, customs officers and land-registry clerks. Yet they preserved many of the oral traditions of their heritage, including their language (a dialect of Judeo-Spanish) and their music.4 Modernity impacted on the Sephardim with the switch to a Habsburg administration in 1878, one of many such collisions of Ottoman and Habsburg dynasties in the Balkans. Life in rural Bosnian communities was not greatly affected, but it was a different story in the towns, and especially in Sarajevo. There were transformations in architecture, interior design, transport (the introduction of trams), and cultural practices. For the most 2 Çelebi’s Seyāhatnāme [Book of Travels] is an indispensable source of information on Ottoman life and culture (Dankoff 1990; Dankoff and Elsie 2000), and on what Robert Dankoff calls the ‘Ottoman mentality’ (Dankoff 2004). Among the many accounts of the Balkans by European travelers, one might cite Wilkinson 1848, Boué 1854 and Maurer 1870. 3 Levy 1996. 4 More detailed accounts of Jewish life in Sarajevo can be found in Freidenreich 1979, Nezirović 1992 and Shaw 1991.

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part Jewish secular musical life was unaffected by the tight bureaucratic control exercised by the new administration over music.5 As an oral culture, predominantly amateur and without dedicated performance venues, it was exempt from the license system that crippled other forms of musicmaking. But it did reap the benefits of the new programmes of education introduced by the Habsburgs and of the cultural awareness that flowed from them. And it responded to a developing cultural nationalism among the Sephardim, a response to the Habsburgs, but even more a response to the Ashkenazim who accompanied them, and who established their own community in the city.6 With the change of administration the Sephardim got themselves organised, establishing formal structures of identity, through which they might articulate a new sense of self and history. Hence the appearance of institutions such as the charitable foundation La Benevolencia in 1892, and the short-lived Judeo-Spanish magazine La Alborado, founded by the Bulgarian reformer Abraham Kapon in 1900. And hence too the first steps in an identity-defining collection of oral culture, in line with nationalist movements more generally at that time. Sephardic folk ballads in particular began to be collected just before the turn of the century, partly under the auspices of La Benevolencia. And as so often in such movements, the motives of the collectors were part political and part conservationist. Outsiders were the prime movers. They included the 1893 notations of the Czech ethnologist Ludvík Kuba, stimulated largely by the activities of the recently established Zemaljksi muzej,7 the 1898 Leo Wiener collections published in North America,8 the pioneering romanicist studies of Angel Pulido Fernández9 and Ramon Menéndez Pidal,10 and the 1911 collections of Manuel Manrique de Lara, a key figure in the conservation of Sephardic oral cultures. La Benevolencia also supported the activities of the choral and tamburica society La Gloria, which featured on the historic recordings made in Sarajevo in 1907 by Felix Hampe for Deutsche Grammophon. These are among the earliest recordings of Sephardic music, and happily copies are extant, rendering the private voice public and permanent.11 5 Risto Pekka Pennanen has discussed this bureaucracy based on researches in the Zemaljska Vlada Sarajevo [Provincial Government Archive]. See Pennanen 2005. 6 Freidenreich 1977. 7 Milojković-Djurić 2002, 149. 8 Wiener 1903. 9 Fernández 1992 and 1993. 10 Pidal 1958; Armistead 1978. 11  Pennanen 2003 and 2007.

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As we move into the inter-war period, the history of Sephardim in Sarajevo is entwined with the wider history of Jewish communities within the first Yugoslavia, a history that was all but extinguished during World War II. Prior to this, Jewish culture in Sarajevo was both enabled and threatened. There was a new intellectual interest in Judeo-Spanish between the wars. The spoken language may have been forced into decline (the Talmud Torah in Sarajevo had been closed in 1910), but new writing flourished in the city, folklore collectors were active, and new Jewish magazines appeared: initially Židovska svijest [Jewish Conscience] and Jevrejski život [Jewish Life], with their rival Zionist and Sephardic nationalist agendas, and then the consciously synthesising Jevrejski glas [ Jewish Voice]. All these included articles on world Jewry and Jewish history, but they also serialised fiction, and Jevrejski glas published ballad texts.12 On occasion we are afforded a vivid glimpse of the dramas of identity played out on shifting grounds of marginality. A short story Tardi di vjarnis [Friday Afternoon], published in Jevrejski glas and signed with the pseudonym Josefiko, depicts the doorstep reflections of two Sephardic women on the mysterious ways of the Ashkenazim. It is a parable about how we draw borders between communities, and between generations, and about how the modern world transmutes difference into alterity.13 It may be that the texts of Sephardic songs published in Jevrejski glas and elsewhere can yield comparable insights into cultural identities in an era unavailable to ethnographic study, for these ‘folk songs’ occasionally hint at meanings that lurk beneath their manifest surfaces. Existing traditions of generic and philological research discuss the contamination that occurs between some of the songs, accounting for illogical breaks in the narrative as one song slips into the world of another. Work by Judith Mauleón-Berlowitz, for example, invites us to speculate not just on the textual and musical commonalities that may have promoted such contamination, but on the latent possibility that they may be expressive of a shared world view; there is a suggestion, for instance, that eastern Sephardic contaminations might somehow signify a collective fear of the tragic ending.14 This may be pushing speculation to its limits. But at least it draws attention to the anarchic twists and turns of the narrating voice in 12 These were requested from readers, and in principle one was published with each issue. Several ballads from Jevrejski glas are included in Armistead and Silverman 1971. 13 Nezirović 1992, 56. 14 Mauleón-Berlowitz 1995.

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several of these songs, straining against the Proppian functions proposed by the leading scholars of Sephardic texts, Samuel Armistead and Joseph Silverman. Some of the surrealities, all but inexplicable in conventional narrative terms, even invite the kind of psycho-analytical readings afforded by cultural critics such as Julia Kristeva. Might the fissures in these texts allow elements of the (Lacanian-Kristevan) imaginary to break through the well-ordered surface of the community? Might they hint at collective insecurities, and perhaps even articulate a latent longing for the past on the part of the Sephardim? Such questions take us beyond Sarajevo into the whole remarkable story of the Sephardic diaspora. And for that we need to backtrack more than five hundred years. Two Peninsulas: The Sephardic Diaspora In 1492, following a presence of more than a thousand years, the Jewish population was expelled from Spain by a direct edict from los reyes católicos.15 Five years later there were forced conversions en masse of those who had moved to Portugal, and in the course of the following century there was a steady exodus of Marranos and Jews from Portugal too.16 These were not the only mass expulsions of Jews from the Christian lands of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. But the Iberian case was distinctive. Contrary to the usual Jewish practice of ready submission to the law and customs of host Jewish communities, significant numbers of Iberian Jews carried with them and jealously preserved the traditions of their homeland; indeed the name by which they became known was itself an assertion of origins: they were the Jews from Sepharad, which had come to mean ‘Spain’ in Hebrew.17 This is not to say that the Sephardim were everywhere resistant to assimilation. Those who travelled northward to the Low Countries and England yielded some of their distinctive identity to host cultures, while settlers in North Africa allowed their ritual practices and social mores to merge gradually and imperceptibly with existing 15 The expulsion edict of 1492 followed the re-establishment of the Inquisition in Spain in 1480, itself indicative of a marked deterioration in the relations between Jews and Christians. 16 The Marranos were converted ‘New Christians’ who aimed to reconvert to Judaism at the earliest possible date. An extensive practice of crypto-Judaism thus developed in Portgual. See Mea and Steinhardt 1999. 17 The term ‘Sephardic’ has in recent years been applied more generally to more-or-less all Jews who do not have an Ashkenazi European background. See Sola Pool, Patai and Cardozo 1960, 5 for speculation on the reasons for this.

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Judeo-Arab elements to create a uniquely synthetic Maghrebi Jewish culture. But the story was different in the Levantine and Balkan territories of the Ottoman Empire.18 Here the Sephardic Jews lived up to their name. One author speaks of a ‘transplanted Sepharad’.19 Already prior to the Sephardic immigration, there had been population transfers within the Ottoman territories. But the arrival of the Sephardim was on a different scale. Of course it was not instantaneous. Partly they came in waves, pouring into the major cities, and in some cases establishing significant Jewish populations where none had existed before. But in addition there was a steady infiltration spread over many years, with temporary settlement at numerous points on the long route from one peninsula to another: from the western rim of Europe to its eastern rim. Try to imagine the experience of individual families as they travelled by foot, mule or cart towards the nearest port or frontier, and then beyond. Inevitably the major Ottoman ports were the first recipients: Istanbul itself, Valona [Vlorë] on the Albanian Adriatic, Salonica, Smyrna [Izmir] in Asia Minor, and some of the Aegean island ports under Ottoman control.20 Later, inland Balkan cities – including Belgrade, Sofia, and Monastir [Bitola], as well as Sarajevo – established major Jewish quarters.21 These were Ottoman mahalas (neighbourhoods), and not ghettos, even if most of the Jewish population did live in impoverished circumstances. From Bayezit II onwards, the Sultans were more than happy to welcome a people with professional skills and commercial experience, useful to the Sublime Porte and the army, and with the potential to develop trading networks based on the geography of diaspora.22 As the years unfolded, the Sephardim vied with the Greeks to dominate the textile industry of the southern Balkan peninsula, to supervise commerce between the Ottomans and the Dalmatian and Italian coasts, and to act as mediators between the ruling class and the remainder of the raya (the non-Muslim ‘flock’). As Lady Mary Wortley Montague observed in her travels in the

18 The culture of Moroccan Jews retained even closer links to Spain than their Balkan counterparts. See de Quirós 1972, 334; also Shiloah 1992, 193. 19 Benbassa and Rodrigue 1993, xvii. The path was cleared for the Sephardim in part by the wealth and commercial acumen of Donna Gracia, so-called ‘Queen of the Jews’. 20 Rhodes became an important centre after the defeat of the Knights of St. John. 21  Frejdenberg 1999. 22 The Sublime Porte was the name given to the Divan or Court of the Ottoman Empire.

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Ottoman Empire in the early eighteenth century: ‘Every pacha has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires’.23 They were of further strategic importance to the larger proselytising goal of the Ottomans. If the Catholic West chose to reject its Jewish populations, then the Sultan would welcome them, and would use them to best advantage, not least to create a balance of power with Christian populations, for in practice the Jews often occupied a precarious social interstratum.24 Above all, they were people of the book. For the Ottomans, religion was – at least in theory – the motor driving the conquests, where war (the gathering of the hosts) was literally a season of the year;25 and it was also the main basis on which they structured dependent peoples, through a so-called ‘millet system’ that existed in varying degrees of formalisation, with the Jewish millet less centralised and less hierarchically structured than its Orthodox Christian counterpart. From the start the empire had been accepting of difference even as it was protective of hierarchy.26 As part of their contract with the Ottoman authorities, Christian and Jewish communities were not just free to practise their own religions; they were ceded a substantial measure of self-government, even down to matters of jurisprudence. For the Sephardic Jews this devolution enabled continuity and some measure of stability. And in return for these freedoms and for Ottoman protection, they paid a special tax, and were required to organise the collection of that and other taxes within their community. Of course the supremacy of Islam was never in question.27 Like Orthodox Christians, the Jews remained subordinate in all major respects to the Sublime Porte,28 and that meant in practice to a ruling class of officials, soldiers and administrators. Throughout the

23 Montague 1800, 126. 24 In the second of the so-called ‘Casino Talks’, Antal de Quental (1842–91), a key figure of the Portuguese Revivalist movement in the late nineteenth century, attributed much of the decline in Portuguese fortunes to the expulsion of the Jews. See Simões 1984. 25 Wheatcroft 1995, 51. The ‘season’ of war began to break down as a pattern during the eighteenth-century, in the so-called ‘Tulip era’. 26 The Ottomans were more tolerant than most Muslim polities in their approach to conquered subjects. Hence what was regarded from the East and the South as the Pax Ottomanica, reminiscent of the Roman Empire. 27 This was even represented symbolically, in that churches and synagogues were built on a lower level than mosques. There are numerous graphic illustrations of this in the Balkans today. 28 With the nineteenth-century reform movement (Tanzimat), equal rights for the millets were notionally achieved, with Jews and Christians admitted to provincial councils and to the Supreme Council of Ordinances. These and other rights were enshrined in the short-lived Constitution of 1876.

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empire, non-Muslims were subject to social and economic discrimination. But in the end, whatever the problems and given the choice, most Jewish communities, and many Orthodox for that matter, preferred a Muslim to a Catholic overlord.29 Jewish communities from the Balkans to the Levant made up one distinctive pattern in the patchwork quilt of religions and ethnicities that constituted the Ottoman ecumene. Their specificity was conditioned by the ritual practices of their faith, and by the Sephardic liturgy.30 But their language also distinguished them,31 and so too did a wealth of cultural practices. In due course the Sephardim squeezed out, or absorbed, existing Jewish cultures to become the dominant Jewish presence in the western Ottoman lands. It would be going too far to claim that they preserved an undisturbed pocket of culture from medieval Spain and Portugal out there in the Balkans, keeping alive forms and practices that had long since died out in the Iberian peninsula itself. But there is a kernel of truth in this myth of a paradise lost. Following the trauma of expulsion, one option was to recreate the homeland, to keep alive fading, no doubt idealised, memories of an Iberian Eden, and to rely on familiar markers of cultural identity to do so. The names of the congregations conveyed this message (Catalonia, Cordova, Evora Portukal), while the decoration of homes, the street names in Jewish quarters, and the dress of the women all reinforced it. Music played its part, reaching beyond the distinctiveness of the liturgy to embrace secular romances and canciones with texts derived from medieval Spanish. The time capsule theory of Sephardic culture in the Balkans has proved attractive to many. Yet it needs to be balanced by some acknowledgement of the steady process of acculturation that followed the expulsions. As Iberian cultural forms entered the Ottoman ecumene, a world of multiple languages, faiths and customs, and of hybrid cultural idioms, they absorbed and adapted Ottoman forms and genres. And of all cultural forms music was especially prone to this process of transformation and adaptation.32 The sequence is complicated by presumed affinities between 29 Benbassa and Rodrigue 1993, 16–26. 30 The Sephardic liturgy was in due course shared with the so-called ‘oriental’ Jews, referring especially to those exiled from Palestine who moved eastwards to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, south to the Arabian peninsula and into North Africa. 31  until the thirteenth century the Jews of the Iberian peninsula spoke Arabic rather than Spanish, but from that point they acquired numerous varieties of Castilian Spanish, albeit incorporating Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish terms. 32 Benbassa and Rodrigue 1993, 54.

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wider Middle Eastern musical practices (Byzantine echos, Persian dastgah and Arabic maqām) and the practices of pre-expulsion Al-Andalus [Arabic Spain].33 But modern scholarship has established that most of the melodies that make up surviving Sephardic repertories actually postdate the expulsions,34 and in many cases direct borrowings from well-known Greek or Turkish melodies have been demonstrated. All this suggests that where Iberian origins are registered, they are registered more through the texts than the music. In the end there will always be imponderables when we attempt to reconstruct the histories of oral repertories. Despite the evidence provided by sources other than musical documents, we come up against what Oliver Strunck once called the ‘impenetrable barrier of oral tradition.’35 At some point the musical idioms of medieval Spain yielded to those of the modern Balkans and the Levant. Some have claimed that the seventeenth century – arguably a point of maximum interpenetration between Sephardic and host cultures, and at the same time the period when Jews began to lose something of their privilege within the empire, even as their congregations became increasingly unified – represented the key stage in this transformation, and have produced supporting evidence.36 Yet even if this holds as a generalisation, the detail and dynamic of this epic musical transfer from peninsula to peninsula, and the vivid reality of it, will continue to elude us. Singing the Community: Music of the Sephardim If the idea of a ‘transplanted Sepharad’ makes sense in musical terms, it applies in the first place to synagogal repertories. Despite all kinds of local variation, certain basic structures of the Sephardic liturgy remained constant across Sephardic communities in diaspora.37 Some scholars have

33 Spanish scholars, notably Menéndez Pidal, have focused on Iberian origins, though mainly through the study of texts rather than music. The major scholarship to emerge from this school is to be found in the publications of Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman. See Armistead and Silverman 1970, 1981 and 1986. Arguments for the Spanish roots of the music are made in Galanté 1932 and elsewhere. 34 See the discussion of this problem in Shiloah 1992, 189–196. 35 Strunck 1977, 55–67. For a general discussion of this problem, see Shiloah 1992, 37–38. 36 Seroussi 2001. 37 See the early essay by David Aaron de Sola and Aguilar Emanuel (De Sola and Emanuel 1857). The most comprehensive anthology is Levy 1964–80.

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even argued for the proximity of Sephardic cantillation not just to medieval Hispanic practices but also to much earlier Jewish traditions.38 Yet whatever the continuities, processes of acculturation were rife. If we home in on religious music around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at which point certain concrete things can be studied, and even heard, it is clear that the practice at that time was heavily influenced by Ottoman traditions of classical and Mevlevî music. Whether cantillation constitutes ‘music’ is, of course, as much of a question for Jewish as for Islamic traditions.39 Accompanied song was unambiguously ‘music’, but chanting was understood not as music but as ‘saying’, ‘reading’ or ‘learning’. Its function was to enhance the text, and especially so in the Sephardic service, where the Hazan was less a cantor in the developed Ashkenazic sense than a traditional ‘reader and leader’, intoning the chants with meticulous attention to correct pronunciation and clear enunciation. Music or not, Sephardic cantillation followed a system of Biblical Accents (te’amim) that was common to all Jewish liturgy, indicating not just emphasis and punctuation but mode and, in a very general way, melodic pattern.40 This was a form of neumatic notation, and the practice it signified was an ancient one, a particular variant of a more general Middle Eastern or eastern Mediterranean musical culture.41 The modal basis of the music had become fundamental, and it was preserved in a traditional form in the Sephardic liturgy, where the ‘saying’ of prayers would be adapted to the mode appropriate to each Sabbath, feast day or fast day. The Spanish (pre-expulsion) Jews were also responsible for some of the great Arab-influenced hymns (piyyutim) that enriched particular services in the Middle Ages.42 And since the piyyutim were meant to be sung, in the familiar understanding of that term, they ensured that music, not just heightened recitation, took its place in the service. Musical qualities were

38 A.Z. Idelsohn, whose ideological bias is apparent, has shown how widely separated practices have retained the same readings (Idelsohn 1948, 39). He contrasts this with more developmental Ashkenazi traditions. 39 Following the destruction of the Second Temple music was proscribed in the synagogue, and all musical instruments were, in theory, out of bounds. 40 This was formalised in the so-called ‘Tiberian system’ of the ninth century. See Idelsohn 1948. 41  It was Robert Lachmann who re-directed Jewish music studies from the quest for continuities within a single tradition towards a more contextual approach across Middle Eastern musical cultures; see Lachmann 1978. Yet we are cautioned by Peter Jeffery against too easy an acceptance of cross-cultural analogies (Jeffery 1992, 2). 42 Key figures were the great poet and Neo-Platonist philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol, and the Toledan doctor and poet Yehuda Halevi.

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further highlighted by the Sephardic practice of transferring tunes to new texts, and thus emancipating the melody from its association with a specific text. This practice, where the poem would be be-lahan – sung to a particular lahan or tune – was widespread, but it was especially common in Oriental-Sephardic traditions. Following the expulsions, ‘rhythmic’ music seems to have gained ground in the Sephardic synagogue, for the piyyutim crossed the divide between synagogue song and public or private ceremonial occasions. Strictly speaking, secular tunes could be introduced to the synagogue only under certain conditions, but the practice was common.43 The last of the great synagogal poets to write in Hebrew, Rabbi Israel Najara (c. 1555–1625) adapted the poems of his first Diwan to Turkish, Arabic, Spanish and Greek melodies; and it has also been possible for scholars to trace piyyut melodies back to traditional Balkan songs.44 As the demand for newly-composed piyyutim, and for related, more domestic, pizmonim (Holy Day songs, stanzaic in form), steadily increased in the communities of the Balkans and the Levant, partly due to the needs of kabbalist movements centred in Salonica,45 they would have absorbed more and more of the characteristics of surrounding Middle Eastern music. This extended to specific aspects of performance practice. It was symptomatic that the rhythmic piyyut would on particular occasions be preceded by an ornamental improvised introduction (mawwāal) of a kind familiar in Arab-Ottoman traditions (the Ottoman taksîm), with the explicit function of outlining the maqām, together with its pre-existing melodic formulae, ‘modulating’ through other maqām-s, and then returning to the original. We might, then, describe a spectrum within Sephardic music, taking us from the traditional cantillation of Biblical texts to newly composed piyyutim, where the influence of Middle Eastern musics would have been more pronounced, and from there to non-synagogal religious repertories, including table hymns sung in Hebrew and virtually indistinguishable from synagogal song. From there we would move to ritual songs inspired

43 Shiloah refers to the practice of Moshe Vital, a Sephardic cantor of Jerusalem who was born in Izmir and studied with Isaac Algazi in Rhodes (Shiloah 1992, 70–1). 44 Najara 1587. In this Diwan (Songster), the tunes are ordered by maqām, and the poems sung to a mixture of Ladino and Hebrew. Idelsohn points out that Hatikvah, a hymn whose melody was thought to have developed from older Sephardic Hallel and Tal tunes, may in fact be derived from the Moldovian-Romanian folk song Carul su boi [Cart and Oxen] (Idelsohn 1948, 376–8). 45 These demanded hymns for Baqqashot (supplication) gatherings at midnight and for the ‘early risers’ or ‘watchmen of the morning’.

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by the Sabbath and the events of the Jewish year, together with countless paraliturgical songs associated with the life cycle: parida (childbirth), asuar (display of dowry items), bodas (weddings) and so on. Such ritual songs were often described as coplas, a genre that appears to have developed largely within the Ottoman Empire; it was not identical to the secular Spanish genre so labelled. Written mainly in Ladino, coplas formed part of the traditional or popular music of the Sephardim, and they lead us to our final category, Ottoman-influenced secular repertories, which included narrative romances and love songs or topical songs (canciones), invariably performed by women, whose role in public life was restricted. Whether sacred or secular, the poetic forms and some of the texts of these traditional Sephardic songs – and the surviving repertory is exclusively vocal – can often be traced back to Hispanic origins, no doubt because for the texts, though not for the music, there emerged a stabilising written tradition in the form of song collections (romanceros, cancioneros).46 Indeed, as indicated earlier, there has been some impressively detailed philological study of selected song texts from this wider repertory, comparing extant sources for the songs, many collected in North America, unpicking their multiple linguistic elements, and demonstrating ‘archaisms’ of language that have now disappeared from Spain and Portugal. Classifying Sephardic songs is in the end a treacherous exercise. For one thing, the separation of sacred and secular is less straightforward than the above summary suggests; narrative romances and even canciones often have sacred or semi-sacred themes. And for another, there was a splintering of Sephardic traditional song into several distinct pathways, for example Italian (Venice and then Livorno), Ottoman-area, and Moroccan.47 Not only were titles differently understood across these separate traditions; they were used somewhat permissively within each of them. Nonetheless, some general distinctions can be drawn. The Sephardic romance is conventionally a narrative poem traceable to, though greatly reducing in scale, the Hispanic epic ballad, with which it shares the poetic structure of assonant couplets of two eight-syllable lines. The Ottoman-area tradition retained this structure, but here the term romanza tends to embrace

46 For a discussion of musical survivals from Spain, see Katz 1992. Katz critiques similar attempts to relate peninsular and Sephardic repertories in Etzion and Weich-Shahak 1988. 47 According to Shiloah, the early eighteenth century was the point at which Ottomanarea and Moroccan musical traditions parted company (Shiloah 1992).

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lyric as well as narrative poems, while the subject matter of the narrative poetry often refers to relatively recent Ottoman or Balkan history. More common than romanzas are canciones (or canticas), shorter strophic folk poems on any number of different topics from daily life, but very often on themes of love.48 And finally there are coplas, which usually highlight specifically Jewish themes, though in certain cases this term has been used generically to cover almost any kind of Judeo-Spanish song. What of the music, sacred and secular? Musicologists such as Judith Etzion, Susana Weich-Shahak and Israel Katz have indeed demonstrated Hispanic survivals. But it seems that from as early as the Diwan of Israel Najara the piyyutim at least would often have been based on makam-s (strictly makamlar, plural of the Turkish makam; cf. Arabic maqām/ maqāmāt), and would have employed a performance style characteristic of Ottoman music.49 Of other repertory, it is likely that the romanzas and coplas would also have adopted Middle Eastern musical idioms at an early stage, even where the texts were explicitly Hispanic. This is supported by ethnographic evidence,50 and also by the more concrete evidence that became available in the early twentieth century, when collectors first began to transcribe the music of the songs as well as their texts. We have already encountered some key figures here (above all de Lara, who in 1911 and 1915 collected both tunes and texts from the Balkans and North Africa), but a major collector from a later generation was Alberto Hemsi (1898–1975). Hemsi began collecting in Asia Minor in 1920, then in Rhodes (1924–1927), and later (intermittently) in Alexandria and Salonica.51 His arrangements of Sephardic melodies for voice and piano exhibit what he himself called a ‘triple process of reproduction, reconstruction and re-creation’,52 and they contextualise the traditional melodies in a highly specific, Spanish-influenced manner. However, these arrangements

48 An attempt at systematic comparative analysis of the music of such Judeo-Spanish ballads is Etzion and Weich-Shahak 1993. 49 In his second collection, She’erit Yisrael, Najara gives the makam and in some cases also the usûl (the rhythmic cycle in Ottoman classical music) along with the texts. 50 The Jewish-American singer Flory Jagoda, who was born in Sarajevo but emigrated to the united States, has discussed this on several occasions, not least in Ankica Petrović’s film The Key to Spain: The Songs and Stories of Flory Jagoda (2002). 51  As noted earlier, some of the earliest musical examples of Sephardic song are the notations made by Ludwík Kuba in Sarajevo in 1893 (see Weich-Shahak 1990). Text collections were published by A. Danon in 1896–7, but Sephardic ballad scholarship began in earnest with Pidal 1958. The most scholarly presentation of Hemsi’s collections is Edwin Seroussi’s edition (Hemsi 1995). 52 Hemsi 1995, 46.

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represent only a small fraction of his total song collection. His larger enterprise was truly ethnological, involving the preservation of the texts and many of the melodies of Ottoman-area Sephardic song, some of it of ancient lineage, but much of it more recent. He set the compass reading for later mid-century collections, by Leon Algazi (1890–1971), Moshe Attias, and Isaac Levy, all of which extended the purview of Sephardic songs to embrace other than Ottoman-area traditions.53 From the transcriptions of these collectors, from documented accounts of performances, and of course from the earliest sound recordings, some picture of performance practices in the Balkans begins to emerge, at least for the later stages of the Sephardic diaspora. In a pioneering study, Israel Katz attempted to bring some realism to this issue by stressing the influence of Middle Eastern music, including the music of Sufi confraternities in Turkey (the ilâhi-s, or devotional hymns, associated with Sufism were especially influential in Albania and Bosnia, where Islam gained a firm foothold).54 In doing so, he was reinforcing a message that had already been articulated in Alberto Hemsi’s commentaries. And the same message is underlined when we turn to early twentieth-century compositions and performances by leading Jewish musicians, several of whom were prominent in Ottoman classical music; they included composers such as Şemtov Şikar (1840–1920) and Ishak Varon Efendi (1884–1962), singers such as the eminent Haim Yapaci Efendi, and the Algazi family, of whom Isaac ben Solomon Algazi (1882–1964) has left a recorded legacy.55 The recordings by Samuel Benaroya of songs associated with the Maftirim choir in Edirne in eastern Thrace also open a window to this world.56 And then, to add further ballast to the argument that the sound world of Ottoman-area Sephardic song was indeed a Middle Eastern one, we have the valuable fieldwork of Pamela Dorn on the music of Turkish Jewry.57 Something of this sound world is recaptured in the work of those present-day recording artists who choose to perform Sephardic music using an ‘oriental’ voice production,58 the makam-s of Turkish music (at least as a trace presence), and an accompaniment of instruments such as 53 Algazi 1958; Levy 1959; Attias 1961 and 1972. 54 Katz 1972. 55 See Dorn 1991a for a discussion of leading Jewish musicians of the Ottoman area. For a study of Algazi, see Seroussi 1989. 56 Seroussi 1998. 57 Dorn 1991a and 1991b. 58 I refer to the nasal tone colour and fluctuating vibrati, and especially the type of wide vibrato known as titrek in Turkey, characteristic of Middle Eastern singing.

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the ney (oblique reed flute), kanûn (plucked zither), frame drum, and saz (Turkish long-necked lute). However, this is only one option among several in a market whose extent and eclecticism bear witness to the revival of interest in Judeo-Spanish song in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Some artists have acknowledged through their performance style the similarities between Sephardic and other popular repertories from the Balkans, notably Bosnian sevdalinkas and Bulgarian and Greek urban songs.59 Some prefer to bolster the medieval Hispanic association either through the use of early instruments, or by introducing flamenco idioms (notably Yasmin Levy), all suggestive of nostalgia as a studied project, or as Svetlana Boym has argued a symptom, of our age.60 Then again, some have created a Mediterranean tinge, linking the Sephardic repertory to traditional music from Italy, Sardinia and southern France. Others have opted for the ‘pure’ folksong manner, minimally accompanied if at all, which was generic to folksong revivals everywhere in the late twentieth century, while yet others have combined the Sephardic ballad style with contemporary popular idioms. The point is that Judeo-Spanish song is now literally in revival. It has moved to the public concert and the recording studio, and has little contact with the traditional ritual practices of a living Sephardic-Jewish culture. Since World War II such a culture has barely existed in the Balkans, except in small isolated pockets, notably in Bulgaria.61 Sephardic culture had already been dealt a major blow by the demise of the Ottoman system, whose innate conservatism had proved an ideal context for the preservation of traditional beliefs and customs, but with the Holocaust it was all but extinguished. Where liturgical music is concerned, the effect of this destruction of Balkan Jewish culture was to sharpen the division between an eastern Sephardic tradition, referring now to Turkey and the Near East, and the Sephardim of Western Europe. And as Edwin Seroussi has pointed out, the centre of gravity of this eastern tradition has now moved to Jerusalem following the migrations to Israel; Seroussi refers to a Jerusalem-Sephardi style, which absorbed many elements of an earlier Ottoman-area practice.62 However, the situation seems rather different with Judeo-Spanish song. Increasingly this was marketed as a species of world music, with a relatively free exchange of idioms across the several 59 Kaufman 1964. 60 Boym 2001. 61  Cichon 2006. 62 Seroussi 2001.

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different Sephardic traditions, and between those traditions and more international popular music styles. In the context of modernity and postmodernity Sephardic traditional song achieved a kind of afterlife. In its recent transformations, attuned to consumer culture and world communication networks, the genre has found new energy from the many possible synergies between the specificities of local cultures and the anonymity of global markets. Sephardic song is a musical culture in decline in one sense, yet experiencing a veritable boom in another. Opening Out: Themes and Developments It is possible to tease out some larger issues from this brief account of Sephardic music in the Balkans. They are issues that will emerge as thematic to my account of music in the region generally, so it will be worth some attempt at exposition here. One concerns the power of place. In practice, history and geography are constantly in dialogue in our discussions of music, but history has tended to have the upper hand, providing musicologists with the basic conceptual models, as well as many of the specific tools, of their trade. Recently this has been changing, perhaps a measure of the smudging of boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology. We noted two hypothetical narratives about the Sephardic exodus, one depicting a transplanted Sepharad and the other a process of acculturation within the Ottoman ecumene. These are narratives of place. At the root of the first narrative lies the assumption that everyone has a proper place; we may not be there (we may be displaced), but we should be, so we define our identity by constructing our proper place in our present place, which is tantamount to constructing the past in the present.63 Music can facilitate this. Of its nature it can be a ritual of remembrance, haunting the landscape, like a mythological Echo. At the root of the second narrative is the assumption that we are creatures of the places we inhabit, shaped more by our present than our imagined past. As the Arab proverb has it: ‘People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers’.64 Here music might enchant rather than haunt the landscape,

63 See Light and Smith (eds.) 1998, 1–19. 64 Quoted in Boia 2001, 47. This quotation is attributed to Guy Debord in Bauman 2000, 128.

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giving it symbolic density and significance.65 And while this foregrounds presence rather than absence, it can also involve a strategic amnesia. Part of the process of defining our identities, in this narrative, might involve silencing certain historical voices, or deciding not to hear them. For the Sephardim both narratives were in play. The tendency of subsequent commentators – modernist storytellers in the main – has been to make a choice. A further issue arising from the Sephardic story concerns identity politics and culture. There is every reason to explore collective cultural identities, provided we recognise that external ascription and internal experience are quite different things.66 We all have many identities. They are fluid and dynamic and clearly cannot be aligned with perceived collective identities in any straightforward way. But they are often constructed with reference to those collective identities. We learn from the Sephardic story how Jewish communities negotiated their cultural identities within very different contexts, and in relation to very different groups and structures. First, there was Ottoman officialdom. The status of the millet within Ottoman administrative structures required a delicate balancing act between the claims of rabbinical law and Ottoman versions of sharia law, for example, as also between the more powerful Rabbis and Ottoman officials. Second, there were rival religious and ethnic communities, be they Romaniot Jews, Greek Christians, or Turkish Muslims. Third, there were changing polities, as nation states were carved from empire, and were in turn subsumed by new federal structures. And finally there was the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment, which had a direct bearing on domestic and gender identities, as Enlightenment ideas confronted the patriarchal family. In all these ways, the Sephardic story might well serve as a model for a more general theme in Balkan studies. This, after all, is a region where many cultures have collided, and continue to collide, and where collective identities are endlessly transformed as they come into contact with other such identities, even to the point at which their constitutive elements are all but lost. Just how borders are constructed, then, and once constructed how they may be crossed, will be a concern of this book. The borders around collective identities foreground alterities at various interlocking levels (institutional, cultural, personal), and comprised of various overlapping qualities

65 On the enchantment of place, see Eliade 1961, especially 20–26. 66 For a discussion of external and internal definitions, see Jenkins 1994.

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(religious, linguistic, geopolitical, social, ethnic). And although the borders themselves remain historically in flux, there is often an in-built resistance to crossing them at any given time. There may be coercion, of course, where the connections and commonalities between people are deliberately eliminated, and one might include here the colonisation of musical consciousness by hegemonic powers. But there may also be conversion; or bridge building, designed precisely to facilitate movement across the more difficult borders. Music is directly implicated in such dramas of identity. Like other symbolic forms, it can work to reinforce collective identities, but equally it can work to subvert them. Musical styles can exhibit, and may even encode, membership of particular cultural communities, for example, and they can be subject either to transformation or to defiant preservation as they come into mutual contact. But individuals can make highly personal syntheses from available styles, and separate musical practices (for example, Ottoman classical music and Sephardic synagogal music) can converge in the work of a single musician. One moot question, then, is just how far stylistic borders in music may be compared in their nature and operation to other kinds of border. Another is how particular musical styles, as symbolic systems, map onto, or are appropriated by, particular social groups in order to assert or deny a collective identity. ‘With a little bend’, says Ara Guzelimian, ‘a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian’.67 A cluster of historical issues also arises from the Sephardic paradigm. One recurrent theme is the difficulty of doing historical justice to oral traditions, and not just because the unavailability of primary evidence prior to the phonograph places undue weight on those fragments of testimony that happen to have survived.68 Even with recorded and transcribed repertories there are challenging questions about practices and products, about stability and change, about the meeting-points between musical styles, and (conversely) about the effects of cultural isolation. There are questions too about how changes of musical idiom map onto underlying social changes, and about how we can, or whether we should, draw local styles into anything like a synthesis. All such questions are germane to our Sephardic repertories, but they have wider applicability. Some of the

67 Guzelimian 2005. 68 Where Sephardic cantillation is concerned, there are naturally synergies with chant studies in general, and especially with the debates about oral and written transmission conducted by Leo Treitler, Kenneth Levy, Peter Jeffery and others. See, among many other texts, Tokumaru and Yamaguchi (eds.) 1986.

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richest music of the Balkans – Ottoman classical music, Orthodox Christian music, urban songs and traditional agrarian music – has relied heavily on oral transmission; indeed this is the norm, not the exception, in music history.69 And as with Sephardic repertories, we need to ask just how we can construct historical narratives for these musics, and how such narratives might account for what is often an endemic diversity of styles. In some rural traditions, the diversity is such that determinants of musical style, even down to specifics, vary from village to village. A related issue arising from the Sephardic story is the impact of modernity on traditional cultures. Jewish culture in the Balkans was of its nature conservative, and it maintained a high degree of cultural isolation. Yet it could not remain impervious to the effects of modernisation, and in some cases of what is usually called ‘westernisation’.70 under the impact of Ottoman reform programmes, and of developing ideas of the nation, the Sephardic Kulturbereich already started to show signs of fragmentation in the nineteenth century. That process intensified during the first half of the twentieth century, when the Sephardim were obliged to adapt to new political realities. With the consolidation of nation states (not least Turkey), the mutual relation of religion and state changed radically, and this threatened more traditional Sephardic values and practices. Moreover, in some centres (notably Salonica) the nationalist imperative also helped promote and disseminate in the Balkans the transformative Zionist ideology that was then shaping the world view of Ashkenazi Jewry. That latter point should not be overstated. The Sephardim of the Balkans, even in Salonica, were much less gripped by emigrationist fervour than their Ashkenazi counterparts (they were more exercised by the need to preserve their relative autonomy). But there was undoubtedly an increasing interaction between western and eastern Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this, together with the educational (propagandist) programmes of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle,71 ensured that modern thinking, associated with the Jewish Enlightenment, slowly percolated through to the Sephardic communities of the Balkans. While the case of the Sephardim is sui generis, it resonates with the wider topic of modernity in the Balkans. Across much of the region

69 The point is well made in Nettl 1983, 200. 70 The two terms are distinguished in Nettl 1985, especially 20. 71  The influential Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded by French Jews in Paris in 1860, and, in the words of Benbassa and Rodrigue, ‘represented Western Jewry’s urge to reform its coreligionists in the East’ (Benbassa and Rodrique 1993, 83).

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village life was organised on traditional, even pre-Ottoman, lines well into the twentieth century. Typically, administration was local, with only the marketplace as a shared space with the towns. And while there was an almost infinite variation in local practices, there were also common intra-national structures not just imposed from above but generated from beneath by the patterns of everyday life. In this context social modernisation was usually effected in response mode, a reaction to ideas and practices from elsewhere.72 Much the same can be said of cultural change. Meeting-points between the ‘provincial mind’ and ‘cosmopolitan reason’ were given expression through cultural forms, and the fragmentation or transformation of traditional musical cultures was an important dimension of this.73 Just how are we to understand the changes in traditional music? At what point does an accumulation of such changes amount to a break with tradition? In addressing such questions we confront a familiar problem in ethnology. It is axiomatic that the more traditional the culture, the more our knowledge of it will be dependent on the observation of outsiders. Božidar Jezernik has helped us by providing an account of the Balkans ‘in the gaze of western travellers’, the more useful in that it balances the views of outsiders with the insider perspectives that were articulated in indigenous nationalist-orientated ethnology from the mid nineteenth century onwards.74 Vesna Goldsworthy and David Norris have looked specifically at literary representations, and Larry Wolff has closed in on a particular corner of the field with his account of Enlightened Europe’s discovery of the Morlachs [black Vlachs] of Dalmatia.75 All these studies will bear on our narrative. A final issue, yet more challenging, arises from our Sephardic story. It bears directly on historical method, and it might be approached by way of a familiar debate in the social sciences: the competing claims of structures and agencies. These categories need not be mutually exclusive, but they tend in different directions, and this has implications for how we choose to represent the dynamics of historical change. As described by 72 Tito Maiorescu used the phrase ‘forms without substance’ (Boia 2001, 86). See the discussion in chapter 9. 73 Radomir Konstantinović sets up the opposition of ‘provincial mind’ and ‘cosmopolitan reason’ in his Filozofia palanke [Philosophy of Provincialism]. Quoted in Bjelić and Savić (eds.) 2002, 13. Peter Burke has discussed the related collision of elitist and popular cultures, albeit in a rather different way, in Burke 1978. 74 Jezernik 2004. 75 Goldsworthy 1998; Norris 1999; Wolff 2001.

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Carl Dahlhaus, a history of music might understand successive stages of historical evolution by means of a kairos (a culminating point or ‘point of perfection’), which generates a kind of essence that is then presumed to characterise that stage as a whole.76 This is a form of structural history, even if the structures are of an evolving character and are understood retrospectively. Thus the kairos in a history of Sephardic music might be represented notionally as the point of maximum integration between two separate musical cultures, allowing us to understand the essential underlying dynamic of that history in the terms of a transitional state.77 understood in this way, the Sephardic story might then serve as a paradigm for many other such meeting-points of styles in Balkan music history. Indeed it might even exemplify one of the most common interpretations of the region as a whole, where it is viewed as a kind of bridge between East and West. Alternatively, our history might draw on the literary critic Derek Attridge, and (perhaps at a greater distance) the philosopher Alain Badiou, by allowing for the new directions, the alternative visions, even the explosive transformative innovations that become possible through human agency, very often in direct response to what these writers call ‘events’.78 Events involve some sort of exceptional rupture with the status quo, usually occurring in a context where prevailing values have been at least temporarily neutralised. The flow is arrested, and in the space left available (Badiou’s ‘evental site’) new worlds become possible.79 Music history, in light of this, is not just about works, institutions and structures. It is also about agency, about actions occurring within a practice, and often diverging from the ethos of the practice, just as, on another level, the interests of practices may diverge from those of the institutions that house them.80 If we were to read Sephardic music history in terms of events and agencies in this way, we would have no difficulty in singling

76 Dahlhaus 1983. The literal meaning of kairos is the right time for action, correct proportion, fitness, or due measure. 77 On transitional states, see Schwartz-Salant and Stein (eds.) 1993. This is part of a wider literature whose orientation is psycho-analytical, but whose findings create resonances for cultural history. 78 Attridge 2004; Alain Badiou 1988 and 2006. 79 There are related discussions of rupture and re-articulation in Kristeva’s thought. See Chanter and Płonowska-Ziarek (eds.) 2005. 80 For a discussion of the practice as a category, see MacIntyre 1981. Elsewhere (Samson 2002, chapter 1), I have addressed the relationship between practices (which have their own setting, history, tradition, values, ideals and ethos) and institutions, which are usually structured in terms of power and status.

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out the key transformative events, even to the point of identifying an origin and a telos. Again it is tempting to transfer such ideas to the larger Balkan canvas. Recent political history in this region might be understood as an event series that has been directly interventionist in music history, impinging on the beliefs, options and actions of musicians, and transforming their understanding of their practice. We can actually take that further if we choose to follow Alain Badiou. For him, events are prerequisites for subjectivity. We cannot really have a subject without them. It is rather hard to see how we can find an accommodation between these two approaches. We seem to be forced to choose between very different ways of punctuating history. The kairos and the event (the point of perfection and the transformative moment) are after all very differently ‘placed’ in any given historical sequence. At this point, we might turn to Jacques Derrida for yet another perspective. Derrida warns us against just this kind of reductionism, against the excesses of what I will later describe as an either-or mentality. Nor is he solely a deconstructive voice. By unravelling the complex hinterland to ‘events’,81 he offers us a possible way to reconcile our two historiographical perspectives. He achieves this by embedding events within mini-histories – their hidden and intertwining backgrounds – and by viewing them as simultaneously reactive and proactive. This approach is sympathetic to the ambiguities of little stories, which have a way of constantly taking detours from the simple characterisations of grand narratives. Much of what follows might well be classified as little stories: about art music, church music, popular music and traditional music. Of course they are really big stories. They are just not much reported. But they only really come into their own, and reveal something of the world that engendered them, when we set them alongside – counterpoint them against – the grand narratives that have shaped our broader understanding of that world. Much of this book seeks to do just that.

81 Derrida 1994.

CHAPTER TWO

ECOLOGIES Music and Place In common parlance we say that a musical performance takes place, but most of our critical discourses emphasise rather that it takes time. This returns us to history and geography. In practice, it is hard to make a clean separation between these two perspectives. As Božidar Jezernik reminds us, ‘there is no history without a place, and no place without a history’.1 place might even be defined as space imbued with history, and not just in such iconic cases as the ruin, where, as walter Benjamin put it, ‘history has physically merged into the setting’, or the shrine and monument, where memory is blatantly on display.2 if we mark a place for consciousness, we bring ‘now’ and ‘then’, presence and absence, into conjunction, so that the place acquires symbolic density. performance, including musical performance, can contribute – forcefully or expressively – to this marking of place, and even to impregnating it with power. it is one mode of territorialisation, a way of drawing a line around ourselves with sound. that metaphor describes rather well how music was used by the sephardim to create borders. it marked their places – they may have been displaced, but they also had their places; sarajevo was a ‘little Jerusalem’ – and it separated them from others. scholars in the humanities, including musicologists, have been alive to the explanatory value of place: increasingly so in recent years, one might venture. For at least one philosopher there are even formal arguments for its existential power, in the sense that ‘being there’ distinguishes ‘existence’ from ‘being’.3 Yet as edward s. Casey suggests, the earlier history of ideas described a contrary trajectory, one in which place increasingly yielded to, or dissolved into, space, until by the late eighteenth century enlightened europe had all but excluded place from its reasoning, if not 1  Jezernik 2004, 211. 2 Benjamin 1977, 177–8. see also gross 1992. 3 see Badiou 2006: ‘if we take into account the etymological framework, we can see that “existence”, which depends on Dasein, is a topological concept. it means to be here, to be in the world’.

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from its sensory experience.4 Another way of saying the same thing, or something like it, would be to argue that civilised society lost some of its capacity for the social memory that is imbued in place, even as it developed an enthusiasm for the writing of history (or, as Jeffrey Olick has suggested, as it confronted too much history), so that this conjunction has had to be rediscovered, or reclaimed.5 Memory, in this reasoning, drained away from the charismatic centres, with their rootless urban elites. Yet it remained, and to some extent still remains, fundamental to the experience of more traditional rural societies, where there is little interest in the writing of history.6 The novelist Ivo Andrić wonderfully illustrated this convergence of the provincial place and the longevity of memory in The Bridge on the Drina.7 The story-telling episode during the Višegrad flood is telling in this respect, and it includes an evocative account of the historically associative power of epic song sung by a Montenegrin with gusle, and by extension of music generally.8 As to periphery, Andrić’s novel reminds us throughout that for the Balkans this has been all but a defining term. The competitive cultural nationalisms of the nineteenth century may have drawn some territories from the peripheries of Europe closer to its cultural centre, but they pushed others, and especially in the Balkans, yet further away. Memory – selectively invoked, it need hardly be added – is long in the Balkans. The Bridge on the Drina tells us how place may be carved out of space through a process of marking and naming. More than that, it illustrates how a place can become a structure within which subjectivities are negotiated and renegotiated across time, in this case several centuries. Throughout the novel we witness ever-changing interactions between subjects and their environment, as deeply embedded responses to a real physical place, with its ‘landmarks of memory’, are brought into conjunction with the more immediate stimuli that the place may provide at any given time.

4 Casey 1997. 5 olick 2007. 6 on this, see lowenthal 1985; also Maria todorova’s introduction in todorova 2004. For more theoretical discussions of the relationship between history and memory, see samuel 1994, and the introduction to hodgkin and radstone 2003. 7 andrić 2003a. the translation of ‘cuprija’ as ‘bridge’ is hardly adequate. the original incorporates the idea of a meeting-place, reinforcing the privilege of place. 8 story-telling is built into the structure of some of andrić’s writing, notably in the novella The Damned Yard, described by Celia hawkesworth as ‘a story about story-telling’ in the introduction to her translation. see andrić 2003b.

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It might even be argued that a sense of place – of being there – is a prerequisite of subjectivity, so deeply rooted in subjectivity that it is crucial for our identity formation. As denise Von Glahn has suggested, it is one way we organise our experiences and order our memories: it tells us who we are.9 For the more experiential aspect of this process some cultural geographers have used the term landscape, a subset of place rather as place is a subset of space. A landscape is defined by our entire experience of a place, and that can include not just ‘dwelling’ in it (Heidegger), but also conceptualising it.10 Naturally it is a considerable step from the forging of subjectivities by way of place to imbuing a place with intersubjective meanings that may contribute to a collective identity. Yet a further suggestion of The Bridge on the Drina is that over time a place might gather to itself collections of sensory material, combining them to create a single spirit of the place (genius loci) that leaves its mark on all who dwell in it. orhan pamuk conveys something of this in his portrait of istanbul; the special character of the place, he argues, is ‘the sum total of every chance encounter, of every memory, letter, colour and image jostling in its inhabitants’ crowded memories after they have been living on the same streets for fifty years’.11 a landscape in this sense becomes a kind of cultural image, though since it operates partly in an imaginative realm it is open to contestation. as many have argued, music may be constitutive of just such a cultural image, and through its associative power it may help weld the landscape to history, to collective social and even national identities. we return, then, to borders, with their negations and exclusions, their prescriptions of difference. in music as elsewhere, borders may be imposed externally, and music history in the Balkans is not short of examples. But the delineation of stylistic borders is a more subtle process than this. Musical styles are symbolic systems as well as social products. in consequence, their borders are more fluid than those marking out political and socio-economic domains, just as the commerce between them and the diversity within them are often greater. places may be marked, and landscapes constructed, by particular styles, repertories or instruments,

9 Von glahn 2004. 10 heidegger 1975, and especially the essay ‘Building, Dwelling, thinking’. ‘to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving’. pierre Bourdieu politicises this with his adoption of Marcel Mauss’s concept ‘habitus’. 11  pamuk 2005, 99.

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and all of these may come to serve as signifying conventions, especially when reinforced by commemorative institutions.12 But countering such fixities are the unpredictable narratives of individuals, who are free to use music in any number of different ways, often identifying with it precisely ‘because it corresponds to [their] sensibility and vision of the world’.13 in negotiating private identities they may establish unusual alliances, dismantle existing borders, improvise counterpoints to prevailing orthodoxies, and bring external experience and knowledge to what is there already. Pace erik erikson, individual identities are not mere instantiations of a social identity.14 there are thus areas of stability and areas of instability in all musical definitions of place. signifiers of various kinds promote stability, but they are weakened by the semantic ambiguities of music, and are easily subverted or even inverted by individual agency. and while none of this is periodspecific, it seems clear that areas of stability are under particular threat in our contemporary world due to the mediating and border-crossing effects of modern technologies: in a word, to globalisation. there are two qualifications to make here. First, it is far from obvious that a sense of place can be so easily undermined, even if the range of reference is dramatically widened; nor is it obvious, conversely, that in a pre-modern world places were entirely self-defined. even in today’s global village locality retains its potency, if only in the sense that indigenous styles become local signifiers of place within worldwide marketing networks. here place can become an attribute of music, rather than music an attribute of place. the second qualification is that there was a significant pre-history to globalising tendencies in the Balkans. the sephardic story bears witness that migration was endemic to the history and geography of this region. there were local migrations from rural to urban settings, impelled by changing patterns of economic geography, but leading in due course to transformations and fusions of cultural forms. there were politically motivated upheavals, transferring populations en masse, and establishing twoway dialogues between different places and their different cultures. and there were diasporas to far-flung places in the new world(s), where local

12 Models of cultural geography developed by peter h. Nash and george o. Carney are useful in examining the signifying conventions of music in this way. see in particular Nash and Carney 1996. 13 aubert 2007, 1. 14 in erikson 1969, it is argued that the mapping of individual to collective identities is defining of a culture.

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cultures were transplanted to radically different contexts, and on occasion preserved in diaspora when they had disappeared in the homeland.15 in other words, ‘moving through places’, and here i adopt the language of Michelle Bigenho, was a familiar pattern in south east europe long before the age of radios and cassettes.16 Moving through places in turn resulted in interactive and syncretic musical cultures. such fusions were a largely urban phenomenon, and they were partly by-products of the unique physical geography of the Balkans.17 Mountains and rivers ensured that there was a restricted number of well-defined trade and military routes crisscrossing the region, so that in many cases Balkan communities had closer ties with the world beyond than with their neighbours. the larger Balkan towns were positioned at key points along these routes, including their intersections. with traffic flowing in all directions, their populations were fluid, and they hosted multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities that in most cases carried little sense of the national definition that would later attach to them. they had major strategic significance, of course, but they also developed very particular cultural ecologies, with a notable tendency towards hybridity. genres, styles and ideas were all transferred from place to place, repelling or attracting one another, co-existing or fusing, in an intrinsically dynamic process of transcultural flow. i will return to these ecologies in due course. But for now i want to focus on the converse effects on rural settings of this same physical geography. here the mountains and rivers acted as lines of resistance that made internal communication difficult and fostered closed, self-defined places. sealed from the world beyond, such places developed site-specific cultural ecologies that nurtured relatively autonomous and often highly distinctive cultural forms, responsive to particular lifestyles and environments and differentiated from those of even their most immediate neighbours. Bigenho’s ‘unique authenticity’ conveys something of this hermeticism, though it has additional resonances, not least the reminder that the companion of specificity is often inaccessibility; and it is, alas, but a short step from this to misinterpretation and appropriation.18 we are fortunate, then, that over the years local cultures of this kind, including

15 For an example of this, see Dunin 1988. 16 Bigenho 2002, 6. 17 a good concise description of that geography is the first chapter of hall 2011. 18 Bigenho 2002, 20.

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musical practices and musical forms, have yielded some of their secrets to the patient observation of ethnologists. Ringed by Mountains: The Oaş Country Let us journey to the extreme edge of the region covered by this book. There is a corner of Maramureş in northern Transylvania known as Ţara Oaşului [Oaş Country], comprising in all some thirty-six villages and their environs. The geographical isolation of this region, ringed as it is by mountains, has ensured that older layers of music-making have survived here rather longer than elsewhere in Romania the impingement of modernity, the effects of emigration, and the folklorisation promoted by the Communist regime.19 Jacques Bouët first visited the region briefly in 1969, returning in 1979, and again with two other researchers in the 1990s. the foci of his fieldwork on all three occasions were the so-called ‘sunday dance’, in which voice and violin are ever-present, the musical system underlying the characteristic genres of oaş, especially as represented by the ubiquitous danţ, and the complex ceremonial dimensions of social events, notably, but not exclusively, weddings. in the course of their 1990s research, now published as a book,20 the three scholars worked to find answers to some of the intractable questions already posed by Bouët during his earlier visits. we travel with them on a voyage of discovery, as they first acquire a vocabulary, and then test out its possible, distinctly contested, meanings. First in line is the enigmatic danţ, a term (literally ‘dance’) whose use by informants seems permissive, at least initially; then there is pont, a component (melodic segment) of danţ, it seems, but again with definitions that seem to vary from musician to musician, and with meanings derived from dance as well as from music; and likewise with the third key term, figură. we work through the various stages of clarification with the authors, until they arrive first at a more-or-less satisfactory definition of pont, and then at a general scheme for danţ. this research uncovers certain universals in improvisation, while at the same time documenting the uniqueness of a musical culture that has

19 Compare areas such as Mariovo in western Macedonia, or the plav-gusinje region of Montenegro, both also surrounded by mountains and also preserving many elements of traditional culture until very recent times. 20 Bouët, lortat-Jacob and rădulescu 2002.

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remained isolated from its surroundings: in short, it probes indigeneity.21 the relation between the three categories ( figură, pont and danţ) is a relation of small through to large, or simple through to complex, and by tracking it we can see how basic models are elaborated in improvisation to create larger forms, themselves relatable to certain archetypal patterns. it is a practice replicated in improvisational practices from widely different musical traditions the world over. thus, the figură belongs to a stock of common materials, partly determined by genre, but mainly responding to an idiomatic imperative, and related to and distinguished from each other by small-scale identities and differences. they are recycled to create a repertory of short melodic segments (ponturi), themselves subject to variation, and combined in larger, open-ended patterns to form the danţ. the result is a surface of melodic prolixity, yet generated from a restricted source pool of figures. By uncovering these workings, the analyses presented by Bouët and his colleagues exemplify and make concrete a familiar paradox of improvisation (in whatever style), namely that the demand for constant spontaneity ultimately promotes the formula. they further reveal how the idiomatic is elevated to a major principle of creativity. and finally, their transcriptions expose, albeit unwittingly, a difficulty of methodology. the more sophisticated the transcription, the further it widens the gap between acoustic and notational forms, especially, but not only, in the rhythmic domain.22 it is when we come to examine the musical materials themselves, as distinct from the transformational processes to which they are subjected, that the singularity of this music becomes truly apparent. the vocal style is highly distinctive, a kind of high-pitched yelling à tue-tête. and the violin, with its moto perpetuo stream of virtuoso figures, generates a sustained level of spiky dissonance against the relatively static harmonic platforms established by the guitar, characteristically held upright and strummed in rapid pulsations. even when performed singly the violin manages to produce complex textures, contributing to the sense of dynamism, while improvised poems [ţîpurituri] are ‘shouted’ against its

21  thomas hylland eriksen reminds us that indigeneity is a far from neutral term in anthroplogy. see eriksen 1993, 13–14. Notions of authenticity are often closely linked to indigeneity, and especially in studies of traditional music; see Johnson 2000; also Bigenho 2002. 22 several of the detailed segmentations in this book seem permissive; conversely, the spectographic notations run the risk of tautology.

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high-momentum line. Typically this is music of the outdoors, as the vocal style suggests, and also the dissonance level. It is a communal music, designed for village activities, including the familiar seasonal rituals associated with the cycle of the crops, the church calendar, and the important events of family life, notably weddings with their elaborate rituals, and funerals.23 and as always with such traditional cultures, the music is closely bound to the occasion, as are the highly distinctive costumes, whose semiology is even more rigid than that of the music. so too are the associated dances, where there is again a counterpoint of universals and particulars, an individuation of familiar forms and functions from village to village. the round dance is found everywhere in the Balkans, for instance, but it assumes distinctive forms in oaş, accreted over many years. and although there are endless surface variations according to season and function, the ethos permits very little change as to underlying patterns. a clear sense of ownership of such traditions emerges from the informants in the book. they commonly trace the origins of a particular danţ to one or other of the nearby villages, reinforcing the sense of hermeticism: of enclosed, region-specific repertories, whose true meanings are barred to the uninitiated. if we try to contextualise the traditional music of oaş, we might begin by relating it to Maramureş of which it is a part. like oaş itself, the wider region is mountainous, and, as Bartók noted back in 1913, this geographical isolation helped preserve its traditional cultures, and also a certain independent-mindedness among its inhabitants.24 thanks to pioneering work by tiberiu Brediceanu in 1910, collecting expeditions with phonogram recordings actually pre-dated Bartók, while fieldwork in the region continues to this day.25 so there is no shortage of information about everyday life and traditional culture. Until the 1990s other Maramureş villages preserved many of the same rituals and customs as those found in oaş, including the sunday dance, raising incidentally all kinds of questions about how social space is controlled, about inter-village competition, and about gender roles; characteristically only men would be allowed to enter the dancing space, for example, while women needed to be invited. there were also

23 there is also a more private tradition of song and flute playing within the culture, suited to indoor performance. 24 i am referring here to the traditional region of Maramureş, since the name is now often applied to a rather wider region stretching beyond the mountains. 25 Brediceanu 1957; Bartók 1913. on Brediceanu’s hostility to Bartók, see Bǎlaşa 2002, and in the same issue an extensive discussion of rival hungarian and romanian views of transylvania in music.

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commonalities – as well as many differences, of course – in choreology (Alexandru refers to the ‘small tramping steps’ of the Maramureş round dance),26 in musical performance style (the strigături [shouts]), and in musical genre (the horă lungă [long song], a specific type of doina).27 the important difference is that when Bouët and his colleagues were recording a living tradition in oaş (albeit in decline), other Maramureş villages had already all but lost touch with these traditions, partly due to widespread emigration in the early 1990s, but also to the familiar effects of television and tourism. recent work in some of these villages (2001–04) has been concerned with the revitalisation rather than the recording of local traditions, notably through the efforts of speranţa rǎdulescu, one of the co-authors of Bouët’s book, with the help of committed locals such as ioan pop from the village of hoteni.28 there is an ambiguous status here, as traditional cultures hover precariously between disintegration and preservation. thus, the village dancing party, once a venerable institution, is revived, but the villagers are now observed, and they are paid to participate! it may be useful to consider yet wider contexts for the music from oaş. it has, for example, been categorised as a local culture within a larger entity described as ‘romanian folk music’,29 presupposing deeper commonalities among a single people: a nation. here a (relatively) self-defined music is, as it were, unbound. there is often a conflation of separate narratives in the common tendency to place regional histories within the framework of national histories in this way. it would really be more realistic to recognise that regional histories introduce another form of global discourse, albeit of an intransitive and intra- (rather than inter-) national kind. it is somewhere in the space between the inter- and the intra-national that a polity intervenes to make decisions about things national, and this can be an especially sensitive issue in border regions such as oaş, since these regions will be prey to the general tendency of states to want to define the nation as culturally homogeneous.30 26 alexandru 1980, 84. 27 the doina, which has been emblematic of romanian folk culture, is a freely ornamented lyrical song, replete with melodic formulae, while the horă lungă [long song] is a sub-genre of this known in northern transylvania. 28 the project was discussed in a session entitled Revitalizing the Village Dance of Maramureş, Romania in a “Cultural Tourism” Context: the Project and its Limits, at the international Council for traditional Music meeting in sheffield, 2005. 29 alexandru 1980. 30 the idea of ‘national bypass’ in today’s culture is explored in Malm and wallis 1993, from 237.

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As part of Transylvania, Maramureş as a whole belonged to AustroHungary prior to 1918, and general Hungarian-Slovak affinities have indeed been noted in songs from the region.31 then, after 1918, the entire province was divided, and it is currently split between romania and Ukraine. local cultures have been no respecters of this northern political frontier either. But even more suggestive than such commonalities across political borders are the parallels between dance music from oaş and music from the northern Carpathians, in present-day slovakia and southern poland. the heterophonic violins, the ‘blue’ notes, and the three-string bass accompaniment found in the music of the polish tatras find an echo in oaş. what this suggests is that even the most region-specific repertories belong to wider musical families, in this case embracing what may once have been a more geographically widespread idiom in the Carpathians. and this suggestion is firmed up when we cross the Danube and explore the very different music to be found in the northeastern serbian mountains and the Dinaric alps. On the Voice: The Dinaric Alps and other Mountains in his film Gluvi barut [silent gunpowder], set in the Bosnian mountains during world war ii, Bato Cengić conveys something of the desolate beauty of the Dinaric alps, which run southwards in parallel to the adriatic coastline and then stretch eastwards into Bosnia and herzegovina, Montenegro and part of serbia. the specificity of place, captured so evocatively in this film, is enhanced by a musical score from goran Bregović, best known for his association with the rock band Bijelo dugme [white Button], and for his subsequent work with the film director emir Kustorica.32 Bregović achieves this distinctive sound world by drawing on, and processing in various ways, an ancient layer of vocal music found in these regions, of which ganga – associated with several traditional mountain communities, including the people once known as Morlachs in western hercegovina, Central Bosnia and imotska Krajina – is probably the most familiar genre.33 31  Bartók noted these affinities, and they are further discussed in alexandru 1980, 67. 32 Bijelo dugme was the most famous of the bands that made up sarajevo’s thriving popular music scene in the pre-war years. see chapter 19 for further discussion. 33 For a detailed study, see petrović 1977. Ganga is a rather specific genre in which solo voice and a group of between three and five singers alternate, with texts semi-improvised and based on units of one couplet of two ten-syllable verses.

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These ancient dinaric songs, including so-called duge pjesme [long songs], in which the singers stagger their breathing to achieve continuity, are closely linked to pastoral communities and their associated occupations in the mountain regions right across the Slavonic Balkans. Characteristically they are performed either in heterophonic unison or in a two- or three-voiced polyphonic texture (iso-polyphony) in which one voice functions as a drone, which in some regions itself ‘modulates’.34 the lead voice has a narrow ambitus, using no more than four or five unequally tempered scalar pitches. Characteristically the lowest will be a tone below the final, often resulting in ‘consonant’ major seconds at cadences; in some traditions this results either from the lead voice ‘guiding down’ or ‘stopping’ the phrase by descending to the tone below the drone; in others it results from the supporting voice dropping a tone. in general these vocal styles are characterised by an unbroken flow, with ‘trembling’ [potresanje] sections, extended melismas (characteristic of so-called ‘drawling songs’),35 various species of semi-improvised ornamentation to ‘dress’ the melody (including ‘slicing’ and ‘sobbing’ effects, the distinctive ‘i’ cry, and exclamatory shouts [ojkanje]).36 the songs are usually designed for outdoor singing, and projection across the distance informs the voice production (chest register with falsetto ornamentation), as also the role of the subsidiary voice(s), part of whose function is to lift and help project the leading voice. there is often a complex semiology, which depends on some degree of communicative competence, in Chomsky’s sense, to register fully. in some regions of former Yugoslavia, for example, singers claim that the glissando ‘i’ wail commonly heard at the end of melodic lines or strophes is supposed to drive away demons (similar stories are told in parts of Ukraine, where ritual singing of this kind just about survives today). this kind of symbolisation is common in the wider region, and can take various forms. in war songs from northern albania, for example, the initial vocalisation, accompanied by appropriate visual gestures, represents a warlike and highly dramatic squaring up to death.37

34 this is the case, for instance, in traditional singing na glas in the tetovo region of northern Macedonia. 35 Fulanović-Šošić 2003. 36 the vowel sound used for ‘non-semantic’ syllables varies according to certain local traditions. 37 rexhep Munishi has written interestingly about this (Munishi 1987).

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Mountains are the salient physical fact about the Balkan peninsula. ‘Mountains come first’ is the apt quotation (from Fernand Braudel) that introduces the first chapter of Mark Mazower’s concise but nicely crafted monograph on the region.38 the Dinaric alps extend southwards until they become the albanian alps and then the greek pindus and taigetus ranges. to the east they branch off into the rhodope and Balkan mountains. so it is not surprising that in many different guises these ancient forms of group singing survived – and among vanishing populations of older singers, still survive – across mountainous regions of the peninsula as a whole. Depending on the region the repertories might be monophonic, heterophonic or polyphonic.39 in certain areas (parts of western Macedonia in greece, for example), the melodic structures of monophonic songs indicates a probable earlier polyphonic practice, now lost, demonstrating that the borders of the polyphonic tradition have been far from stable. Conversely, in some existing polyphonic practices (north pindus, for example) ornaments within the melodic style, such as the mid-phrase leaping seventh, seem to have taken their origins from the distinctive vocal cries (a kind of yodelling) that are common to many ancient forms of group singing. although related genres of ritual and occupational group singing were once to be found in traditional cultures over much of south east europe, they were divided by certain cultural boundaries that no doubt had an ancient provenance. identifying the distinctive families of group singing created by these boundaries has occupied a number of scholars. there have been attempts to weld some of these idioms to an exclusively slavonic culture.40 and there have been suggestions by some specialists of links with much older cultures, referring to the hellenic traditions of north pindus, to the illyrian idioms of albania and the Dinaric alps, and to a rather different, independent thracian tradition in Bulgaria and western thrace.41 one might even propose correspondences between Dinaric idioms and alpine traditions further north, notably those of the austrian Juchzer. this

38 Mazower 2000. 39 iso-polyphony may have developed from the heterophonic practices that commonly emerge from group singing. at least within the hellenic tradition, speculation about this might return us to the ‘worded melody’ of classical antiquity, marked by the association between accent and a rising interval (notably the fourth), providing two points of orientation around which melodic ideas might cluster. My thoughts on this come mainly from discussion with athena Katsanevaki. 40 rice 2004, 21. 41  see the discussion in Nitsiakos and Mantzos 2003.

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is the more striking in that all these repertories stand in sharp contrast to those of Maramureş and Ţara Oaşului, reminding us that the Transylvanian and Carpathian mountains are separated from the Northeastern Serbian and dinaric Alps by a cultural as well as a physical fault line (the danube is the physical border, with the most dramatic point of separation the gorge known as the ‘Iron Gates’).42 it is not realistic to generalise about such a wide range of traditions. in particular, the Dinaric styles – including north (geg) albanian – are significantly different from the distinctive polyphonic repertories found among Vlach-, albanian- and greek-speaking communities further south in epirus. Nor have analytical approaches to these separate traditions been at all uniform. Compare the complementary insights yielded by the very different approaches of ankica petrović in her study of ganga in Dinaric regions and of athena Katsenevaki in her analysis of the tonal basis of music from north pindus.43 the former demonstrates how a limited repertory of basic and compound melodic patterns made up of anything between one and five notes can be subject to endless permutation and variation, with melodic diversity closely linked to particular localities. in contrast, the latter proceeds reductively, revealing that archetypes of either hemitonic or anhemitonic pentatonic sequences underlie the melodic prolixity of traditional repertories in this part of northern greece; indeed the whole region of epirus, including what is now south albania, has been described as a kind of ‘pentatonic zone’. the polyphonic music of epirus has long been recognised as singular (the albanian variety is one of the listed ‘masterpieces’ of UNesCo’s socalled ‘oral and intangible heritage of mankind’).44 it is a true polyphony, in the sense that each part has a distinctive role and function: one leading, one ‘cutting’, and others providing and elaborating the drone (the ison), and is very much sui generis. Nonetheless it is not an entirely unified tradition. there are certain differences, for example, between albanian and Farseriot Vlach versions on one hand and greek and Koutsovlach versions on the other. in brief, the albanian traditions often have a distinctive rhythmicised ison and a significantly different underlying pitch

42 this gorge, once right on the old turkish frontier, is now the site of a major hydroelectric dam. 43 petrović 1977. Katsenevaki 1998. 44 at the meeting of the relevant committee in abu Dhabi in 2009 reservations were expressed about the rationale of this scheme, not least because classifications are by nation.

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structure, albeit still pentatonic. Like dinaric singing, moreover, Epirotic styles incorporate many regional variations. Tracing these differences and linking them to the historical record is an important task. But to the outsider it will be the commonalities between this music and other ancient layers of singing in the Balkans that will seem striking, not least because their tonal principles are a world apart from those of modern Western harmony. As an ‘ideal type’, then, such ancient songs embodied an outdoor ritual life that survived in mountain regions well into the post-World War II years. depending on the occasion they were sung by either men or women but usually separately, and they invariably related to communal activities, including the familiar calendrical cycles of work (haymaking, herding, shearing, gathering, weaving), and of religious rituals, including saints’ days. Laments and ritual wedding songs were among the most common forms of female singing, but Holy day songs were no less important. Typical are the songs associated with the Lazarian rite, found all over the region as far east as Bulgaria, where Lazarian traditions are strong, and even beyond; they are found in Georgia, for example. Velika Stojkova Serafimovska has examined these songs in the villages of the Radoviš municipality in Macedonia, and her work allows us to reflect a little on the dynamics of preservation and change. On St. Lazarus Saturday, a week before Orthodox Easter, unmarried girls dress in bridal costumes, with a feather for protection against evil, and do the rounds of the village houses, dancing in front of each of them and singing St. Lazarus songs, to wish good health to all within. The ceremony is still performed in an earnest spirit, but there has undoubtedly been some loss of functionality, and along with that an obvious change in the music. What is significant here is not that new Lazarian songs appear, absorbing and transforming older stylistic components. These are regarded as acceptable, given that the young girls perform their roles in all sincerity, albeit with a new self-consciousness. The real change has more to do with performances of the older songs, and it results from subtle alterations to the ‘voice’ due to the changing ethnic composition of the villages, as (Bulgarian) Shopi settlements increase.45 It is for these reasons that the older songs are sometimes not now recognised, at least by the older women, as ‘on the Lazarian voice’.

45 palikrusheva 1986, 33.

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The (untranslatable) term ‘voice’ here is significant, and its use may help us gain some understanding not just of the particular case, but of the relationship between functionality and the aesthetic in this music more generally. In some parts of former Yugoslavia, singing ‘na glas’ [literally ‘on the voice’ or ‘to the voice’] is the term used to describe this older layer of song, distinguishing it from a newer type of singing na bas [on or to the bass], where the norm of consonance is the third and the cadence is on a fifth, or alternatively from epic song, as performed by guslars.46 But more crucially it refers to melodic patterns (‘voices’) created within a given tonal structure and strictly determined by the conventions of the rite or occupation, as also (secondarily) by the place of performance, the specific ritual or occupational function, and the status of the performer. Hence ‘Lazarian voice’, but also ‘wedding voice’, ‘bee-keeper’s voice’, ‘traveller’s voice’, ‘kolede voice’ (from the round dance or kolo), and so on. Traditionally, the voice here was inseparable from the rite, occasion, place or role – it was indeed defined by such categories – and it was thus regarded as one important way to preserve ritual meanings across the centuries. For it should be stressed that these melodic types are almost certainly of ancient origin, and were probably associated originally with nomadic, tribal societies. It is only in a very limited sense that we can speak of an audience or a listener for such performances, if indeed ‘performances’ is the mot juste. The voice was integral to the rite, so that any threat to the integrity of the rite was also a challenge to the authenticity of the voice. Within this constraint, there could be considerable freedom as to the aesthetic manifestation of the voice. The melodic type or formula, in other words, could be given life in numerous different ways, depending on place, time, person or situation, while the underlying meaning would remain the same. Like other forms of ritual activity, singing na glas provided a framework for the expressive life of its participating community. Such frameworks functioned as a protection against the destabilising and potentially disruptive effects of individual expression. To express it in Lacanian terms, they protected against the pre-rational, pre-symbolic Imaginary, or perhaps more relevantly still, against the Kristevan Semiotic; they by no means denied such expression, but rather channelled it, and socialised it. 46 the ‘voice’ in this terminology has several connotations. it can refer to outdoors singing (‘iz glasa’ [from the throat]); it can identify a ritual or function; and it can refer to a mode. i am grateful to Velika stojkova serafimovska, who discussed these points with me at length.

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Put more simply, life in the mountains was hard, and this ancient form of singing was one way to make it easier; it was that rather more than an entertainment in any conventional sense of the term. There is a more general point here. Ritual forms are established to supply order. They create a temporal and physical space within which various kinds of affective experience, including the more extreme affective states associated with, for example, bereavement, might be socially sanctioned. ‘However personal a lament may be’, writes Gail Holst-Warhaft, ‘it is sung in company; other women pick up phrases from the first lamenter and incorporate them into their own song’.47 In this way ritual forms preserve, or act as surrogates for, what Kristeva and Lacan call the ‘Symbolic’ register, whose role is to regulate: to bring order and rationality to the chaos of our lives. At the same time they act as a necessary bulwark against what Lacan calls the ‘Real’, those ineffable (sublime or brutalising) manifestations of the world whose intrusions on the Symbolic are no less threatening than the Semiotic (or ‘Imaginary’). Rituals, in other words, protect the Symbolic Order from both the Semiotic and the Real. And while they are culturally specific, they are also cross-cultural, since the Semiotic and the Real are universals of human experience. The voice in ancient dinaric singing might thus be regarded as an embodiment of the Symbolic Order. Compare this with more recent lyric (rhymed) ‘songs’ which form no less a part of mountain traditions in the Balkans, but are without ritual significance. Here the individuated message – the particular text, speaking mainly of love, in countless romances – is aesthetically encoded by the performers; it is embodied in the melody which carries it and whose memorability is essential to its communication. Here one can indeed speak of an audience, of a performance, of a product as well as a process. Aesthetic values are foregrounded from the start; the song has an identifiable tune rather than a melodic formula. This presents us with an intriguing paradox, for although they are by definition more individuated, less a vehicle for collective expression, non-ritual songs have been preserved more consistently and have allowed for much less fundamental musical change than ritual songs. Their identity is linked to their aesthetic properties, and that allows them some capacity to transcend a local ecology. Hence the functionality may change freely (is the song to be performed by women, men, or both? Is it to be sung outdoors, indoors, or either? Is it to be part of a private or a public occasion? Is it a traditional rendition

47 holst-warhaft 2000, 52.

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or a modern revival?), but too much change to the melody itself will result in a loss of recognition. The non-ritual song, in short, can survive the incursions of modernity, and can maintain its identity in often dramatically changed conditions. This throws into relief the fate of singing ‘on the voice’ in recent years. Since World War II it has all but disappeared as a living tradition, though genres such as ganga were reformulated for new urban environments for a time in the 1970s, and the idiom is preserved today in carefully researched performances and recordings by some leading secondary ensembles, designed above all for the folk festival and even for the mass media (at the time of writing Croatia is submitting such a repertory to uNESCO for inclusion in the ‘oral and intangible heritage of humanity’). The real point here is that singing na glas was so intimately linked to an outdoor ritual life and to a traditional mountain ecology that it could survive the destruction of that life and ecology only as an echo or an obituary. Deep in Šumadija Travelling to the north and south of Belgrade, you enter two different Serbias. As you journey northwards into Vojvodina, you approach central Europe, physically and culturally. Apart from the mountainous region Fruška Gora, home to a cluster of Orthodox monasteries, the landscape flattens out, until eventually it reaches the Pannonian plains. The urban geography also changes, as Austro-Hungarian Baroque begins to replace Byzantine-Slavonic in some towns. And (noticeably) the ethnicities become more diverse, for along with the Banat, of which it was once a part, Vojvodina can claim to be one of the most multi-cultural provinces in the region. In contrast, as you travel southwards from Belgrade, you enter a world of forests, wooded hills, and rolling contours, with Rudnik mountain in Gruža standing at the centre. You have a sense that you are probing deeper into the Balkans. You are in Šumadija, the ‘heart of servia’,48 where the early nineteenth-century insurrection began. this is the land of Karađorđević, whose memory is revered in this region, and whose tomb and home can be visited in topola, one-time capital of the newly liberated territories.

48 Durham 1904, 204.

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In Šumadija you are mainly among Serbs, though settlers from dinaric Herzegovina are also found there, as are communities of (Serbian) Roma, with their ‘marvellous gift – a gift that amounts to genius – for playing stringed instruments’.49 The sense of history in this region, strikingly captured in travel literature by Alphonse de Lamartine, and in a later period by Edith durham and david Footman, is palpable.50 It has fed too into fiction, notably in Lawrence durrell.51 Yet although this territory is indeed the serbian heartland, it has never been isolated in the manner of the mountain regions discussed earlier. on the contrary, it was constantly traversed, as over the centuries the serbian people made their way across it, travelling northward in recurring cycles of migration either from the Dinaric regions or from the Kosovo-Metohija basin. these migrations left visible traces on Šumadija, but they were no threat to its strong sense of identity, a genius loci stemming from shared ethnicity, shared history, and shared experience. this is not to say that Šumadija is, or ever was, uniform in culture. partly because of its centrality within serbia, and within the Balkans as a whole, its traditional music has registered influences from the different worlds that surround it. You can almost draw a line through the province separating east and west, with the western flank belonging to the peripheries of Dinaric culture. in some of the villages of western Šumadija ancient Dinaric singing was familiar until relatively recently, and it is still remembered by an older generation today. Yet here we find a softer version of the tradition, not just in terms of voice production, but in the privileging of unison-heterophonic over multi-voiced singing, though even in unison singing there is a clear division between lead singer and supporting voices. it is also worth noting that ritual songs are less common in this region than in the Dinaric alps, mainly because it is a land of cattle breeding rather than shepherding. in the eastern part of the province the music responds to a rather different musical world, the world of eastern serbia, bordering on Bulgaria. But again these influences are processed, their livelier features, especially in the rhythmic domain, moderated. and as a result the musical idiom is again rendered distinctly Šumadijan. as for the central and northern territories, if there is (or was) a single prevalent idiom of traditional music it

49 ibid., 210. 50 see the discussion in goldsworthy 1998, 168. 51  Durrell 1957.

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would be the ‘modern’ style of singing described earlier as na bas, where the lead singer is answered by multi-voiced refrains to a simple harmonic formula of parallel thirds, and with a cadential close on the fifth. This style is common all over Šumadija, and is more formalised here than elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia; the underlying harmonic formulae are relatively few, and individual songs conform to them surprisingly strictly. But it is no doubt significant that here in the notional centre of the Balkans we can find the only sustained examples of a hybrid style that synthesises both the na bas and the na glas singing styles. These hybrid forms, first so described by dragoslav dević,52 are abundantly clear in the published collections of songs made by ljubinko Miljković from lower Jasenica in 1986.53 the layout of this book is highly formalised, and in ways that underline the separation of old and new styles. of its three parts, the first is given over to speech rhythms, without any melodic indication, the second to ‘chromatic’ melodies sung na glas, and the third to ‘diatonic’ songs of the modern (na bas) variety. and because the presentation is so schematic, the hybrid songs that appear in the second section stand out all the more clearly. later work by Jelena Jovanović in upper Jasenica, where many of the Dinaric peoples settled, and in gruža, also registers this synthesis.54 in her collection of songs from gruža, Jovanović again presents old, new and hybrid styles, though not schematically. she also makes further classifications within the older style, identifying several species of two-part singing, notably heterophony (a mainly unison melody, and with the descent of the leading voice crossing the accompanying final), heterophony-drone (alternating heterophony with a more elaborated ornamental leading voice descending to the major second below the accompanying drone), and drone (the melody carried only by the leading voice, with the accompanying voices giving only the drone). But perhaps most crucially, she is alive not just to the complexity of stylistic patterning found even in a relatively homogeneous region such as Šumadija, due to the inflections produced by neighbouring cultures, but also to the impossibility of establishing a direct congruence between musical styles and ethnic groups.

52 Dević 1997. the phenomenon is also described, but without the term ‘hybrid’, in golemović 1984. see also golemović’s articles in Novy Zvuk, vols. 8 and 9. 53 Miljković 1986. 54 Jovanović 2002. the gruža collection is based on material recorded by radmila petrović and later by Jovanović herself, and is published as petrović 2003.

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Thus, dinaric peoples are in the majority in western Jasenica, for example, but this is not reflected in the distribution of musical styles. Aside from current research by Jovanović, there has been fieldwork done by dragoslav dević and dimitrije Golemović in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s in the neighbouring Takovo district, situated just to the west of Gruža. this region, like upper Jasenica, was populated in the main by Dinaric settlers from Montenegro and herzegovina, and while it developed a singular repertory of entertainment music and some unique stylistic features, its music and music-making can easily be related to practices both in upper Jasenica and in central Šumadija, notably through the familiar division between singing na glas and na bas. Dević and golemović provide some intriguing information on the older layer of singing in the takovo district, notably on related groups of wedding and harvesting songs, on verse forms, and on the manner in which informants distinguish the ‘voices’. But they also describe a rich tradition of instrumental music, mainly designed for village dancing.55 here we are in the territory of the Šumadijan kolo, in all its many forms, originally accompanied by svirala [short pipe], frula [flute], dvojnice [double flute] or (often home-made) clarinet.56 the bagpipe was also used of course, especially for semi-professional performances at special occasions such as weddings, fairs and public ceremonies, but following world war ii it was gradually replaced by the accordion, and in the 1960s it was an accordion-dominated ensemble that became associated with a distinctive, trans-regional, folk idiom (often performed by roma) that became familiar and widely popular not just through wedding traditions but through folk festivals such as guča, at least in its early days.57 subsequently, the takovo district went the way of the rest of serbia and the wider region generally, as older ensembles made way for electronically amplified instruments: for the world of the electric guitar, the drum kit and in due course the synthesizer. in Šumadija today even the commercial folk idioms of the 1960s struggle to survive, while the more traditional idioms have all but disappeared. it is mainly through ensembles such as tipoplastika and Moba that they are

55 Dević and golemović 1997. 56 there are interesting descriptions of such festivities in the late nineteenth century in the Geschichte der Serben written by Benjamin von Kállay, the influential consul to the serbian court appointed by the Dual Monarchy in 1868 (von Kállay 1878). 57 the hugely popular guča festival is best known for its brass bands, and specifically for trumpet-playing traditions, and has of recent years become a cult event.

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preserved, though some younger groups are now following suit (the folk festival in Topola, now almost 40 years old, is of key importance here). Among an older generation one can find people who were once active as semi-professional musicians and whose memories of the old songs are invaluable to researchers.58 Occasionally the results can be surprising. In autumn 2006, five men who had performed together as a group several years previously gathered in a school in Svetlić, a small village just south east of Topola.59 They performed an extensive repertory of songs, exclusively na bas in style. The singing was strong, especially from dragan Jeftić, the lead singer. After the recordings and interviews they made way for three women from the same village, and at this point the music changed course completely. These women had not sung together for many years, and there were predictable self-deprecatory noises at the beginning of the session. But when the singing started, it was unambiguously in the ancient na glas idiom, and in several instances it employed that Šumadijan hybrid of na glas and na bas styles, marking the place. It was a world apart from the singing of the men. This blatant gender divide is not unique to Šumadija. Sokol Shupo has noted something similar in Albanian villages, and Athena Katsanevaki in the Pindus region. And much earlier Bartók observed that women preserved an ancient stratum of song because they were bound to the home and had relatively few opportunities for external contacts. That it extends well beyond the Balkans is also clear from writings by Amnon Shiloah.60 Several scholars of music in South East Europe have been exercised by questions of gender, and with good reason. Within many of the more traditional rural communities women played distinctly subordinate social roles, and were confined largely to the private sphere. This extended to making music, for men’s and women’s songs were treated as distinct and separate, and there was a widespread presumption that while women would participate freely in ritual singing (not playing), they would not be involved in public performances. It was in the post-World War II years, particularly under state socialism, that this began to change. The staging and public representation of traditional music and dance was official Communist policy, and women increasingly played their part in so-called ‘village gatherings’ and folk ensembles. As Ana Hofman has pointed out in 58 one such is tomislav Đurić, now living in Natalinci, and the founder and leader of the ensemble ŽitoŽito, which was active in saranova, near topola, in the 1970s and 1980s. 59 this fieldwork took place on 5 November 2006. 60 shiloah 1995, 159.

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her studies of women singers in the Niško Polje region of Serbia, this had major repercussions. This might seem an unlikely setting for a case study in ‘cultural capital’, and Hofman does not use the term. But she does demonstrate that performance was an empowering force for women, a subtle mode of negotiation between old and new female roles.61 returning to Šumadija, we might note that although traditional singing was the product of a particular ecology – a predominantly mono-ethnic region where musical markers of ethnic identity were strong enough to absorb the movement of peoples and the impingements of neighbouring cultures – it has begun to take on new meanings more recently. there is renewed interest in Šumadijan traditional music in certain circles today, and there are sustained attempts to ‘recover’ it, not least because it can be read rather easily as an assertion of ethnic identity against the homogenising tendencies of the modern nation state.62 the idea that these repertories have survived for centuries gives them a powerful emotional charge as cultural representations of strength and stability. it goes without saying that there is an element of idealisation here, nostalgia for the pastoral, for a world that might have been rather than one that ever was. this quest for a mythic world of conservative values, where older moral and social orders are preserved, is of course common in folk revivals, and serbia is no exception. lying behind it is perhaps a fear of change, a rejection of the contemporary world and the commercialism that it embodies, and an impulse to replace that world with one that is lyrical and stable, even unchanging, one in which identities are fixed and established values are maintained. traditions are invented in folk music as well as art music, and even present-day collectors are prone to idealise the traditional life of a rural peasantry; in a word, to reify the concept of traditional culture, and to present it as somehow free of internal contradictions. suraiya Faroqhi has commented on this, and in the process she has usefully problematised the terms high culture, popular culture and folk culture, suggesting that it may not be entirely helpful to separate them cleanly.63 Context is all, of course. interviews with the men from svetlić revealed a specific set of

61  hofman 2010; see also hofman and Marković 2005. one fascinating instance of gender roles and music was the phenomenon of ‘sworn virgins’ in North albania. Dressing as men, and acquiring men’s rights, they were able to perform on musical instruments. For an introduction, see Young 2000. 62 on this, see Jovanović 2005. 63 Faroqhi 2005.

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values, where a strong competitive rivalry with other folk groups loomed large, where appearances in the city (Belgrade) were eagerly sought, and where failure to secure a television performance some time earlier was not just a misfortune but carried with it a real sense of grievance, accompanied by a plethora of explanations, that has clearly come to dominate much of their conversation. There was, in short, a hard-edged realism in these discussions that is somewhat at odds with the idealism of the revivalists. Their music was in its own way and within its own sphere no less commercial than that of the pop groups.

CHAPTER THREE

DISPLACEMENTS Investing in Place Displacements occur when people argue over a place, having first invested it with ideological meaning, whether religious, ethnonational, or both. more often than not, those displaced are not those who made the investment. in Balkan history, religious affiliation invariably preceded national affiliation, but in some circles, and especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there was a tendency for the one to map closely on to the other; some commentators have referred to ‘ethno-religious communities’.1 in this respect even the later stages of our sephardic story were not entirely typical, for Jewish places were widely dispersed, and largely indifferent to the ethnonational divisions that shaped and responded to Balkan geographies. On another level, of course, Jews were the very embodiment of displacement, and they bequeathed to european nationalism such resonant ideas as the ‘holy land’ and the ‘chosen people’. the potency of these associations can be demonstrated by turning for a moment to the later history of Yugoslavia. here the intertwining of religion and nationalism was fundamental to the myth-making that accompanied strengthening aspirations to separate nationhood by the dominant republics.2 thus, in the later years of the federal state, the celebrations and symbols associated with tito’s ‘brotherhood and unity’ were all but crowded out by the ever more insistent public presence of the major religions, their ceremonies, congresses and festivals freighted with collective national memories, and empowered to construct national landscapes.3 the conflation of religious and national symbols here was transparently designed to create the illusion of a stable social and intellectual order, a utopian ideal that might stand in sharp contrast to the dissolving structures associated with existing social realities at the time.

1  Bringa 1993. 2 roudometof 2001. 3 perica 2002, especially 89–108.

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the music of the serbian Orthodox liturgy had long embodied national values,4 and in the later tito years it worked to keep those values alive and assertive in the face of official opposition.5 thus the crescendo of serbian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s was punctuated by a sequence of public commemorations in which the church marked the place, and music ennobled it, cementing the bond between social space and symbolic power.6 One starting point might be the services accompanying the public transfer of tsar Dušan’s relics to the church of saint marko in Belgrade in may 1968, an explicit association of the faith and the nation that drew openly on medieval precedent.7 the momentum was sustained by the Jubilee celebrating 750 years of ecclesiastical independence (1969), held jointly in Belgrade and Žiča, and in the mid 1970s by jubilees marking the centenary of the herzegovina uprising, the 800th anniversary of saint sava, and the 375th anniversary of the Orthodox monastery Gomirje in Croatia.8 then in the ‘eighties, following the death of tito, there ensued the consecration of the massive, and still unfinished, church of saint sava in Belgrade (1985), a new programme of church and monastery building, and a whole series of pilgrimages and festivals, including a year-long tour of the relics of prince lazar, associated with the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo (1389), the defining event in serbia’s image of itself and of its history.9 in all of this the symbolism of place, especially associated with the ‘Kosovo myth’ (Kosovo as sacred place, in eliade’s sense,10 as well as heroic battle site), was strengthened by a potent convergence of three very different kinds of music: serbian Orthodox chant, epic songs about the Kosovo myth, and a new wave of popular music on Kosovan themes, including YU-Grupa’s Kosovski božuri, recounting a famous legend of the battle, lutajuća srca’s Jemifija, about the fourteenth-century serbian nun and poetess, and idoli’s Odbrana i poslednji dana [apologies

4 the patriarchate of peć was authorised by the porte in 1557, and although ‘Ohrid Greek’-dominated, it increasingly took on the character of a national church (Banac 1984, 64). 5 ramet 2005. 6 Bourdieu 1989. 7 Dušan was the greatest of the nemanjić kings, and following his death in 1355 the medieval serbian empire disintegrated. 8 the preparations for the Gomirje event, including renovation of the monastery, witnessed an unusual degree of cooperation between serbs and Croats. 9 as tim Judah remarks, the battle was more significant for the legends it spawned than for its strategic importance (Judah 1997, 27). 10 eliade 1961.

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and last Days], which invoked Kosovo to the combined strains of rock beat and Orthodox chant.11 the Catholic Church in Croatia maintained a safer distance from such explicit political agendas. Yet, as Vjekoslav perica has demonstrated, it too had a nationalist agenda in the later years of Yugoslavia. it was epitomised in the revival of the marian cult as a powerful national symbol, enacted in the ‘seventies through a series of commemorations, congresses and festivals similar to those in neighbouring serbia.12 like serbia, moreover, Croatia had its sacred places, notably marija Bistrica, the shrine that served as the site for many of the major mass gatherings sponsored by the Church, and (from 1981) međugorje in herzegovina, home of the much trumpeted marian apparitions, and subsequently an important, if much exploited and manipulated, pilgrimage centre.13 Once again music was important as a means of detaching these sacred spaces from their amorphous (‘profane’) surroundings, and then imbuing them with ideological significance by juxtaposing iconic representations of the Church and the nation. thus, the mass singing of marian hymns alongside the Croatian national anthem in marija Bistrica at the international marian Congress of 1971 was potently symbolic, and the same conjunction was repeated on numerous occasions during the so-called ‘Great novena’, a nine-year Jubilee (1975–1984) that explicitly followed polish precedent. On such occasions ceremony and spectacle served as clarion calls of separatism, with Catholicism clearly identified as an integral element of Croatian nationality. međugorje, meanwhile, soon attracted a whole repertory of marian songs for the pilgrims, now widely available on cassette and CD. the investment of sacred places with national meanings in this way turns them into sites of conflict. the ‘circle of stones’ (eliade) surrounding them, compacting their myths and symbols, also serves to exclude the world beyond; it functions, in short, as an analogue for a national border or would-be border. this was the fate of both the Kosovan holy places and of međugorje. they became twin foci in the war of the churches, which both paralleled and catalysed the war of the nations. ‘Churches’, remarked edith Durham, long before these events, ‘are the most powerful

11  see perica 2002, 281–2. 12 ibid., chapter 4. 13 On 24 June 1981 six children from međugorje reported the ‘miracle’ appearance of a madonna, instigating a major cult that continues to this day.

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political engines in the Balkan peninsula’.14 in both cases a third faith was implicated, and this time a faith that (from 1968 onwards) was officially designated an ethnic nation, an illogicality with Ottoman roots but here stemming from more immediate serbian and Croatian designs on Bosnia and herzegovina. the muslims of Bosnia were less politicised than their Orthodox and Catholic neighbours, and they remained pro-Federation until the late 1980s, when ethnonationalist agendas from serbia and Croatia forced both a response and a mobilisation.15 in due course the muslims marked their own places and – from 1990 onwards – began to muster their own cultural propaganda, including the restoration of pilgrimages (these days increasingly folk-touristic) to the muslim shrine of ajvatovica in western Bosnia to commemorate the legendary story of allah splitting the rock that blocked a key spring at prusac. this was helped by a revival of sufism in Yugoslavia, after many years of suppression by the official islamic Community. sufism soon became a powerful force engaged in the defence of the muslim community against the nationalist agendas of Bosnia’s neighbours, and since music played an important role within certain sufi orders, it was harnessed to the political cause. in the mid ‘nineties, in the aftermath of the Bosnian war, the music of islam was made available to mass culture in a blatant assertion of Bosnian national identity, not least through the appropriation – the making public – of private devotional genres such as the ilahija. What do such musical commemorations of place tell us? even this brief sketch is enough to indicate how politics, myth, history and religion are all implicated in territory, with imaginative culture in a strong supporting role. my synopsis of commemorative events in Yugoslavia illustrates how musical, like visual, symbolism can play a key role in associating a cultural landscape with a collective sense of loss and remembrance. the tendency of such symbolism, as of ritual generally, is toward fixity of meaning. a place becomes associated with clearly defined sets of values and these lend it meaning and privilege. and if a place is privileged in this way, people will claim it, fight over it, and close it off from others. in the Balkans place has been fiercely contested in recent years. there have been sustained attempts to use the institutions and resources of both church and state to give authority to particular meanings and concepts associated

14 Durham 1905, 67. 15 For a detailed account of the issue of muslim identities in Bosnia, see parts of poulton and taji-Farouki 1997.

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with place, and at the same time to prevent competing meanings from being articulated. it is this essentialisation of place that leads in the end to displacement.16 the key point about displacement is that two existing worlds establish a dialogue. the dialogue may take many forms – an absent culture may be studiously preserved or inadvertently caricatured (through idealisation); a host culture may be a source of creative transformation or an object of facile imitation – but it remains a dialogue, ‘an awareness of simultaneous dimensions’, as edward said expressed it.17 svetlana Boym used a more graphic cinematic metaphor, referring to ‘a superimposition of two images – home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life’. and she elaborates: ‘the moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface’.18 nuances abound in all of this. ‘identity is a quest that is always open’, says Claudio magris, and he goes on to argue that an obsessive defence of origins is as much a form of slavery as willing submission to displacement.19 in articulating these nuances, the world of imaginative culture has the advantage that it can mediate between individual and collective experiences of displacement, and can thus help reconnect the semiotic and the symbolic (Kristeva).20 Kristeva reminds us that the division and separation involved in displacement may well tap into much deeper psychic realms in the lives of individuals.21 mediation between the individual and the collective can be a thought-out strategy of narrative fiction, as in miloš Crnjanski’s novel Seobe [migrations],22 or more recently in Dubravka Ugrešić’s account of exile, The Ministry of Pain.23 But equally, and perhaps especially through the medium of music, mediation can result from the preconscious expression of shared experiences and intuitions, resisting easy rationalisation. through music, more tellingly than through explicit articulations, the Kristevan semiotic can break through the ‘symbolic’ barrier of language, and perhaps reawaken the tragic

16  Knapp 1991, 1–2. 17  said 2000, 173–84. 18  Boym 2001, xiv. 19  magris 2001, 43. 20 initially in Kristeva 1984. For Kristeva, the semiotic is related to the infantile state (the imaginary) in lacan and Freud, at once opposed to and influencing the symbolic (the social code, akin to a status quo). 21  see sprengnether 1990 for a discussion of Kristeva in this context. 22 the only english translation is tsernianski 1994. 23 Ugrešić 2005.

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moment of separation. it can express both an individual and a collective ‘longing to reconnect’. Migrations: Serbs in a Habsburg World in 1690, reportedly under the leadership of patriarch arsenije iii Čarnojević, many thousands of serbs (the number is disputed, as is the role of arsenije iii) left ‘Old serbia’, meaning the sandžak, metohia and Kosovo, and made their way northwards across the Danube into the recently regained habsburg territories of srem and Bačka, and of the Banat, where they were ceded land and religious freedom in return for military service.24 Known as the Great migration, these flights from the serbian heartlands, a defining stage in the general northwards movement of the serbian people (and indeed the serbian lands),25 were a response to failed rebellions against the Ottomans in support of habsburg territorial ambitions. For the most part the serbs fled into the so-called Vojna Granica [military Border], established by the habsburgs in the sixteenth century and extended eastwards into slavonia and present-day Vojvodina in the late seventeenth century following Ottoman retreats.26 this was a kind of buffer zone separating habsburg Catholics and Ottoman muslims, and as such it was also a cultural fault line between what ivo andrić described as two ‘warring worlds’. as the constantly shifting political borders attest, much Balkan history from the early modern period onwards was framed by collisions between these two worlds, whose political centres lay outside the region itself. however, the serbs were ‘at war with both these warring worlds’.27 like much of the Balkans they belonged culturally to Orthodox eastern europe, part of the legacy of Byzantium. and although their relations with

24 noel malcolm’s doubts about the details of this story, and especially about the role of the patriarch, are not shared by native historians. in any case, as ‘effective history’ the story carries a powerful symbolic weight, even today. see malcolm 1998, chapter 8. 25 there had been northward migrations since the beginning of the fourteenth century, stemming from the Dinaric region and from Kosovo. some Kosovan migrants crossed into romania and transylvania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with later implications for the traditional musics of Vlach populations in eastern serbia, when they returned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. thereby hangs a quite different tale of displacement. 26 For a discussion of music in the military Border, see Kos 1998a. 27 here i appropriate andrić’s description of the plight of the turkish political prisoner in his novella The Damned Yard (andrić 2003b).

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fellow members of the Orthodox millet were far from harmonious, they established – especially through the migrations – close connections with russia, a more distant Orthodox place. in some quarters this amounted to the kind of mystical russophilia (shared with Bulgaria) that is perfectly captured by Vuk isakovič, the central character in Crnjanski’s Seobe: ‘Just as my sweet Orthodoxy did reside forever within my mother, so shall it reside forever within me and those who come after me. Our russia is also sweet. i pray to God the Creator to show me the way there.’ the ideology of modern serbian nationalism was forged from the mix of influences at work on the ‘border serbs’, as they are often called. as tatjana marković has noted, one of the key attributes of serbian intellectual history in general is that its driving forces have often been communities of serbs living beyond the national frontiers – in Buda, prague, and above all Vienna – rather than those in the homeland.28 the serbs were divided between two empires, and in this respect we might argue that there are two serbias even today; almost every election provides ample evidence of the division between a pan-european strand in serbian culture and a more traditional rural serbia, proud of its Byzantine-slavic roots. it was the habsburg serbs who played a key role in modernising the serbian language and culture, and in constructing the canonic narratives of the national history. removed from the original homeland, which was extensively settled by albanians and turks, they were open to intellectual influences both from Catholic austria and from Orthodox russia. Yet far from weakening their sense of serbian identity, these contrasted influences contributed to a strengthening sense of (anti-Ottoman) nationhood among the émigré communities. From the late eighteenth century onwards, formative notions of popular sovereignty and of civic, essentially secular, nationalism gradually migrated eastwards to the border serbs, confirming them in their quest for independence: for a modern nation. at the same time a more holistic model of the nation made its way from russia, collectivistic and ethnic rather than individualistic and political in character, and closely linked to the Orthodox Church, which came to acquire powerful symbolic values. When we combine these two waves of influence, we see that it was indeed a volatile alloy that was fused in the collective psyche of the border serbs. Once again the individual dilemmas of exile are perfectly captured by Crnjanski’s novel, where the action intercuts between two locations (the

28 marković 2005.

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distant habsburg wars and historic Zemun, the last frontier of the habsburg empire), and where the central character has to make his choice between a committed Orthodoxy and an expedient Catholicism (‘how could a non-Catholic serve a Catholic empress?’). But the novel also hints at a divorce between ideology and social reality among the border serbs. their nationalism, it seems to suggest, thrived on myth and dream: the myth of a glorious past, the dream of a glorious future.29 in the aftermath of the migrations, it was the habsburg serbs, rather than those in the older heartlands, who carried the torch for serbia; indeed it is no exaggeration to claim that sremski Karlovci became the centre of serbian culture. and it was in the habsburg cities that serbian writers would later cultivate that rhetoric of history we associate with nineteenth-century romantic nationalisms more generally, especially in eastern europe: the waves of heritage gathering, the struggles for language rights in education and the public domain, all based on notions of linguistic and ethnic homogeneity that developed in europe following the enlightenment. But that is to leap ahead. at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the military Border was a locus for negotiation between conflicting austrian, russian and Ottoman interests. it was also a meeting-point of cultures, and although under habsburg control following the defeat of the turks in 1699, it still exhibited pronounced Ottoman cultural influences.30 On arrival in the habsburg lands, then, the serbian immigrants would have confronted a variety of musics, of which popular military or military-style repertories, clearly marked by Ottoman traditions and often performed by roma, were among the most prominent.31 such repertories, crucial to the Ottomans because of the strategically useful association of military power with culture, would have been stylistically eclectic, blending austro-German and Ottoman elements, and since serb musicians formed part of the border troops, they would certainly have performed them. it should be noted, though, that the migrations coincided with a period of transition to a military music of more obviously western character, where 29 the two brothers, soldier and merchant respectively, represent particular archetypes of the serb at home and in exile. 30 the treaty of sremski Karlovci [Carlowitz] in 1699 formalised the success of the habsburgs in driving the Ottomans out of hungary and (in the main) south of the Danube. 31  the musical idioms associated with Ottoman Janissary bands [mehterhâna] had a well-documented influence on european styles, though the subject is a complex one, not just in relation to the origins and specificity of the Janissary music itself, but also in respect of the alaturca style. this will be discussed briefly in Chapter 7.

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the Ottoman element was reduced and domesticated, eventually forming the basis of the essentially european genre of ‘turkish music’.32 this in turn was part of a more general europeanisation of cultural traditions in the region, in which the border serbs were implicated. they had brought with them their own traditions of street theatre, medieval in origin, and they appear to have adapted these to their new surroundings, almost certainly drawing on elements of folklore, including folksong, from existing (austro-hungarian) populations and blending them with homegrown materials. But, as Katarina tomašević has pointed out, they were also exposed to theatrical traditions closer to the spirit of the austrian Baroque, and as such much further removed from their own Byzantine or Ottoman inheritance.33 a specific role was played here by Jesuits, for whom culture formed an integral part of a faith mission driven by the Counter-reformation. this had led to the establishment of colleges in Belgrade, then a ‘turkish city’ that came under austrian control for a brief period in the early eighteenth century (1717–39), and later in the fortress town petrovaradin.34 along with these initiatives came prestigious programmes of theatre (including so-called ‘school dramas’ on Biblical themes), together with public ceremonies and street processions on feast days. music was involved in all these programmes, though relatively little is known about it. the theatre productions often incorporated musical numbers, probably in a multivoiced sacred idiom, while religious processions and ceremonies included both vocal and instrumental performances. in other words, Jesuit activities – setting aside the churches, from which most Orthodox citizens would have absented themselves – provided a context and a model for the development of western cultural practices by the serbs. in 1726, for example, the first serbian secondary school, known as the slavonic-latin school, was founded by maksim suvorov in sremski Karlovci partly on the model of Jesuit secondary schools, and it proved of some importance in the development of serbian culture, offering places not just to the border serbs but also to the southern serbs. it was a teacher from the school, manuilo Kozačinski, who wrote the first serbian school drama Tragedokomedija [tragi-Comedy] in the mid 1730s, a kind

32 see the discussion in Kos 1998a, including an account of changes in costumes and instrumentarium. 33 tomašević 1997. 34 tomašević 1996. Belgrade was also taken by the austrians briefly in 1688 (with disastrous consequences for the Jews of the city) before being recaptured in 1690.

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of allegory that explicitly linked the medieval serbian empire with possibilities for contemporary cultural renewal. Kozačinski also inadvertently provided a footnote to serbian music history. the music of the three songs for Tragedokomedija has not survived, but the melody of one of them was transmitted orally, and more than a century later it was sung to one of the father figures of serbian art music, Kornelije stanković (1831–65), who arranged it both as a solo song and as a set of piano variations.35 the importance of the slavonic-latin school – and the centrality of sremski Karlovci – can only be grasped when we turn to the second area of influence on the border serbs. like the founder of the school, suvorov, Kozačinski was a teacher from the Ukraine, and had been sent to sremski Karlovci along with other Ukrainians by the russian authorities at the request of the serbian metropolitan mojsej petrović. the background to this was the relative autonomy reluctantly granted by the habsburgs to the serbian Orthodox church within the military border region, with sremski Karlovci as the seat of an independent archbishopric for the Orthodox population. it was partly to defend that restoration of autonomy that links with religious centres in Kiev were strengthened, and such links were in turn a strategic support for russia’s growing territorial ambitions in the Balkans.36 During the eighteenth century russian money, liturgical books and teachers were all made available to the border serbs, and scholarships for study in russia were offered, leading among other things to a major shift in orientation in the literary language.37 a community of interest developed around Orthodoxy, and where music was concerned this played a part in transforming the chant, as the polyphonic, usually three-part, idiom associated especially with the Kievan mohyla academy infiltrated serbian practice. the so-called ‘Karlovac chant’ that developed in sremski Karlovci (Dimitrije Krstić was a key figure), and was also largely practiced in Belgrade, was of some significance, helping to drive a wedge between Greek and serbian traditions and preparing the way for the later notations and polyphonic settings of

35 the song appears in Book ii of stanković’s collection of Serbian Folk Songs, published in Vienna in 1863. For a discussion of early traditions of folksong collection in serbia, see Djurić-Klajn 1971. 36 Danica petrović discusses these links in relation to a specific russian manuscript (petrović 1985). 37 For a discussion of the politics of language in the region, see part One of skendi 1980.

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Kornelije stanković and stevan mokranjac (1856–1914).38 no less importantly, the link with russia strengthened the national symbolism associated with serbian church music, stressing its differentiation from a parent Byzantine tradition. as i will indicate in a later chapter, present-day debates about serbian church singing have returned to this distinction, and in doing so have problematised it further.39 here, on the eve of modernity, the migration of the serbs brought a subordinate group into direct contact with two politically dominant groups, instigating a transcultural process that took a good century to work itself through to synthesis.40 For the émigrés, the military Border was a crucible of change, in which the east receded, the west advanced, and russia was embraced.41 indeed the metropolitans of sremski Karlovci were skilled diplomats when it came to keeping all relevant parties in the frame. it needs to be emphasised that serbian music prior to the migrations was rooted in (slavonic) folk and medieval Byzantine traditions, and that both of these maintained a high profile throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the academy at irig, for instance, was a centre – albeit in decline – for the promotion of epic poetry.42 likewise there was an oral tradition of monophonic church chant that seems to have been very similar to Greek traditions, but ‘cut’ to Old Church slavonic, and this was still the main practice even in the time of mokranjac.43 elements of traditional Ottoman music would also have been present, especially in urban song, bearing in mind that the populations of the cities were ethnically mixed, and with a pronounced turkish component. in short, the modernisation of serbian music was anything but instantaneous. it was largely thanks to the migrations – to displacement – that windows were opened both to the habsburg West and to russia, in

38 some sense of this tradition can be gleaned from the recording of the nuns of ljobostinja in Kosovo made in 1963, and presented by arsenjije Jovanović on the WerGO CD sm 1619 2. 39 see milin 2000. 40 For a general account of transculturation, see pratt 1992. 41  it has even been suggested (tomašević 1997) that through the genre of the Christmas ritual known as Vertep, which included musical numbers, this crossroads of cultures, involving church, school and folklore traditions, was semi-formalised. 42 note too how Crnjanski has the ‘sweet viols’ of the soirée followed by Vuk and his friends ‘singing to the gusle at the top of their lungs’ (tsernianski 1994, 93). 43 Vesna peno has looked at this question, and at the rather chaotic state of the practice, by way of church magazines and newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. her paper ‘pojačka praksa u srpskim crkvama u vreme stevana stojanovića mokranjca’ is unpublished at the time of writing.

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due course enabling exchanges between the military Border and serbia proper. Crudely put, goods were transferred in one direction and ideas in the other. the ideas proved the more durable. they prepared the way for political change, for language reform, for the development of a national literature, and in general for the embrace of a european elite culture, including a modern, increasingly professional, and nationally orientated musical life that would culminate in both the creative and the prosyletising achievements of stanković, mokranjac, and their successors.44 Trading Places: Greece and Anatolia the practice of ethnic cleansing is ages old. Only the term is recent. Witness the exchange of populations contrived by the governments of turkey and Greece in 1923 as a consensual political resolution to their recent hostilities, and sponsored by the international community at the lausanne Conference.45 true, it was religion rather than ethnicity that controlled the exchange, a legacy of the millet system that bequeathed to later governments – even to this day – very real legal difficulties in their treatment of respective minorities. But the outcome in any event was a massive influx of Christians from asia minor to the Greek mainland, and a rather more modest traffic of muslims in the opposite direction. as Bruce Clark has pointed out, the whole process was awash with anomalies.46 the exchange formalised developments that had been under way for some time. We can track them right back to the policies of a newly independent Greek state, asserting its Christian identity, but there was an accelerating momentum in the years leading up to lausanne. the Balkan wars of 1912–13, the events of the First World War, including the antiOttoman entente, and the Greco-turkish hostilities of 1919–22 all led to expulsions in both directions, and frequently in a context of alarming brutality.47 Clark’s semi-ethnographic study bears witness not just to the complexity of the exchange, but to the complexity of the response it

44 Czech musicians played a prominent role in this process in the nineteenth century. see peričić 1969 and tomašević 2006. 45 a record of the lausanne conference was published as Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs 1922–1923: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace (london: h.m. stationery Office, 1923). 46 Clark 2006. see also hirschon 1989 and 1993. 47 exchanges between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919 and between eastern and western thrace in 1922 anticipated lausanne.

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engendered, as members of plural societies, harbouring antipathies but equally nurturing shared experiences, were forced either side of the line.48 nothing more clearly epitomised the journey from an Ottoman ecumene to a world of nation states, from traditional communities to modern territories, than lausanne. there was an asymmetry of numbers, but also of effect, as Greece struggled to accommodate, and then to integrate, the refugees from asia minor, who were anything but universally welcomed by existing populations. they came from smyrna, the neighbouring province of aydin, and other coastal provinces;49 from some turkish-controlled aegean islands; from the extensive pontic regions on the southern shores of the Black sea, with their singular dialects and distinctive culture;50 and from Cappadocia in central anatolia (including sinasos and Kayseri [Caesarea]), where the Christian communities, the Karamanli, were largely turkish-speaking (compare the Greek-speaking muslims – the Valaades – in northern Greece).51 many ended up in tightly clustered communities in athens and piraeus,52 while others – especially from pontos and Cappadocia – were sent to thrace and macedonia, thus strengthening Greek ethnicity in those newly acquired northern territories. naturally they brought with them customs and cultural practices associated with their lives in asia minor, adapting these gradually to local conditions. Where music is concerned, risto pekka pennanen has commented on distorted perceptions of the music of the asia minor Greeks,53 and given the misreadings that have attended the almost fetishistic study of songs widely and loosely described as rebetika,54 his analysis has been necessary and important. Following it, we can see that while the exchange of populations did indeed have a major effect on the direction taken by Greek popular music, the story conventionally relayed by Greek and other scholars is in need of revision. in particular, pennanen demonstrated that the ‘oriental’ rebetika described in Greece as smyrneika tragoudia,

48 some of this is given fictional articulation in de Bernières 2004. 49 For a general account of the Greeks in asia minor, see augustinos 1992. 50 ibid., 17 for a discussion of the importance of the great monastic houses in preserving Greek culture in the pontic regions. 51  in several cases whole communities, including villages, were moved en masse. On the language of the Cappadocians, a more precise description would be ‘Karamanlidikaspeaking’, i.e. turkish but with the Greek alphabet. 52 hirschon 1989. also pentzopoulos 1962. 53 pennanen 2004. 54 i use the plural form ‘rebetika’ in this book.

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originating among the flourishing Greek community in smyrna (along with Constantinople, the leading cultural and commercial centre of the Greek world prior to 1923)55 and arriving in mainland Greece with the lausanne exchange, were really Greek-language instantiations of a much wider genre of ‘Ottoman café music’, centred on the institution known as the kafe aman [music café] and performed all over the eastern Balkans and anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. this music took a variety of forms, ranging from simple kantos to makam-based, semi-improvised oriental laments known as amanedes, Greek-language versions of (Ottoman) gazel-s. such Ottoman café music, performed using instruments such as the santûr [santorini], kanûn [kanonaki], saz or oud [outi], and kemânçe [middle eastern lyra] or violin, was well known in mainland Greece prior to the exchange of populations. moreover, it continued to be performed and recorded subsequent to the exchange, reaching its heyday, it seems, in the years just preceding the metaxas dictatorship (1936–41). there is no foundation, then, for the identification of the repertory in any exclusive way with a Greek tradition from smyrna. Yet it is easy to see how this misreading played to larger Greek agendas following the exchange of minorities. the real issue here is that i megali idea [the Great idea] beloved of Greek ideologues – a unification of the entire Greek world of the middle east, effectively a reconstituted Byzantine empire – was transferred from the political to the cultural sphere in the aftermath of lausanne. the political failure was palpable after the ‘catastrophe’ of asia minor, but the cultural battle was still to play for. One effect of displacement, then, was to intensify the nationalist agenda in Greece by first claiming and then naming a repertory of common ownership. rather similar narratives attended some of the regional styles of traditional music – Cappadocian and pontic – when they were transferred to northern Greece after 1923. pontic musical idioms in particular maintained much of their distinctiveness (they had developed in relative isolation) when they arrived in their new surroundings. But this did not prevent them speaking into yet another story of pan-hellenism that exhibited the ideology of the ‘Great idea’, downplaying the blatant affinities between this music – associated with the kemânçe, touloum [bagpipe chanter], kaval [a kind of flute] and daouli [double-headed drum] – and

55 milton 2008.

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Caucasian (Georgian-lazi) as well as turkish (Bektashi/alevi) traditions.56 moreover, the heavily ornamented pontic idiom, with its characteristic parallel fourths (achieved by simple double-stopping), its preference for phrygian and Hicâz modes, and its specific fast-tempo rhythmic genera (notably 5/8 and 7/8 patterns), takes on an even more eclectic character in vocal music, given that the spoken dialect is a mix of old Greek (ancient and Byzantine) and Ottoman–turkish, with an additional smattering of persian and Caucasian words.57 in a more concrete way the exchange of minorities in 1923 accelerated processes of stylistic synthesis that were already under way in urban music. these involved synergies between Ottoman kafe aman traditions, performed especially by asia minor immigrant musicians, and popular music (including urban songs of some vintage, usually based on traditional Greek-anatolian dance rhythms) associated with the amateur musical life of the piraeus-athens underworld of prisons and tekedes or hashish dens. the process crystallised in what pennanen has described as the ‘local syncretic style’ of rebetika, connoting the anarchistic lifestyle and philosophy of the rebetes or manges. these characters, the products of rapid urbanisation and concomitant social disadvantage, existed on the margins of the law, wore distinctive outfits, and lived life with a certain swagger; they owed something to ideas of honour attributed to the klephts and preserved in some of the klephtic songs. the rebetes were among the most singular of many marginalised populations in the Balkans. it might even be argued that they embodied yet another form of displacement, not literal but psychological. more concretely, in these early days the piraeus ensemble, in which the bouzouki and its offspring the baglama came centre stage, was associated especially with the professional activities of markos Vamvakaris and his piraeus Quartet, which entered its classic era in the early 1930s. Countering any emergent uniformity and further marking the specificity of place and an orientation towards the West, piraeus rebetika singers tended to avoid the oriental style of the kafe aman traditions, cultivating a vocal manner 56 Black sea repertories were extensively studied by Kurt reinhard. see reinhard 1966, especially p. 11, on the migration to Greece; also the anthology of texts: reinhard and reinhard 1968. the question of Georgian polyphony is explored in nadel 1933, schneider 1940 and tsurtsumia and Jordania 2003. 57 excellent examples of this repertory are found in the lp recording Musik der PontosGreichen (musikethnologische abteilung museum für Völerkunde Berlin: mC-05/2). see also the 1930 recording digitised as Songs of Pontos by the melpo merlier music Folklore archive.

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that was rough, earthy and immediate, analogous to american Blues in its direct expression of hardship and in the priority it assigned to emotional authenticity. Vamvakaris in particular pioneered this manner of singing. at this stage rebetika were not commercialised. they were not really ‘popular music’. through rebetika we can register something of the dialogue between two places that characterises displacement. the two types of rebetika – asia minor and piraeus – were distinguishable, but they had a common basis in dance genres, and in melodic and modal types. increasingly they interacted, and the dialogue between them was expressed technically through interplay between dromoi [literally ‘roads’: Greek versions of makam-s] and chordal harmony. it was not a straightforward yield of one system to another, though the replacement of the saz by the bouzouki had a lot to do with it; as did the homogenising effects of the commercial recording studios that started up in athens and piraeus from the late 1920s.58 rather it was a complex process of adaptation and compromise, a form of transition in which the general direction was towards equally tempered pitch and european ‘functional’ harmony, but with movement in the other direction too, and with the most typical state one of hybridity and transition. in a similar way piraeus rebetika winnowed the rhythmic cycles of the wider Balkan-anatolian area into well-defined types, prominent among them the slow 9/4 zeibekiko rhythm [originally a solo anatolian ‘warriors’ dance’] characteristic of northern Greece, the duple metre Balkan hasapiko [‘butchers’ dance’], the tsifteteli [often associated with the oriental belly dance], and island genres or nisiotika. the subsequent history of rebetika is inseparable from the pendulum swings of ideological change. in geographical translation, that amounted to swings between mainland Greece and anatolia, between europe and asia minor. there was, for instance, the censorship imposed during the later stages of the metaxas dictatorship in the late 1930s, during which tekedes were closed and the rebetes were persecuted. here some ancient tropes came into play. in a climate where ‘authentic’ national values were supposedly served by traditions of rural folk music, however dubious any such easy association may be, rebetika were condemned as oriental and therefore morally dubious. the state was interested in using culture as a means of consolidating national identity, but it was clear that the tradition

58 there are insights into the effects of recording in torp 1993.

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of rebetika could only be claimed for the nation if it cleaned up its act, in a word if it were purged of corrupting oriental associations. in post-war years rebetika had a further incarnation with a more popular appeal in the hands of Vassilis tsitsanis and associates such as the singer sotiria Bellou. the centre of gravity shifted at this time – following the occupation and during the Civil War – from athens to (Greek) macedonia. and it was here, in the post-Civil War years, that the tradition was further europeanised. paradoxically, this allowed the oriental idiom to resurface as a specific sub-genre in the late 1950s, its atmosphere of exoticism and fantasy often reinforced by the familiar tsifteteli rhythm. this idiom found its ideal exponent in stelios Kazantzidis, whose vocal delivery represented something of a return to the world of the earlier kafe aman traditions, though with a resonance from later nightclub idioms.59 the background to this revival was a more general, politically sanctioned, investment in rebetika through the post-war nationalist mass media of radio and commercial film. this continued through the Civil War, and its propaganda value was such that it had a defining effect on public taste, allowing rebetika to replace other kinds of traditional music as a model of ‘Greekness’ in music. Following the Civil War the pendulum swung once more towards europe, as rebetika acquired a new status, and even an accommodation to bourgeois taste. in particular, the style informed highly influential ‘popular art songs’ associated with manos hadjidakis, and in a rather different way with mikis theodorakis. this is a development to which i will return in later chapters, but it should be remarked here that the ambivalent term ‘popular art song’ (more literally, ‘artistic popular song’) points to interesting questions of strategic hybridity in its address to different taste publics within Greek society. popular art songs are not rebetika, but they would not have been possible without rebetika. in the late ‘sixties popular art songs, at least in the hands of theodorakis, were transformed into protest music, and they functioned as a symbol of resistance against the Junta when the composer was in exile. in the political environment of that time they increasingly came to represent a Greek national style in music, partly assuming the role formerly assigned to itself by Kalomiris’s national school of art music. it seems likely too that appropriations such as these encouraged the revival of original rebetika that became such a marked feature in the late 1970s, following the collapse of

59 holst 1975.

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the Junta, and promoted in part by the Costas Ferris film of 1983 about marika ninou. From this period onwards the revival was associated with an increase in the archiving of early performances of rebetika, as also with the return to prominence of some of the older singers. already here we may note a central irony. Composers such as hadjidakis and theodorakis played a major part in preparing the way for the rebetika revival. But one effect of that revival was the cultivation of a discourse of authenticity that distinguished ‘true’ rebetika from the music based on them. alongside the development of popular art songs, a more orientalised popular music idiom (an ‘oriental surge’) was cultivated in 1980s, associated with a re-negotiation of identities by youth culture. this was a wider Balkan rather than a specifically Greek phenomenon,60 but in Greece it invoked particular connotations, a nostalgia for asia minor, and a ‘longing to reconnect’ that did not exclude dialogues with turkey (it was given more cultivated expression in the urban musical movement known in some quarters as paradhosiaka).61 this oriental idiom came in the wake of a blatant rejection of the bouzouki by modern Greek youth, and a parallel engagement with western pop-rock. But in truth it represented a kind of third way, enabling some measure of separation both from tourist stereotypes of Greek popular music and from western fashions. it was at once modern and enticingly different, and its popularity in recent years is suggestive of the idea that things might be expressed through popular music that cannot be expressed through official channels (there are comparable developments in other forms of mass culture, including tV soaps). after all, the reconnection is not just with anatolia, but also with a shared Ottoman inheritance. in Kristevan terms, music here ‘speaks the unspeakable’. it articulates a pre-verbal semiotic at odds with public discourse, and one that is inseparably linked to our sense of place. tallava Rules: Kosovars in Macedonia as the Ottoman empire disintegrated, no single issue engaged the Balkan nations with greater fervour than the fate of macedonia. the historic region so described was extensive, and of great strategic importance. there was territorial interest from Bulgaria, serbia and Greece, on the usual grounds of historic rights, as well as from turkey and albania. in the aftermath of 60 rasmussen 1996. 61  Kallimopoulou 2006.

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the Balkan Wars (1912–13) Bulgaria was the principal loser, though it did secure pirin macedonia.62 Greece acquired the aegean littoral, including salonika, and this has remained a stable border until today, while Vardar macedonia went to serbia, or rather was subsumed by the first Yugoslavia, and eventually became a constituent republic of the Communist state. the present-day nation state of macedonia (originally known as FYrOm) resulted from the secession of that republic from Yugoslavia in 1991, hard on the heels of slovenia and Croatia. native macedonians have been anxious to assert a specific ethnic identity other than the more generalised south slavic roots that might distinguish them from Greek macedonians.63 Yet because of its geographical position this territory had long been traversed by many peoples and settled by several nationalities. it had been right at the centre of medieval Bulgarian and serbian empires, and was later heavily populated by turks. among the most prominent of its inhabitants were albanians (often described as ‘turks’, meaning muslims), who had been a stable presence in this region, as in present-day Greek epirus, since antiquity. so it was hardly to be wondered at that irredentist ambitions in tirana should have embraced western macedonia as well as Kosovo. What would have been harder to predict was the influx of Kosovar albanians at the very end of the twentieth century. the story of Kosovo in 1999 has been told many times. there have been histories, not always impartial (noel malcolm), first-hand reports by journalists (Janine di Giovanni), and accounts that lie somewhere in between ( James pettifer).64 there have also been sober and thoughtful, but committed, analyses by Balkan historians (maria todorova).65 in brief, the borders imposed on a newly independent albania by the Great powers following the Balkan Wars left Kosovo harnessed to serbia, but with a majority albanian population, predominantly muslim, seeking independence, and a serbian minority who ascribed iconic historical and religious significance to a province which they regarded as the heartland of Old serbia. subsequently Kosovo was incorporated within the first Yugoslavia, and it was then assigned the constitutional status of an autonomous serbian province (in 1963) in the second Yugoslavia. in 1989, under the

62 Bulgaria acquired new macedonian territories following the First Balkan War, but lost them after the second War. 63 roudometof 2002. 64 malcolm 2002; di Giovanni 2004; pettifer 2005. 65 todorova 2000.

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milošević regime, it became an integral part of serbia (its autonomous status revoked), and there was a crescendo of discrimination against the albanian population through to march 1999, when the failure of the talks at rambouillet led to ethnic cleansing on an extensive scale. the albanian population was all but routed by the Yugoslav (de facto serbian) national army in spring 1999. later, following the natO air bombardment of serbia, the serbs withdrew from Kosovo, natO forces moved in, and the ethnic cleansing went into reverse (and this despite the natO presence). at the time of writing, Kosovo [Kosova]66 has declared its independence, and this status has been recognised by some, but not all, members of the international community; its status is that of a natO protectorate. my concern here is with the first cycle of ethnic cleansing, at which point Kosovar albanians were driven from their homes, most headed for albania, but others settling in neighbouring Greece or in macedonia. today some macedonian villages around skopje are predominantly albanian, while towns such as tetovo have a majority albanian population. in early 2001 ethnic minority grievances erupted in an albanian insurgency in northwestern macedonia, and the subsequent ceasefire (July 2001) resulted in enhanced civil and political rights. Despite this, the albanian population remains essentially distinct from the macedonian, and maintains close cultural ties with albania proper and with Kosovo. the Kosovar albanians who settled in macedonia brought their music with them, including the genre known as tallava, typically the preserve of roma.67 the roma of Kosovo were of low social status and subject to discrimination, but they were highly valued as musicians, not least because in many cases they alone knew the appropriate music for both serbian and albanian rituals. in earlier times they would adopt the costumes appropriate to the occasion, serb or albanian, as well as the requisite musical idioms. in urban settings their basic ensemble was the Ottoman-influenced čalgija, originally comprising clarinet, with kemânçe or violin, kanûn, oud and frame drum, but later replacing some of these instruments with accordion, guitar, drum set, and (more recently) synthesizer. svanibor pettan has argued that this modernisation was part of a quest for ethnic neutrality and so-called universality, and that this

66 the albanian majority use the term Kosova (rather than Kosovo) to describe the independent state. 67 Tallava is not of course the only genre associated with the Kosovar albanians. Other repertories have been examined by alma Bejtullahu, with a special focus on the changing roles of female performers in a time of war (Bejtullahu 2006).

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same quest motivated the eclectic approach to repertoire in the 1980s and 1990s.68 What is undoubtedly true is that the mounting ethnic tensions of those decades created something of a tight rope for the roma, who traditionally made no claim on territory. and it may well have been their attempt to preserve this traditional ethos that led them to cultivate tallava, an albanian-language genre that developed out of a particular style of ‘female music’,69 but was transformed into a highly distinctive, orientalsounding popular music idiom. so what exactly is tallava? it is minimalist in idiom, with a single repetitive rhythm applied to very simple, largely unchanging, harmonies in a manner akin to some disco idioms. Over this background the soloist improvises (and for very long periods) in a distinctly oriental, nasal-toned manner, but with a melismatic idiom that is often more akin to indian than to arabic traditions; it should be noted here that indian film music had played something of a symbolic role for Kosovo roma, partly as a way of connecting to perceived origins. the genre is associated above all with the Ashkalije (albanian-speaking roma from Kosovo, said to have originated in palestine), and it is performed mainly at weddings, with improvised lyrics directed to the particular occasion, and peppered with topical references. as a music that remained entirely separate from the political agendas of partisan groups in Kosovo, tallava marked out a unique territory for the Ashkalije. at the heart of the genre was always the union of improvisation and virtuosity that has long been associated with rom music-making (as formulated for elite publics in liszt’s book),70 and it is entirely in keeping with this that certain star performers have emerged as iconic figures among albanian and rom populations. pettan reminds us that for a time after 1999 rom musical activities were badly affected. But in diaspora, and especially in macedonia, tallava lives on today. Carol silverman has pointed out that even under socialism roma in macedonia suffered much less discrimination than in neighbouring Bulgaria, and that they were accordingly able to play a more visible role in musical life.71 nonetheless, as a low-status music, even today, tallava seldom has access to official cultural channels. it is of course frequently played on rom radio and television stations, but mainly it is

68 pettan 1996a. pettan has elaborated on these ideas in numerous publications, and in his video Kosovo Through the Eyes of Local Rom (Gypsy) Musicians (Krško, 1999). 69 pettan 1996c. 70 liszt 1859. 71  silverman 1996.

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known through live wedding performances and privately produced compact discs or cassettes, marketed on the streets but also available in some of the shops. if we try to understand its significance in macedonia today, we note a double appropriation. although originally associated with the Ashkalije community in Kosovo, and welded to the albanian language, tallava has been adopted as a rom genre by non-albanian-speaking roma in macedonia (many of them settled in Šutka, a large and vibrant muslim rom ‘city’ just outside skopje, dating from the immediate post-earthquake period), and rom musicians regularly perform it in dialects of the romany language.72 Yet at the same time its albanian credentials have ensured its wider acceptance among non-rom albanian communities not just in macedonia, but also, and increasingly, in albania itself and throughout the widespread communities of the albanian diaspora. popular singers such as muharrem ameti regularly include tallava performances on their recordings. the effects of displacement are not straightforward, then, and they distinguish this case study of displacement from my other two. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries serbian migrations enabled a premodern culture to embrace modernity through transculturation. as a result, serbian music was brought into contact with european idioms and ideals, and that included an increasing commitment to european models of cultural nationalism. in the early twentieth century, the triumph of those same modernist ideals was evident in the effects of the population exchange in Greece and asia minor, where a shared music was appropriated and then transformed until it could be claimed by the nation as its exclusive property. at the same time there was a gesture of reconnection in the later stages of that narrative, something belonging in some ways to late modernity, or even – culturally speaking – to a postmodern world. the tallava story in macedonia reveals another facet of that world. here, in the early twenty-first century, a genre that was consciously apolitical and boundary-crossing in inception has been transformed through displacement into an embodiment of liminality. it functions today partly as an underground music, but not in the familiar sense that it carries explicit and subversive political messages. rather tallava in macedonia has been a means of forging and consolidating the identities of ethno-religious minorities within a society whose ostensible aim is precisely to transcend such categories. 72 see the Cultural Cornerstones CD ‘the shutka music project: heartsongs from the Gypsies of shutka macedonia’.

CHAPTER FOuR

ECuMENES In the Minority In addressing some of the issues that arise when societies, nations and even civilisations come into contact, practitioners of world history have identified two broad approaches. the first examines the units that interact, while the second examines the field of their interaction, described by ross Dunn as an interactive zone, and by William mcneill as an ecumene.1 How might we transfer these two approaches to the study of world music today? The first would be concerned with individual, musically articulated, identities – the music of a particular community, ethnic or social group, or indeed religion – and would recognise that such identities are subject either to transformation or defiant preservation as they come into contact. the second would consider an ecumene, well tuned to our present global age but by no means unique to this age. ecumenes have their own developing histories, but it is arguably not necessary to invoke history at all (and thus to interpret plurality as somehow postmodern) in order to envisage them. We might think of them rather synchronically, imagining systemic fields of interactive musical idioms sharing a single space. the relevance of these approaches to the study of world music seems uncontroversial, but they have a less obvious purchase on music from a single geographical territory such as the Balkans. all the same, i think they might help us address issues of cultural identity in this region. if we understand the Balkans primarily as Ottoman presence and legacy in south east europe, the second approach seems especially pertinent.2 ottoman governance, tolerant of faiths and ethnicities, embodied or promoted the characteristic qualities associated with an ecumene. Co-existence and diversity (though not equality) were central to the political philosophy of the empire, and this influenced its cultural world. the effects were evident in musical life, not least in the Balkans, where the commerce

1  mcneill 1998. 2 see maria todorova on the difference between legacy and tradition (todorova 1995).

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between styles was both fluid and dynamic. thus the Balkans as a whole might be viewed as a working model of a musical ecumene. and within the wider region there are particular territories that invite this ascription in their own right, places that are defined musically by the interplay of co-existing styles. at risk of labouring the point, I will review the sites already discussed, positioning them within the continuum defined by our two approaches. the traditional music of oaş can be placed at one end of the spectrum, with relatively little interactivity or change. as the product of a particular ecology, the music here helped define the place. that of radoviš has also been relatively stable, but we noted that an ethnic shift resulting from the migration patterns of the shopi led to significant changes in style. again, the first approach is the more helpful, tracking the development of a community’s music, and noting its transformation as it comes into contact with alternative cultures. the first approach might also be applied to the music of the Šumadijan villages, and perhaps even to the music of sephardim in sarajevo. however, in the latter case there is a difference. musical repertories may have marked sephardic identities, but in no sense did they define a place more generally. If we want to define sarajevo musically, we need our second approach. and this goes for the sites associated with our case studies of displacement too. If our focus is on the places involved – the military Border in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the towns and villages of asia minor and the Greek mainland in the early twentieth, or macedonia in the early twenty-first – it will be diversity and interactivity that prove to be defining. It would be misleading to suggest that such interactive zones are neutral territories in which the different idioms have equal weight. as its etymology suggests, the term ‘ecumene’ suggests not just a plurality of cultures, but the interactive field that results from the impact of external elements on a ‘home’ or ‘dominant’ culture.3 Characteristically, ecumenes are sites of peaceful co-existence, but the various elements nevertheless exist in a power relationship, determined either by an inherited sociopolitical framework or by some disruption to existing structures, notably through diaspora and migration flows. ethnicity has been one of the principal categories by means of which such interactions of peoples and their music have been understood. Yet although debates about socalled ‘ethnic groups’ became increasingly prevalent from around the mid

3 the word comes from the Greek noun oikos (home) and the verb meni (to live).

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nineteenth century onwards, the concept of ethnicity has proved resistant to precise definition. some cautions are necessary. First, as thomas hylland erikson has pointed out, ethnicity is a relational concept, carrying little real meaning until contact has been established with others (as in radoviš, but not in oaş).4 secondly, ethnicities do not map directly onto particular cultures, nor for that matter onto particular social or religious groups; there can be considerable non-congruence between these categories, as our story of Greeks and turks demonstrates. and finally, it is salient, dependent as much on self-definition as on external observation, and susceptible to manipulation. We should therefore be wary of essentialising ethnicity by ‘fixing’ it as a stable category, though it is often in the vested interests of particular parties to do just that.5 there is undoubtedly some objective reality to definitions of socio-political relations in terms of majorities and minorities in the Balkans (as determined by census statistics and in relation to a status quo), but ethnic identities are not always reducible to such straightforward binaries.6 Behind any of the stories we may choose to tell of ethnic minorities, then, there will be a more complex narrative. the homogeneity of an ethnic group may depend on a range of criteria, including duration of settlement, language or dialect, and religion. moreover, majority status is not just a matter of numbers but also of access to the sources of economic and political power, and it is for this reason that there is often an overlap between ethnicity and class. Likewise, exclusion from these sources of power, often accompanied by territorial marginalisation, often constitutes minority status, though simple failure to participate in the ethos of the group may also qualify. typically, minorities will be either migrating, locked into insulated pockets, or positioned at the borders between different majority cultures (usually nation states). a key factor here is that the minority culture, read as ‘pure’ in its original place, will often be read as degenerate – a symptom of decaying culture – when it is dislocated. minorities and their rights have been increasingly recognised in recent years, but whether tolerated or persecuted, their basic condition tends to

4 eriksen 1993, 11–12. 5 Knudsen 2007. 6 this book will discuss some ‘minority’ communities in the Balkans, but it would be impossible to include all. to take Greece as a single example, I will discuss briefly Vlachs but not sarakatsani, and pomaks but not Christian slavophones. For an account of Greek minorities, see Clogg 2002.

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be one of social liminality.7 they are, in hommi Bhabha’s words, ‘the difference within’.8 music in these circumstances can function as a means of consolidating identities in adversity; in short it can ‘carry’ the minority culture by affirming its traditions, and giving voice to its interests. alternatively, given that musicians often possess what pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital, it can serve as one means of gaining access to social spaces inhabited mainly by the majority culture.9 In the first case study I will revisit Vojvodina, broadening out beyond serbian history to embrace music in this region more generally. In the second I will revisit the territory of the population exchange, but this time narrowing the range of that territory to focus on the villages of Western thrace. and as part of both case studies I will return to the roma, who have always played, and continue to play, a key role in Balkan music. All Together in Vojvodina In one respect the tension between our two approaches played out historically as a tension between ethnicity and territory. this tension was characteristic of emerging nationalisms in the Balkans. We can find it already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the quest for a greater Greece, a rebuilding of Byzantium that would incorporate Greek populations in asia minor; indeed Greek concepts of nationhood are still governed more by ethnos than by territory. and it surfaced more recently in serbian ambitions to embrace minority serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia within a greater serbia, with the aim of establishing a serb corridor across three states, and likewise in the irredentist ambitions of albania. the serbian example returns us to the habsburg military Frontier. as we noted earlier, the territory of present-day Vojvodina played a key role in the modernisation of serbian culture. But as a heavily colonised region bordering hungary and romania, and as a natural victim of shifting imperial ambitions, it was home to many different ethnic groups, and in constantly changing configurations, depending on the ruling power at any given time. Its role in the 1848–49 revolution was symptomatic, as the serbs (the largest ethnic group) rebelled against the hungarian authorities, and joined with the habsburgs in crushing the revolution, even

7 Ceribašić and haskell 2006. 8 Bhabha 1994, xv. 9 Bourdieu and passeron 1970.

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though the territory was destined to remain austro-hungarian until the collapse of the habsburgs in 1918. then, as Danubian Banat, it was a province of the first Yugoslavia before it was attached to serbia as an autonomous province of the second Yugoslavia after World War II, incorporating srem (part of Croatia during the war), western Banat and Bačka. under milošević, there was some loss of autonomy, but since his downfall this has been partly restored. as a relatively prosperous, fertile, and strategically positioned territory, Vojvodina attracted a steady stream of immigrants from all directions, especially during the nineteenth century. Germans (mainly Catholic) and hungarians came in large numbers under the habsburgs, but at various times romanians, slovaks, ruthenians, macedonians and roma all made their way to the province. successive census dates have revealed numerous changes in the constitution of these nationalities over the years, with a major alteration following World War II, when tito expelled many of the Germans, and again within the last two decades as a direct result of migrations from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Census results could never be more than an approximate indicator of the demography of this multi-ethnic province. In the census of 1991 it was clear that several of the Germans declared as hungarians, while many of the roma declared as romanians. historically there were certainly tensions between the various ethnic groups, depending on the politics of the day, and at some points (especially during World War II) there was major oppression of some of them. But by the standards of south east europe as a whole, inter-ethnic relations were reasonably harmonious. as in the Banat, now part of romania but sharing much of its history with Vojvodina, we may speak entirely legitimately of a culture characterised by its broad acceptance of ethnic diversity.10 Vojvodina today is closer to a multicultural province than a melting pot, but it is closer still to an ecumene in that there exists a dominant culture in relation to which the others enjoy the status of (at least officially) respected minorities. statistics, however flawed, tell part of this story. In the census of 2002, Vojvodina had a population of just over 2,000,000, of whom 1,320,000 declared as serbs, 290,000 as hungarians, 57,000 as slovaks, 57,000 as Croats, 32,000 as romanians, 30,000 as roma, and 16,000 as ruthenians. In addition there were significant but smaller numbers of Germans,

10 Vojvodina was part of the historical region of the Banat, which was divided between romania and Yugoslavia in 1918.

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montenegrins and macedonians. Broadly speaking, hungarian communities tend to be located in the north, romanian in the east, and serbian in the central and southern parts of the region. there are, as one might expect, disputed views as to the legitimacy of historical claims on Vojvodina, but these have never been as passionately voiced as in neighbouring transylvania. as for the musical life of the province, there are continuities within each of the separate ethno-cultural traditions, and that can include strategic present-day attempts at preservation. But there has also been a process of interaction. and in more recent years there has been some move towards the obliteration of any such boundaries, as Vojvodina enters into dialogue with wider global processes. In considering musical traditions we can locate three major groupings based on shared pasts or related ethnicities. the majority serbian (and montenegrin) communities host a family of musics shared with serbia proper. thus, multi-voiced singing na glas arrived in Vojvodina with the migrations and then gave way to the modern style of singing (na bas) that can also be found in Croatia, Bosnia and western serbia. epic songs with gusle, a tradition associated especially with montenegro, could also be found among these communities, though often performed here with gaida. and there is also a distinctively serbian repertory of ritual songs and dances associated with wedding festivities, again accompanied by gaida. these can be differentiated from other traditions in Vojvodina by their characteristic melos, simple refrain forms and symmetrical rhythms, and also – as nice Fracile has observed – by the construction of the pipes.11 until a few decades ago the distinctive, complex instrument of the traditional serbian piper (with its oscillating drone and double bellows enabling him to accompany himself singing) was an indispensable adjunct to any wedding party, and it was distinct both from the hungarian instrument and from the characteristic gaida commonly found among Wallachian communities. more recently traditional piping has been on the wane, as the old customs gradually disappear. But there has been a notable attempt to revive the practice on the part of younger serbian pipers, and interestingly they have largely abandoned the serbian instrument in favour of the Bulgarian gaida, whose construction is better suited to a concert-orientated virtuosity, with an appropriately adapted repertory.

11 I am grateful to nice Fracile for sending me his unpublished paper, Changes of Style and Repertory in the Instrumental Music of Serbs, Wallachians and Romanians in Serbia, read at an ICtm study Group in Innsbruck, may 17–23, 2000.

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this in turn is part of a much wider raft of changes in the constitution and presentation of traditional serbian music throughout the region; if we cross to the Banat, for instance, the declining serb minority has been steadily losing touch with its traditional culture in recent years, as urban influences prove unstoppable. the music of minority hungarian and slovak communities in Vojvodina constitutes a second grouping that reflects wider historical and political associations between these two nationalities. here traditional music is performed by groups of singers accompanied by peasant zither bands, often with köcsögduda [friction drum]. the zithers are distinctively hungarian in style and construction, and their popularity among hungarian and slovak inhabitants of the province is reflected in the numerous festivals that are centred on the instrument. the idiom is unmistakably that of hungarian and hungarian-rom traditional and popular music, focusing on the well-known verbunkos genre that developed from the mid eighteenth century onwards. this idiom, known as style hongrois when appropriated by art music, transparently belongs to the cultural world of the eastern habsburg empire, a provenance that is all the more apparent when the repertory is performed, as it often is, by hungarian-style string bands rather than zithers. It is a world of music-making that stands somewhat apart, clearly distinguishable from the traditional slavic music associated with serbian communities in Vojvodina, as also from the ottoman-influenced idioms associated with romanian and romanian-rom populations. this latter pairing constitutes the third major grouping within the musical traditions of Vojvodina. minority romanian communities have long been established in this region, coming initially from the Banat and then from transylvania, with traditional music and dance determined by these different origins. the ardeleana family of couple dances obviously suggests transylvanian ancestry, for example, whereas the hora (circle dance) has been more commonly associated with the Banat. But at least where music is concerned there has been considerable generic interpenetration within a recognisably romanian idiom, as well as an impressive continuity of tradition that links some of Bartók’s findings in the region with recent fieldwork by nice Fracile.12 as well as discussing the fate of some long-standing customs,13 Fracile has argued for asymmetrical rhythms as

12 Fracile 1995. 13 Fracile 2003.

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a distinguishing feature of music from traditional romanian communities in Vojvodina, linking those repertories to others from the eastern Balkans, and differentiating them clearly from serbian and hungarian repertories in the province.14 these rhythms have long been noted in ethnomusicological literature. they are an important component of traditional music in the eastern Balkans, and for that reason they merit more general consideration at this point by way of an excursus. It is well known that Bartók described such asymmetrical patterns as ‘Bulgarian rhythms’, drawing on the work of the Bulgarians Dobri hristov and Vasil stoin.15 however, the eminent romanian folklorist Constantin Brăiloiu demonstrated that they were a global phenomenon, albeit with a marked concentration in the eastern Balkans, anatolia and the Levant.16 In macedonia in particular they have come to be perceived as an essential defining feature of a native traditional music, especially in the dactylic form of a foot-tapping 7/8 rhythm (3 + 2 + 2). although it may be tempting to explain these and other asymmetrical rhythms in terms of ottoman legacy, it is probably more realistic to see them – as Wouter swets has done – as indigenous to the traditional music of the entire Balkan-anatolian region, even if it is the usûl (rhythmic cycle) of ottoman-turkish classical music that has provided their theoretical rationale.17 the roma are often linked with such rhythms, but it is more than likely that their performance practices played some part in a process of simplifying what were once even more intricate patterns. some of the metres (or usûl-s) identified in traditional music across the entire Balkan-anatolian region are complex (they also vary greatly from region to region), though presenting them in western notation (29/16, 22/16, and so on) obfuscates what native musicians tend to regard simply as aggregates of long (3-beat) and short (2-beat) units. nowadays the tendency anyway is to simplify the longer usûl-s, translating them into patterns of 4, 5, 7 or 9 beats. aside from theoretical evidence of the antiquity of complex metres in the Balkans,18 there are intriguing strands of more concrete evidence, including transcriptions made by the 14 Fracile 1996. according to Fracile, the dactyloid form of the rhythm 7/16 (3+2+2) is especially characteristic of the romanians in Vojvodina. 15 hristov 1913; stoin, 1927. Fracile demonstrates that Bartók’s transcriptions of the music of Yugoslav romanians on occasion miss these asymmetrical rhythms (Fracile 1996). 16 Brăiloiu 1967. 17 see, among other writings (including informative cd liner notes), swets 1997. 18 It is often noted that they are represented in the theoretical writings of aristoxenus (Fracile 1996), but this is a complex question, treated in some detail in Katsanevaki 1998.

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musician-novelist Daniel speer (1636–1707) during his travels in the late seventeenth century,19 and an original composition from a more unusual source dating from even earlier, in 1621. the Gypsies’ Dance from Ben Jonson’s masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, possibly composed by robert Johnson, is in a characteristic aksak rhythm (2 + 2 + 2 + 3), unusual in art music at the time, and clearly perceived as a genre marker of ‘gypsy music’.20 Quite apart from the continuity implied by this source (bearing in mind that appropriations by art music can often yield important historical clues about the nature of pre-1900 oral repertories), we are reminded of the importance of rom musicians generally as agents of transculturation. It is often and plausibly argued that the unique identity of rom music has less to do with compositional styles, where the borders between folk, popular and rom musics may be rather fluid, than with distinctive performance styles. It is for this reason that roma have been able to move with notable ease from one idiom to another, assuming various cultural identities in the process. on one hand they have played a key role in cultural conservation by taking over ritual musics that had been discarded by host populations.21 Yet on the other hand they have acted as pollinators, disseminating musics far and wide, and generating multiple hybrid idioms as they do so. It is true that in the past there were certain formalised divisions between romanian and romanian-rom musicians in Vojvodina, many of them offshoots of social divisions (characteristically the roma lived in mahala-s on the edge of the towns and showed little interest in agriculture). thus the fanfară (wind and brass orchestra), widely associated with roma elsewhere in the wider region, tended to consist mainly of romanian performers in Vojvodina, while the bandă (string ensemble, often accompanied by accordion or cimbalom) would be made up of roma. Yet cultural and even

19 published in 1688 under the pseudonym simplicissimus as Musicalisch-Türckischer Eulenspiegel . . . mit Ungarisch- Griechisch- Moscowitisch- Wallachisch- Kosakisch- Rusnakisch- und Pohlnisch lustigen Balleten. a modern edition, with an introduction in Czech and German, was published by opus in Bratislava (speer 1978, 1980). speer transcribes ethnic dances which he claims are based on music he encountered while traveling. 20 there is a studied ambiguity in this masque, in that although the texts flatter royalty, the gypsies serve as a symbol of alterity, their freedom and anarchy implicitly critiquing the authoritarian ambitions of King James. 21  one of many examples here is the ritual of falling women (in a rain-making dance) performed by roma in Vojvodina. I am grateful to the social linguist Biljana sikimić for telling me about this serbian tradition, early descriptions of which date back to the early 1920s.

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ethnic boundaries are not always so clear-cut. even today roma will often regard themselves as romanian principally on linguistic grounds. But in any case it has long been the practice of rom musicians to adopt and then to personalise the idioms and genres associated with the majority nationality in a region, and in that sense the roma have greatly enriched romanian instrumental traditions in Vojvodina across many generations, as performers at village dances, wedding parties, and similar events. It is clear that in many of Bartók’s early recordings from these communities ‘romanian’ really meant ‘romanian rom’; indeed, as Fracile points out, the notes on Bartók’s own transcriptions tell us as much.22 During the last half century there have been sustained attempts to make some order in the wealth of music associated with the Vojvodina roma. In the 1950s, for example, the composer ernö Király instigated collecting programmes, and the results of his research have been classified and published according to four major ethnic groups in the province: Vlach, serb, hungarian and romanian.23 We may note too that in recent years rom musicians have themselves made a contribution to some of the ethnomusicological initiatives carried out in the province, not least the attempt by radio novi sad to preserve as much as possible of the cultural heritage of the Vojvodina romanians, including field research centred on the traditional instruments and their repertories. such enterprises, where roma are representing other ethnic groups, underline the central difficulty facing all students of rom music-making, and not just in Vojvodina. how far do rom identities carve out a singular stylistic space, as opposed to inhabiting established spaces in unique and distinctive ways? In the last few decades the boundaries between traditional groupings in Vojvodina, once clearly separated out, have been freely crossed. Fracile has documented some of the early stages of such crossovers, noting fusions of hungarian violin repertories and serbian brass band music, together with newly composed folk music that draws together the idioms of Wallachian-romanian and serbian gaida traditions. he outlines quite specific instances of melodic and rhythmic cross-fertilisation in these case studies.24 But actually the dialogues and fusions – increasingly responsive to institutional change, and especially to the invasion of public space by traditional music – extend far beyond such examples. the star performer,

22 Fracile 1996. 23 Kovalcsik 1992. 24 Fracile 2004.

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improvising on clarinet, taragota, violin or cimbalom, has become the main protagonist of a widespread professionalisation of traditional music now often sited in the concert hall, and rom musicians have again been in the vanguard, in a skilful alliance between clever marketing strategies and a more general politicisation of rom culture. thus a star system has emerged within the concertising of established folk ensembles such as the Folk orchestra of rtV novi sad, with stylistic reference points in wellknown rom bands from romania itself, such as Taraful Haiducilor [taraf de haidouks] and Mahala Rai Banda. all this comes in the wake of processes of modernisation that were already in place in the immediate post-war years, when traditional rites and customs began to disappear from the region. In the Communist era folk orchestras replaced traditional ensembles, modern factory-made instruments substituted for home-made ones, and high-profile performers of a newly-composed repertory took over from local exponents of ritual music; and all that before we mention stages, artistic directors, choreographers, or the electronic mass media. In due course I will address these developments, which affected the wider region. But it may be noted here that the transformation of traditional music in Vojvodina smudged not just ethno-cultural and geographical borders, but to some extent class borders too, in that folk ensembles increasingly drew upon and transformed repertories from the western tradition as well as popular repertories from all over the world. effectively the old traditions were transformed into newly invented styles, and it is this that has kept them alive. It has, after all, created a new, essentially middle-class, taste public for traditional music, overlapping at one end of the spectrum with a popular music public and at the other end with a classical music public. In the post-Communist years, here as elsewhere, traditional music has tended to morph into the commercial category ‘world music’. and here too the roma played a key role. one could go further, and argue that longestablished rom values favouring eclecticism and hybridity have harmonised remarkably well with the much more generalised climate of change associated with world music today. thus, instrumentalists associated with all three major traditions in Vojvodina now engage in projects of synthesis or fusion, and these projects typically extend their reach well beyond the Balkans. It is enough to cite one of the most familiar examples, the cross-fertilisation that has taken place between verbunkos and flamenco idioms, begging much-rehearsed questions about commonalities and shared origins. this is a familiar fusion among local rom musicians in Vojvodina, but it is obvious that it is not peculiar to this small corner of

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the Balkans. It is modeled above all on the popularisation of flamenco by various international and heavily promoted gitano groups, creating a kind of pop-flamenco that has been very widely disseminated throughout south east europe as a whole. What such developments invoke are questions about the limits of cultural relativism. It may not be fanciful to think of Vojvodina as a Yugoslavia, or even a Balkans, in miniature. this province offers us what is perhaps the most positive reading there might be for ethnic diversity and multiculturalism in the wider region. Yet even in Vojvodina, and whatever official policy may say to the contrary, there is no doubt that some groups remain more equal than others. there is a clear correspondence between cultural elites and dominant ethnicities, for example, and arguably this has been strengthened by political aspirations in Belgrade. Conversely, in the context of the major economic downturn that followed recent migrations (from 1990 onwards), and in light of the subsequent and transparent failure of capitalist economics to deal with the full implications of these migrations, there is not much doubt about who bears the brunt of any hardship that ensues. Orchestrating Thrace since the exchange of minorities in 1923 Greece has been relatively homogeneous ethnically. this has been changing in recent years. Like other countries in the european union, it has absorbed large numbers of migrant workers from the former Communist countries of eastern europe, including albanians and (later) Kosovar albanians, while its location has made it a first stop for wider immigration to europe from the middle east, India and pakistan. the point is moot as to whether this immigration may begin to undermine the strong sense of an ethnic nation. In the case of the albanians one might expect to see some community of interest with one of the most venerable existing minorities in Greece, the arvanites. Yet this rarely occurs, for although they are of albanian origin and have a distinctive culture (including music), the arvanites have been readily assimilated (hellenised), not least because, rather like many Vlachs, they have adopted the orthodox faith.25 their acceptance points to the alliance of

25 For an anthology of the music (some of it in asymmetrical rhythms), and with a useful introduction, see moraitis 2002. the music Folklore archive in athens has also released a double CD including arvanitic songs from Florina, Konitsa and oresteiada.

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church and nation that has been so crucial to a sense of Greek identity, partly explaining why the only officially recognised minority in Greece is not ethnic but religious. the acknowledgement of the muslim minority, and the rights accorded it, have their origins in the Lausanne exchange. the relevant point is that there were significant exemptions built into the Lausanne treaty, affecting the orthodox Greek community in Istanbul, home of the patriarchate, and the muslim communities in northern Greece. and it is for this reason that significant muslim populations – constituted principally of turks, pomaks (slavic-speaking muslims) and roma – are to be found primarily in western thrace, just as other slavophone minorities are found in Greek macedonia.26 these northern lands were of course the last to be incorporated within the Greek nation state.27 the historical territory of thrace exerts a particular fascination as the easternmost edge of europe, the point at which europe might be said truly to begin. this region was a victim of ethnonational disputes as the ottoman empire began to disintegrate, resulting in two population exchanges that predated Lausanne – between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919, and between Greece and turkey in 1922 – and in the subsequent allocation of ‘Western thrace’ to Greece, ‘eastern thrace’ to turkey and ‘northern thrace’ (roughly the ottoman province of ‘eastern rumelia’) to Bulgaria. my focus here will be on Western thrace, but there remains a strong sense of thracian regional identity in Bulgaria, and to some extent in turkey too. In other words, there are aspects of thracian culture that have survived the imposition of national borders.28 Conversely, ethnic differentiations are registered within this generic thracian culture, and these are apparent not only between the different provinces but between majority and minority populations within each of them. Where music is concerned, then, we can identify in Western thrace elements of a more general thracian culture, while at the same time noting singularities belonging to the turkish, pomak and rom minorities. these minorities, muslim in the main, are to be found in all three prefectures of Western thrace, adding up to more than 40% of the population 26 Danforth 2001. 27 For a discussion of hierarchies within the minority groups in particular localities, see papakostas 2008. 28 thrace has legendary associations with music, through the myths of orpheus. tourist brochures in Bulgaria lay claim to orpheus and to the mythical birthplace of music, while at the same time thrace has been widely considered to be the musical heartland of Greece.

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in Xanthi and rhodopi, and around 10% in evros.29 But such statistics can give a misleading picture of ethnicity and culture. For one thing, there are numerous additional ethnic groups (they include pontic, arvanite, armenian, Gagauz, and sarakatsan populations); and for another, individuals may and do choose to move between groups for strategic or pragmatic advantage, or simply because the pattern of their lives precludes any straightforward mapping of their cultural onto their ethnic identities. In keeping with this, very different tastes in music are displayed right across the region, ranging from turkish popular music to wedding music genres associated with Bulgaria. In other words, it would be an oversimplification to assign genres to ethnic groups in a straightforward way. music and dance in Western thrace has been subject to canonising processes of a kind found elsewhere in Greece, in that a pan-thracian repertory, suitable for presentation at festivals and promotion by so-called ‘cultural associations’, has worked to appropriate and absorb the diversity of idioms belonging to neighbouring and minority cultures. this is part of a much wider synthesising and classicising impulse, and it is epitomised in the construction of the zonaradikos as the characteristic dance of thrace. the ideological charge here may not have been as strong as in Communist eastern europe, but we can note the same redesigning of traditional practices and the same accommodation of these practices to new taste publics, with the aim of reinforcing a collective identity that is profiled against alterities of place and time (the neighbouring muslim village; the ottoman ‘tyranny’). motivations are not always as political as this suggests. the teaching of traditional dance in cultural associations of necessity imposes some canonising tendencies, even to the extent that on returning from periods of working abroad, people effectively re-learn dances they knew as children, but in more uniform, standardised forms. the relation between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is indeed complex in this area. Folk ensembles belong in essence to the world of modernity, for example, but it is much too simplistic to see them as entirely oppositional in values to an older layer of fastdisappearing traditional music-making. miranda terzopoulou has argued cogently to the contrary, suggesting that there is real reciprocity here, as supra-local forms feed back to rural communities and generate new ritual practices based on the commonalities of historical memory.30 29 prior to the exchange of minorities, when this whole region had only just emerged from ottoman rule, Greeks made up only 20% of the total population of Western thrace. 30 terzopoulou 1999.

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In any event, the dominant repertory in Western thrace is essentially Greek in character, with similarities to those of (Greek) macedonia and to the neighbouring island of thasos (though this has distinctive features), and it has been researched intermittently over a period of some fifty years.31 the music of ethnic minorities has been less well served, but relevant research programmes have been undertaken, and as their findings have now been made widely available the complexities of this ‘interactive zone’ are becoming ever better known.32 In addition to the music of native Greek communities, there are the distinctive repertories of refugee communities made up of pontics and Cappadoceans; then there are semiprofessional rom musics, which may be directed either to Christian or muslim audiences; and there are musics associated with the turks and pomaks. as in Vojvodina, relations between these communities have been broadly harmonious, but there are undoubtedly some tensions between and within the different groups. this is not even a recent phenomenon. patrick Leigh Fermor tells us of the anxieties of the sarakatsans to keep themselves separate from the Vlachs back in the 1930s.33 the position of pomaks from the rhodopi villages is especially sensitive. most have now come down to lowland towns such as Cimmeria on the outskirts of Xanthi, and the issue of identity looms all the larger as they come into more direct contact with other communities. not only are they either claimed or rejected by all, with their language penalised by the education system; they also face an internal crisis. there is a pomak cultural association in Xanthi, for instance, but it meets with opposition from within the

31  a key figure here was melpo merlier, who founded the music Folklore archives in athens, and who recorded thracian musicians in 1930. these recordings, together with the findings of other collectors, were drawn together by polydoros papachristodoulou and pantelis Kavakopoulos into a series of radio programmes Thracian Folk Melodies (1953–56), and in subsequent years Kavakopoulos continued to collect and publish folk songs from the region. the most recent research in the area is part of the research programme Thrace sponsored by the Friends of music society under the leadership of Lambros Liavas. one major publication resulting from the programme is Liavas 1999. 32 In addition to the Friends of music programme, there are several relevant publications, including Brandl 1996, and hoerburger 1976. some work on pomak villages has been undertaken by nikos Kokkas, who has published several texts on the pomaks and has also produced cds of pomak musicians. 33 Fermor 1966, 19. Fermor also describes a wedding at sikarayia including a klephtic song about the War of Independence leader, Kolokotrones. this description nicely captures the contrast between the slow klephtic ballad style and the rom band that follows.

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pomak community itself, for many prefer assimilation to culture conservation. there are also difficulties of generation and gender here.34 Faced with this diversity, one simple but telling inroad to music in Western thrace is to examine the traditional instruments, most of which have all but disappeared from contemporary music-making. the instruments themselves open windows onto wider practices; they register the fluidity with which styles have been transformed and appropriated; and they embody symbolic values within the culture. Where stringed instruments are concerned, I will pass over the familiar outi [oud], which was prominent both as a solo and an accompanying instrument, and move directly to the pear-shaped thracian lyra, bowed, like its rectangular pontic counterpart, and with an ancestry in Byzantine secular music. In today’s world the lyra, known as the gŭdulka in Bulgarian thrace,35 is largely confined to institutionalised folk ensembles, but it remains ‘active’ in at least one intriguing setting, the fire-walking rituals of the anastenaria, performed by refugee Greek populations from Bulgaria in the village of mavrolevki, just outside Drama in eastern macedonia (essentially of thracian culture), as also in a cluster of villages around serres (similar rituals were performed by the nestinarki [fire-dancers] in mountain villages of south east Bulgaria). although denounced by the Church, and very likely of pagan origin, the anastenaria is an orthodox ceremony lasting for several days. aside from the hypnotically repetitive music that accompanies the ritual dancing (the anastenarides hold icons of st Constantine and st helen as they dance, ‘seized’ by st. Constantine, both within the konaki and around and over the hot embers on the final evening), slow-moving, richly ornamented ballads from the Byzantine epic Digenes Akritas are sung at the close of each evening. stylistically, the music of these ballads has some synergies with Byzantine sacred repertories. throughout the proceedings, a particular species of thracian lyra is centre stage. two of them invariably accompany the ballads, while for the dancing one lyra plays a drone, another elaborates a narrow-compass modal melody, and the daouli [large frame

34 see tsibiridou 2004 for a discussion of the subject positions of the pomaks. there is a rhodopi culture with regional variants that cuts across the various ethnic and religious groups. at the same time there is an attempt on the part of some pomaks to preserve their separate culture, and an attempt by others to conceal it and merge with the majority culture. the gender issues are related to the nervousness of muslim women to perform publicly. one young amateur singer told me that she felt obliged to change her name when she recorded a cd of pomak songs in 1995. 35 the instrument has been modernised in recent decades.

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drum] provides an unchanging, hypnotic rhythm.36 the anastenaria is sui generis, but it also affords us a glance backwards to a time when the lyra was one of the ubiquitous accompaniments to the songs and dances of thrace and eastern macedonia. no less central to traditional music-making in the region is the thracian gaida. the gaida is said by some to have originated in ancient thrace before spreading to macedonia and later becoming staple fare in the music of slavic peoples all over the eastern regions of europe; but in reality, in one form or another, it seems to have been part of european pastoral life more generally in the ancient world. traditionally it accompanied songs (the pipe, after all, was the invariant accompaniment to elegiac, as opposed to lyric, poetry in the ancient Greek world), as well as fast-tempo dances such as the circle dances zonaradikos and xesyrtos, the seven-beat couples dance mandilatos, and the nine-beat processional synkathistos. the latter two dances were commonly performed at characteristically prolonged, sometimes three-day, wedding ceremonies.37 the thracian gaida is different in construction from its macedonian and Bulgarian counterparts, and at one time its use was geographically specific, marking out a thracian cultural territory. as in Vojvodina, however, the indigenous instrument began to lose ground to the more sophisticated Bulgarian gaida, which among other things maintains its tuning more effectively.38 the Bulgarian instrument was also commonly used (until recently) for the music of ethnic minorities in Western thrace. It accompanied the songs of arvanitic minorities (notably in evros), distinctively different from Greek songs; it featured in the music of pomak rhodopi villages such as echinos in the Xanthi prefecture, where the repertory has much in common with music in Bulgaria proper even if active links with Bulgaria are surprisingly few; and it even infiltrated turkish communities in towns such as Komotini. as in other spheres, the several musical idioms here have been increasingly accommodated to a generic thracian 36 For a detailed study of the anthropology of this ritual, see Kondos 2000, and for a wider perspective, see Danforth 1989. see also neikova 2000. the ceremony did give rise to two major projects of classical music, one Greek, the other Bulgarian. they are the Anastenaria tryptych by Iannis Xenakis, from which Metastaseis was extracted to form the first work of his maturity, and the ballet Nestinarka [the Fire-Dancer] by marin Goleminov. 37 these and other thracian dances, which are usually inseparable from the vocal repertory, are also preserved in diasporic societies. the us-based Orpheus newsletter gives some insight into such diasporic activities. 38 every year there is a major gaida festival in the Bulgarian rhodopes. one pomak musician and instrument maker from Cimmeria, Ferat ali afendi, indicated to me that he now models his gaidas on the Bulgarian instrument.

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style, a process that is neatly represented by marika rombou-Levidi in her study of the nine-beat ‘turkish’ dance karsilamas and the five-beat ‘Bulgarian’ baïdouska, both traditionally accompanied by the gaida.39 two other traditional instruments, both associated with the outdoors, but now stalwarts of the folk ensemble, are the floyera [shepherd’s pipe] and kaval [a longer version of the same], both closely linked to Bulgarian traditional music, but once widely played right across the region, including rural turkey, both in pastoral settings and for village festivities.40 they made way for the klarino [folk clarinet], violin and accordion, all preeminent in urban ensembles, when music was increasingly repositioned as an indoor entertainment in the aftermath of the Greek Civil War, the years that really marked the beginning of the end of a rural thracian culture. other factors contributed to this widespread modernisation of traditional music. For one, music became subject to educational practices embodied in the mandoline orchestras and even the philharmoniki that sprang up in urban centres in thrace and eastern macedonia around the mid twentieth century, and in some places considerably before that. and for another, it was brought into contact with modern culture through the common experience of exile (xenitia) and return, as discussed by pavlos Kavouras in his ‘Biography of a Folk musician’.41 In this intriguing essay, Kavouras links the stages of one folk musician’s life to the symbolic role of his instruments. thus, the floyera and kaval represented for our musician the traditional life he once knew in ormenio (traditionally young boys would be given a kaval when they began shepherding, and would be largely self-taught),42 while the klarino was associated with a later period of xenitia in Germany and became in several respects both a ‘symbol of otherness’ and also a marker of supra-local styles (it had, for example, a clear association with the music-making of turkish roma). the Bulgarian gaida meanwhile became the instrument that symbolised cross-cultural synthesis, marking the musician’s return to a new ormenio, but at the same time registering his growing relationship with Bulgaria (for which the gaida is emblematic) in a climate of political and cultural change. one further instrument should be mentioned here. the zournas [large conical oboe] has special significance as the almost exclusive preserve 39 rombou-Levidi 1999. 40 Fermor 1966, 54. 41  Kavouras 1999. 42 Ferat ali afendi described his own introduction to music to me in just these terms.

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of the roma, the oldest and largest single minority in Greece, with particular concentrations in macedonia and thrace. Despite being awarded Greek citizenship in the 1970s, the roma have never been assimilated by Greek society, living in mahala-s at the edges of the cities or in separate romani villages such as anthi and Flambouro south of serres, or alan Kuju in Komotini.43 nor has their distinctiveness been readily tolerated. Indeed sustained practices, and even policies, of discrimination have led in some quarters to the rejection of their rom identity not just by individuals (compare the pomaks) but by whole communities, such as that of Ifaistos [Kalkanza] in Komotini, in favour of the descriptor ‘muslim’ or ‘turk’. In other cases, the ethnic confusion is a familiar one, in that roma who do not speak any romany dialect are inclined to describe themselves as ‘turks’, though they may not be recognised as such in turkey and are widely regarded as yiftoi [gypsies] by the non-rom populations in thrace. as elsewhere in the wider region, the roma of thrace are associated with music-making of a semi-professional kind, including performances with the zournas-daouli (zurla-tapan or shawm-drum) ensemble comprising two zournas-s and large frame drum (in some cases the karamouza replaces the zournas). While this ensemble is found in various forms in many traditional cultures, it derives here from middle eastern traditions, and until recently it was widespread across northern Greece, macedonia (where the instrument is known as zurla),44 south West Bulgaria (where it is zurna),45 and albania. It is still a living tradition among roma – exclusively performed by men, and passed down from generation to generation – in the Xanthi and rhodope prefectures of western thrace, as also in Greek macedonia and south West Bulgaria (pirin macedonia). as to the daouli: ‘thrace is the beat of a drum’, writes patrick Leigh Fermor.46

43 In addition to turkish and Greek roma, there is a branch known as the athinganoi, whose religion combines the muslim faith with elements of paganism. the marginality of rom communities, and at the same time the dedication of certain teachers and priests devoted to improving their conditions, was apparent to me when I visited a rom mahala on the outskirts of thessaloniki. 44 For a fascinating ethnographic study of rom musicians in Greek macedonia, see Keil and Keil 2002. 45 on south west Bulgaria, see peycheva and Dimov 2002. this book contains interesting accounts of the zurna in folklore texts and in travellers’ writings. 46 Fermor 1966, 227.

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the musical idiom of these ensembles is generally perceived to be ‘oriental’ in character, with improvisation, elaborate ornamentation, interval structures related to dromoi or makam-s, and a ‘dirty’ tone production. Characteristically the second zournas provides a drone, but on occasion both play in heterophony, with each instrument furnishing independent ornamentation. repertories vary somewhat according to region, faith and ethnicity. thus the ensembles perform for Christian communities at village weddings and calendar feasts (saint’s Day panigyria), but they are especially linked to the muslim population of turks, roma and pomaks,47 performing for weddings, bayram-s (especially the Kurban Bayrami), the all-important feast of Hidirellez [romani Ederlezi] in early may (effectively marking the beginning of summer), and sünnet-s (multi-day circumcision feasts which include competitive games and the ubiquitous wrestling). even within these muslim communities there are different musical inclinations, with pomak festivities favouring various kinds of horo (especially the nine-beat daichovo horo performed in Bulgarian thrace), while turkish and rom communities prefer the seven-beat rŭchenitsa (Bulgarian raichenitsa), the anatolian halay, and above all the nine-beat čoček, or tsifteteli turkiko, associated especially with the roma. all of this begs the question of the longer-term survival of the zournas. You can still hear these rom ensembles at weekend bazaars and in other traditional contexts, and they have been subject to ‘revitalization’ by ethnomusicologists and others committed to local cultures. But they struggle to compete with the drum kit and synthesizer. even so, modernisation cannot undermine the central achievement of the roma from thrace, which has been to preserve key components of a musical culture that is both distinctive in itself and a model of diversity and even synthesis. By ‘moving around’ with virtuosic facility between several different musics – Greek, turkish, Bulgarian, rom – these musicians implicitly critique discourses of alterity and dualism (majorities – minorities). What they offer in place of such discourses has been aptly described by one source as ‘rites of inclusion’.48 as a footnote to this discussion, I should mention one other tradition of instrumental music, albeit not involving endangered instruments. this is the urban tradition of the fanfara [brass band], also widely though not

47 Brandl 1996, and hoerburger 1976. the association between the shawm-drum duo and muslim communities is not confined to Greece; see pettan 1996a. 48 Keil and Keil 2002, 267.

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exclusively associated with the roma. It developed in part as a legacy of the military presence, both turkish and austrian, and it is certainly not unique to thrace; indeed it has been cultivated with greater success in other Balkan countries. Celebrated by festivals such as Guča in serbia, where the tradition is especially strong, the fanfara has been made famous by the films of emir Kusturica, and it has now been reinvented for world music in the form of popular bands such as Fanfara Ciocărlia (romania), the Boban marković orkestar (serbia), the Kočani orkestar (macedonia) and the Fanfara tirana (albania).49 such has been the success and influence of these bands that one might even speak of their influence on Greek musicians as a kind of ‘Balkanisation’ of native traditions. the fanfara is now a presence, notably involving roma, right across northern Greece, though it is Greek macedonia rather than thrace that has produced famous modern bands such as the Florina Brass Band and Christodaktyli [the Gold Fingers]. Interestingly Goran Bregović, closely associated with Kusturica, is hugely popular in Greek macedonia. In thrace the tradition is found especially at events like the annual carnival at Xanthi. this is a major event, and it has been studied closely by Vasiliki sirakouli, who notes how, as with many such events, the organisers face many political difficulties over the balance of representation between particular communities and particular repertories.50 the carnival in this sense encrypts rival claims that speak more widely into contemporary culture: the claims of the indigenous and the global, the young and the old, the majority and the minority. the result is of course an unwieldy compromise (sirakouli traces some of the politics behind the scenes with sensitivity), with a now well-established pattern that alternates a week of indigenous music and dance with a week celebrating the global scene. of course there are many carnivals in Greek cities.51 But it is precisely because of the interacting ethnicities and religions I have been describing that the one at Xanthi presents us with such an interesting and challenging ethnographic text.

49 there is an extensive literature. see in particular Golemović 2006 and rǎdulescu 1999. In the second of these essays the author argues that it is a tradition in decline. 50 sirakouli 2010. 51  they have been studied by maria papapavlou of the university of athens. For approaches to the study of carnival more generally, see the chapters by olga supek and stjepan sremac in rajković 1988.

CHAPTER FIVE

CENTRES All in the Family: Mapping Montenegro Wherever I am is the centre. Others may not agree. I may be persuaded by the others. What these three propositions boil down to is that identities are constructed in the gaze of others, usually through a process of negotiation between what is assigned and what is experienced. By definition our own subject position is centred, but we may accept a designation of periphery, and the tension generated by the co-existence of these two states – we are simultaneously centred and decentred – can result in highly defensive self-representations. We are sidelined by the dominant narrative, but at the same time mimic it. the key concept in all of this is alterity, which plays an important role in identity-building even when it functions passively as a marker of difference. that was the message of hegel, for whom alterity was the prerequisite of any awareness of the self.1 emmanuel levinas went further, arguing that it is the face-to-face confrontation with a (not-fully-knowable) other, and the responsibility we feel for that other, that gives us meaning (the self, in other words, is fundamentally relational).2 Both positions confirm the importance of alterity for any discussion of culture and identity. at the same time they suggest that the binaries self-other and centre-periphery are closely related. in surveying Balkan histories, it is tempting to think of towns as centres and rural villages as peripheries. Yet this is not always an appropriate reading. Over a period of many centuries this region – indeed the eastern half of europe generally – became familiar with a specific pattern of colonisation, in which urban and rural communities were not just differently structured economically but differently constituted ethnically. typically there would be mixed populations in the towns – depending on the setting there might be turks, Greeks or Germans, but there would usually be other groups, including Jews, armenians and roma (at the edge of town) – surrounded by predominantly slav (but also Vlach, and in some

1  hegel 1967 (1807), 228–40. 2 Levinas 1981. this will be discussed further in the penultimate chapter.

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settings romanian) populations in the countryside. towns, in other words, were replete with immigrants, as distinct from the relatively stable monoethnic populations of rural communities. the result, predictably enough, was a cultural dislocation between town and country, with a leaning towards hybridity in the towns and relative autonomy in the villages, and with limited space for cultural interactivity and mutual dependencies between the two. this is a very rough analysis, and if we look to the detail we can easily find the exceptions, notably where trade and military routes incorporate the smaller towns.3 But it stands as a generalisation, and it suggests that the mutually dependent centrifugal and centripetal tendencies that would allow us to think in terms of centres and peripheries in strictu sensu were not always to be found. at least until the onset of modernity, the cultural lives of town and village were pursued in large measure separately, and their music will be characterised separately here. Openness and receptivity to difference are characteristics often associated with urban cultures. and given the ethnic and religious diversity of towns in the Balkans, it is not surprising that music – especially urban song – was susceptible to multiple influences. Broadly we can identify two classes, of which the first is ‘oriental’. i have already referred to music café traditions in Greece and asia Minor, but one could equally cite the ashiki songs of albania and the important genre known today as sevdalinka. this developed in Bosnia, but was also found in southern serbia, where it was associated especially with the important Ottoman trading town vranje and its surroundings. these poems (often neo-petrarchian in character) were not always sung, but many became popular as songs, including wellknown poems (to serbians!) such as ‘protuzila pembe-ajsa’ and ‘abassah’ by Jovan ilić. there are in short commonalities – of instrumentation, form and melos – across all those regions where the Ottomans were a sustained presence, allowing us to speak of a family of related styles. a second class of urban song, including school songs, love songs, and patriotic or revolutionary songs, flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the towns gradually established an independent economic and cultural life and became the foci of so-called ‘national revivals’.4 Often linked to the development of national theatres, these songs were responsive not only to the nationalist imperative in itself, but

3 see Golemović 1996 and Katsanevaki 2006. 4 Balareva 1985.

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to the educational activities, including choral singing, associated with that imperative. With their texts foregrounded as the crucial component, and with sentiments more heavily reliant on traditions of bourgeois poetry from central europe, they remained distinct from the ‘oriental’ class. Flourishing all over the region, from Macedonia to serbia, they drew on neighbouring traditions whose orientation was broadly european, including russian, italian, Croatian and Czech.5 very often they appeared in songbooks with text only, but by the end of the century it was common to find them published with western musical notation and with named composers. they were a marker of the emergent national consciousness of Balkan cities, for nationalism (like its antithesis cosmopolitanism) was a largely urban phenomenon. What, then, of the very different world of the villages prior to modernisation? here too we can group repertories into broad stylistic families, in many cases of ancient origin. We noted in Chapter 2 that there was a marked contrast between the music of the Dinaric and Carpathian mountain ranges, but we might contrast both of these groups with the more eclectic idioms found in the eastern Balkans, more oriental in character and sharing features with repertories in north africa and what used to be called the near east. at the opposite extreme, we might look at the very different traditional music found along the adriatic coastline, once the Dalmatian territories of a venetian empire, then part of the habsburg domains, and registering something of those backgrounds through the practice of singing in thirds. naturally all of this is in search of fine-tuning. But at least until the incursions of modernity, when the towns became more accessible to the villages and various forms of symbiosis began to develop in the cultural sphere, the families of both urban and rural musics retained an element of mutual distinctiveness. and of course all these families stand in marked contrast to yet another family, that of western classical music, which occupied a growing space in Balkan musical life. it may be interesting to examine the coexistence of several different stylistic families in a region not yet referenced in this book, the presentday state of Montenegro. Following the wars of Yugoslav succession, only 5 in major serbian cities, influences came from vojvodina. the song ‘sve što mene okružava’ of 1793 by Dositej Obradović (a writer from vojvodina who was influential in spreading enlightenment thought in serbia) is characteristic, with the melody written down by Josif Šlezinger (1790–1870), and later, in a different version, by isidor Bajić (1878– 1915), while one of the best-known of all – made famous not least through a popular set of piano variations by Kornelije stanković (1831–65) – is ‘Što se bore misli moje’, whose text was by prince Mihailo Obrenović.

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serbia and Montenegro were left in the federal state, and Montenegro gained its full independence from this rump Yugoslavia as late as 2006. Following the Ottoman conquest, depopulation, and an inflow of vlachs, modern Montenegro emerged in the early eighteenth century under a petrović-njegoš theocracy based in the old capital of Cetinje.6 it gained formal recognition in 1878. as one of the few regions in south east europe to have held the Ottomans at bay, Montenegro was widely regarded, and regarded itself, as a warrior nation that embodied neo-medieval qualities of heroism, stoicism, and rugged independence, qualities that were an easy prey to romantic myth-making. as a result it became a hunting ground for writers, including librettists, from elsewhere in europe, with impetus from the sonnet by tennyson.7 at the same time it responded to nineteenth-century national myth-making by fostering and nurturing its own sense of an heroic past, mainly through the ancient genre of epic song accompanied by gusle, in which the famous deeds of ‘heroes’ such as Marko Kraljević of prilep are recounted. 8 a musical map of Montenegro and surrounding territories might well begin with this genre, one of the oldest in the Balkans. it has become wellknown to literary scholars through the work of Milman parry and albert Lord, who followed Matija Murko in using this living tradition of epic to cast light on the homeric genre. ‘they are of the same diamond dust, the same seed’, says the Great Lady in the second of Kadare’s Three Kosovo Elegies, comparing the tales of the Balkan minstrels to the Greek tales.9 indeed Kadare’s intriguing novel The File on H (a reference to homer) was itself directly inspired by parry and Lord. this thesis proved influential not only in Classical scholarship, but in studies of epic more generally, including canonic works of Old and Middle english.10 in a nutshell, parry and Lord were oralists, who were keen to downplay any sense of a monumental author, and who preferred to understand the homeric epics

6 Despite its rich cultural heritage, Cetinje today has a neglected feel. With its imposing monastery and other public buildings in a village-like context, it strengthens the sense of Montenegro as the most ruritania-like of all the modern Balkan states. 7 see Wilkinson 1848, i, 533–4, for a characteristic presentation of this romanticised view of Montenegro. a more comic portrait was drawn by Franz Lehár, who used Montenegro as his model for pontevedro in The Merry Widow. 8 strictly speaking these songs come from adjacent herzegovina. see Fisher 1990 for an account of the Marko songs that compares written texts with the oral tradition. see also Wilkinson 1848, i, 440–1, where it is clear that the genre in 1848 was much as it is today; also trevor 1913, 60. 9 Kadare 2000, 70. 10 For an introduction to some of this work, see Foley 1981.

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as products of a tradition of improvised heroic songs that existed across the cultures and the ages, and of which extant written versions are just instantiations. the system (not too strong a word) developed by parry and Lord claimed to reveal the formulaic basis of improvised epic poetry, explaining the textual sophistication of the homeric epics in terms of the ‘natural’ emergence of repetition structures, variation sequences and other forms of patterning based on ‘formula’ and ‘theme’ (compare proppian functions and the generative grammar of Chomsky).11 as philip hardie puts it: ‘the epic strives for totality and completion, yet is at the same time driven obsessively to repetition and reworking’.12 the primary concern of parry and Lord was with the poetic text, but Lord also dealt with the interdependence of text and melody, and his account proposes a creative process in the music that echoes that of the poetry, an improvised, yet highly formulaic sound world, in which voice and (one-string) gusle shadow one another in heavily ornamented formulaic lines within a very narrow range. the point for now is that although Montenegro and ‘Old’ herzegovina were major centres for this tradition, it was by no means confined to these territories. it was also found in southern serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and albania, though parallels with albania are complicated by the difference of language. it was part of the parry-Lord premise that this kind of epic poetry would once have been much more widespread. indeed the singer-poet accompanied by some form of fiddle in narrative and epic songs was once common throughout the Middle east and even down to parts of West africa,13 and there are obvious parallels with other traditions, not least in ireland. the nub of it is that for parry and Lord epics survived as a living tradition only in those parts of Yugoslavia and albania that had resisted modernisation. the material they collected was from both Christian and Muslim communities, but with a leaning towards the latter on the grounds that the Muslim singers were less ‘contaminated’ by contact with the printed text. thus the tradition of Montenegrin Christian epic poetry, famously canonised in written form by petar ii petrović njegoš and by the Croatian

11  see Lord 1965, and especially chapter 3. note here too the link with Judeo-spanish ballads in Mauleón-Berlowitz, 1995. 12 hardie 1992, 1. 13 hale 1998.

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ivan Mažuranić (as well as by successors such as radovan Bećirović),14 belonged to the same world as the southern slav epics collected by the serb vuk stefanović Karadžić. and likewise the Muslim songs recorded by parry and Lord in eastern Montenegro, especially sung by the guslar avdo Međedović from Bijelo polje, were part of a wider tradition in the sandžak (now divided between serbia and Montenegro), herzegovina and large tracts of Bosnia.15 naturally the subject matter is antithetical (repelling the turk; defending the turk),16 but in terms of musico-poetic structures and processes the Christian and Muslim traditions were all but synonymous.17 together they represented a family of semi-professional – and exclusively male – music-making that was associated especially with Montenegro and herzegovina.18 interestingly, this is an art that is still highly valued in Montenegro today even among the younger generation.19 nor is it purely a museum piece. new epics were created during the first Yugoslavia, and again during World War ii in support of both serbian Četniks and Croatian Ustaše. then in the wars of the 1990s the genre appeared in further revivalist incarnations, in which the nationalist ‘heroes’ of the day were duly elevated by association with those of old. the familiar poetic imagery, steeped in popular tradition, was harnessed to new causes, as the cult of the gusle lived again. indeed such adaptability was part of the history of the epic. Undoubtedly the symbolism of the gusle, resonant of virility and heroism, was considerably tarnished by the politics of the 1990s, but we should be wary of projecting this stigma back to the earlier history of the genre. the art of the (traditionally and mythically blind) guslar, was (is) assigned a high status, associated with public gatherings, competitions and festivals as well as with more local entertainments. he was, after all, the guardian of his country’s heroic past, a kind of troubadour, except that his social class was not necessarily high (pace njegoš).

14 the best-known poem by Bećirović is the epic The Battle at Mojkovac, based on the World War i battle at which the Montenegrins inflicted heavy casualties on the austrohungarian army. 15 For a discussion of Bosnian epics, see Čolaković 2007. 16 Wilton 2004. also Bosković 2004. 17 see the splendid description of epic singing in Durham 1904, 207–8. 18 there is an evocative account of a gypsy performing with gusle at a turkish home in herzegovina in Wilkinson 1848, ii, 44–5. 19 Danica Lajić-Mihajlović, an ethnomusicologist at the serbian academy of sciences and arts, has researched changing performance practices within this tradition.

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On a different level were the village musics that could be found all over the country, including genres we have already encountered. Ganga is one such, and although its sound world is at some remove from that of epic song, it too relies on formulaic improvisation based on a very limited pitch range. there is some overlap in the geographical spread of these two Dinaric-centred genres, but whereas we can track the epic tradition eastwards to embrace serbia, ganga ranged rather to the north, where it maintained a strong presence in ‘the land of the Morlachs’, in western herzegovina, imotska Krajina and the Dalmatian Zagora (in the Croatian Dinaric alps). then again, we might turn our gaze to the ‘savage borderland’ to the south of the country (the land of the blood feuds and the Kanun of Lek), where we would encounter a different idiom, associated with albanian Catholic villages such as Zatrijebač and Gusinje. Much of this music is preserved today in the work of contemporary ensembles like Besa,20 and it includes wedding songs and dances (the ubiquitous kolo), together with pastoral genres performed on fyelli [floyera]. predictably, it is similar in style to music from northern (Geg) albania, of which these villages were once a part. and like the other traditional musics of Montenegro, it follows a pattern that we have already encountered elsewhere. as long as the villages remained relatively isolated, their music was both unique to the specific locality and at the same time united with music springing from similar ecologies much further afield. then, as village and town increasingly interacted, we find a remorseless ironing-out of such local styles to contribute to the more standardised idiom of the festival and the CD.21 the southern and eastern borders of Montenegro were in fact contested, especially before and after World War i, when there were tricky negotiations about albanian independence and about the status of the sandžak centred on Bijelo polje. all these territories remained under turkish rule until the Balkan wars of 1912–13. even podgorica, the present capital, was occupied by the turks as a garrison town in 1474 and only transferred to Montenegro in 1878, at which point it had a mere handful of Montenegrin inhabitants.22 the turkish legacy here was both direct and indirect, and in some cases it resulted in fascinating shifts of meaning. in addition

20 the albanian word ‘besa’, roughly translatable as ‘oath’, is drawn from the law of Lek. 21  the ‘traditional sound of Montenegro’ is widely marketed on CD today. 22 part of tito’s strategy in confirming the republic status of Montenegro was to weaken the hegemonic tendencies of serbia and Croatia.

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to pan-Ottoman urban traditions that continued to flourish here (edith Durham, describing a rom wedding in the city, refers to ‘a long howling chant, while the pom-pom and metallic jingle of the tambourine sounded over the voices with mechanical regularity’),23 podgorica after 1878 assimilated a tamburica tradition that had by then become a familiar part of the soundscape of the western Balkans, flourishing especially in northern Croatia and vojvodina. here we find yet another transformation in the symbolic significance of an instrument, setting up a cluster of associations that are in sharp contrast with those attaching to the gusle. the tamburica (tanbûr) arrived in the Balkans from turkey initially, but the tamburica societies that sprang up in the towns and cities of the wider region (the earliest recorded was founded by pajo Kolarić in Osijek in 1847) quickly divested themselves of their oriental characteristics, including their unequal temperament.24 initially these ensembles were cultivated by hungarian roma, but later they were linked to the illyrian nationalist movement, and in due course they were often associated with the socialist movements and even with the factories and workplaces that accompanied emergent industrialism in the wider region. the earliest reference to a tamburica ensemble in presentday Montenegro takes us to coastal Kotor [Catarro] in 1866, but other towns followed suit in the later nineteenth century, and that included podgorica, where, as Gordana Ćetkovic points out, the gradske pjesme [urban songs] were often accompanied by a tamburica ensemble.25 the repertory, which can still be heard in revival today, certainly foregrounded local traditions, but the musical idiom is best thought of as a local variant of yet another family of styles, this time characteristic of towns and cities all over the western Balkans. through its association with both Croatia and serbia, the tamburica ensemble became in due course an explicit symbolic statement of proto-Yugoslav cultural independence, and eventually a construction of serbian and (especially) Croatian nationalisms.26 But its associations were not with the heroic deeds proclaimed by the guslar, but rather with (illyrian) peace and harmony, with an arcadian, pastoral ideal.27 in particular, it has developed a thriving

23 Durham 1904, 25. 24 see Feldman 1996, 143 on the origins of the tanbûr. 25 Ćetkovic 2002, 18. 26 March 1983. On neo-traditional tamburica music, see also Bonifacić 1993. 27 Žanić 2007, 62–75.

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tradition in diaspora, though the label ‘tamburica orchestra’ is treated very loosely these days; it seems the tamburica is no longer a prerequisite! turkish influences were stronger and longer-lasting in Muslim townlets in eastern Montenegro. thus towns such as plav, once an albanian stronghold, maintained an oriental tradition of music-making much longer than podgorica, and the tradition is preserved today, at least in fragmentary form. epic song with gusle is found here, and so too is traditional singing na glas. But in addition there is a distinctive Muslim tradition of song and dance characteristically accompanied by an ensemble of tamburas, accordions and the vase-shaped ‘goblet’ drum known as tarabuka. this idiom marks an intriguing stage of the double transition between east and west, pre-modernity and modernity. and Dimitrije Golemović has suggested that it also represents a point of transition between village and town, somewhat akin to the ravna pjesma [flat songs] that he identifies (controversially) as an early form of sevdalinka in Bosnia.28 the harmonic world occupied by this Muslim tradition of plav is characteristically ambivalent. it preserves the cadential second of village song, for example, but then tends to absorb this either within an oriental modality, or (because of the accordion) an implicit or explicit diatonic structure. in some contexts the second is left unresolved, while in others it functions as a component of a pseudo v7 harmony, except that the ensuing ‘tonic’ (even when it closes the song) is simply a momentary resolution and does not represent an underlying tonality. One final musical idiom – a world away from plav – should be mentioned here. the very different history and topology of the Montenegrin coastal strip has promoted a very different kind of music-making. this coastline, embracing the Gulf of Kotor, was known prior to habsburg annexation as venetian albania, signifying its ambivalent status as an appendage to venice’s Dalmatian territories or a remnant of its former albanian territories. Musically, it is marked above all by a style of choral singing associated with the klapa [singing group], a tradition Montenegro shares with littoral Croatia. it is now a well established and immensely popular tradition all along the Dalmatian coast, and while the Montenegrin practice is mainly confined to amateur groups, in Croatia it extends to fiercely competitive semi-professional choirs which form part of a highly sophisticated infrastructure, involving tours, television and radio performances, festivals and competitions.

28 Golemović 1996. see p. 298.

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the homophonic idiom of the songs themselves is much closer to popular italian choral music than to anything heard in the mountain villages, and this is reflected in the common practice of accompanying the songs (where they are accompanied at all) with mandolins rather than, or as well as, tamburas. With their ‘sweet’ harmonies and characteristically nostalgic tone, the Dalmatian songs represent a kind of meeting point between traditional and popular musics; indeed the journey from the former to the latter is reflected in what has now become a common subdivision of the genre into ‘traditional klapa’, ‘festival klapa’ and ‘modern klapa’. Where the first of these categories signifies a staple diet of traditional songs, the last refers to the common tendency of the klapa to promote new composition. the newly composed songs may in their turn enter the repertory as ‘classics’ of Dalmatian harmony, but more crucially they point to an important distinction between this tradition and most of the others discussed here. the klapa repertory is neither preserved, nor in revival, but is part of a living tradition.29 Finding the Centres: People and Traditions i have used the term ‘tradition’ rather freely in this brief guided tour of Montenegro. it has been invoked largely on geo-cultural grounds, referring to the transmission – the ‘handing over’ (Latin: tradere) – of musical traits that are distinctive to certain communities in certain segments of the country. such segmentation is hardly an exact science. We are speaking of very roughly defined regions with which particular cultural characteristics have been loosely identified. But the key point is that each of them points beyond the political state to suggest affinities with much wider geo-cultural areas that share something of the same characteristics. as we begin to identify these larger cultural areas we may be tempted to give a clearer focus to them, in a word to speak of traditions: traditions of epic song that reach deep into the heartlands of the central and eastern Balkans; of strident village musics shared with neighbouring albania; of peasant singing na glas that gives expression to the distinctive mountain culture of the Dinaric alps; of tamburica ensembles that point to the illyrianism associated with towns and cities in the western Balkans; of urban songs and dances that look right across the Balkans to

29 Ćaleta 1997 and Marjanović 1998.

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an Ottoman-turkish homeland; and of singing groups that signal a Mediterranean world of italian-influenced resorts and islands. Mapping the traditions in this way is not a neutral exercise. in the act of mapping we appropriate them and ascribe values to them. For, as Michel Foucault reminds us, traditions are contained within, rather than existing prior to, the discourses about them.30 they are retrospective constructions, and invariably linked to larger issues of cultural politics. One could go further and suggest that the point at which a tradition becomes identified as such is the point at which it is already appropriated, and hence subject to transformation, or alternatively revival. invariably it is the outsider who labels and classifies, and in the case of the Balkans that means the Western outsider drawn from a relatively small literate elite. this process came into its own in the late eighteenth century, at which point enlightened europe, having emerged from the religious wars of the seventeenth century, seemed increasingly anxious to construct a marginalised other to its own educated, sophisticated, and well-bred circles. several peoples exemplified this opposition between civilisation and its (barbaric) other, including at various times the scots, Bretons and andalusians. But the Montenegrins also served, albeit often as a kind of appendage to the Morlachs of Dalmatia, a vlach people whose ‘discovery’ in the late eighteenth century generated an important body of travel literature and fiction.31 For Western travellers, the main point about the Morlachs was that they were the people of the mountainous interior, as distinct from the coast, and they were variously identified with Dalmatian Croats, serbs from the Krajina, slavicised vlachs or Montenegrins.32 the historical background to their ‘discovery’ was the extension inwards of venetian Dalmatian territories in the early eighteenth century, following which the Dalmatian Morlachs joined slavic eastern europe in the construction of what Larry Wolff has aptly called a ‘geography of backwardness’.33 and in keeping with this prevailing colonial or semi-colonial discourse, the Morlachs were naturally labelled barbaric, wild and primitive. they were ‘a race of ferocious men, unreasonable, without humanity, capable of any misdeed’.34 30 Foucault 2002, 33, and elsewhere in the book. 31  the best introduction to this, both from historical and literary points of view, is Wolff 2001. 32 ibid., 157. 33 ibid., 7. 34 ibid., 2.

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there was, however, an alternative discourse. the abbé Fortis claimed to have found among the Morlachs ‘the innocent and natural liberty of the pastoral centuries’, finding these people ‘uncorrupted by the society that we call civilised’.35 and in an interesting intellectual trajectory, this rousseau-inspired ideology of romanticism, also a product of the enlightenment but at odds in many ways with enlightenment values, not only found its way into the influential theories of culture (as distinct from civilisation) promoted by herder, but was later absorbed and transformed by an elitist, enlightenment-engendered Modernist ideology, within which uncontaminated, ‘primitive’ societies came to assume a privileged status. the ambiguities in this story even left traces on the much later development of comparative musicology (later ethnomusicology) as a discipline. For one thing, the colonial perspectives proved hard to eradicate. european scholars in particular found it difficult to avoid slipping into discourses that betrayed all too clearly the european origins of their discipline. as Michael herzfeld put it with reference to the mother discipline of anthropology, marginality ‘highlights the eurocentric ideology that both spawned [the discipline] and now elicits its most pious ire’.36 Yet at the same time, a modernist ideology, in anxious quest for authenticity, was careful to place rural ‘folk music’ alongside modernist art music on the side of the angels. Both were ‘pure’, in the sense that they were respectively innocent of, or wary of, the debasements of mercantile art. Bartók became the touchstone for this ideological position. it not only informed his project as an ethnomusicologist; it further clarified his compositional project, where he sought to create an ambitious hybrid of unrationalised peasant music and Modernist art music. this same ideology was responsible for devaluing urban popular music, which was thought to be tainted and degenerate, hybrid in the worst sense, and in the case of Balkan music ‘oriental’ to boot. these repertories, and the roma who so often performed them, were therefore deemed to lack authenticity by a Modernist generation, and this influenced the ethnomusicological agenda, which for long enough remained nervous of cultural hybridity. it is only relatively recently that the ways in which music inhabits urban spaces have attracted serious scholarly attention. Moreover, to the extent that urban popular music in the Balkans was shaped by Ottoman traditions it faced an additional layer of prejudice from native schol-

35 ibid., 160–1. see also Gulin 1997. 36 herzfeld 1987, 3.

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ars, for whom the Ottoman era was often regarded as a kind of dark ages, even a suspension of history. Within a modernist discourse that separates out progress and degeneracy, such music was located on the wrong side of the divide. On the right side was european art music. this, after all, was not only the most highly valued and prestigious music to infiltrate the Balkans; it was widely regarded (including by the Ottomans) as a potent symbol of social status and progressive values. Where Montenegro was concerned this infiltration was hardly extensive, but it occurred nonetheless, and on several fronts. in the first place a harmonised Orthodox chant on the serbian model was practiced in Cetinje, following the partial devolution of jurisdiction from peć to sremski Karlovci. njegoš was a familiar figure in sremski Karlovci, given that for much of the nineteenth century the monastery and the royal court were closely allied in a formal theocracy (as it happens, a separate Montenegrin Orthodox church was created much later in 1993). at the same time theatrical productions of plays by Đorđe protić, including singing parts, coincided with the momentous arrival of a piano in Cetinje,37 while the demands of international ceremonial and diplomatic protocol led to the formation of a ‘first’ military band in 1871, followed by a ‘second’ in podgorica in 1899 under the leadership of František-Franjo vimer and robert tolinger, though it too moved to Cetinje in 1892. the band was an ambitious venture, functioning as a music school for around forty youths (Ludvík Kuba recalls staying in the podgorica school in 1892), and in 1899 it engendered a separate string orchestra.38 there were other developments along these lines, including choral societies in both towns (Branka in podgorica; Njegoš in Cetinje). and there was also an important tradition of formal music-making associated with Kotor and its environs, somewhat analogous to that found in the more prestigious ragusa [Dubrovnik] just along the coast. this was mainly venetianinspired, but there was some influence from austro-hungarian circles too, especially following 1815. in the main, it consisted of bands and amateur societies, but there were occasional visits from italian opera troupes, for these regularly toured the adriatic coast as well as visiting the italianinfluenced ionian islands to the south.

37 it is widely thought that the first piano arrived in Montenegro with princess Darinka, when she came from trieste to marry Danilo i. 38 Kuba 1996. For an account of the second band, see ivanović 2001.

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to view this musical life from the perspective of a european elite is again to invite a discourse of centres and peripheries. here we need to consider a broader european narrative. it is a familiar one, in which privileged social classes, aristocratic and then bourgeois, defined themselves culturally by institutionalising their music first within sacred and courtly life and then in a manner independent of both. in this latter stage – in the late eighteenth century – a newly consolidated bourgeois class established its principal ceremony, the public concert, in the major cities of england, France and central europe, and then created a repertory of classical music, with related concert rituals, to confirm and authenticate the new status quo. the resulting european canon was not so much a selfconfirming demonstration of universal value (let alone truth) as a model of the privilege attaching to one corner only of a plural cultural field. the canon, in other words, was an instrument of exclusion, and one that legitimated and reinforced the identities and values of those who exercised cultural power. Moreover, it was no less integrally linked to the construction of centralising national identities. Within this narrative Montenegro, like the Balkans as a whole, was relegated to a periphery; the region became part of Larry Wolff ’s ‘geography of backwardness’. that is where we entered this chapter: with a hegemonic discourse of marginalisation that emanated from enlightened europe but had a considerable capacity to shake self-belief at the periphery. the fact that humanism, cosmopolitanism and modernism were understood as essentially european or western categories not only by those at the centre but by those who were marginalised is of some significance here, since it produced an experience of liminality, an awareness of the minority vantage-point, that promoted (in art music at least) a culture that might be characterised by way of Gellner’s category ‘hostile imitation’. it is within this context, a context that promotes european exceptionalism, that the familiar description of the Balkans as a frontier region has been made. a frontier is by definition a peripheral zone, and it can often take on rather particular characteristics, creating a specific mentalité, a periphery of the imagination against which the cultural and political identities of others might be constructed. as Charles King remarked, people shape themselves against this image of the frontier,39 for it is a site that nurtures what homi Bhabha has called ‘the dream of the deprived, or the

39 King 2004, 8–11.

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illusion of the powerless’.40 Yet frontiers also present certain advantages, not least that they are potentially privileged sites from which to look critically at a centre, if not indeed to probe the stability and durability – even the very idea – of that centre. and from this vantage point one might either deconstruct or collude with the eurocentric tendency first to alienate or exoticise a cultural other and then to appropriate it by imbuing it with european values (or alternatively to project it as a dependent negative image of those values). if we return to our musical map of Montenegro we might re-examine our categories in this light. With art music, we might argue, native musicmaking was largely in response mode; nor did it acquire critical potential, as happened elsewhere in eastern europe when ideas and practices from the centre fused with slowly developing nationalist sentiments on the periphery. village music, on the other hand, initially alienated from the centre, was in due course appropriated by it as a convenient symbol of an ahistorical natural community, a counterweight to commercial culture. and finally Ottoman-influenced urban popular music was parcelled up as oriental, invoking values associated with the essentialised and polarised geo-cultural pairs europe and Orient, and – at least since thermopylae – with a clear implication of the cultural and moral superiority of the former. this invokes another advantage of a frontier. it usually invites us to look in two directions. We might turn around and face east, and then we would see another, quite different, centre. East – West On the eve of World War i, the travel writer roy trevor published a short book on Montenegro.41 travel books on this region were not uncommon at the time, and like many of them trevor’s is an odd mix of acute observation, idealisation and prejudice, similar in its descriptions to the account by John Gardner Wilkinson more than sixty years earlier. the basic story is an admiring one, depicting a warrior kingdom peopled by scrupulously honest, fearless heroes, currently governed (in 1913) by a scrupulously honest, fearless King. Yet the book identifies certain downsides to the legendary heroism of the Montenegrins. the infamous vendettas or blood feuds – a practice shared with neighbouring albanians (described 40 Bhabha 1994, xi. 41  trevor 1913.

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by edith Durham in High Albania, dissected by Margaret hasluck in The Unwritten Law, and brilliantly depicted by ismail Kadare in his novel Broken April) – are by no means idealised, and the warrior ethos is deemed to foster not just a contempt for hard work, but a profound misogyny; this was no country for a woman.42 perhaps the most interesting aspect of trevor’s account is the contrast it presents between the heartland of the nation, depicted as a kind of insular mountain fortress peopled by indigenous Montenegrins of provincial culture, and the borderlands of the sandžak and albania (including podgorica), which were multicultural in aspect, marked by ‘the babel of strange tongues, the roar of rough, harsh voices’. the marketplace, we are told, thronged with turks and albanians rather than Montenegrins, and it was clearly a site of shared experiences as well as ancient hatreds. already this portrait challenges pedigreed narratives about a collision of empires and religions (habsburg-Ottoman, Christian-Muslim), and there is further qualification in trevor’s insistence that Orthodox Montenegrins harboured their grudges against Catholic albanians with no less venom than against turkish Muslims. We are reminded, in short, that there are dangers in reading Balkan histories reductively as pre-histories to the kind of ‘clash of civilisations’ famously proposed by samuel huntington.43 the Montenegrin case demonstrates something of the space that exists between our validating historical discourses (together with their slogans) and the lived experience of historical subjects on the ground. and much the same applies to the wider Balkan region. it has become conventional to think of the Balkans as transitional between something that is an essentially european culture and something else. Whatever that something else may be, it is usually filed under some version of ‘east’, though the geographical and conceptual definitions of ‘east’ remain fluid. vesna Goldsworthy refers to an asymmetry in this picture. While it is true that europe constructed the Balkans to its own specifications, this was achieved through ‘an imperialism of the imagination’ in which a leading part was played by Britain, the very country which had the least material (i.e. economic) involvement with the region. Conversely, while the 42 hasluck 1954; Durham 1985 (1909), Kadare 1990. in theory at least, the ‘law of Lek’ accorded some degree of privilege to women within what is by any standards a patristic society. it is intriguing that albania has proved attractive to independent women travellers (allcock and Young 1991). 43 huntington 1993. adam Kuper points out that huntington’s reading was memorably anticipated by t.s. eliot. ‘antagonistic religions’, according to eliot, ‘means antagonistic cultures; and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled’ (Kuper 2006).

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Ottoman empire colonised much of south east europe physically, and for a long period, ‘its direct narrative contribution to the way the Balkans are seen and imagined by outsiders is negligible’.44 in general, Goldsworthy is a little too ready to impose on the Balkans a saidian model of cultural imperialism that meets the case in some particulars but not in others.45 Yet even if her approach relies too heavily on polarising east and West, it has the merit of exposing starkly the question of subject position: of a european Balkans, an Ottoman Balkans, and a Balkan Balkans. none of these are stable categories – indeed the reification of the first is a problem with Goldsworthy’s book – and there is no shortage of fissures leading from one to the other. nonetheless, there may be some value in presenting them reductively at this point. the qualifications will appear soon enough. how did the Balkans look from Western europe? this question has generated an extensive literature, and it will be dealt with quickly here. it begs another question. Where, and what, is europe? ‘Which is europe’s true mass?’, asks Kadare’s Great Lady. More than a name, and more than a place, europe is above all an idea, and one that gained focus in enlightenment thought and the historiography that emerged from it.46 as an entity, europe’s borders were historically fluid and with considerable slippage between geo-political and geo-cultural description; it lacks in truth clearly marked physical frontiers. pedigreed histories of the idea describe a slow process of holistic self-definition to a liberal agenda, proceeding alongside a gradual rise in status to global hegemon.47 in this narrative, the Byzantine empire was the crucial protective shield that enabled the process to occur,48 while the self-definition itself is presumed to have proceeded hand-in-hand with the definition of an oriental other. at a late stage of this narrative, the Balkans, which in the seventeenth century was still widely perceived to be part of the east, was appropriated by europe, but problematised within it. if it really was a part of europe, it was an alien,

44 Goldsworthy 1998, x. 45 said 1978. For an appraisal of the orientalism debate, see chapter 1 of MacKenzie 1995. 46 Leyser 1992. the seventeenth century was arguably the crucial period of european self-definition, the point at which its distinctiveness from other cultures and civilisations (based on a neo-hellenic ideal stemming from the renaissance) was affirmed. 47 For an interesting angle on evolving definitions of europe, see stoianovich 1994. see also Le Goff 2005. 48 this point is well made by Judith herrin in several publications. see, for example, herrin 2007.

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marginal part, and transitional to other spaces. and it is arguably this liminality, rather more than Goldsworthy’s imperialism, that defined the Balkans in relation to the formative category ‘Western europe’. thus, in music history the tendency of european critical discourses was either to exoticise the Balkan region in the manner described by Goldsworthy (the case of traditional musics) or to write it out of european culture altogether (the case of art musics). either way there was a larger universalising agenda, promoted in a select cluster of high-prestige cultural centres. that agenda privileged a modern musical culture in europe, associated with the twin formation of a canon and an avant-garde and predicated above all on certain historical and analytical readings of Beethoven’s heroic style and its aftermath. this narrative – i will call it the march to modernity – is one to which i will return later. the point to make here is that there is certainly little doubt about where the Balkans sits in relation to it. this region barely makes the standard music history books. in our present political and intellectual climate there are other ways to read european history, and these suggest ways of reconfiguring the status of the Balkans. it will be enough to mention edgar Morin, whose book Penser l’Europe invites us to ‘think europe’ by engaging with the structural and cultural pluralism that shaped it in the first place, predating the monolithic thrust of modernity and arguably surviving its demise.49 Morin refers to the meeting of multiple components in the construction of a collective european identity as a ‘carrefour’, and he goes on to argue that this multiplicity persists into modernity de facto, that there are markers of identity that prise open the closed borders defining territories, religions and ideologies. More than that, he demonstrates that even the elite centres depend on their peripheries to preserve their status. the traffic, in other words, is two-way. not only do the common ideals that crystallised in the centres permeate the peripheries; the constitution of those ideals draws heavily on those same peripheries in the first place. Morin is not of course denying the importance of centres, nor their universalising tendencies. But he does accord to marginality a positive role beyond the obvious one in which it has served as an important motor of activism in european politics and society.50 the application of Morin’s

49 Morin 1987. 50 this is not the place to elaborate such thoughts, but it is certainly tempting to look at redefinitions of civilisation that are emerging in the new europe, in which the tradi-

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‘carrefour’ to music can only be hinted at here. We can trace it way back to the transalpine origins of Gregorian chant, the beginnings of a long process of mutual interaction and accommodation between northern and southern european styles and practices, at least as significant as any later east-West dialogues. and we can demonstrate that in subsequent periods peripheries not only served as stylistic feeders to central musical traditions, but were themselves subject to radical reevaluation and even reconstitution with the rise of a nationalist ideology. it is reasonable to ask a less familiar question. how did the Balkans look from the asian rather than the european side of the aegean? how exactly did the Ottomans view the Balkans?51 this question needs more sustained consideration at this stage. there has been a recent spate of publications on Occidentalism, and this literature, which is mainly about how ‘the rest’ views ‘the West’, is distinctly relevant to our question. however, i will argue at the very end of this book that so-called Balkanism cannot be aligned with Occidentalism in a straightforward way, any more than it can be aligned with more familiar orientalist discourses. For now i will simply remark that the Ottoman perspective on europe was anything but stable. it oscillated from engagement to withdrawal and back again: from a position that was antithetical to europe to one that was sympathetic to europe, from fierce rejection to studied emulation. in principle, the values of the Ottoman empire remained largely unmediated by those inter-dynastic, essentially cosmopolitan, agendas of rationalism and liberalism, modernity and progress, that increasingly defined europe following the religious wars. For the Ottomans the ostensible goal and duty was to extend the ‘domain of peace’, which they did on behalf of islam with a war machine that in its heyday was second to none in efficiency and ruthlessness, and with sustained policies of repopulation. and within this domain there was a tolerance of faiths and nations that contrasted with the proselytising and controlling mechanisms associated with the later european empires. this was the dubiously labelled Pax Ottomanicus. it bore little resemblance to modern european nationalisms, but was if anything closer to the social technologies of imperial rome, where qualities of romanity were not dependent on ethnicity but were disbursed to the conquered under certain conditions.

tional legitimations of a highly centralised Franco-German system are challenged by an eastwards drift and by a greater acceptance of diversity. 51 see adanir 2002 for several takes on this question.

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aside from the security they offered, the Ottomans did little for subject territories; infidels were taxed more heavily than Muslims, and there were other constraints on their activities. indeed this was part and parcel of the philosophy. they left surprisingly little in the form of a durable material culture, while at the same time they expected and demanded that their basic needs – especially while engaged in military campaigns – would be met by subject peoples. all the same, government was exercised for the most part with a light hand, for the only major obligation was to preserve order in the expanding ‘domain of peace’. indeed the linking factor in the Ottoman conduct of war and peace was precisely the primacy of order, and the singular combination of elegance, rigour and ruthlessness with which order was achieved and maintained. it held for the bureaucracy of war, for the complex mechanism of rewards and penalties, for the millet system of government, for the symbolism of public life that extended from the courts of the palace down to the ordering of public processions and even to the dress codes that identified peoples and their religions, and for the institutions of arts and learning.52 the empire operated by way of various kinds of contract established between the sublime porte and native elites (religious in the main), many of which retained their legislative authority under Ottoman rule. it encouraged but did not usually enforce conversion to islam, but in certain parts of the Balkans, notably Bosnia, the sandžak and albania, mass conversion did indeed take place. its self-image was one of medieval certainties, defined against the simplest of alterities: anything outside the ‘domain of peace’ was the ‘domain of war’. its hierarchies were rigid, but it was relatively non-discriminatory, finding stability in its diversity, and harnessing the multiple, regionally distinctive, talents of its subjects to the service of the centre. thus the Ottoman view of the Balkans, whose core territories were known by them as rumelia, was both inclusive and appreciative, not least because this region was a major source of wealth and power. With its complex history, it not only differed in important respects from the eastern territories; it was itself internally diversified, anything but a single entity. For the Ottomans this was its strength. they were in no need of a foil to help shape some emergent identity; that is abundantly clear from the ‘Ottoman mentality’ so skillfully filtered by robert Dankoff through the

52 Dankoff 2004, 85–93. histories of the Ottoman empire and its aftermath include shaw 1976 and shaw and shaw 1977, Kinross 1977, Goodwin 1998, and Wheatcroft 1993.

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voluminous travel writings of evliya Çelebi.53 What the Ottomans needed were the multiple skills available: the commercial and maritime acumen of the Greeks, the legal and bureaucratic skills of the Jews, the equestrian know-how of the Bulgars, the talents of the ragusan goldsmiths and the salonican textile manufacturers, the musical gifts of the roma. to a large extent it was the people of the provinces – the raya – who maintained the Ottoman system. they fed in their taxes and their skills, but at the same time they benefited from the stability of the system, and from the freedom of religious expression it allowed. this account maps easily onto music. the Ottoman tradition of art music, having forged its independence from earlier islamic traditions, was centred on the Court. it was an elite music, standing outside local ethnic and religious conventions, but more than in europe this central tradition, while it remained separate from peripheral cultures, was constructed in part from those cultures.54 in this it perfectly epitomised the Ottoman system, at once highly centralised and a patchwork of nationalities and lifestyles. interestingly, it was just when the socio-political system was beginning to weaken at the centre (broadly speaking from the beginning of the eighteenth century) that Ottoman high culture entered its most creative phase, marked by a productive reciprocity of centre and periphery. Where music was concerned, not only was the central tradition inclusive of non-Muslim and non-turk musicians (Jews, Greeks and armenians were prominent in its constitution, and were attached to the Court and trained at the royal school); what actually survives of this oral tradition in notated form was largely due to musicians from the european periphery. the later development of the tradition – even down to basics of organology – likewise depended on imports, acquisitions and adaptations from folk traditions and from the constituent regions of the empire, especially the Balkans. in this respect the roma played a crucial role, but Greek and romanian musicians were also important (the terms sirto and longa, Greek and romanian respectively, were widely adopted for relevant dances, for example), and so were sephardic Jews. in other words, while the basic genres, scale systems and improvisatory devices belonged to a wider Middle eastern culture, elements drawn from a pre-Ottoman musical practice were synthesised into something uniquely and centrally

53 ibid. 54 this is discussed at length in one of Bülent aksoy’s essays in aksoy 2008.

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Ottoman. the tradition then maintained its vitality in part through constant infusions from peripheral cultures.55 Famously, of course, the empire declined, even as Western europe flourished. Modernisation may have been an economic necessity, but the underlying structures could not easily be changed, and there is some irony in the fact that the Tanzimat reforms served only to hasten the end. in their nineteenth-century dialogues with the Great powers the Ottomans increasingly borrowed european discourses, including those ethnonational discourses that were already shaping the thinking of Balkan elites. even as the forces of nationalism overwhelmed the empire, educated sectors of Ottoman society were looking to europe, aspiring not just to european values, but to european fashions. the empire was increasingly sidelined, its structures and values widely regarded as old-fashioned, indeed its very survival dependent on mutual antagonisms among the Great powers. By the time we reach modern turkey, atatürk was outperforming anyone in europe in his contempt for the Ottomans, though he retained a reluctant affection for their art and music (indeed, modern turkey’s need to absorb its Ottoman legacy is a resonant topic in itself ). the world of culture reflected these changes, but not in a straightforward way, for people’s lives take time to register political change, and cultural continuities often play a compensatory role. three points might be noted. First, the music of heterodox islam was forced underground in turkey in the late 1920s, and the sufi tekke-s closed. significantly, music continued in the tekke-s of the Balkans, however, though these were more often part of the Bektaşi and other orders than the Mevlevî, with which Ottoman art music has been closely associated. second, Ottoman popular music – music café traditions in the eastern Balkans, and various hybrid genres in the western Balkans – continued to thrive after the collapse of the empire, so that in this respect the Ottoman legacy remained active. and third, the music of the western classical tradition, already high-status in parts of the western Balkans, increasingly permeated turkey itself, a process that had begun in the nineteenth century but accelerated in the early twentieth. Finally, and again briefly, how did the Balkans look from the Balkans? it is an impossibly generalised question, even in relation to those communities of social and intellectual elites who might have thought to ask it.

55 an interesting inversion of this is the unusual phenomenon of a turkish musicologist writing about the Balkans: see Gazimihal 1937.

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implicated in the question is another: how did the world beyond look from the Balkans? ivo andrić, in The Days of the Consuls, conveys something of the stoic hostility with which ‘silent Bosnia’ viewed the meddlers from without, whether they were ‘turks’ or ‘Franks’.56 however, the irony is that attempts to celebrate ‘our own’, as distinct from a foreign, culture drew heavily on premises bequeathed from without. We are back to the opening propositions of this chapter. at times it really does seem that this region is for ever fated to enter history on the back of other histories, as a kind of adjunct to, or alternatively in resistance to, Central europe or the Ottomans. With the demise of the empire, the tendency was to block out the Ottoman years completely and then to replace Balkan identities with national identities. For historiography, including the historiography of culture, the result was a series of discrete ethnonational histories. ‘Our own’ became synonymous with the nation. there were interesting, but unsustained, attempts to invert some of these categories, as in the Zenitist movement in literature and art, whose founder Ljubomir Micić demanded a ‘balkanisation of europe’. But the more serious part of this enterprise was, as Miodrag Maticki argues, precisely an attempt to overcome the opposition between ’our own’ and ’foreign’.57 More to the point, in our present age, with Occidentalism on the critical agenda, it has been possible for critical theorists from the Balkans to investigate this topic afresh. rather than making do with the Balkans ’in the gaze of others’, we can now make room for a Balkan-instigated concept, now indeed a major publication, ‘Balkan as Metaphor’.58

56 andrić 2003c. 57 Maticki 2006. 58 Bjelić and savić 2002.

PART TWO

HISTORICAL LAYERS

10. Christmas celebrations in Topola, Šumadija, pre World War II. The men prepare to collect ritual oak branches. Traditionally the priests and the families burn the branches on Christmas Eve to invoke sunlight and heat for the coming year. © Courtesy of the Archive of the Foundation of King Peter I Karađorđević, Topola.

11. A photograph of the Serbian composer Ljubica Marić (1909–2003) taken in 1933. © Courtesy of the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

12. Iconic performance of Mozart’s Requiem amongst the ruins of the National Library in Sarajevo. Sarajevo Philharmonic, Sarajevo Cathedral Choir. Conductor Zubin Mehta, Soloists José Carreras, Ruggero Raimondi, Cecilia Gasdia, Ildiko Komlosi. 19 June 1994. © Courtesy of the Sarajevo Philharmonic.

13. Folk music group from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with performers on zurna, drum, accordion. Tešanj, Bosnia and Herzegovina. mid-20th century. © Courtesy of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

14. Markos Vamvakaris and his Piraeas ensemble, Athens, 1968. © Courtesy of the Musical Folklore Archives of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens.

15. A photograph of the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris (1883–1962) from the late 1950s. © Courtesy of the Manolis Kalomiris Society Archive.

16. Little-known photograph of the Romanian composer George Enescu (1881–1955) © Courtesy of Romanian Composers’ union.

17. The Căluşari from Vlaşca at Moşilor Fair (photograph Nicolae Ionescu).

CHAPTER SIx

A MAKAM-ECHOS CULTURE Grand Narratives From the perspective of what we now call Western Europe, there were two neighbouring ‘Easts’ prior to the Balkan Wars. Islam carried the East with it into Central and South West Europe, with historically fluid boundaries as political fortunes ebbed and flowed. Christianity created a further ‘East’, and in this case the geography was more clear-cut. The Balkans remains to this day the heartland of Orthodoxy.1 There was no love lost between Ottoman and Orthodox cultures. But the divide between them was widened by Balkan nationalist agendas. These agendas effaced from collective memory any elements of co-existence that had prevailed in Ottoman South East Europe, for there were certain natural alliances between Ottomans and Orthodox Christians, based on a shared antipathy to the Latin, Catholic world and to emergent Enlightenment values; in the early days of the empire Greeks and Turks lived cheek by jowl.2 But all those areas of communion between the two worlds were suppressed by the alignment of Orthodoxy to nationalist causes. And to understand this process, we must turn first to Greece. Inconveniently, at least for some cultural historians, Greece is an integral part of the Balkan peninsula. Even the most adventurous metaphorical reading of ‘the Balkans’ cannot quite ignore this basic geography. The difficulty lies in accommodating the geography within pedigreed historical narratives both of Western and of Southeastern Europe. There is a narrative of Greece and ‘the West’, where Greece is viewed as seminal to European self-awareness, and is widely regarded as symbolically privileged, ancestral to, and formative of, our core values. The eastern context for ancient Greek culture is played down in favour of an idealised uniqueness that can be claimed by the West.3 Greece becomes an oasis of civilisation 1  For an informal ethnography of today’s Orthodox world, see Clark 2000. 2 Kinross 1977, chapter 1. The term ‘Byzantine’ was applied long after the event to describe the Eastern Roman Empire. 3 A polemical, albeit controversial, alternative view is offered in Martin Bernal’s threevolume study Black Athena (Bernal 1987–2006).

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in a desert of barbarism, whether ancient Persian, Ottoman-Turkish or East-European Communist, though, as Michael Herzfeld reminds us, there is a price to pay for this: a perception that the modern nation somehow fails to live up to European standards of statehood and culture that were derived from putative Greek values in the first place.4 Then there is a narrative of Balkan hatreds. Here Greece is exempted from a popular stereotyping of the wider region as alien and aberrant, an ethnic cauldron where simmering ancient feuds would periodically boil over into violence. It is easy to use such stereotypes to make sense of, and to establish continuities with, the excesses of more recent Balkan history, as though Great Power politics had nothing to do with it.5 But whichever narrative we choose – Greece as the fountainhead of European values; ancient Balkan hatreds begetting modern Balkan hatreds – the effect is to divorce Greece from its (mainly Slavonic) Balkan neighbours. It is separated off from the more general culture of South East Europe and acquires in the process a unified national history, drawing together its ancient, medieval (Byzantine) and modern phases.6 If our narrative of Balkan hatreds ‘others’ a place, that of Greek origins ‘others’ a time. It separates the past (the ancient world) from the present (the modern world) as though by some invisible caesura.7 It seems we need to distance the past and divide it off from us in this way before we can appropriate it, before we can create an autonomous present that might be related to an autonomous past (quite when the past ends and the present begins is a question here). Of its nature, the writing of history contributes to marking off the past in this way. It is a way of registering the centrality of memory, the principal means by which we make sense of our selfhood, and of the relation between that selfhood and the social world.8 Memory, individual and collective, has no need of words, however. Words reify it, and stratify it. The fluid relation of past to present, where the distant event can feel contemporary and the recent event remote, can be prejudiced by words, and so too can a sense that the past lives on in a

4 Herzfeld 1987. 5 A widely-read presentation of this narrative is Kaplan 1993 (there is also a genre of semi-autobiographical travel literature of this kind in the Balkans; see Winchester 1999). In contrast, Glenny 1999 assigns due blame and credit to the Great Powers. 6 The prototype for such histories is Paparrigopoulos 1925. 7 Sahlins 1983. 8 Eric Hobsbawm argues that the destruction of ‘the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations’ is under threat in today’s world (Hobsbawm 1995, 3).

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dependent (rather than an autonomous) present, that it is ever with us, central to our daily lives.9 Yet the written text has distinct advantages, not least because it offers us protection, prestige and power. There are the comforts of classification, keeping at bay a disordered present; there are the pleasures of analysis, of sifting and dissecting, of supposedly demystifying the world;10 there is the promise of access to privileged knowledge; and above all there is the freedom to shape the past to our specifications. One effect of elevating the Greeks was to obscure alternative stories, including stories of other literate cultures in the eastern Mediterranean and the greater Middle East.11 Narratives of music history are embedded in all of this. One is a story of oriental infection. A foreign element, dangerous but seductive, was transferred to Europe by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire reached westward. This story is part and parcel of the narratives of national identity that developed throughout the Balkans in the nineteenth century.12 Something pure and natural, essentially European and preferably mono-ethnic, was corrupted, and the factors involved are specific. There is an Ottoman instrumentarium: those ‘non-European’ musical instruments that are widely found in the hybrid cultures of Ottoman territories in Europe. There is a vocal style characterised by nasal voice production, wide vibrato singing, and an elaborate improvised ornamentation circling around key scale steps. There are asymmetrical rhythms. And there is the so-called Hicâz tetrachord, whose augmented second, albeit in equal temperament, has been widely read as a signal and symbol of the Orient, mainly through innumerable European appropriations. Yet it is not obvious that any of these features can be attributed exclusively to Ottoman influence. The organology of ancient and traditional cultures suggests that there were long-standing commonalities in the nature and function of musical instruments across a much wider circumMediterranean region, embracing North Africa, the Levant and the eastern Balkans. The same goes for vocal idioms and rhythmic cycles. And as for the Hicâz tetrachord, this is present in the plagal second echos within Orthodox chant, whether medieval or post-Byzantine. The form of this we 9 De Certeau 1988. 10 The corollary of Max Weber’s progressive rationality is a disenchantment (or demystification) of the world. Musical instantiations are discussed in Weber 1958. 11  Dimitris Kitsikis has argued for a Greco-Turkish ‘common space’ (Kitsikis 1995). As yet this book has not been translated from Greek, but it has been discussed at length in Özkirimli and Sofos 2008. 12 See Milin 2008 for a view of this in relation to Serbia.

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recognise today may or may not have predated the Ottoman Empire; so far as I am aware, there can be no certainty either way.13 But in any case, rather than lining up Greece and the West in opposition to Ottoman traditions, one might speak of an older, more general culture of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, a culture of which Greece was a part. A related narrative of music history describes ancient Greek traditions as formative not only of European music, but also of Ottoman music. It proposes continuity between ancient Greek traditions and Byzantine repertories, which were in their turn the immediate ancestors of Ottoman art music. It further notes that the music theory of the ancient Greeks was transmitted in large part through Arab-language scholarship, by which route it reached both medieval Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans then neatly closed the circle by transferring these ideas back to modern Greece. As presented here, the narrative is reductive to the point of caricature, but even this brief outline is enough to indicate how the singularity of Greece is again emphasised. The continuity narrative was widely adopted by Greek musicologists, notably Constantinos Psakhos,14 but its influence has been more pervasive than this. It is certainly striking that distinguished articles on ancient Greece and on Byzantine chant in the New Grove Dictionary contextualise their topics more-or-less exclusively in relation to western music. Thus the reception of Greek theory in the West is discussed in some detail, but synergies with Persian and Arab theory are largely ignored. Likewise, parallels between Byzantine and Gregorian chant are discussed, but there is little hint that Byzantine echoi might have any connection whatever with Arab maqām-s or Ottoman makam-s.15 Only in a separate article on echos, first published in the 1980 edition, is there a hint that some such connection might exist. ‘It has also been suggested’, writes Miloš Velimirović, ‘that the concept of Echos strongly resembles the Arabic Maqām in its use of formulaic patterns. Such points need further study before the formulation of principles common to both musical cultures can be attempted’.16 Already in his pioneering studies of Arab music, Henry George Farmer separated out the independent systems of Arab, Persian and Byzantine 13 See Dragoumis 1966 for a comparison of Byzantine and Neo-Byzantine repertories, with clear implications for continuities. 14 Psakhos was of major significance for his establishment of a Department of Byzantine music within the modernised Athens Conservatory in 1904. 15 Matheisen 2001; Levy and Troelsgård 2001. 16 Velimirović 2001. A more adventurous approach to the topic is taken by Powers in his contributions to Powers et al. 2001.

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musical cultures, and later scholars have further differentiated them.17 But the differences are articulated mainly in ‘Books’ of music theory, whose relationship to praxes was by no means one of straightforward congruence. Whatever the differences in scales, modes and rhythms, interactivity between Arab and Persian traditions is a matter of historical record; indeed many of the theorists were themselves of Persian extraction, even if Arabic was the unifying language. Suffice it to say that historians of Near and Middle Eastern music commonly refer to the development of medieval pan-Islamic musical practices, covering an extensive geographical range, in the terms of a single ‘Great Tradition’, linked with varying degrees of specificity to the music practiced in ancient oriental civilisations.18 It has been less conventional to associate Byzantine sacred repertories (and we may include here the music for Christian rites in Georgia, Armenia and Syria, and even Egypt and Ethiopia) with this ‘Great Tradition’. The tendency has been to make a clean separation between Islamic and Christian musical cultures. Naturally there is a solid basis for this separation; it would be surprising if the spread of Christianity had not resulted in distinctive and specialised repertories. But within the complex and competing musical rites associated with the Christian Church in Syria, influences from Persian and Arabic traditions are now widely acknowledged,19 just as in Islamic Damascus, in the time of the Umayyads and even more under the Abbasids, we know that musicians played and sang Byzantine, as well as Arab and Persian, music. In his Ichos und Makam, published in 1994, Ioannis Zannos reinforces and generalises this point, drawing on medieval sources to establish that Byzantium contributed to the lingua franca of the ‘Great Tradition’.20 The orientalised Hellenism of Byzantium, in other words, was of distinct relevance to Arab and Persian musicians (men such as Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahānī studied Byzantine repertories), just as in a later period Ottoman art music proved to be important for post-Byzantine Orthodox traditions. Greek musicians from Asia Minor were very familiar with makam. They treated Ottoman art music as a secular counterpart to church music: witness the existence of Ottoman works in Byzantine notation, church compositions

17 Farmer 2001 (1929). See also Farhat 1990 and Feldman 1996. 18 Shiloah 1995. 19 For suggestive ‘similarities, homophonies [and] processes of toponymic assimilation’ between the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds, see Balivet 2004. See also Balivet 1999 and Jeffery 1992. 20 Zannos 1994.

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with explicit references to secular music in their titles, and lists made by Greek (Phanariot) musicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries detailing the relation between echoi and makam-s.21 Such reciprocity within a cosmopolitan culture makes for a more convincing historical description than accounts of a straightforward genealogical descent from ancient Greece via Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire.22 Before introducing two repertories that have reverberated across the Balkans, it will be worth commenting on yet another grand narrative of music history, by no means confined to the Balkans. According to this narrative, music history describes a progression from simple to complex forms. It may be explained in evolutionary terms (a kind of aesthetic Darwinism) or in the terms of an increasing rationalisation of resources (as described by Max Weber), and it may – and in earlier times almost always did – include some linkage to ideas of aesthetic value. Deconstructing this narrative is hardly a challenge. We need go little further than the acknowledgement that there are different qualities of complexity, and that it is risky to generalise criteria drawn from a single musical culture.23 Yet the covert influence of this thinking lingers on, not least in the tendency to equate oral traditions with simplicity and written traditions with complexity. Leo Treitler warns us against separating these categories too cleanly, arguing that we need ‘to break down the oral/literate dichotomy and to make explicit the tacit assumptions of the paradigm of literacy wherever they operate’.24 Thus the products of literate traditions, usually associated with composers, works and complexity, still depend heavily on oral transmission, and on a body of performative insight that is largely unwritten. And conversely, the fact that a composition does not exist in notated form, but lives rather in the minds of performers, does not disqualify it as a ‘work’, and as ‘complex’. There are resonances here not only for art music from several cultures outside the West, but also for so-called ‘folk

21  Eugenia Popescu-Judetz reminds us that Cantemir studied in the Greek Patriarchal ‘Great School’ (Popescu-Judetz 1999). It was customary for Phanariot collections to be ordered by makam-s rather than ēchoi. For a case study of correspondences, see Plemmenos 2006. 22 There is little evidence to suggest that the musical treatises of antiquity were known in any kind of detail by Byzantine musicians. The translation and transmission of those treatises in the Arab-speaking world towards the end of the first millennium represented an independent scholarly enterprise. 23 Garnett 1993. 24 Treitler 1986; see also Treitler 1974.

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music’. Leaving aside the intervention of the collectors (who often had their own agendas, political and otherwise), we may note with Alan Merriam that ‘items of culture do not simply appear out of nowhere; there must be contributions from specific individuals, whether these contributions can or cannot be pinpointed after the fact of composition’.25 Treitler’s ‘paradigm of literacy’ may also refer to the perils of a retrospective fallacy, where we read back from techniques and principles associated with a European notated tradition (at what is taken to be a defining stage of its development) to earlier forms of that tradition, including – and this is Treitler’s particular interest – church chant. The classification of chant in relation to other musical repertories requires careful handling. Peter Jeffery has drawn our attention to the tripartite classification proposed by Johannes de Grocheo around the year 1300, roughly translatable as ‘folk’, ‘church’ and ‘art’.26 It is clear from Jeffery’s account, moreover, that Grocheo classified repertories not just in terms of genres, forms and materials but in relation to the use made of them. This surprisingly modern, Chartier-like criterion of social utility, can lead to interesting inversions of categories such as ‘elite’ and ‘popular’, allowing for the different meanings such terms carried back then.27 Then or now, it is clear that neither ‘folk music’ nor ‘art music’ can be regarded as entirely stable categories.28 The intriguing aspect of Grocheo’s classification, however, is his separation of church music, meaning Gregorian chant, from both of these. Chant, in other words, occupied for Grocheo a kind of middle ground between folk music and art music, both of whose exponents have tended to make claims on it. This tripartition carries considerable conviction. Church chant is not, of course, an evolutionary stage taking us from one category to the other. Nor need there be a hierarchy of value. Rather we might think in terms of layers, each unfolding separately but often in close mutual dialogue. And finally, we should note that although Grocheo’s model refers to music in Western Europe (the chant is Gregorian), it is no less applicable to Orthodox repertories in the Balkans. I will shortly move directly to church music and art music, the second and third of Grocheo’s layers. But it will be worth offering a brief comment here on the first layer, comprising those traditional repertories that have 25 Merriam 1964, 166. 26 Jeffery 1992, 85–86. 27 Chartier 1988. 28 For a detailed examination of this very interesting issue, see Gelbart 2007.

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engaged and addressed very broad segments of the (often non-literate) population. Both church chant and art music drew freely upon demotic music. In the case of early Christian chant, any such transfer would have been achieved through a mixture of osmosis and simple borrowing, and it allowed for movement in the other direction too. Synergies between church chant and demotic music are very marked in Greece in particular, and in the hands of Simon Karras the latter was effectively drawn into an explanatory theoretical system based on the former. An osmotic relationship no doubt also describes the incorporation of traditional music into the practice of Ottoman art music. With European art music, on the other hand, the transfer came to involve a more self-conscious appropriation, especially in more recent times. From the early nineteenth century onwards, this was often motivated by the Herder-inspired ideology with which ‘folk music’ was increasingly freighted. Even today, when the term ‘folk music’ is usually replaced by the more neutral ‘traditional music’, this ideology is hard to expunge. It goes some way beyond the rhetoric of authenticity, mono-ethnicity and pastoral integrity that supposedly separated rural ‘folk music’ – true folk music – from urban ‘popular music’ to embrace a powerful myth of atemporality, a reassuring but questionable belief that prior to the sea-changes of modernity there was a static repertory of folk music that had existed in much the same form for centuries. Early recordings are characteristically privileged here as documents that are presumed to inscribe some sort of primary state of the music in question rather than a particular stage of its evolution. In reality, it seems more likely – given the nature of oral transmission – that traditional music in the wider region would have been subject to a process of very gradual change, on the principle of Chinese whispers. It is hard to track the history of such repertories, but we can at least claim that there were many common traits among the diverse idioms of traditional music spread across a very broad geographical area that stretches from North Africa across to the Middle East and into the Balkans. It is enough to remind ourselves of some of the instruments we encountered in Part 1. Organologists tell us that many instruments with eastern associations were familiar in the Balkans well before the Ottoman conquests.29

29 Among numerous organological studies from the region one might cite Alexandru 1956; Atanasov 1977; Anoyanakis 1979; Sokoli and Miso 1991; Pejović 2005. Detailed investigations into the instruments of the Byzantine era are documented in Maliaris 2007.

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They go by different names, but the long-necked lute known as tambura or tamburica in the Balkans is found all over the wider Balkan-Anatolian region (indeed far beyond it), as is the short-necked oud [outi], the zither (kanûn [kanonaki]), the kemânçe (later replaced by violin in the Balkans), the flute known as ney, the darbuka, and the zurna-tapan ensemble discussed earlier in relation to Thrace. And the list could be extended to include instruments associated with rural settings: the gajda, floyera and kaval. It is apparent from ethno-organological research that there were similarities in the construction and function of instruments resulting from the endless migrations of herdsmen and craftsmen, as well as from the peripatetic trading of a merchant class. It is also clear that multiple differences arose when instruments were acclimatised to the needs of particular cultures (not least because musicians and craftsmen in rural settings would look to home-grown materials). All this could be, and indeed has been, subject to close analysis. But the main point to make here is that it is much too simplistic to account for the traditional instruments of the Balkans in terms of Ottoman legacy. Like various kinds of folk dance (circle dances, line dances and sword dances), like epic song accompanied by some form of stringed instrument, and like the ‘long songs’ and laments sung by women, they are better understood as part of an older stratum of music-making common to the wider Balkan-Anatolian region. This began to change with the end of Ottoman rule and the encroachment of western traditions and values. It was not just modernisation but the related growth of a nationalist ideology in the nineteenth century that led to the fragmentation of common practices in the traditional music of the Balkans. In particular, national cultures promoted and valued western harmonisation in the presentation of traditional music, and thus changed the character of that music from an essentially monophonic or heterophonic repertory with an unequally tempered modal basis, and a supple and often intricate rhythmic organisation, into something more immediately recognisable as today’s folk music. The tendency of some Balkan scholarship has been to view much of this through the wrong end of the telescope, attributing to the Ottoman ascendancy qualities that were indigenous to the wider region, perhaps stretching back in one form or another to an ancient world whose practices were made accessible to theory by the Greeks, but which were by no means unique to classical Greece. This is not a crude argument for survivalism. It is obvious that studies of folklore and classical antiquity are easily colonised by nationalist agendas, generating continuities in time that complement imposed homogeneities

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in space.30 And frankly it would hardly be sensible to deny Ottoman influences on the traditional music of the Balkans. But we may still suppose that there were regional continuities, elements that remained invariant even as other elements changed around them, for the past is both a foreign country and a few handshakes away. Despite the constant interactivity between the different traditions of the eastern Mediterranean, and the remarkable degree of regional specificity, it seems likely that there were common underlying structures stretching back a very long way. Such claims are bound to be controversial, but it is at least suggestive that specific studies of the pitch and rhythmic patterns associated with particular places suggest connections between layers of traditional musicmaking in some isolated communities today and music-making in the ancient world.31 Byzantine Reflections Since relevant notations did not appear until close to the end of the first millennium, and diastematic notations later still, our knowledge of the sacred music of early Christian communities cannot be certain knowledge. Nonetheless, the hypotheses entertained by chant scholars are persuasive and evidence-based, even if the evidence is indirect. It seems likely that the chant developed by communities in the eastern Roman Empire for the recitation of liturgical texts, especially the psalter, drew eclectically from a wide range of traditional (including sacred) repertories from the Middle East. Early forms of Aramaic-Syriac Christian music, together with Jewish domestic rituals, may well have been influential in the formation of this chant. It developed in rural – often desert – monastic settings as well as in the cathedrals and churches of the cities, and its centres of gravity shifted over a period from Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria to Constantinople. Exactly when and where the oktoechos modal system crystallised and how this system relates to earlier forms of the chant remain subject to

30 On this, see Özkirimli and Sofos 2008, 87. 31  Katsenevaki 1998. It may be worth specifying here just one example from Katsenevaki, the survival (as she sees it) of the enharmonic genus in the rural communities of north Pindus, despite the widely- and correctly-held belief that it declined among professional musicians. Katsanevaki’s comparative study of repertories in over a hundred villages in the area allows her to note both commonalities and variations, and this in turn enables her to track developments not just spatially but also historically.

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debate, but the transmission route conjectured by Peter Jeffery takes us from origins in Jerusalem chant and by way of Syrian hymnody to the Byzantine rite, with the eighth century a privileged moment.32 And although there is some danger of retrospective misreading, it seems likely that the echoi bore some relation to older modal practices associated with non-Christian traditions: Greek, Hebrew and Arab. (Our understanding of ‘mode’ in this context naturally embraces much more than scale, incorporating structural hierarchies within the scale, associated melodic formulae, and characteristic melodic direction). As with parallel traditions in the West, the development of notation, occurring in several distinct stages, had a stabilising and stylising effect, directing a semi-improvised and formula-based practice towards the status of a composed repertory, and one that played a special role within Orthodox spirituality as a model in praesentia of the timeless perfection of paradise.33 From the time of the Schism (1054), this repertory was placed at the service of an increasingly self-contained eastern church. The separation from Rome was not expected to be permanent, and its initial effects can easily be exaggerated. But hopes of reconciliation were firmly squashed by the events of the Fourth Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, and from that point the gulf seemed harder to bridge, despite the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–39. The subsequent restoration of the empire proved to be short-lived, but even as Byzantium declined politically, its cultural influence – and that includes its music – remained far-reaching, so that by 1453, when Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans, there existed a rich and varied tradition of sacred chant that might be related to a parent Byzantine tradition. Aside from the Greek-speaking world, it embraced much of the Christian Middle East, including Syriac, Armenian and Georgian practices, as well as Coptic and Ethiopian rites. It was also a long-established presence in Romania and in much of the Slavonic world. The transfer of eastern Orthodoxy to Slavonic cultures had taken place in two phases: the evangelising mission of Cyril and Methodius in the mid-ninth century, and the importation of Christianity to Kievan Rus a century later. In the process the texts of the liturgical books were translated into Old Church Slavonic, and at various points the melodies ‘cut’ to fit. From a fairly early stage Russian chant developed an independent

32 Jeffery 2000. 33 See Raasted 1985 on the formulaic basis of composition within these traditions.

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profile, eventually developing into the unique ‘znamennïy chant’, but the southern Slavonic chants remained fairly close to their Byzantine counterparts. And although they were of course separated off from the sacred music of the western Balkans, Croatia in particular – for the divided church was a marker of wider political and cultural divisions – there was almost certainly (as Svetlana Kujumdziewa suggests)34 a more ‘open’ culture between east and west in the medieval period than conventional wisdom would have it. Even so, in the aftermath of empire, bridges to western culture – and these included early moves to harmonisation on the part of eastern chant – were undoubtedly damaged, arguably leaving the music of Orthodox Christianity more open to influences from a surrounding Ottoman culture. Although the old Irmologion all but disappeared after 1453, most of the Byzantine hymnals remained in use. But they were supplemented by new compositions, and they were subject to increasingly melismatic improvisational practices that no doubt registered Ottoman influence (Romanian scholars trace this influence to the late seventeenth century in relation to their own psaltic chants).35 All the same, the tradition of Orthodox music preserved its main defining characteristics during the Tourkokratia through the faith and through the church. These two categories were not synonymous. There was a tension between them, and that tension was heightened by the new political realities of a post-Byzantine world. The faith signals the Orthodox ideal of a universal kingdom of the spirit. The archetypal Hesychast [from Hesychia: ‘inner silence’] will be in the world but not of it, and will be informed by an intense spirituality, suspicious of reason and promoting transcendence through asceticism and withdrawal. This ideal, increasingly at odds with a western Reformation and Enlightenment culture, was embodied in the monasteries, where it had initially developed as a reaction against the politicisation of the Church. It was the monasteries that kept Byzantine culture alive under the Ottomans and preserved its musical heritage both in liturgical practice and through manuscript conservation. And since the faith invests in a universal truth, the musical tradition supporting it should ideally remain constant. One should not exaggerate this. Just as monastic and conventual traditions were not all about withdrawal (the medieval establishments

34 Kujumdziewa 2002. 35 Ciobanu 1976, i, 10.

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were among the prototypes of the modern town), so their music was not unresponsive to wider contexts. But in principle it remained free from the fickle dictates of contemporary styles. The monasteries of Mount Athos stood for this Hesychast ideal in its purest form, and here ‘national’ variants of the chant were largely subordinated to a central Byzantine tradition.36 Music history did not, of course, stand still. After the Fall of Constantinople there was a decline of the written tradition, placing greater weight on oral transmission and depriving chant scholars of information on an evolving musical practice for a good century and a half. But towards the end of the sixteenth century something began to move. Inter alia, the modal practice changed, and although the chromatic system as such is not of Ottoman origin, it is likely that some of the microtonal elements in the echoi were indebted to Ottoman traditions. Along with these changes, and perhaps responding somewhat to the powerful counter example of Latin polyphony, a new and highly elaborate repertory of kalophonic (ornate, melismatic) and composer-centred chant began to take shape, culminating in a large production of manuscripts from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. The notational system for this repertory was by no means precise, and as a result there was a wide diversity of practice even within the same community. Indeed it was partly the confusion caused by this, together with the influence of Enlightenment thought, that led to the reforms of the so-called ‘three teachers’ at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But before addressing that, we should consider wider political questions. As we move into the eighteenth century it becomes ever harder to isolate church music from politics. Our gaze shifts from the faith to the church, to the earthly politics of institutions, and that includes the catalytic role played by Orthodoxy in empire- and nation-building programmes. With these programmes, Orthodoxy, far from unifying the eastern Balkans, became an agent of its division into nation states. Under Ottoman rule the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople was assigned full jurisdiction over the Orthodox millet, but its aspiration to control the entire Eastern Church was thwarted by the ambitions of the Bulgarians and Serbs to regain their autonomous churches. Against this background, church music lent support to movements that increasingly assumed the aspect

36 Hasluck 1924. For a modern study, looking inter alia at aspects of tradition, modernity and Europe, see Lind 2012.

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of emergent nationalisms. For the Greeks, such movements found their ideological grounding in i megali idea, not least because it implied a synthesis of two distinct brands of Greek nationalism, the Byzantinism of the Romaioi, nostalgic for the Empire and distrustful of the West, and the Hellenism of the Greek Enlightenment, embracing modernity and celebrating the legacy and continuing influence of the Ancient Greeks (Patrick Leigh Fermor referred to an ‘Helleno-Romaic dilemma’).37 The history of the chant registers these conflicting positions. Thus the spirit of Byzantium was preserved in the conservative chant traditions cultivated on Mount Athos, in the monasteries generally, and in Constantinople. However, even these traditions succumbed in due course to the reforming agenda of the ‘three teachers’. The reforms, part of a more general opening out of Ottoman culture to the West, culminated in the widely-accepted system of Chrysanthine notation, which lifted the chant clear of the closed circles of private teaching, transferred it to the classroom, and gave it both wider accessibility and greater uniformity.38 This involved eliminating redundant signs, simplifying the notation in matters of rhythm, and greatly reducing the improvisational element by writing out embellishments, at least in skeletal form. There was no radical break in continuity between post-Byzantine and Chrysanthine music (the impact on practice was not immediate, but the reforms were in the end widely adopted),39 but there was an institutionalisation of the tradition and its teaching, and a developing engagement of the chant with nationalist agendas. In the Greek world, these agendas culminated in the War of Independence, following which the Greeks acquired a self-governing church, effectively a state church. Orthodox music from this point was increasingly appropriated by the nations. Already in the late eighteenth century the Patriarchate had regained control over the Orthodox community in the Balkans. Both the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, which had been reinstated in 1557, and the ‘Bulgarian’ Archbishopric of Ohrid, home to an exceptionally rich

37 See Fermor 1966, 106–15, including a seven-page list of contrasted characteristics, including musical preferences! See also Kazantzakis 1965, 167–8, where the idea of a ‘double-descended’ identity is discussed. The same case was later made in Herzfeld 1987. 38 This rationalisation of Byzantine notation, institutionalised already in 1814, was codified in the Great Theoretic of Music of Chrysanthos of Madytos, published in Trieste in 1832. See Romanou 1990. 39 The Romanian territories were among the first to take them up, and it was in Bucharest that the first printings of psaltic music were issued, on Greek texts. See Ciobanu 1976, i, 15.

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medieval literary tradition, were abolished at this time, leaving the way clear for the forces of Greek nationhood. In the aftermath of the War of Independence, an autonomous Greek church sponsored ambitious and proselytising political and cultural programmes. So it is not surprising that debates about the chant, common in the press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were caught up in debates about the nation. Post-Chrysanthine chant, itself distinguishable from older traditions, had already been appropriated for the nation, though a more detailed survey would do justice to a range of distinguishable regional traditions (Smyrnean chant would be one). Increasingly the issue at the heart of the debate was harmony. There had been an incipient polyphonic practice prior to the Fall of Constantinople, but this was stymied by the collapse of the empire. Later, polyphonic settings made their way from the Greek diaspora in Europe (especially Vienna), first to Crete, which was occupied by the Venetians until the Ottoman annexation in the 1690s, then to the Ionian Islands, where many Cretans took refuge and which belonged largely to the sphere of Italian culture, and eventually to the Greek mainland.40 The Cretan practice was really an oral tradition of harmonised chant that extended back to at least the seventeenth century, and included a unique modal system related to ‘old’ Byzantine echoi. Something of this Cretan practice was also adopted in the Ionian Islands, though an independent polyphonic practice may have predated the Cretan presence there. In any case the islands developed their own specificities, including (in Zakynthos) mixed monophonic-polyphonic chants, and a specific form of three-voice harmony. There were, in other words, various kinds of folk polyphony in the island practices, often closely related to secular traditional music. But nothing is straightforward in attempts to summarise these traditions. It seems, for example, that more established westernised versions of the chant, associated with settings by Ioannis Sakellarides (1853–1938), were also known in the Ionian Islands from the late nineteenth century onwards. On the Greek mainland, there was yet another model for the development of a polyphonic practice. It was partly due to the demands of Russian-born Queen Olga that Russian influences were registered in the royal palace. Orthodox Russia was read by the Greeks in two quite different ways: on one hand as an important eastern bulwark against the

40 Panagiotakis 1990.

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Catholic and Protestant West, all the more crucial in a post-Byzantine world, but on the other hand, and because it had adopted harmony, as an example of western-influenced ‘progress’ in ecclesiastical music.41 Traditions of Ukrainian and Belorussian chant had already been westernised (with staff notation and harmony) in the late sixteenth century, and when these lands were joined to Russia almost a century later the official church policy was to support polyphony. Only the Old Believers [Raskolniki] kept, as they continue to keep, the tradition of znamennïy chant alive, today mainly in Baltic villages and in the global diaspora. Polyphony took root more easily in traditions outside Greece. As we noted in chapter three, Ukrainian polyphony impacted on Serbian traditions, culminating in the liturgical settings of Stanković and Mokranjac, which in later years supplanted existing oral traditions of monophonic chant as the national church music of Serbia. Byzantine roots were still evident in the Mokranjac tradition, of course, but at the same time it evolved into something entirely distinctive. In the main, this occurred well into, if not after, Mokranjac’s lifetime. Not only was the earlier chant more enduring than has been thought; it survived as a relatively continuous tradition in the Hilandar monastery on Mount Athos, and has come into the foreground again in recent times. There were parallels in Bulgaria, where Dobri Hristov (1874–1941) and others claimed an independent tradition evidenced by the ‘discovery’ of Bolgarski rospev [Bulgarian chant] in Russian manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (their significance has been contested), and where harmonisations similar to those of Mokranjac were cultivated. The wider Bulgarian practice had in any case diverged from that of Greece, following conflicts with the Greek patriarchate back in the 1860s. These conflicts culminated in the establishment of a Bulgarian Exarchate, and the nationalist tendency to proprietorship over repertory was further intensified after the liberation. Such, then, was the background to those late nineteenth-century debates in Greece. The general Greek practice was monophonic chant with ison [drone], but in the last two decades of the century polyphonic choirs established in Athens met with some success, and this further fuelled the debate. The points of dispute were fourfold. First, they were doctrinal. Does the new music corrupt a sanctioned truth; or is it a necessary adaptation to the contemporary world? Second, they were about the perceived Greek character of the chant. Here the debate focused on the

41 Filipoulos 1997.

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need to preserve the chant from corruption from east as well as west, a point that exercised Sakellarides in particular, but not only him; in 1881 Patriarch Joachim III established a committee to systematise church music, ‘cleansing it of every foreign element’,42 and in the 1890s complaints about the nasal singing coming from the East were commonplace. Third they were about origins: familiar constructions of the nation bridging ancient Greece and Byzantium. And fourth they were about musical integrity. How should one harmonise the intervals of the Byzantine echoi within a western rational system? As the argument rolled on, the issue of national character moved centre stage, though again this could be presented in very different ways. Should the purity of the chant, and of the national character, be preserved from foreign elements? Or should musical progress be embraced as a welcome sign of national progress, of the Europeanisation of Greece? And tied into this debate was the ancillary issue of a developing competition between Athens (rapidly expanding from not much more than a small town in the early nineteenth century) and Constantinople for the place of the true capital of Hellenism. This, then, was the tightrope walked by Byzantine chant. Both western polyphony and eastern music, depending on the circumstances, might be renounced or embraced for the preservation of this fictitious balance. What started as a musical debate very quickly became an essential part of a cultural debate whose motivation was the formation of a Greek national identity. The gathering support for polyphonic music as the century turned was part of the increasingly influential belief that Greece should represent a kind of model synthesis of East and West. As noted earlier, a key figure in this musically was Ioannis Sakellarides, who occupied key teaching positions in Athens and was thus in a position to proselytise for his westernised settings of the chant.43 But in the end the tide turned, and polyphony was not to be the way forward for church music. Interestingly it is only through the Greek diaspora to North America that the Sakellarides tradition lives on today. Harmonisation was not abandoned, of course. One leading composer of art music, Emilios Riadis (1880–1935), an important 42 Romanou 2006a. Romanou’s main concern in this article is with the fascinating organs constructed in the 1880s and again in the 1920s (by Constantinos Psakhos) with tunings designed for Byzantine Echoi. 43 A separate issue was the translation of harmonised church music to the concert platform, something much developed in Serbia and Bulgaria, but also cultivated in Greece. As Katy Romanou points out (Romanou 2006a), there was a larger issue here about building a national school on the foundations of Greek-Byzantine music.

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figure in the development of the so-called ‘national school’, turned to the liturgy and contributed his Cherubic Hymn. Then, rather later, the composer Michael Adamis (1929–2013) developed harmonic settings that work outwards from inherent characteristics of the chant to find a multi-voiced, often complex and ‘modern’ language that has deep roots in the Byzantine tradition. But for the most part, and despite an enormous diversity of local practices, monophonic chant (essentially an eighteenth-century tradition though developed in various ways since) held fast in Greece. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, Petar Dinev (1889–1980) built on Dobri Hristov’s example, exploring polyphonic idioms that blend ByzantineBulgarian traditions with Russian styles in creative ways. In Romania, where both Greek and Slavonic chants were cultivated until the intermittent introduction of the vernacular in the eighteenth century, harmonisation was introduced in the late nineteenth century by Gavril Muzicescu (1847–1903), and it was embraced even more willingly in the twentieth, notably by Nicolae Lungu (1900–93), Ioan Chirescu (1889–1980), and in more recent years Nicu Moldoveanu (b. 1940) and Viorel Munteanu (b. 1944). The latest twist is in some ways the most remarkable of all: a ‘back to the (pre-reform) roots’ movement in both Slavonic and Byzantine traditions. This takes the form of a return to a pre-Chrysanthine practice in Greece itself, and to a pre-Mokranjac monophonic tradition in Serbia. Even Russia has not been exempted from a movement that seems to spell out with peculiar clarity just how far nostalgia has become a studied project of our times.44 Ottoman Canons The Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was the culmination of a century of Ottoman jihad in the Balkans. Using Gallipoli as their base, and Adrianople [Edirne] as a European capital, Ottoman forces had already acquired, or reduced to vassal status, the modern territories of Bulgaria, Serbia, Wallachia and much of present-day Greece when the imperial city was finally captured. As the new capital of an Islamic Ottoman Empire, Istanbul underwent a rapid regeneration and transformation, restoring it to something of its former glory; indeed there was some measure of continuity with its traditional role as the political centre of a theocratic empire. Subsequent territorial expansion by the Ottomans reached its apex under

44 Boym 2001.

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Süleyman I in the sixteenth century, and by the time of Süleyman’s death in 1566 the empire embraced a solid block of European territory with a northern border that enclosed most of Hungary, much of modern-day Croatia, and (as vassal clients) the Romanian principalities. The line was held to the north by the Habsburgs and Romanovs, and to the west by Venice, which at that time controlled much of Dalmatia, the Ionian Islands, parts of the Peloponnese, and Crete. Then, for some two centuries, and with the second siege of Vienna a key turning point, there was a steady contraction of Ottoman territory as the Habsburgs reclaimed Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia, prior to the national independence movements of the nineteenth century. In other words, there was a core area of Ottoman-controlled land in the Balkans for more than five centuries, while around the edges of this core there were territories that either came under Ottoman rule for relatively short periods, or (in a few cases) alternated between Habsburg and Ottoman rule. We noted that the organisation of non-Muslim communities in the empire was based on millets, determined by religion rather than ethnicity. And given the relatively laissez-faire approach to local governance by the Sublime Porte, these millets were able to foster distinctive cultural identities among their peoples, as well as enjoying considerable political power and influence. The Orthodox community constituted by far the largest of them, with Greece and Romania (at various times including Transylvania) subject to the Patriarchal seat in Istanbul, while Bulgaria (together with present-day Macedonia) was subject to Ohrid, and Serbia (together with present-day Montenegro) to Peć. In other words, Orthodoxy, whether Greek or Slavonic, was able to generate its own cultural world in the postByzantine Balkans, including a liturgical life enhanced by singular musical traditions in the monasteries and churches scattered across the empire. These traditions were anything but sealed off from the (Ottoman) world around them. But it is rather obvious all the same that, against this background, Orthodox repertories maintained a distinctive profile. Much the same could be said of traditional music across the Ottomancontrolled Balkans. No doubt there were deep-rooted links between agrarian communities, stemming from ancient layers of music. But we might nonetheless differentiate between the overlapping traditions – including some Turkish-language folk music – of the southeastern ‘core’ (Rumelian) region, and the music of the western Balkans.45 Rural communities in 45 Just what can be meant by Turkish folk music, and its relation to ‘Turkism’, is discussed in Stokes 1992, 20–49.

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these western areas were touched only tangentially by the imperial presence; rules were imposed, but there was relatively little contact with either the officials or the cultural practices of the ruling dynasty, other than the local Pasha. Ottoman musical influences were not significant here. What really distinguished the isolated villages of the western Balkans musically were their highly distinctive, largely autonomous repertories. The more geographically isolated the region, the more singular the music. The deepest cultural marks left by the Ottoman presence were to be found rather in urban centres. Musically, the most widely acknowledged influence until the early nineteenth century was that of the mehter bands of the Janissary Corps (originally recruited through the devşirme system),46 mainly because they were stylised by European composers in the familiar alaturca idiom.47 Much has been written about these appropriations, principally within a Saidian discourse of Orientalism, and in some cases this has resulted in subtle reflections on the penalties, as well as the conviction, carried by Said’s thesis, and in ways that carry wider messages for musicology.48 There have also been easy assumptions about organology, and especially about the influence of the mehterhâne not just on European military bands, but on town and theatre bands, and on the emergent symphony orchestra. It may be that some of these assumptions need to be revisited. What is not in question, however, is the impact of the bands, of which there were many scattered across the empire, with Roma prominent in the ranks. It is well attested in the writings of European travellers that during military campaigns in the Balkans over several centuries (until the dissolution in 1826 of the increasingly self-promotional and mutinous Janissary Corps, at which point the military bands were Europeanised) this was a powerful agent and symbol of war,49 though the mehter bands played a ceremonial role in civilian life too.50 At the heart of the band was the kös [the ruler’s

46 The forced recruitment of Christian youth for the military was a feature of the Ottoman system in its early history, and one that could bring very real advantages to the youth in question. 47 See Popescu-Judetz 1996. Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Mehter as an Act of Power and Performance’. 48 Windschuttle 1999; Irwin 2006. Both authors argue that Said oversimplifies the motives of Orientalist scholarship by aligning them with political (imperialist) agendas. For a discussion of musical resonances, see Head 2000. Mary Hunter has suggested that the alaturca topic was only used in Western art music while the Ottoman Empire still constituted a threat, whether imagined or actual (Hunter 1998). 49 For a description, see Dankoff 1990, 235. 50 Ibid., 271. See also Dankoff 2004.

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drum], accompanied by wind instruments such as the zurna, boru [bugle], kurrenay [a kind of horn] and mehter whistle, as well as nakkare [small kettledrums], cymbals and tambourine. The core sound, re-created after a fashion in the ‘band and standard’ performances at the Military Museum in Istanbul today, has some similarities with the zurna-tapan ensemble we noted in Thrace and found very widely across the region. And from the late seventeenth century it was common and fashionable for European courts to import not just the style, but also the instruments, and in some cases the musicians too. Two further categories of music associated with the empire left their traces on the Balkans. They are religious music and classical music, closely linked in practice by concepts and rituals pertaining to Sufi mystical traditions. Islamic religious authorities have traditionally been nervous of music; indeed the admissibility, let alone the definition, of ‘music’ was as much at stake in the mosque as in the synagogue. Within Orthodox Islamic musical practices there were two performance areas associated with formal worship: the minaret, the site of ‘adhān (Turkish ezân) [the call to prayer], and the interior of the mosque itself, the site of tadjwīd, or Kor’anic cantillation [Turkish tilâvet], a form of heightened ‘learning’ of prayers that was generally arhythmic in presentation, as well as of rhythmic ilâhi-s [simple Dervish hymns] for special Holy Days: for example, the mevlüt ceremonies dedicated to the birth of the prophet. Kor’anic chanting followed specific rules, but strictly speaking it could not itself be music. This is as much a theological as a musical issue. It could not be music because it was the voice of God. Or rather, as it approached the condition of music it was shifted to another heavily mediated dimension: mediated by the voice of humanity, by the hand of history. In reality, as Walter Feldman has pointed out, the Ottoman tradition was less severe about this than other Islamic cultures (it was based on relatively flexible Hanafi Sunni beliefs), and was more inclined to see ‘a continuum between religious and secular forms’. Thus, we might consider the various forms of religious music designed to accompany the ceremonial and festive occasions associated with Holy Days such as bayram-s or with sünnet-s as somewhere in the middle range of Feldman’s continuum.51 Music and dance assumed greater significance in the rituals associated with Sufi confraternities. There are many forms of Sufism, of course, and many forms of music associated with it: folk-popular in some Bektaşi

51 Feldman 1996, 22. See also Kusić 1997.

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orders, more often classical in the Mevlevî order. But in general the power of music, provided there is an appropriate attunement (samā [literally, ‘listening’ as distinct from ‘hearing’]), is enlisted in support of meditation and ecstasy, the two principal routes to effective communication with God. Some of the most interesting metaphysical reflections on music are to be found within the orbit of Sufi mysticism, and here Ottoman theorists were heavily indebted to the Arab Systematists. Safī al-Dīn was translated into Turkish already in the fifteenth century by Abdülkadir Maragî, and as Popescu-Judetz points out, the Abdülkadir ‘dynasty’ of theorists, and indeed Turkish theorists generally in the fifteenth century, advanced independent theory only tentatively and always with reference to validating figures such as Safī al-Dīn and Al-Fārābī.52 Categories such as the Ottoman mutlak (‘soundless’) and mukayyad (‘sounding’), as employed by Abdülkadir in particular, can only really be understood in relation to that earlier tradition, and in particular to Sufi authors such as the twelfth-thirteenth century Andalusian Ibn ‘Arabī. The sense is that ‘sounding’ (rather than ‘soundless’) samā, the lowest stratum of which corresponds very roughly to a Boethian musica instrumentalis, is a stepping-stone to an inner hearing that is eventually free of music altogether. At the same time, Ottoman theorists made some effort to bridge the gap between such theories of listening and theories of creativity, not least by stressing the Neo-Platonist orientation in some Arab writings (again Ibn ‘Arabī), where considerable privilege is attached to human creativity, allowing its capacity to transform objects (through himma [the power of the heart]) into symbols of the divine, rather than simply ‘represent’ them as part of a Platonic degenerative sequence. In other words, divine creativity is perceived to be at work here in and through the human imagination.53 Within the orbit of Sufism, there was a close relationship between such speculative theory and the zikr [dhikr] – the ‘naming of God’ or ‘remembrance of God’ rituals – of the dervishes, through which union with God was sought. This is especially intense in the case of the semâ ritual, part of the mukaabele ceremony associated with the Mevlevî (Sunni) order, commonly found in the tekke-s [lodges or monasteries] of Anatolia and elsewhere.54 Several Mevlevî lodges (mevlevihâne) were virtually schools of 52 See the essay, ‘Intertextuality in Turkish Musical Writings’ in Popescu-Judetz 1996, 67–81. 53 Żerańska-Kominek 1986. 54 See the account given by Lady Mary Wortley Montague (Montague 1800, 170–1).

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music and poetry – at the very least they were important meeting-places for musicians and poets – and the repertories composed for their rituals fed into what is usually described as Ottoman classical music.55 Indeed the musical traditions of the Mevlevî order, centred on the multi-part âyîn-s composed for the ritual, were closely related to those of classical music, with the âyîn very roughly comparable to the classical fasil. It is no surprise, then, that many of the leading Ottoman composers were themselves Mevlevîs. Following the conquest, Istanbul was the centre of Ottoman music, and of Islamic music generally. The royal court, the intellectual and artistic hub of the empire, was the leading patron, in that professional musicians and instrument makers received a court salary, and music was taught institutionally at the Enderun, the imperial school.56 But the tradition was eventually widespread across the elite cultures of the empire, cultivated not least through the ‘at homes’ of private teachers (meşkhâne-s). All the same, it was some time before a truly distinctive Ottoman repertory emerged historically. With no clearly defined tradition to inherit, the Ottomans drew eclectically on existing styles, ranging from well-established Persian traditions (it is worth remembering that the literate elite were largely Persian speaking) to music from Ajerbazan, Armenia and the Anatolian provinces, and the Byzantine Empire. The precise nature of the transition from a pre-Ottoman ‘Great Tradition’ to a distinctively Ottoman music remains hazy, but there are concrete sources, and they include notations as well as treatises. The transmission of key concepts in the transition is often attributed to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theorists such as Yusuf bin Nizameddin and Şeydî. Major sixteenth-century figures were the Crimean ruler, Gazi Giray Han (1554–1607), a poet and composer of instrumental pieces, Hatib Zâkirî Hasan Efendi (1545?–1622), who composed mainly religious music, and the Sufi master Aziz Mahmud Hüdâyî (1541–1628). Scholars seem to be in agreement about dating the early stages in the crystallising of a singular Ottoman style – obvious markers of which included the adoption of Turkish texts, development of new musical forms, changes in instrumentarium, and redefinitions of makam-s and usûl-s – to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Murad IV was a leading patron of this era, supporting the traveller-musician Evliyâ Çelebi, as well

55 Signell 2006. 56 The Enderun was replaced by a more western-orientated school under Mahmud II.

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as composers such as Miskalî Solakzâde (d. 1658), Ama Kadrî (d. 1650), Yusuf Dede (d. 1670), Koca Osman Efendi (d. 1665), Köçek Derviş Mustafa Dede (d. 1683) and the Azeri Şeştarî Murad Ağa (d. 1673). Mehmed VI also supported music, and during his reign there were notable composers such as Hafız Post (d. 1693) and Taşçızâde Receb Çelebi (d. 1690), as well as the Polish-born theorist Ali Ufkî Bey [Wojciech Bobowski] (1610–75), who produced historically important staff notations in his Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz [Instrumental and Vocal Collection]. At that point, so it is argued, there almost certainly began an extended period of consolidation, and in general detailed historical source materials are exiguous after Ali Ufkî Bey. There is a hiatus in the theoretical record until the early eighteenth century, at which point the famous notations and treatise by Prince Demetrius Cantemir (1673–1723) initiated a self-consciously ‘new’ approach, set up in a kind of dialectical relation to the ‘old’.57 The result, according to Popescu-Judetz, was ‘a new theory of Turkish music independent from Arab and Persian musical influence’.58 What Cantemir really achieved was a special notational convention for Ottoman music, differentiating it from antecedent Persian music, and his notations effectively documented the tradition up to that point. As with other such notations, they were a way of collecting and recording the music, and were not intended as scores for performance. That Cantemir was Moldavian was symptomatic of the tendency of the tradition to draw widely on the provinces and on non-Turkish ethnicities, including Phanariot Greeks, who were influential in Moldavia and Wallachia, as also Jews and Armenians; there was constant immigration, willing and otherwise, to Istanbul. Following Cantemir, further major changes took place within the tradition. In the first place there was a proliferation of new makam-s as well as some changes to the structures of existing ones and a notable tendency towards ‘compound’ makam-s; and partly as a result of these changes the standard two-octave scale on which the ‘Great Tradition’ is based, was extended. In addition, there were further alterations to the usûl system of rhythmic cycles; there were changes to the instrumentarium; and there were new compositional forms, including the small-scale şarkı, and the development of the four-hâne [section] peşrev. Through all of this the extended classical or semi-classical fasil, with its fixed sequence of vocal and instrumental forms dominated by the

57 Wright 1992 and 2000. 58 Popescu-Judetz 1996 and 1999.

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tanbûr and the ney (as described in the early eighteenth century by both Cantemir and Fonton), remained the fundamental schema for concert music performed at the meclis [reunion].59 It was suggested in chapter 5 that at the very period in which the sociopolitical system was weakening at the centre (broadly speaking from the beginning of the eighteenth century) Ottoman high culture entered its most creative phase, and that this rising curve, together with continuing processes of transformation, seems to have continued into the early nineteenth century. This was the era of Selim III, the most famous of the Sultan-musicians, during whose reign and at whose behest another notational system – Hamparsum Notation, based on the Khaz script of the ancient Armenian Church – was developed. Among the many leading nineteenth-century composers were Ismail Dede, the classicists Zekaî Dede (d. 1897) and Tanbûrî Ali Efendi (d. 1890), and the innovators Hacı Arif Bey (d. 1885) and Tanbûrî Cemil Bey (d. 1916), associated with the so-called ‘Romantic School’.60 According to Walter Feldman, even those versions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century peşrev-s (an instrumental movement that forms part of the fasil, following the introductory and improvisatory taksîm) that can be found in nineteenth-century sources took on all the aspects of nineteenth-century compositions.61 The term ‘composition’ here is used advisedly. That improvisation was an important component of the Ottoman classical tradition in no way detracted from the centrality of composition, whether or not the results were deposited in print. Pieces were often designated first by usûl, then by makam and form, and finally by composer. As a result, we encounter this music today as a tradition of canonic works transmitted across the generations from master to pupil (the so-called meşk [lessons] system). They were composed in the main between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, at which point, with the establishment of the Turkish nation state, the tradition was suppressed for ideological reasons. Ottoman classical music as performed today is, in other words, a recognisable corpus within a defined historical period. And as such it was summarised and re-theorised in relation to the Systematists – as a kind of post hoc rationalisation – by the early twentieth-century theorists Rauf

59 Fasils were also played at court by the mehter bands. 60 Panagiotis Poulis writes about the construction of Tanbürî Cemil Bey as an innovator in Poulis 2005. 61  Feldman 1996, 413.

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Yetka, Suphi Ezgi and Sadettin Arel.62 It is by way of the so-called ArelEzgi system, based on trichordal, tetrachordal and pentachordal genera, that it is taught in Turkey today, following the rehabilitation of this music in the 1980s. While Ottoman classical music was associated initially with the royal court, it soon established institutionalised performance traditions not only in the tekke-s but also in the wealthy homes of Istanbul, and in major Ottoman cities such as Bursa, Edirne, Izmir and Salonika. Yet subtle and tricky questions arise, beyond the scope of this exposition, as to the stylistic borders of the tradition. What were its synergies with Turkic makam traditions in Central Asia, for example? What were the links between Sufi repertories in the Ottoman Empire and the music of neighbouring Safavid Mevlevîs? How far did the conventions of classical music percolate through to less elite genres, or indeed itself draw sustenance from those genres? How do we classify genres of popular dance and processional music, or of ‘light’ music and café music, that were performed not only by the numerous professional musicians of Istanbul (organised in guilds and featuring prominently in all public festivities), but also by travelling ensembles made up of Turkish Roma? These repertories too were based on the makam-s and usûl-s of classical music. Indeed for Ottoman theorists they were often understood as a less complex and formalised species of this classical music. The key distinction was that ‘folk music’ was local, whereas ‘classical music’ was empire-wide.63 In any event the later nineteenth century witnessed significant changes. The old complex forms lost ground to simpler lyric forms, and they were also threatened by pronounced westernising tendencies that had been instigated with the Tanzimat. There was a quest for simplicity (for some Turkish musicologists that equates to a process of degeneration) in the declining years of the empire, with smaller lyric forms such as the vocal şarkı replacing the more sophisticated improvised gazel. There were comparable changes in instrumental music, as the old fasil performances were replaced by simpler, more popular genres, including shorter versions of peşrev-s (a development pioneered by Tanbûrî Cemil Bey). In the early twentieth century the less sophisticated genres of Ottoman music, including domestic repertory (ilâhi-s and secular ballads), semi-classical music,

62 The clearest exposition of this is found in Signell 1977. This includes an account of the seminal article by Rauf Yetka. 63 See Faroqhi 2005, for a discussion of this distinction within the Ottoman world.

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and the popular music associated with the ‘music café’ were to be found everywhere in the core Ottoman territories, not least those European territories that had been substantially Islamised. At the same time, western (alafranca) styles of popular music (and for the social elites western classical music too) increasingly permeated the soundscape of the empire. In short, just as an insistent oriental voice lingered on in the Western Balkans, in the heartland of Europe (and it has not fallen silent), so western traditions increasingly colonised the core Ottoman lands of Asia Minor. In some places – notably some of the Aegean islands, and in particular Lesbos – musical traditions literally fused together elements of Asia Minor traditions and western popular music. But these are instances of a much more general condition. The territory of South East Europe is located precisely at the crossroads of these two musical worlds. The Balkans is a place of transit.

CHAPTER SEVEN

EASTERN RECESSIONS Allahu Ekber It was a journey from the Adriatic coast to the mountainous interior that first attracted me to this part of europe in the late 1960s. armed with a short introduction in the series The Modern World – a (then) plausibly optimistic account of Yugoslavia by a.W. palmer, still in my possession – i left the resorts and headed inland.1 The towns and villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina made an indelible impression. There were the mosques and minarets, but even more there was the ezân, the call of the müezzin, not quite as in Istanbul, but still a perennial passport to a mythical east and a mythical past for the western observer. Even today, with the sound of Islam a familiar part of metropolitan environments, it feels strange to encounter it in rural settings within Europe. Whether they are ‘music’ or not, ‘adhān and tadjwīd became part of an Arab-language soundscape in South East Europe with the early Ottoman advances, and they remain so to this day in those parts of the Balkans that retain numerically significant muslim populations. islamisation was facilitated by a policy of steady colonisation, with turkish settlements established along the major routes through thrace, Bulgaria and historical macedonia. the initial settlers were Ottoman officials and their retinues, together with soldiers. there was also some agricultural settlement, as anatolian nomads transferred stockbreeding traditions to the eastern Balkans, and dervishes were translated from ghazi warriors into timar-holders. But most of the settlement was urban. very often it would be the tekke that helped establish or further develop urban communities, paving the way first to market place and then to town, and allowing the dervishes to play a key role in the guilds or esnaf-s of an increasingly oriental urban culture. Mark Mazower gives statistics for Muslim populations in eastern Balkan towns for 1530 as follows: Larissa 90%, Serres 61%, Monastir 75%, Skopje 75%, and Sofia 60%.2

1  palmer 1964. 2 Mazower 2005, 36.

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in this way, the music of islam entered the Balkans, partly transplanting anatolian traditions to Balkan soil, but partly allowing the Balkans to participate in the formative stages of ottoman traditions. the most prominent sites of music-making in these early stages of the conquest were the tekke-s. these Sufi lodges were significant in bedding down the ottoman presence in the Balkans, not least because they met the social as well as the spiritual needs of local populations, and proselytised to people of all faiths and ethnicities.3 they were established in tandem with the ottoman advances, and usually with official sanction, either in existing Christian buildings, in private houses, or in newly-built foundations, and they undoubtedly helped islam to penetrate local cultures, while at the same time preserving its voice in adaptation to local languages. not only did music and dance play a role in the rituals of Sufi tarikat-s [brotherhoods]; the formation of an ottoman classical music tradition was closely associated with the Mevlevî order in particular (Mevlevî rituals foregrounded the reed-flute [ney], accompanied by küdüm [kettle drums] and zil [cymbals] right across the Middle east). in general the Mevlevîs were from the higher social classes and the urban intelligentsia; they were ‘men of the pen’. they often had wealthy backing, and their educational programmes in music and literature carried prestige. however, they were less influential in the Balkans than in anatolia, and were mainly confined to educated circles in the cities. this may partly account for the fact that ottoman classical music remained the preserve of a small, elitist, and mainly turkish, society in the major urban centres of the ottoman territories in europe. it was familiar in some of the major towns of the eastern and southern Balkans, but was never really adopted by islamic society in Bosnia, despite a Mevlevî presence in Sarajevo.4 the key point here is that Bosnia was not settled extensively. indeed its islamisation over a period of more than a century begs a clear explanation. noel Malcolm attributes it mainly to the ‘fractious competition’ between Catholic and orthodox churches, as opposed to a single, strong national church, as in Serbia or Bulgaria.5 But arguably the strong Catholic background in Bosnia was a more telling factor, since for Catholics, as ines aščerić points out, there was a major loss

3 Michael Balivet argues that ‘the most original phenomenon in the diffusion of islam in the Balkans is the essential role played by the dervishes’ (Balivet 1999). 4 an impressive study of islamisation in Bosnia is aščerić 2004. See also hickok 1997 and adanir 2002. 5 Malcolm 1994.

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of legitimacy under the ottomans.6 the papacy was in effect removed from the political world of the empire, whereas the orthodox patriarchate remained inside it and was if anything strengthened by an ottoman ascendancy. More prevalent in the Balkans was the Bektaşi order, not least because of its close links with the Janissaries, ‘men of the sword’. in general Sufi orders were responsive to what Muslims took to be significant earlier revelations of God, but for the Bektaşi synergies with Christian practices were especially important, and this helped acclimatise islam to the region. the temporary ban on the Bektaşi order that followed the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 was the trigger for a major exodus of Bektaşi Babas and dervishes to the Balkans.7 almost a century later, Frederick hasluck recorded the results, researching the lodges in Bulgaria, romania, Macedonia, Greece and albania. he noted just how many had been destroyed during the Balkan wars, and he also pointed out that although their true centre of gravity remained the shrine of hadji Bektash near Kirshehr in central anatolia, they had developed a large and important presence in albania.8 albanian populations had been converted to islam mainly in the seventeenth century (as in Bosnia, there was a strong Catholic presence), and there the Bektaşi instituted what was effectively an independent sect of islam.9 elsewhere in the Balkans the Bektaşi remained a Sufi order, however. their presence in Bosnia was relatively small, but in Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece they flourished, and like the Mevlevîs they placed much emphasis on music and dance. however the style of music in Bektaşi rituals was rather different from that associated with the Mevlevîs. the Bektaşi did attract famous musicians, but they were drawn less to elite traditions than to popular regional styles, and for this reason the music used in their ceremonies took many different forms, was more populist in orientation, and was thus a further force for the acclimatisation of islam to Balkan communities.

6 aščerić 2004. 7 the Bektaşi shaykhs are known as Babas. 8 hasluck 1929. the map of Bektaşi distribution in albania at the end of volume 2 is instructive. 9 i retain ‘Bektaşi’ for convenience, though albanians would have ‘Bektashi’. there is an exquisite shrine at Kruja, near Durres, associated with the Bektaşi saint Sari Saltik, but in recent years the Bektaşis have struggled to reassert themselves in albania following the rescinding of enver hoxha’s ban on religion.

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there is a diversity of practices among Sufi orders. So the characterisations offered here are broad-brush. it will be enough to describe briefly four additional orders that had a significant presence in the Balkans. two of them, the rifa’i and halvetije, were prominent throughout the southern Balkans during ottoman rule, and they could hardly have been more contrasted in constitution and character. Music and dance, of both cultivated and vernacular character, played a part in the (sometimes violent) rituals of the rifa’i order, once prominent in Kosovo and northern albania.10 there is a surviving tekke in Skopje that in its heyday attracted eminent poets such as Jahja Kemal Beyatli and musicians such as Sheik Sadeddin Sirri.11 in contrast, the beliefs and rituals of the halvetije order, second only to the Bektaşi in its size and distribution in the Balkans (it were prominent in Bulgaria and Serbia), were closer to orthodox Sunnite traditions, and its music consisted mainly of simple, usually unaccompanied, hymns.12 the other two orders, again contrasted in character, were especially prominent in Bosnia. Like the rifa’i, the Kadiri [Qadiri] order, which was firmly established there by the late seventeenth century, placed a high value on music and poetry, and its ceremonies were elaborate, including solo instrumental forms and percussion accompaniments not just to the prayers sung by the zakir (singer) but also to the Kor’anic readings. the nakşibendi order, on the other hand, was associated with ‘silent’ rituals, and consequently found rather less place for music, or at least for musical instruments, in its ceremonies. its historical importance lay partly in securing orthodox (Sunnite) islam for urban centres in the Balkans. this order was of key importance in Bosnia, where the largest number of tarikat-s is nakşibendi, even today, but it is also prominent in Macedonia. Surprisingly little has been recorded about the specifics of music in the Balkan tekke-s. apart from the tendency for national histories in the region to blank out sustained discussion of ottoman traditions, there is a paucity of sources dealing with music. For the earlier stages of the empire, up to the late seventeenth century, we must rely on the ottomaninsider accounts of travellers such evliyâ Çelebi for insights into musical practices.13 Çelebi’s accounts of extensive travels across the Balkans

10 Sheholli 2006, 401. 11  i am grateful to aida islam for educating me in these matters. 12 there are numerous sub-orders of the halvetije order, and several still function in albania, Kosovo and Macedonia today. 13 Dankoff and elsie 2000.

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are fascinating precisely because they are undertaken from the ottoman perspective. in addition to providing evidence of the extensive ottomanMuslim infrastructure in the region, including detailed, if unreliable, listings of the mosques, han-s, medresa-s, hammam-s [bathhouses] and tekke-s he encountered in his journey through Kosovo, northern albania and Montenegro, he speaks with delightful condescension about the customs of the Christian raya, in a neat inversion of the usual perspective of Balkan travel literature. Çelebi’s enumerations of the tekke-s in the Balkans are often secondhand and widely thought to be over-estimates, but they are a valuable reference point, and there is really nothing comparable until the anthropological studies of the early twentieth century. he was himself a singer, serving at various times as both Imam and Müezzin, and elsewhere in his book of travels he is specific about musical practices at the homes and courts of local dignitaries, listing the many types of song sung by the abdal Khan of Bitlis in eastern anatolia, for example, together with the extensive range of musical instruments in his collection.14 there is less specificity about music in his accounts of Balkan travels, but the Book does include some descriptions of local music and dance in albania. they include a memory of the dancing following a wedding party in Zharovina, together with a description of mourning rituals in Gjirokastër. there are also references to love songs he heard in elbasan, and descriptions of the roma who were employed in the mehter bands.15 even so, and despite an extensive account of the activities and writings of the Bektaşis, there is little about religious music in Çelebi’s writings, beyond a mention of the teaching of ‘Koran melodies’ at a medresa in Berat. in any case, soon after he traversed the length and breadth of the empire, the ottoman state distanced itself from the Sufi orders, in a so-called ‘anti-Dervish movement’ whose turn to piety and orthodoxy resulted in intensified policies of islamisation in the late seventeenth century. the movement was not sustained, but it may partly explain why subsequent accounts of Muslim music in the Balkans, from the early eighteenth century onwards, tended to come from western rather than ottoman sources (a more obvious reason, of course, was the waning power of the ottomans following the treaty of Karlowitz).

14 Dankoff 1990, 99–101. See also Özergin 1972. 15 See Shupo 2006, 149–50 on some of the possible ambiguities here.

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the many accounts by european visitors to the Balkans constitute a second layer of historical description. they are often instructive, but they invariably reveal institutional and personal prejudice. the characteristic perspective is anti-turkish, so that the fleeting glimpses we are afforded into musical life tend either to ignore altogether or else to denigrate Muslim practices. Dismissive comments on the ‘music’ of the ottomans now become a commonplace of travel writing. a notable exception was the remarkable Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who spoke ottoman turkish, and whose letters offer us many insights into the social mores of the ottomans, including the life of women. Written in 1716–18 but published a half century later, they do not dwell at length on music, but they do make reference to this anti-turkish perspective. Montague seeks to qualify it, however, and often reveals a genuine sympathy for and understanding of the idiom. ‘i suppose you may have read that the turks have no musick, but what is shocking to the ears’, she wrote from adrianopole. ‘[. . .] i can assure you that the musick is extremely pathetick’ (meaning here ‘deeply expressive’).16 Later travellers were by no means convinced by Lady Mary’s advocacy. an anti-turkish rhetoric informs the many late-eighteenth-century recorded accounts coming from men affiliated to the embassies, for example, such as Sir James porter, whose journals and diaries include much about the religion and customs of the turks, (Le Comte) Choiseul-Gouffier, author of Le voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782, 1809), and even ignatius Muradgea d’ohsson, who distanced himself from his own ottoman origins but went on to write a three-volume Tableau général de l’empire ottoman.17 and in the wake of the napoleonic Wars, the same rhetoric surfaces yet again in a plethora of new writings by independent travellers to the Balkans, notably W.M. (‘Colonel’) Leake, (especially in his Travels in Northern Greece of 1835),18 and edmund Spencer,19 whose description of the singing of the ‘turks’ (meaning the Muslims of Bosnia) as ‘wearisome and monotonous’ and of their musical instruments as ‘equally primitive’ is characteristic.20 a similar prejudice is found in victorian authors such as 16  Montague 1800, 123. 17  porter 1854; Choiseul-Gouffier 1782, 1809; d’ohsson 1787, 1798, 1820. Moving on a generation, one might also mention the diplomat andrew archibald paton, who wrote about a visit to Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia in 1846–47; see paton 1945 and 1949. 18  Leake 1835. For a comment on Leake’s indebtedness to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1749), see Wagstaff 2004. 19  Spencer 1851. 20 Quoted in hadžiselimović 2001, 287.

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John Gardner Wilkinson, and a generation later arthur evans, whose travelogue was based on a walking tour of Bosnia and herzegovina in 1875, the very year of the historic uprising in those territories.21 the list of such travellers is extensive. very striking is the prominence of women, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 vesna Goldsworthy has written with insight about such women, including edith Durham.23 Durham’s agendas were those of the victorian age, but she was influential, including politically. her observations of local life and customs, especially in Montenegro and albania, extended to music. in describing the music at a post-supper gathering in Skreli, albania, she contrasted the unequally tempered scale of albanian traditional music with the modern european scale, and described the vocal style as follows: ‘the words are incredibly drawn out over long minor turns and ups and downs that few english throats could imitate. to the uninitiated it seems to begin nowhere and leave off anywhere, until, after a few weeks, the ear, accustomed as it were to a new language, recognises both tune and rhythm, and airs that at first seemed all alike become distinct’.24 (Compare edward Lear, for whom the albanians ‘make a feeble buzzing or humming over their tinkling guitars, like dejected flies in a window-pane’.)25 elsewhere Durham described the ‘long-drawn, melancholy cry’ of funeral laments in niš in Serbia,26 ballad singing to the accompaniment of the tambura in prokletije, where the singer’s ‘lean fingers [plucked] strange trills and wonderful shakes from the slim, tinkling instrument’,27 as also gypsy bands in Devich, epic songs in Montenegro and even the ‘raucous wailing voices’ heard in the Catholic Cathedral in Scutari (Shkodër).28 For the most part her emphasis was firmly on traditional village music of albania and Montenegro, and she undertook some pioneering recordings of epic songs as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, producing some of the earliest recordings of albanian music still extant.29

21  evans 1877. See also hobhouse 1858. 22 allcock and Young 1991. 23 Goldsworthy 1998. in the early twentieth century the predominant anti-turkish stance in this travel writing was not always politically welcome to politicians in the West. 24 Durham 1985 (1909), 48. 25 edward Lear’s accounts of his travels in the 1840s have recently appeared in a new edition (Destani and elsie 2008; this quotation on 44–5). 26 Durham 1904, 180. 27 ibid., 141. 28 ibid., 111. 29 these cylinders, mainly from 1905, are housed in the Sound archive of the British Library. they consist of (sometimes barely audible) laments and epic songs. Compare the

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in general, where Muslim musical practices are described, they are congealed into a representation of alterity, epitomised in Durham’s description of ‘the long-drawn oriental yowl that means music’ at a Muslim rom wedding.30 alongside such travel literature there had always been a body of more scholarly writing, but this gained new impetus following the systematisation of academic disciplines that took place in the late nineteenth century. even as Durham was writing up her travels, Frederick hasluck was embarking on a more dispassionate scholarly study of sacred sites in the region. hasluck’s contribution to the sociology of religion under the ottomans was of pioneering significance. in particular, his descriptions form a valuable counterweight to the travellers’ tales, if anything swerving towards the kind of positivistic listing that we find in some of Çelebi’s writings more than two centuries earlier. indeed his systematic enumeration of sacred sites in the early twentieth century provides us with a fascinating comparator for Çelebi’s listings, but now undertaken from the perspective of european scholarship. predictably, the comparison reveals a decline in islamic foundations overall, but also intriguing continuities, where lodges, sanctuaries and rituals survived the centuries, and in the case of the albanian Bektaşi [Bektashi] a notable numerical increase, not least because the sect was closely associated with the albanian national movement. hasluck’s agenda was at some remove from that of Durham in every respect, and for that matter from the agenda of Durham’s arch rival rebecca West.31 thematic to his work were the reciprocal interactions of islam and Christianity in the Balkans (and anatolia), and accordingly he documented the ‘transferences’ between sacred places, a phenomenon widely recognised informally, including by Durham.32 Music, indeed imaginative culture in general, was never part of his programme, but by describing systematically the infrastructure of sacred life in the region, he provided a valuable context for the ethnographic researches of present-day scholars into music and islam in the Balkans. extant recordings made by paul traeger in 1903. these latter are available on the CD ‘Discovering albania’, produced by the Ulysses Foundation, tirana in 2012. 30 Durham 1904, 24–5. 31  West’s epic account of Yugoslavia in the 1930s (West 1977) has overshadowed the very different contributions of Durham. hasluck’s redoubtable widow Margaret hasluck also spent several years in albania and made her own contribution to the literature produced by women travellers. See Goldsworthy 1998 and the essay in allcock and Young 1991. 32 hasluck 1924. again this is conveyed in fictional form in de Bernières 2004.

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Such ethnography as has been undertaken – much of it unpublished – provides us with yet another layer of description, throwing light on past and present alike. By observing and recording contemporary practices, and by interviewing informants whose memory of musical traditions extends a long way back, several researchers have been able to build some sort of picture of ‘now’ and ‘then’. What seems to emerge from this is that in most cases (though, as we shall see, not all) musical practices from the ottoman heartlands were not simply imported wholesale to the Balkans, but underwent a process of gradual acclimatisation to local conditions. and the further removed from the centre, the more tenacious was the hold of local traditions. it may be possible to give some indication of how this worked by looking first at ‘core’ turkish populations in Macedonia and Bulgaria, then at albania and Bosnia, and finally at Serbia, including vojvodina, where the ottoman presence was of shorter duration.33 For some years now aida islam has researched the religious music of dwindling turkish populations in Macedonia. By interviewing prominent spiritual leaders in Skopje and elsewhere, she has charted the development of religious music in these regions from the late nineteenth century to the present. in the period immediately following the ottoman retreat, religious services employed a wide range of forms, and enacted them according to conventions that had been carefully maintained by a formalised ottoman system of music education. More recently, however, there has been a reduction and simplification of forms, and of makam-s. in tetovo and Gostivar to the west, there have been attempts to improve the quality of the ezân when performed live, and to encourage a more rigorous approach to music in the mosque. thus the form known as Mihrabije is performed daily after the morning and evening prayer in tetovo and Gostivar, as opposed to twice per week in Skopje, ohrid and Struga, and not at all in eastern Macedonia. there has also been a decline in the forms associated with spiritual holidays (notably the Tekbir, and the Miradzhie [Miraciyye] for the ‘night of Lights’), and in full performances of the nativity poem Mevlid-i Şerif (here again tetovo and Gostivar prove the exceptions). in ohrid and Struga several forms originally associated with the mosque have migrated to the nakşibendi tekke, including the Salavat, which was traditionally sung daily with the afternoon prayer, and also the Temdzhid.

33 this is no more than a sketch; it does not, for example, extend into Greece. For a useful account of the legacy in Crete, see Williams 2003.

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Yet in other parts of Macedonia the tradition of the tekke – the halvetije order in particular – is in serious decline, not least due to a crisis of leadership caused by population shifts. the social and cultural role of the institution has dwindled to insignificance compared to ottoman times, with many of the lodges either closed altogether or turned into museums. Yet the surviving tekke-s still provide some continuity with a vital tradition of music-making that was once widespread across anatolia and the eastern Balkans. overall, then, the story in Macedonia is one of decline or liberalisation, punctuated by intermittent attempts at reform. But in another sense traditional forms of Sufi music have found new incarnations far beyond the tekke on world music platforms. this story, again one that is not confined to Macedonia, is for a later chapter. turkish communities in Bulgaria present a very different profile. they exist only in the east of the country, and although they number almost a million they retain some traces of a ghetto mentality; there were pogroms in the 1980s. Margaritova rumiana researches communities in the villages around Kuirdzhali in southeastern Bulgaria, where there are substantial populations of heterodox Muslims, mainly following alevi traditions.34 From her interviews with older people it is clear that for many years the tradition, centred on the saz, remained defiantly conservative (in a manner very often characteristic of traditions displaced from their spiritual home), and was largely unaffected by surrounding Bulgarian traditions. this is in marked contrast to the increasing permissiveness encountered in Macedonia. Moreover, although in very recent years the practice has begun to change, the impetus for change has come not from Bulgaria but from turkey, with which the villagers maintain close contacts. the tendency has been to open up the islamic rituals to a wider public domain, a belated response to similar developments in turkey, and one that tends to detach the music from ritual, and to give it something of an autonomy character. as we move further from the ottoman court, to the remote edge of the islamic world of the Middle east, musical dependencies become rather less apparent, particularly in the realm of secular vocal music. among Bektaşi [Bektashi] circles in albania a secular tradition of oriental love poetry (akin to Bosnian sevdalinka) developed at an early stage, with the 34 there is an impressive publication programme sponsored by the international Centre for Minority Studies and intercultural relations in Sofia. of special relevance to our subject is Lozanova and Mikov 1999 and Gramatikova 2001. For a general discussion of the Muslim minorities in Bulgaria, see neuberger 2004.

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albanian language written in arabic script. When sung, these ‘ashiki songs’ fused oriental idioms with native traditional music, again as in Bosnia, and this fusion was also a feature of the ilâhi-s that were performed not just in tekke-s but in domestic contexts. it seems, however, that as we enter the world of the zikr rituals such elements of local colour recede somewhat, making space for wider Sufi practices. this emerges not least from Bahtir Sheholli’s vivid and highly specific (stage by stage) evocation of the ceremony of Hashure in the Masjid of helvets of rahovec (Kosovo).35 the intense spirituality associated with this ritual – its fervour and its calm – comes over clearly in Sheholli’s account. it is a very long way from the commercialised presentations of zikr rituals that are now a commonplace, and it is striking how closely the description accords with recordings of similar rituals in Bosnia.36 immediate location may well be a factor in this. ankica petrović tells us that in the more remote mountainous territories of southern Bosnia even the Kor’anic chanting and the call to prayer are influenced by local styles.37 in contrast, the urban centres and the more accessible rural settings of the northern plains were more thoroughly orientalised, both in the ‘music’ of the mosque and in the ceremonies of the tekke [tekija]. Yet even here, the institutions took on a particular character, at some remove from more central ottoman traditions. the Sufi orders in Sarajevo exhibited a markedly syncretic character, with shared practices and cross affiliation, not least because the orders came under considerable pressure following proscriptions from the Bosnian islamic community from 1952 onwards.38 this situation eased in the early 1980s, but the syncretic character of the rituals remained in place. risto pekka pennanen recorded the state of play in the Sarajevo tekije in the late 1980s and 1990s, pointing to the close links between the nakşibendi and Mevlevî orders, led by the same sheik, meeting in the same tekija, and perfoming the zikr in similar ways.39 today,

35 Sheholli 2006. it is worth persevering with the atrocious translation in this publication, as it offers us an intriguing glimpse into a world of non-commercialised Sufi musicmaking and its effects on participants. 36 See, for example, the CD Sufi Chanting from Sarajevo (archives internationales de Musique populaire). 37 petrović 1988. petrović has also collaborated with David Levin in the 1993 CD Music from an Endangered Minority: Bosnian Muslim Music (Washington DC: Smithsonian Folkways records). See also Baralić-Materne 1983. 38 all tekke-s were officially closed in Bosnia and herzegovina in 1952 following these proscriptions. 39 pennanen 1993 and 1994. For a comment on the Mevlevî order in Sarajevo during ottoman times, see Zubović 2001.

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apart from the Kadiri rituals at the hadži-Sinananova tekija, ceremonies are often performed without instruments in Sarajevo. the ilahije were, and are, at the heart of Sufi religious practices in both albania and Bosnia, and it seems that the term was used more widely and permissively in these regions than in turkey, from where many of the texts and melodies originated. While it is primarily understood as a devotional song, often praying for God’s help to stay on the right path, the ilahija can also embrace or subsume the kasida, a eulogistic song dedicated to the prophet. it is performed in the home as well as the mosque and tekija, and its generic boundaries are not always clear, at times embracing lullabies as well as devotional songs, sung either in turkish, Bosnian or albanian. in Bosnia today, this genre has been appropriated as a concert or recorded item in glitzy, explicitly political, manifestations. But we can glimpse a more private world of Bosnian Muslim devotional music of some five hundred years’ vintage through the ethnographic researches of Maja Baralić-Materne, based on recordings and interviews made with a small group of older singers from the nakşibendi tekija. the ilahije here vary from simple strophic songs to more melismatic arias, performed either unaccompanied, as on special occasions in the mosque, or accompanied by the kudüm when sung at home (traditionally the ilahija should only be accompanied by ‘natural’ instruments, meaning those associated with the islamic tradition). there is also a hereditary dimension here. armir orman, a prominent figure in Bosnian Sufi circles and himself a kudüm player, accompanies both his father and his son as they sing, or strictly speaking ‘learn’, the improving or consolatory ilahija texts. Despite the commercialisation of ilahije today, the traditional repertory has by no means disappeared from Bosnian Muslim spiritual life.40 in contrast, those parts of the Balkans in which orthodoxy and nationalism joined forces were quick to dismantle ottoman infrastructures once the empire had retreated. in Sofia, Bucharest and athens the majority of the mosques were speedily converted, though there remain quite a few historic mosques, including the sixteenth-century Banya-Bashi Mosque in Sofia.41 this was also broadly true of Belgrade and niš (annexed by Serbia in 1878). Božidar Jezernik tells us that from ‘the middle of the nineteenth century, the Balkans [looked] like a copy or even a caricature, of western

40 Baralić-Materne 2003. 41  this was possibly built by the Janissary Kodja Mirrat Sinan, who built over 80 mosques including the famous Selim ii Mosque in edirne.

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europe’.42 Further to the west and to the north, Catholic europe likewise rapidly effaced the turkish inheritance: in osijek in Slavonia, for instance, and even in pécs and Buda in hungary, though there is still a Bektaşi shrine in the hungarian capital today. these are all cities in which a oncepervasive ottoman culture has left relatively few visible traces today, though all of them continue to host minority islamic communities. as a result we have to exercise historical imagination to register that they were once homes to a thriving and dynamic Muslim culture. a brief return visit to Serbia will make the point. as in Bulgaria, canonic narratives of Serbian general history have been so focused on the emergent nation that the ottoman centuries tend to be presented as an extended (and aberrant) parenthesis in the story. David norris has remarked on how comprehensively the ottoman legacy was erased architecturally in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: ‘Such was transformation that even those Westerners who did not hide their disdain for the Balkans could not help but comment favourably on what Belgrade had become’.43 But it is worth remembering that Belgrade was once a turkish city, and that there are still traces of a lingering ottoman influence. the Bajrakli Mosque, built in the second half of the seventeenth century, may be the only surviving mosque in the city today, but at one point there were many, as there were of course in niš (the surviving mosque there is of some historic importance). there is interesting archival material at the Bajrakli Mosque, as at several of the historic mosques in Serbia.44 But little of it helps us with music. the transience of music is part of its joy – it disappears into the ether, and leaves only vestigial traces in material culture – and part of its frustration. it is the more frustrating when we move yet further from the imperial centre to vojvodina. the ottoman empire took control of this region (not yet so named) following the Battle of Mohács of 1526 and the fall of Banat in 1552, though the territory was still ruled by Serbian Despots acting as hungarian vassals. During ottoman rule, most of the inhabitants of vojvodina were Serbs. But the cities were populated with Muslims, and for more than a century and a half, before the habsburg empire took control with the treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and passarowitz (1718),

42 Jezernik 2004, 227. 43 norris 1999, 99. 44 one classic example is the beautiful sixteenth-century hussein-pasha Mosque in pljevlja, now in northern Montenegro (it includes a manuscript of the Koran dating from the sixteenth century).

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the territory was divided into the Sandžaks of Srem and Segedin, and the elayet of temeşvar [timoşoara], a turkish province existing in Banat after 1552. So before the end of ottoman rule dramatically changed the demographic character of the region there would have been a prominent layer of islamic cultural and religious forms in the towns. information about this is all but impossible to find, so comprehensively was the ottoman presence effaced. Musicologists do refer to the mehterhâne, but this is the only genre of turkish music in vojvodina on which anything is ever written, no doubt because it was absorbed by western culture. naturally it is hard to say much in the absence of concrete sources. But we can at least allow our knowledge of the practices in mosques, minarets and tekke-s elsewhere in the Balkans to stimulate the imagination. there will have been local particularities, as there were (and are) in Bosnia, and very likely the proximity to central europe will have been registered musically. But there will also have been the commonalities imposed by the rituals of the faith. the ezân will have sounded in this remote corner of the ottoman empire, before it became austrian, then austro-hungarian, and then Serbian; the Mevlid will have been sung there too, and the semâ performed. Coffee Break Beyond the mosques and the tekke-s, and right across the ottomancontrolled Balkans, an oriental secular music was performed in a variety of settings. During the heyday of the empire, the most prestigious venues were the courts of the viziers and pashas, but in some contexts these sites were matched by the feudal estates of native aristocracies, notably the romanian boyars ruling under turkish authority. even with the emergence of newly independent Balkan nations in the nineteenth century oriental music was not immediately deposed, and for a time it still found a role in official ceremonies. Serbia is a case in point. When prince Miloš obrenović became ruler of the (semi-)autonomous province in 1829–30, a turkish military band from the old regime remained in place. and even when Miloš’s westernising policies were instigated in 1831, they did not immediately oust the influential band leader Mustafa, as several travellers to Serbia at the time testified.45

45 Djurić-Klajn 1972, 49.

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ottoman music also traditionally accompanied the elaborate entertainments (including ‘shadow’ plays) arranged for private parties given by the social elites of the eastern Balkans. the geographical point is important, for it was only really in the eastern Balkans that the more sophisticated traditions of ottoman classical music were practised extensively within the confines of a patronal culture. these traditions were the preserve of educated Muslims. on the other hand, as noted in the last chapter, the boundaries between this repertory and more widespread styles of popular music-making were not always sharply drawn, and in the later stages of the empire musicians seemed to move rather freely between classical and popular styles. Karl Signell refers to ‘semi-classical music’ to describe some repertories in this borderline area.46 Musical entertainments were in the hands of professionals, but if the performers were Muslim they would usually come from the lower social orders. the orthodox islamic view of music, and even more of dancing, was at best circumspect and at worst censorious. So although for many Muslims the roles of listener and spectator were deemed acceptable, that of practitioner was off limits. professional music-making was a low-status occupation, as it was within the aristocratic cultures of Western europe, at least until the late eighteenth century. typically, professional musicians would have been Jewish or Christian (Greek or armenian), and by the late nineteenth century they were predominantly roma, renowned for their capacity to move with insouciant ease from style to style, and from genre to genre. roma were to be found right across the empire, but they were especially prominent in the Danubian principalities, where they participated in a tradition of urban popular music of some specificity. initially, in pre-unification days, they were attached to the mehterhâne at the phanariot courts or to the musical establishments maintained by the households of boyars and voivods, and even monasteries. But with their political emancipation in the mid nineteenth century, many became itinerant musicians, and these (often romani-speaking) roma maintained traditions of music-making that were essentially separate from those who settled in the towns. the town-dwellers, a mix of turkish and romanian roma, soon became the professional musicians who supplied music for all dances and other social occasions, often joining forces with romanian musicians to make up the lăutar ensembles, ancestors of the modern

46 Signell 1977, 11.

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taraf-s of the world music scene. villages such as Clejani, just south of Bucharest, became famous, and are still famous, for muzica lăutărească.47 Muzica lăutărească synthesised turkish makam-s and performance styles, european chordal harmony and appropriations of the melodic and rhythmic patterns of romanian traditional music. it was the latter ingredient that provided the main distinguishing element, differentiating the lăutar ensembles from other urban popular music. Some of the romanian repertory was trans-regional, and known by all, including ritual wedding music, epic songs (cântece bătrâneşti), and traditional ballads. But there were also songs and dance melodies drawn from specific regions, to be used as and when the occasion demanded, as well as versions of Greek and turkish popular music. Somehow it all coalesced into a clearly defined style, associated with the solo dancing of the horă ţigănească [gypsy hora], and with the popular oriental women’s song-dance known as manea, complete with tsifteteli rhythm. By the late nineteenth century it had become customary to perform the repertory as suites of pieces according to context and demand. it was a high-prestige popular culture, and some of the performers became legendary figures. in listing several of these, Marian Lupascu is anxious to stress that they were not exclusively roma.48 among the principal urban venues for the lăutari were restaurants, and more particularly coffee houses, in the larger cities of romania. the coffee house was an institution all over the ottoman-occupied Balkans. it was already installed there before it conquered Western europe in the eighteenth century, and when the turks receded it remained one of their lasting legacies. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coffee houses of basically oriental design (with rugs scattered on the floor and benches with cushions around the edges of the room) were to be found in the major towns and cities of the Balkans. they were often owned by Jews, and were frequented exclusively by men. Characteristically they were sites of leisure and studied inactivity of a kind frequently caricatured as ‘oriental’, but they were also used as popular venues for political and religious debate. they were often organised according to ethnic group or religious affiliation, and in this respect a legacy can still be found today in the eastern Balkans. in the towns of Western thrace, Christian roma will congregate in one café, while Muslim roma can be found in another, and pomaks

47 Ciobanu 1969. 48 Lupascu 2006.

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in yet another. one indispensable accompaniment to the coffee was the chibouk or narghilé. patrick Leigh Fermor was surprised to encounter the chibouk during his sojourns in hungary and transylvania in the 1930s; while staying in a rather wealthy aristocratic home in Békéscsaba (on the hungarian-romanian border).49 the narghilé, on the other hand, is not just a staple of tourist shops in today’s bezistan; it is an active social practice. the other indispensable accompaniment to coffee was music. in the same travelogue, Fermor documented his encounter with the ‘wild music’, and its ecstasy-inducing effects, performed in the coffee houses by rom ensembles.50 Given the location, the music he heard would have been in a style hongrois, but the idiom changed with the geography. a little further east, it might have been muzica lăutărească. a little further south, it might have been čalgija. as usual, rom musicians would assimilate the most marketable local style. Since several were of anatolian origin, ottoman forms and styles could be bequeathed rather directly. But in practice there was much greater interactivity than this suggests. Jane Sugarman makes the point well when she describes urban music-making in the late ottoman-period Balkans as ‘characterised by multi-directional borrowing or sharing of musical materials among different groups’,51 and she goes on, incidentally, to draw a telling comparison with commercial musical production in South east europe today. Whatever the ethnic origins of the performers, there were often question marks about the propriety of such entertainments, especially when they involved dancing. the sense of moral dubiety is nicely conveyed by a French traveller in the early 1920s, as reported by rudolf Brandl. of a banquet in northern Greece, our traveller remarks: ‘the musicians made the palace and the courts resound with the tones of their barbaric instruments and their calls [. . .] after the meal [. . .] the musicians made way for the [. . .] immoral gypsies who performed [. . .] lascivious dances in front of these dignified Muslims [. . .]. Finally they served us pipes, followed by coffee’.52 Female dancers of the kind described here (known as çengis under the ottomans) were often roma, and they were usually organised into guilds.53 Some commentators have suggested that it was precisely

49 Fermor 1977, 79. 50 ibid., 62. 51  Sugarman 2006, 65. 52 Brandl 1996. 53 Silverman 2008.

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their alienation from the status quo that invested the rom women with a special kind of power, enabling them to tap into the subversive potential of female sexuality in male-dominated societies. Undoubtedly there are potent gender issues here, and they resonate right across the social and familial practices of the eastern Mediterranean.54 Mark Mazower tells again the familiar story of the young roza eskenazi, the Jewish singer who later became one of the great exponents of rebetika.55 his account reminds us that Jewish women too were alienated from the status quo, and it is no doubt significant that the Sephardic women singers and dancers (tañadera-s) of Salonica were much in demand in the kafe aman; indeed eskenazi started her career as a dancer in just this way. they were, moreover, part of a broader Jewish component in the multinational musical life of Salonica, a kind of public counterpart to some of the Sephardic practices discussed in chapter 1. Before the famous Café Mazlum was burned in the Great Fire of 1917, abraham Karakas efendi sang amanedes there before going on to lead the chant in the synagogue. Later, in the 1920s, ‘Maestro Sadik’ was hardly less famous, singing in Ladino, as well as in Greek, turkish and arabic. in general, Mazower’s book offers us a vivid depiction of the musical world associated with the ‘smoke-filled cafés’, the tavernas, the bars and the night clubs of this great multi-cultural city, many of them sited in the red light districts and all with broadly similar repertory. this was the world of the kafe aman. We encountered the term kafe aman in chapter 3. originally turkish, the music café had a long history in istanbul, but it came into its own and was much more widely disseminated in the second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries. it was not a monolithic institution – there were various species of music café, each with particular clienteles – but very broadly it hosted repertories based on the ottoman fasil ensemble, consisting mainly of instruments such as tanbûr, kanûn or santûr, tambourine, tarabuka [darbuka], violin (or kemânçe) and klarnet. in Macedonia, thrace and Bulgaria these ensembles were known as čalgija, from the turkish çalgi, meaning simply instrumental group. this should not be confused with the more recent Bulgarian pop-folk genre chalga, though, as Dimitrina Kaufman and Claire Levy have separately

54 veronica Doubleday has addressed some of these issues, especially in relation to women and instruments, in Doubleday 1999. 55 Mazower 2005, 370.

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pointed out, other genres such as wedding music and ethno-jazz in Bulgaria took čalgija as a starting-point.56 it was above all in the turkish-dominated towns of Bulgaria and Macedonia that čalgija was instituted in the nineteenth century. the ensembles were associated initially with the entertainments particular to different town guilds and their saints, but they quickly took on a much wider role in weddings, fairs, dances and cafés. the Macedonian čalgija, linked especially with roma and Jews, acquired its own character, differentiated from turkish prototypes by the incorporation of Balkan as well as turkish repertory. it was in the nature of čalgija that it blended cultures in this way, drawing on the rural music of Macedonia as well as urban popular repertory. the ‘old town’ tradition of čalgija was really an urban popular music associated especially with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was familiar in all the major towns of the ottoman Balkans, albeit not always under this name. in albanian towns, for example, the ensembles were known as saze. Like čalgija, saze represented anything but a unified tradition. the most famous ensembles were from permeti in the south, with an entirely different character and instrumentation from the distinctive, makam-based saze of Shkodër in the north. even in those towns in the western Balkans where the turks had already been expelled and political independence achieved, traditions of oriental urban music survived. Labels were used loosely and often interchangeably. thus, in and around vranje, in that corner of southeastern Serbia geographically and culturally closest to Bulgaria, the term sevdalinka was occasionally used to describe characteristically oriental love songs, a particular genre of gradske pjesme associated especially with Bosnia. in much the same way, the term čalgija was used to describe the corresponding instrumental ensemble of the vranje region, and it was even extended to cover similar ensembles in Belgrade. the ‘Dardaneli’ coffee house, a cultural centre and meeting place, had a resident čalgija right up to 1912, at which point the building was demolished. once again the spread of these ensembles and their music right across the ottoman Balkans was due partly to the roma, who were to be found wherever there was music, and who kept pace with the rapidly changing idioms of urban popular music, from the fasil ensemble, to guitar and accordion, and eventually to synthesizer.

56 Kaufman, D. 1990; chapter 3 of Levy 2007.

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in Greek cities, the terminology was complicated by the fall-out from the exchange of minorities. these days the term amanedes is often used as a loose description of early twentieth-century ottoman vocal pieces performed, along with semi-improvised instrumental genres, in the music cafés. in its strict meaning, however, it referred to a particular kind of lament, derived from the ottoman gazel mentioned in the last chapter.57 But these laments, when sung in Greek, were sometimes labelled rebetika following the exchange of populations, thus establishing a permissive usage for that term too. in reality the amanedes differed markedly from the bouzouki-based, male-dominated piraeus rebetika popularised by vamvakaris. For long enough the two genres co-existed. We find them side-by-side in the music cafés of Salonica, at least from the late 1930s. Certainly the charge of orientalism made against rebetika by the censors at this time was poorly-founded so far as the piraeus genre was concerned, for these songs marked a stylistic departure from kafe aman traditions; even the texts have all the marks of a counter culture increasingly directed against a specifically Greek political establishment. they represented a swerve towards europe. that swerve was part of a much more general rejection of the ottoman world that was apparent over most of the Balkans from the late nineteenth century onwards: in town architecture, in interior design, and in the patterns and structures of daily life. edith Durham once remarked: ‘nothing is more surprising about [the turk] than the speed with which all visible signs of his existence can be wiped out’.58 the coffee houses were themselves swept up in this steady process of europeanisation. increasingly they exchanged their rugs and benches for tables and chairs, just as (later) their music-making exchanged turkish instruments for european and makam-s for chordal harmony. and the process was naturally accelerated in the interwar period by the 78 rpm records that were produced in considerable numbers, and had the familiar standardising effect of recorded music everywhere. a common misconception about the exchange of minorities is that it brought an oriental culture into immediate contact with a western culture. in reality there already existed a western culture in asia Minor long before the exchange. throughout much of the later nineteenth century 57 the distinctive feature here is the repetition of the phrase aman-aman [mercy, mercy], in part as a means of ‘filling out’ the syllable count. Fermor refers to the ‘aman’ interjections in the context of klephtic singing by the Sarakatsans in thrace (Fermor 1966, 17). 58 Durham 1904, 318.

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it was cultivated by ottoman elites, and by bourgeois Greek populations in Smyrna and Constantinople, as also in cities such as trebizond. there was a more cosmopolitan culture and lifestyle in some of these cities than in mainland Greece at the time, and it ranged from elite formal culture, including opera, to the popular culture associated with the café chantant. effectively, the influence of the West began to transform the practice of popular musicians from early in the nineteenth century, encouraging them to use chordal harmony, and to add to their repertory western dances such as polkas, waltzes and quadrilles. in other words, a repertory of urban popular music of western orientation already had well-established roots in asia Minor, and it was transferred to the mainland along with the oriental traditions associated with the kafe aman. For long enough two distinct traditions of popular music – conveniently associated with the café chantant and the kafe aman respectively – co-existed and even mingled in early twentieth-century Greece. indeed their relative merits were a debating point right through to the mid century. So the move to european fashions already had a broader context. there was genuine reciprocity in the exchanges between asia Minor and mainland Greece, as we noted in chapter 3, but the general tendency was clear enough. as the ottoman empire receded politically from the Balkans, its cultural forms were gradually but inexorably replaced. even so, they did not disappear altogether. it was in the smaller towns rather than the major cities that they survived the longest. Turning West that the syncretic character of urban music percolated down to smaller towns becomes apparent when we place particular regions of the ottoman Balkans under a microscope, as athena Katsanevaki has done in her study of communities centred on the ottoman-albanian (now Greek) city of Janina [ioannina] in epirus.59 the social and cultural life of Janina, especially under its tosk albanian Governor ali pasha in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, found a major place for music. it was prominent at the court of the pashalik, with rom and Jewish musicians and dancers brought directly from istanbul, at the carnival feast (a Christian institution but shared with the ottomans), at entertainments

59 Katsanevaki 2006.

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in the central square with its open garden, and of course at the coffee houses (known as yalí-kafené) and taverns. Samuel Baud-Bovy caught the residual traces of this tradition, noting that the surviving songs about ali pasha resembled the urban songs of istanbul, and also of Moldavia and Wallachia. he also remarked that, as sung in Janina, the songs were close to what he labelled the thracian amanes.60 in other words, the picture we have of music in Janina is one that foregrounds urban song, and musical life in general, of a distinctly oriental character, in which Jewish coplas, turkish ilâhi-s and Greek stihoplakia (light songs in rhyming couplets) coexisted and interpenetrated. however, the intriguing aspect of Katsanevaki’s research is her detailed study of the spread of these urban songs by way of trade and military routes to ‘small urban islands within the local provincial musical idiom of the area’.61 the picture was clearly a differentiated one, allowing for the coexistence in some settlements of traditional ritual songs and urban songs, while in other settlements – especially close to what she calls ‘cultural poles’ – the traditional songs were themselves urbanised by means of ottoman influence. Katsanevaki’s work on the Janina vilayet qualifies but does not contradict the basic proposition that until the incursions of modernity there was a rather clear differentiation between orientalised urban and indigenous rural musical styles in this part of South east europe. What it really does is to make specific the fine grid of urban centres that are nested within the larger regional map, and also to reveal significant areas of interpenetration between city, town and townlet. Defining a relation between these urban traditions and surrounding indigenous musics is another question again, and a complex one, invoking the conventional categories of ‘folk music’ and ‘popular music’. it seems necessary to explore this terrain a little, and to do so i will take a brief excursion into traditional music, a category that would later be relegated – one might say downgraded – to ‘folk music’, in Greece more generally. Following that i will return to epirus, where present-day political borders are exactly that: present-day. the rural-urban divide partly maps onto a folk-popular divide in Greece, and that in its turn partly maps onto different vocal styles and different instrument sets (for example, lira, laouto and gaida or tsabouna, often

60 Baud-Bovy 1984, 62–63; Baud-Bovy 1958, 122–25. See the reference in Katsenevaki 2006, 290. 61  ibid., 291.

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‘home-made’, tend to be associated with folk traditions, while violin, guitar and klarino tend to refer us to popular idioms, though in some island traditions a ziyia of violin and laouto, or sometimes santouri, has long provided the main instrumental accompaniment to local songs). But ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ are far from stable categories. they are ideological as well as descriptive terms, and in the end both folk music and popular music came to be heavily implicated in musical constructions of nationhood in Greece. even so, it is easy to fall a prey to retrospective misreadings of Greekness in traditional music, for it is hard not to look at this subject through the unifying prism of modern recordings and tourist stereotypes. in general, the Greeks have defined themselves as an ethnic nation, and for this reason traditional Greek music has tended to refer mainly to music by Greeks rather than music in Greece. attempts to gather traditional cultural practices into a national heritage were made initially by Spyridon Zambelios in the late nineteenth century, followed by nikolaos politis and his successor Stilpon Kyriakidis in the early twentieth.62 the very act of collecting already involved an ideological intervention in what was really an oral ‘demotic tradition’ of poetry and song,63 and this was intensified by a subsequent quest for commonalities. Later folklorists found these in three areas in particular. one is prosody, with some scholars stressing that quantitative prosody lingered on in the ‘worded melody’ background to Greek folksong long after it had been abandoned in the spoken language.64 another concerns the underlying dance genres that shaped the songs, including many varieties of syrtos (and related kalamatianos) and tsamikos, which some have been read as expressive of a national culture avant la lettre.65 and the last is structural type, notably the skeletal pitch structures (partly expressed by the term skopos) that underpin the ornamental processes found in some Greek traditional music. in reality such common factors struggle to impose themselves on the multiple regional differences found in the ballads and lyrical songs of

62 politis’s major collection was Selections from the Songs of the Greek People (1914). the ideological roots of Greek folklore collection have been discussed at length, notably by Michael herzfeld. 63 roderick Beaton uses the term ‘demotic tradition’ (Beaton 1980, 2–3). 64 this is a complex issue whose bibliography has been discussed in detail by Katsanevaki (Katsanevaki 1998). 65 See Chianis 1967 for an account of the synergies between albanian and Greek versions of the tsamikos, which is regarded as a national dance by both nations (likewise the syrtos is shared with pirin Bulgaria). For general studies of Greek dance, see petrides 1994 and hunt 1996.

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Greece, whether of the mainland or the islands. not only are traditional music and dance invariably shaped more by regional and social than by national impulses; we also need to factor in the transforming effects of three very powerful external poles of attraction. First, there is asia Minor, influencing the eastern mainland, the northern aegean islands (Lesbos in particular), and also parts of Macedonia and thrace. Second, there is the western Mediterranean, drawing the music of the ionian islands and the littoral peloponnese in particular towards an italian sphere of influence. and third, this time looking north, there is the Slavonic Balkans, creating musical continuities between northern Greece and Bulgaria, as also between the pindus mountain range and the albanian and Dinaric alps. this returns us to north pindus. We may assume that during the reign of ali pasha there existed some form of the ritual songs associated with pastoral communities in epirus. as noted in chapter 2, the extraordinary polyphony of Greek epirus is in fact closely linked to rural music in southern (Lab) albania, for until the demise of the ottomans epirus embraced this region too. (there was no clear political dividing-line between albania and Greece until the settlement following the Balkan Wars, and that settlement left difficult minority issues that remain active even today, especially in relation to the Chams.)66 in truth, epirotic polyphony – whether north Greek or south albanian – presents us with a truly indigenous music, and it is a music that has remained almost entirely untouched by orientalised urban idioms. Much less autonomous were the traditions of Klephtic ballads (kleftika tragoudhia), strongly represented in northern Greece. these melismatic songs were usually written in an unrhymed so-called vers politique of fifteen syllables, possibly derived from Byzantine epics, and were characteristically performed in free rhythm, albeit at times with ‘hidden metre’. they thematised long years of warfare with the turks by the klephts – brigands and freedom fighters – of the mountains, around whom a very particular culture developed, a culture also associated with a popular improvised klarino repertory, and with heroic varieties of the traditional tsamikos dance. one of the most famous of the klephtic ballad cycles, the Saga of Suli, concerned ali pasha directly, describing his treacherous conquest of the fortress of Suli, having reneged on his promise to spare the lives of its defenders, and telling of the subsequent suicide of a group of women and children who supposedly hurled themselves from a cliff by

66 vickers 2006, 112–14.

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way of a syrtos dance. the episode is commemorated by a version of the Zaloggos dance. there are similar commemorations elsewhere in northern Greece, including the Makrinitsa dance associated with naousa in Macedonia, where the women allegedly cast themselves over a waterfall rather than surrender to the turks, and the Kaggeleftos dance, still performed today, that commemorates the 1821 rising further east in halkidiki and the beheadings that followed it. Such tales and customs are the stuff of folk heroism, and they are certainly not particular to Greece. resistance to turkish occupation generated a wealth of traditional songs, dances and ceremonies all over the Balkans, and we will encounter some of them if we follow the mountains and coastline northwest of pindus, through albania and Montenegro and into herzegovina and Croatia. there is the annual Carnival pageant of Lastovo, for instance, in which the burning of the effigy represents the reputed burning at the stake of a turkish envoy whose demand that the island surrender to the turks is ignored. there is the Kumpanija dance from Blato on neighbouring Korčula, representing the valiant defence of the village against turkish (and other) pirates. there is the Sinjska alka tournament in which the people of Sinj and the Cetina March re-enact their victory over the turks in a famous battle of 1715. and yet further north, there is the Robinja pageant (no longer performed) at Karlobag, commemorating the battle at Krbava in 1493 that paved the way for later turkish conquests of northern Croatia. it was in the nineteenth century that such ceremonies were invested with powerful ideological significance, and in like manner nationalist intellectuals gave new meaning to the epic poems of the region. these heroic poems, discussed briefly in an earlier chapter, probably represent the most famous and lasting cultural legacy of the anti-turkish resistance, though the tradition of epic singing certainly pre-dates the ottomans. among the many heroic themes was the Battle of Kosovo, which generated both Serbian and albanian epics, their opposing sentiments conveyed in fictional form by Kadare through identical poetic formulae (‘a great fog is covering the blackbird plains! rise, o Serbs, the albanians are seizing Kosovo!’; ‘a black fog has descended! albanians, to arms, Kosovo is falling to the pernicious Serb!’).67 to this day there remains a dispute about the historical priority of this sub-genre: Serb or albanian? Who borrowed what from whom? Some of the major research on albanian traditions,

67 Kadare 2000, 79.

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fittingly enough, occurs in Kosovo, especially at the institute of albanology (anton Çetta, Zymer neziri).68 Kosovo apart, the epic tradition reached beyond the Dalmatian hinterland to embrace the whole of the former Yugoslavia and yet further. it was a tradition of heroic ‘peasant’ poems in deseterac [ten syllable lines], already collected in the nineteenth century by the Serb vuk Karadžić, the Croatian ivan Mažuranić, and the Bosnian ivan Franjo Jukić. these were the men who invested the epics with national significance, with vuk in particular using them as evidence of the underlying unity of the South Slavs as part of Great-Serbian or proto-Yugoslav political agendas. But we should add to the mix a corpus of fifteen-syllable bugarštice known mainly from Dalmatian manuscripts (though of Serbian provenance). these bugarštice were really urban poems, probably degenerate forms of earlier feudal court poetry, and they were rather different in form and character from the peasant epics.69 Given their fifteen-syllable structure and their subject matter, they invite at least surface comparison with the Klephtic ballads of northern Greece, an invitation to which Samuel BaudBovy responded.70 Baud-Bovy noted the parallels, but at the same time pointed to significant musical differences between the Greek and Slavic traditions, in particular the more complex melismatic structure of the former and its preference for dance-based refrains.71 in fact he understated the differences between what are really separate worlds. if we seek a bridge between them – and in more than a strictly geographical sense – we might turn to the historical epics and frontier warrior songs (kângë kreshnikësh) of albania, traditionally accompanied by lahuta, a one-stringed bowed instrument similar to the gusle; Kadare refers to the ‘lahuta of the Cursed peaks’.72 there is a good cross-section of recorded repertory here. Following the early recordings made by paul traeger (1903) and edith Durham (1905), albert Lord went on to collect albanian epics in 1937, and both he and parry commented on the commonalities between South Slavic

68 See, among many publications, neziri 2006. 69 Miletich 1990. 70 Baud-Bovy 1958. 71  only poems in the deseterac (ten-syllable line) are available for musical commentary, as the bugarštice were no longer part of a living tradition when recording began. 72 Kadare 2000, 35.

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and albanian songs.73 in the 1950s there were major collections made by erich and Doris Stockmann and in the 1960s by a.L. Lloyd, who established links between albanian and Bosnian epics.74 the historical epics and kângë kreshnikësh are associated with the Gegs in northern albania and southern Kosovo, and they are still sung today, notably in rugova in Kosovo, to the accompaniment of either çifteli or lahuta. the main point for now is that the albanian epics establish continuities both with the (Greek) south, and the (Montenegrin) north.75 From Montenegro, we might continue further north to Senj, one of the oldest towns on the Croatian coastline and the heartland of the Uskoks, who were situated on the outside of ottoman-controlled land. the legendary exploits of the Uskoks, especially their defense of the Military Frontier and the Dalmatian coast against the turks, constitute the subject matter of yet another great cycle of epic songs (including The Death of Ivo and The Captivity of Janković Stojan), a world of coastal oral poetry that is clearly distinguishable in verse, style and content from the inland epics.76 artistic evocations of these epics were also common, as in Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga [agreeable Discourse of the Slavic people] by andrija Kačić Miošić, the subject of a detailed analytical commentary, including a comparison with the albanian epic Lahuta e Malcís by Gjergj Fishta, in an essay by Stavros Skendi.77 a more specialised look at these epics would reveal an interweaving of motifs and subject-matters across languages and faiths. it would take us into details of metrics, motives and plots, as well as into disputes about origins, borrowings and typologies. it would compare not just the fifteen- with the more common ten-syllable verse form, but the stylistics of northern with those of the southern traditions.78 But the main issue

73 Lord 1965, xv. an agreement now exists between harvard University and the prishtina institute of albanology to publish the albanian epics recorded by Lord after parry’s death. 74 See his notes on the 1966 Lp, The Music of Albania. For a more detailed study of the Bosnian epics, notably those collected by Luka Marjanović and Kosta hörmann, see Čolaković 2007. 75 See the various comparative studies in Skendi 1980, including the identification of common themes and contrasted metres. one feature of Skendi’s work that was unusual at the time was his inclusion of Greece alongside the Slavonic Balkans in studies of language and folklore. 76 See Bracewell 1992, 92. also Bošković-Stulli 1999. 77 Skendi 1980, 101–20. 78 See, for example, Stolz 1969.

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for present purposes is that the Klephtic ballads, kângë kreshnikësh and Slavic epics stand as monuments to the preservation of an oral culture in the Balkans. in this respect the importance of the ottomans was less that they provided the thematic focus for a culture of dissent and resistance, than that the nature of their administration created major disincentives for the development of those forms of literary culture that grew out of Christian traditions. they established, in other words, ideal conditions for the preservation of oral cultures long after these had disappeared from other parts of europe. the epics represented one archetype of indigeneity in the mountain ranges and seaboard from north pindus to northern Croatia. an older layer of ritual songs presents us with another. But, more broadly, we might include within this oral culture the many site-specific dances, pageants and ceremonies that celebrated the resistance all the way along this route. here, in a Croatian littoral that was prey to conflicting turkish, venetian and habsburg ambitions from the fifteenth century onwards, such rituals marked out a frontier of sorts, a symbolic break on the reach of ‘the east’, effectively an Antemurale Christianitatis in at least this part of the Balkans. What confronted ‘the east’ was of course ‘the West’, which had a strong historical presence all along the adriatic littoral. the Croats who settled there had befriended but were not subject to Byzantium, but they remained with the Western church following the schism. Latin was the principal language of the church, of course, but the Croats cultivated a vernacular form of the roman rite using the Glagolitic script, and for many years rival Slavonic (Glagolitic) and Latin liturgies were a source of conflict. Glagolitic chant represented, then, another strand of oral culture in the western Balkans. there are historical data, but no musical notations, so that what we know about the music is based on a few nineteenth-century transcriptions, and on the researches of scholars such as Jerko Bezić and Gorana Doliner.79 By collecting recordings from the dioceses of Krk, Senj, Zadar and Šibenik, Bezić demonstrated the sheer diversity of this ancient and very rich tradition of singing. the earliest available recordings date back to 1910, but there was an intensive period of collecting in the early 1950s, and fieldwork and analysis continues to this day; Gorana Doliner, for example, has presented a detailed analysis of a corpus of melodies collected by the nun Lujza Kozinović over an entire church year. on the

79 among many publications, see Bezić 1970 and Doliner 1999.

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evidence of the recordings, we can say that this tradition embraced many distinctive, locally defined styles, ranging from Gregorian- and Byzantineinfluenced monody to two-voice polyphonic or heterophonic idioms that bear a close relation to regional folksongs. Glagolitic chant functioned as a mode of traditional Slavic culture out there on the littoral. and as such, it coexisted with, and brushed up against, an italianate culture that signalled the Mediterranean rather than the Balkans.

CHAPTER EIGHT

INFRASTRuCTuRES Littoral Balkans: Venice and the Adriatic The header ‘littoral Balkans’ begs some questions. It reminds us that ‘Balkans’, like ‘Orient’, is a culturally contested term. For Jovan Cvijić, as for Fernand Braudel, the Adriatic littoral was part of the Balkans. It existed in a symbiotic relation to its mountainous hinterland so that they formed contrasted parts of a cultural, as well as a geographical, whole.1 Yet, as Bojan Baskar points out, this has not been a widely-held local view.2 for cultural geographers such as guido Miglia, the narrow strip of the eastern adriatic coastline, which was never secured by the Ottomans, belongs not to the Balkans but to the Mediterranean.3 But that too is a culturally contested term. Defined by Braudel and others as a ‘culture area’ characterised by a topos of diversity within unity, ‘the Mediterranean’ has come to be understood more in symbolic or cultural than in strictly geographical terms; indeed the quality of mediterraneità has been subject to appropriations of various kinds, not least by italian fascism. ‘Mediterranean’, then, might join ‘Balkans’ and ‘Mitteleuropa’ as a term with resonance.4 Where Dalmatia is concerned, it connotes the italianate culture of the towns, open to the sea and cosmopolitan in character, together with an everyday culture (cuisine, architecture, interior design, lifestyle, music) that is removed from the colder, darker Dinaric interior (the contrast is spelt out by andrić in Days of the Consuls). Within Dalmatia, the istrian peninsula is sometimes singled out as distinctive: more culturally and ethnically mixed, a kind of Mediterranean in microcosm, with a tendency for (urban, maritime) italians to cluster along the coast, and (rural) Croats or slovenians to favour the inland territories.5 these are stereotypes,

1  Cvijić 1918; Braudel 1990. 2 Baskar 1999. 3 Miglia 1994. 4 see Driessen 1999, and other papers in this issue of Narodna Umjetnost. for a recent history of the Mediterranean, see norwich 2006. 5 the historical differences, and their relevance to music, are discussed in stipčević 1992.

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of course. But the key point is that a Mediterranean culture has been a reality for many inhabitants of Dalmatia and istria. One might indeed go further, and suggest that the Croatian lands extend the notion of ‘inbetweeness’ that will be developed in this book, in that they mediate culturally between the Mediterranean and Mitteleuropa. for much of its history this coastal region was subject to the Venetian republic, and for several centuries there was an extended war of attrition fought along the whole of the littoral, as the Ottomans pushed forward and harassed the Venetians in all their adriatic and aegean territories.6 it was a relationship of mutual dependency (mercantile and cultural exchanges between them began at an early stage), but on the coastal strip it was Venice that held the upper hand in cultural terms, and the legacy proved to be a lasting one. it was not, however, without challenge. in later years, as both the Ottoman and the Venetian empires declined, the habsburgs exerted a more pronounced cultural influence. they had long been a ruling presence in the slovenian parts of istria, and they controlled much of northern Croatia. But following 1815, in the wake of napoleon’s illyrian adventures, the habsburgs acquired the bulk of the adriatic coastal provinces, and much of their hinterland too. it is unnecessary to spell out the constantly shifting political fortunes. the bigger picture is one of conflicting Venetian, turkish and austrian (or hungarian) interests until the late nineteenth century, at which point developing nationalist aspirations in both Croatia and slovenia came into conflict with the habsburgs, and – in northern Dalmatia and istria at least – with the irredentism of a newly unified italy. there is no neutrality in scholarship. today this region is Croatian, and prior to that it was Yugoslav. But the national perspective can function as a distorting lens through which we look back at events, practices and materials. and it has functioned in this way in Croatian music historiography, with national labels assigned to composers and repertories as though present-day political borders had a permanent meaning. it is instructive to set Croatian accounts of renaissance-baroque music in Dalmatia alongside italian-based accounts. the Croatian scholar Josip andreis wrote a detailed history of Croatian music, and one that has benefited from

6 for a period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Venetian empire embraced much of the peloponnese peninsula (Byzantine Morea).

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english translation.7 Yet it is not difficult to discern a wider agenda. the objectives are first to establish the originality of what andreis takes to be significant music in the region, then to claim that music for the nation, and finally to ensure that it is part of a european story.8 Music from the littoral is discussed within the same framework as music from the northern territories, which belonged culturally to the orbit of Central europe. Compare this with the approach of ivano Cavallini, who regards the eastern adriatic, from trieste southwards, as a more-or-less unified and predominantly italianate culture. significantly, Cavallini’s essays on music and musical life in renaissance istria were published as a monograph in the series Studi di musica veneta,9 though they also do justice to the influence of german Lutheranism and to the habsburgs. Cavallini’s mapping of different cultural strands in istria at a particular historical moment provides a useful antidote to the generalising trends of the national histories. and his study tells us something too about the cultural complexity to be found further down the Dalmatian coast; witness the linguistic history, with dialects of a native Dalmatian spoken well into the early renaissance period, when they were assimilated by a Venetian lingua franca (Venetan). at this time Croats represented just one population strand in the roman cities on the littoral (vestigial roman Dalmatia). But they moved in increasing numbers to these cities during the Ottoman wars, and their Čakavian dialect became increasingly assertive. During the renaissance a rich humanistic culture developed in the bourgeois circles of the Dalmatian cities, where an italian tutor, or an education in italy, was the norm. and it was in these cities that a vernacular literature for Croatian, influenced by church writings in glagolitic script and by the increasing use of the vernacular in official documents, was first developed. the landmark text is usually taken to be the epic Judita (1501) by split-born Marko Marulić, a reworking of the hebrew story to connote the struggle of the Croats against the Ottomans. But the literary centre of gravity soon passed to Dubrovnik. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dramatists (Marin Držić), poets (Vladislav Menčetić and ivan Bunić), and epic poets (Dinko Zlatarić and ivan gundulić) all elevated Dubrovnik to a level of international significance in culture.

7 andreis 1982. 8 this is a recurrent theme. see also tuksar 1998a. 9 Cavallini 1990; cf. stipčević 1992.

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Dubrovnik’s ‘golden age’ as a City state on the italian model, with general assembly, senate and cabinet, lasted from the mid fourteenth century to the major earthquake of 1667. its achievements in music are less widely recognised than those in architecture and literature. But research – by Miho Demović, stanislav tuksar and others – in the historical archives, the Dubrovnik Museum, the Cathedral archives and the franciscan Monastery library indicates that there was a flourishing musical life, and that music was considered an important component of a general education.10 it is noteworthy that the accademia dei Concordi hosted discussions on the role of music, associated especially with the neo-aristotelian philosopher and statesman nikola Vitov gučetić (1549–1610) and the mathematician and poet Miho Monaldi (1540–1592). as an independent City state, Dubrovnik maintained a Capella (a resident band) for ceremonial occasions, and details of the musicians and their instruments are extant from the late fourteenth century.11 in addition, concerts were promoted by the Duke and the city fathers (organ music, madrigals, lute-songs); there was popular music performed by professional musicians to accompany dances; there were processions and carnival festivities associated with the feast of st. Blaise; and there was a wealth of music at the Cathedral, the Dominican and franciscan monasteries and the Church of st. Blaise. Croatian-language theatre was also developed, with music playing a prominent role in pastorals, tragedies (usually translations from the greek), mystery plays and melodramas. Opera appeared surprisingly early. a translation of Ottavia rinuccini’s Euridice was published in 1617, and a performance of the first native opera, Junije palmotić’s Atalanta with music by Lambert Courtoys the younger, was given in 1629. a good deal is known about individual composers in old Dubrovnik, and especially about the french family Courtoys, of which the composer of Atalanta was a younger-generation member. But very little indigenous music has survived from this period, partly due to the destruction of Cathedral and other archives by the earthquake. in contrast, there is a corpus of extant music from the cities further north on the Dalmatian littoral and from the islands. it was associated mainly with the churches and monasteries (codices date from the eleventh century), but in the sixteenth 10 see, for example, Demović 1981. also tuksar 1994, and the last chapter of tuksar 1980a. for the archival materials, see Blažeković 1988. 11  Demović 1981, 375–95. a legacy of the processional role of the Capella is present in today’s cultural tourism.

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and seventeenth centuries it also included secular vocal and instrumental music, notably frottole, madrigals (to italian texts) and lute music. When this music was printed at all, it was invariably in Venice. unlike Dubrovnik, which modelled its cultural and ceremonial life on a rival Venetian republic, the northern adriatic cities belonged more directly within the orbit of that republic. either way, la serenissima loomed large, both as the major centre of a developing print culture, and as a channel to italian humanist thought. this returns us to an earlier point: the dubious relevance of invoking nationality in the discussion of such repertories. Croatian national histories invariably include music by Croatian-born composers living abroad, for example. in a later age, this can often carry the justification of diasporic transfer of elements of a national culture, but it is hard to see how the music of renaissance composers from Dalmatia would have been uniquely shaped by, or would have sought to preserve, qualities that might be considered ‘Croatian’. Conversely, there is every reason to recognise the music composed in Dalmatia by foreign-born composers as formative of the cultural history of the region. it was common for italian composers to take employment along the coast, as we can tell just by looking at the story of music at the Cathedral in split, the second major cultural centre after Dubrovnik. the Cathedral archive in split allows us to reconstruct a more-or-less continuous history of the maestri di capella of the cathedral from the early years of the seventeenth century.12 We learn that quite a few were italians, some resident for just a few years, as was the case with gaetano de stephanis.13 We also learn something about the gradual installation of music institutions, and about the beginnings of music education. thus, the first Cathedral organ builder fra Ventura signed his contract as early as 1412, undertaking teaching duties, and contributing to a tradition of organists that would become well entrenched in Dalmatia. Likewise the maestri di capella were required to compose, to direct the (male) Capella, and to teach at the Cathedral singing school. it is clear from all of this that musical life in split was firmly centred on the churches and monasteries. the split Cathedral archive is only one of many archives located on the littoral, including the islands.14 thanks to them, and to international libraries, we have extant compositions of varying quality associated with

12 grgić 1990. 13 stipčević 1982. 14 for details of the major collections, see tuksar 1992.

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the organist-composers of the Dalmatian cathedrals and churches, including a handful of surviving motets and madrigals by Šibenik-born Julije skjavetić, probably the most distinguished sixteenth-century composer from the region. and as we move into the seventeenth century, we begin to find music of real artistic merit, notably by three composers who neatly exemplify the three standard options as to nationality in the region: native, immigrant and émigré. the first is ivan Lukačić (1574–1648), also from Šibenik. Of the three, he is the only one who was born in Dalmatia and worked there, taking the post of maestro di capella at split after an extended period in italy. the only surviving music is a collection of Sacrae cantiones, published in Venice in 1620 and influenced by Venetian concertante styles.15 they are motets for one or several voices with organ continuo, and they indicate that the monody of the seconda prattica was transferred to Dalmatia remarkably quickly. this is also clear from the music of our second composer, tomaso Cecchini (c. 1583–1644), who was born in Verona but spent most of his life in Dalmatia, initially at split Cathedral but later at Lesina Cathedral in hvar. his output includes some 27 published opuses, including madrigals, canzonettas, motets, psalms, sonatas and masses; the third book of madrigals, Amorosi concetti, has been highly praised.16 and finally we have Vinko Jelić (1596–?1636), who was born in rijeka but spent his entire professional life in graz and Zabern (alsace). his output has only been partially preserved, but it includes spiritual concertos (motets) with continuo in the modern italian style, as well as instrumental ricercare. the flowering of art music in renaissance-baroque Dalmatia was a rare phenomenon in the Balkan peninsula, and in one sense without obvious consequence for the wider region (only in some of the larger greek islands, including Crete, can we find some comparable developments). it made few incursions to the Ottoman-controlled interior, though its ripples extended further down the coast to Boka kotorska, which was part of the ragusan republic. Venetian Dalmatia, we might say, held the line for western culture prior to the nineteenth century, and it established some of the musical infrastructures that would later be extended under the habsburgs, at which point european art music really did begin to penetrate more deeply into the interior. Yet even before the habsburg 15 see the discussion in plamenac 1998 (plamenac was a pioneering figure in the study of Dalmatian repertories of the renaissance and baroque periods). a facsimile edition of the Sacrae cantiones was published by ennio stipčević (stipčević 1998). 16 Bujić 1993, 1416–22. see also plamenac 1998.

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annexation, the aristocratic and bourgeois cultures of the littoral began to change direction, as they responded increasingly to northern influences. in Dubrovnik, nature intervened to mark the caesura between old and new. it was some time before the city began to recover from the devastation of the 1667 earthquake. Certainly its ‘golden age’ was over. Yet recover it did, and if its old glories were not restored, it was at least able to use commercial and diplomatic connections as well as substantial historical wealth to renew its cultural life. By the second half of the eighteenth century there was a thriving musical life associated with aristocratic and bourgeois sociability, and a rising curve of public-music-making. as in old Dubrovnik, the churches remained central to this, as did the theatre, and there was the continuing round of civic ceremonies. But a bourgeois concert life, of a kind developed rather earlier in slovenia,17 also took shape in the city, including instrumental concerts with music by native as well as foreign composers. Of the former, Luka sorkočević (1734–89), a nobleman and diplomat from a distinguished ragusan family, has special historical significance. he was a figure of importance politically, and he was well connected in cultural circles too: a familiar of haydn, gluck, Metastasio and alberto fortis. But he is remembered today as the first Croatian symphonist, even if ‘symphony’ here really means three-part sinfonia heavily influenced by italian opera buffa.18 there are eight such symphonies, modestly scored for strings with two oboes and two horns and somewhat akin stylistically to the early works of stamitz. they are skilfully crafted and attractive contributions to the pre-classical repertory, and it does them no great service to entertain higher claims. Luka sorkočević met an unhappy end.19 But his name lived on. rather as with the Courtoys family, there was a sorkočević musical dynasty, including Luka’s son antun, his daughter Marina, and Jelena pucić-sorkočević. Like his father, antun (1775–1841) had a distinguished career as a diplomat. But he was also a man of letters, and wrote extensively about the cultural history of Dubrovnik, and about the history and putative future of slavonic languages and literatures. although generally thought to be a less accomplished composer than his father, he amassed a considerable

17 for a discussion of slovenian musical life, including the role of the Academia Philharmonicorum (established in 1701), see the relevant parts of Cvetko 1981. 18 Majer-Bobetko 1997. 19 On 11 september 1789, he committed suicide, after it seems succumbing to a form of mental illness. for biographical data on the family generally, see Demović 1983.

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output, including some of the earliest Croatian piano music. Closely associated with both Luka and antun sorkočević was the composer Julije Bajamonti (1744–1800). he was pre-eminent among the split circle of composers, though he also spent a few years at hvar and was a frequent visitor to Dubrovnik at a time when there appears to have been growing reciprocity between the major cities on the littoral.20 a formidable and versatile intellectual, Bajamonti composed in all the principal genres, vocal and instrumental, and in an idiom that bridges baroque and early classical. Bajamonti’s biography testifies to the continuing importance of split as a cultural centre. it is clear from a study by Danica Božic-Bužančić that it was hardly less active than Dubrovnik in community music-making, and that in addition to the well-documented activities centred on the Cathedral, there were regular visits from Venetian troupes, and performances of esteemed contemporary music by local musicians.21 Moreover, the wide range of music found in private collections signals the importance of music in domestic gatherings, and the catholicity of local tastes. indeed the sheer wealth of archival material in split may have distorted our picture of musical life on the littoral. Zadar was also a major centre, and there were comparable activities in the other cities, and on the main islands. Yet for all its vitality, cultural life in eighteenth-century Dalmatia was cultivated in the shadow of a declining empire. the heyday of Venice had long since passed. her cultural glories outlived her political prestige, but the loss of political power during the eighteenth century took its toll on music not only in Venice itself but in her residual subject territories. Well before the end of the republic in 1797, habsburg and south german influences had begun to encroach on the littoral. from that point on they came to dominate it. Mitteleuropa: The Reach of the Habsburgs it would be hard to overstate the transformative influence of the french annexation of the adriatic littoral, following the short period of austrian administration that succeeded the Venetian republic. this napoleonic

20 another interesting eighteenth-century figure was ivan Mane Jarnović (1740–1804), born, it seems, on a ship just off Dubrovnik and with a cosmopolitan career as a performer and composer. see tuksar 1980b. 21  Božic-Bužančić 1982.

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interlude may have been of short duration (1806–13), but it was of key significance. Whatever their views of the annexation itself, Croatian intellectuals were brought into direct contact with the politics of liberalism and nationalism, and this encounter with ‘modern’ thought proved decisive for the cultivation of a nineteenth-century Yugoslav ideal. in the shorter term, the french annexation served to reforge the fragile links that had previously existed between Dalmatia and northern Croatia. With the defeat of napoleon, a shared austro-hungarian bureaucracy strengthened this sense of a common Dalmatian-Croatian culture, despite attempts to keep the two provinces apart politically (Dalmatia was ruled directly from Vienna rather than administered by the Croatian parliament [the Sabor] in tandem with hungary). this was reflected in the structures of musical life. some infrastructures were common to the two provinces long before the nineteenth century, mainly through the church. a monastic culture that extended back to medieval times was one unifying factor, and it provided a continuity underlying both political change and cultural renovation. Moreover, the church continued to play a key role in musical life right through the eighteenth century. partly this was due to the social instabilities of these Croatian territories. the church could maintain its cultural influence, in other words, precisely because the vacuum created by a steadily weakening aristocracy was not adequately filled by the kinds of bourgeois structures that had developed elsewhere in europe. Of special significance was the Jesuit order. Jesuit colleges, offering a broadly liberal, humanist education, were established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Dubrovnik, rijeka, Varaždin and Osijek (in the northern towns they helped promote a developing kajkavian literature).22 and if we extend the geographical trajectory, we link up with our earlier discussion of a Jesuit presence in Vojvodina. the theatrical activities described there were also found in Croatia, as were the public processions and festivities. so it follows that the suppression of the order in 1773, in a context of developing anti-clericalism, had important consequences for cultural life as a whole, right up to its restoration in 1814. among other

22 Kajkavian is the dialect spoken in northern Croatia, as distinct from čakavian (the coastal dialect) and štokavian (the more widely-spoken dialect that became the basis of the written and spoken language that used to be known as ‘serbo-Croat’). since Croatia has been an independent state, Kajkavian, which has connections with slovenian, has been actively cultivated as a means of distinguishing Croatian from serbian.

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things, it required the establishment of new municipal schools, though the franciscans took over some of these Jesuit activities. as Dragotin Cvetko has pointed out, the suppression of the Jesuits was only one of several measures that impeded musical life under the habsburgs in the late eighteenth century.23 there was also a rigorous censorship of church music stemming directly from the centralising policies of both Maria theresa and Joseph ii. in other words, even before the 1815 settlement, those parts of slovenia and northern Croatia already under austrian rule were made forcibly aware that while the habsburg administration could undoubtedly be culturally enabling it could also impose rigid bureaucratic controls. a high-profile casualty of this was the slovenian academia philharmonicorum, one of the oldest in europe. and it hardly helped that these southern slav territories were treated much less favourably than hungary, and that hungary went on to assume control of Croatian affairs in 1779. it will be worth trying to clarify at this stage just how far the habsburg monarchy actually extended into south east europe in the aftermath of the napoleonic wars. the Ottomans had long since been pushed back from hungary itself, but the reclaimed habsburg territories also included transylvania, the Banat of temeşvar and Vojvodina. in addition, Vienna controlled most of the territories of the old Croatian kingdom, including slavonia, which had been returned to the monarchy following the Ottoman defeat in 1718, and Dalmatia, which was administered directly from austria with the defeat of napoleon. then there was Bosnia, which was occupied by the habsburgs much later. Bosnia remained an Ottoman territory, united with herzegovina at the istanbul Conference of 1876, until the habsburg occupation following the Berlin treaty of 1878. the Croatian Sabor repeatedly staked a claim to it (as did the serbs), but it was formally annexed by the austro-hungarian empire in 1908 in the wake of the Young turk revolution. if we stand back from the detail of all this, we can see that from as far back as the early eighteenth century the threat from the Ottoman empire had been steadily reduced, enabling a period of relative stability in the Balkans during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. as a result, from the early nineteenth century onwards all those territories recovered from the Ottomans were in a position to develop the kinds of bourgeois social structures and accompanying cultures that were already familiar in

23 andreis, Cvetko and Djurić-Klajn 1962, 350.

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other parts of the habsburg empire. the territory most resistant to this modernisation was the Military frontier, which remained under direct rule from Vienna until 1881, when it was returned to native (mainly Croatian) administrations. some elements of western culture were established there through the Jesuit orders (until 1773) and the franciscan monasteries, but of their very nature the frontier towns were not conducive to the development of a bourgeois culture. Music-making contexts in these habsburg territories could be public or private, professional or amateur, native or foreign. Likewise, repertories could be sacred or secular, elite or popular, conservative or modern. it is initially tempting to line up the contexts and the repertories in matching columns, but in reality the categories would constantly cross. Quite apart from the mix of religions and ethnicities that was endemic to the whole of this region, social class boundaries remained fluid on the periphery of the empire. this was partly because there had been no real landed aristocracy under the Ottomans, and only a weak bourgeoisie, so that even under subsequent habsburg rule, aristocracies were effectively ‘planted’, while middle-class values on a Western model struggled to gain a secure footing. if we add to this the endless wars, the frequent changes of political administration, and the numerous instabilities as to demography and settlement caused by continued migrations, we can see why structures were far from stable, and also why it is hard to generalise about what particular repertories might have represented in terms of social or confessional groupings. What we can say is that the transformation from a patronal to a bourgeois musical life – effectively from court to city institutions – took place more slowly on this southern frontier of the empire than in the capitals of central europe. in northern Croatia in the late eighteenth century there was a professional musical life in private aristocratic settings, well networked to the major cultural capitals. Many of the wealthiest families in hrvatsko Zagorje and slavonia had been effectively transplanted there by the habsburgs and given parcels of land in return for military service against the turks. such families were favoured by the austrians, and several of their courts became centres of a thriving ceremonial culture. they imported baroque archictecture to the region (whole quarters of Osijek were transformed in appearance, for instance), as well as artists of international reputation. By the late eighteenth century, families such as the hilleprand-prandaus in Valpovo and the pejačevićs in Virovitica, našice and Osijek had establishments well capable of maintaining their own Kapellen and bringing in their own composers.

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a case in point would be the erdödys of pressburg [Bratislava], relatives of the esterhazys, who had a seat at Varaždin. they were not just able to provide a resident Kappelmeister in the person of Juraj Karlo Wisner Morgenstern, an enthusiastic illyrian, but could also attract a composer with the reputation of the Vienna-based Johann Baptist Vanhal to Varaždin, as well as sponsoring and employing the young ignaz Josef pleyel. this patronal culture was not to last. in the face of a more general decline in aristocratic fortunes right across the empire, indeed right across europe, music at the Croatian courts began to lose vitality. it did persist in the wake of the napoleonic Wars, but the growing tendency was for court institutions to become de facto public institutions, where the patrons functioned increasingly as promoters rather than sponsors of musical life (the history of successive generations of the Bombelles family in Varaždin is indicative).24 in this way, the shift to an urban-based musical culture, one as yet barely supported by a bourgeoisie, was slowly effected. austria-hungary choreographed much of this development, guiding the moves of the more prominent citizenry as they extended the reach of cultural activities to embrace wider audiences, for the monarchy was well aware of the potency of formal culture as a mode of social control. its intervention could be enabling, promoting theatre and music, as well as general programmes of education. But it could also be inhibiting, not only due to censorship, but because bureaucratic and legalistic controls were imposed on any cultural forms that entered the public domain. urban centres were relatively small in northern Croatia and slavonia. until the nineteenth century, many of the towns were really little more than either military fortresses or enlarged marketplaces, within which communities of Jews and roma acted out their customary roles. there had been too many wars to enable these towns to develop economically. so it is hardly surprising that as they did begin to expand, their course was increasingly determined by the imperial powers. political interventions, in other words, played a very direct role in the slow formation of a bourgeois culture. for all that, social and cultural modernisation did take place in its own time, and music played its part. the role of aristocratic courts was steadily taken over by theatres and music societies, while music education – aside from the boarding schools that provided musical training – was channelled into state-controlled schools and academies. and throughout this process the political unit of the monarchy, however loosely structured,

24 perči 2002.

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also functioned as a cultural unit, exercising strict control, but at the same time enabling a constant traffic of people and ideas. Where there was a lack of skilled labour on the peripheries, it could be brought in from all over the empire, and that included the developing technical skills of music printing and instrument making, as well as the entrepreneurial skills involved in the bookshop or the music shop. Often it was simplest just to import things, and that included music and musicians. emblematic of these emergent bourgeois cultures were the music societies that sprang up all over the habsburg empire, together with associated schools of music. in Croatia they appeared in Varaždin, Osijek and above all Zagreb. the Zagreb Musikverein was founded in 1827, somewhat on the model of societies already established not just in Vienna but in hungarian towns such as pest and Kolozsvár [Cluj-napoca in transylvania, now in romania], as well as in Ljubljana, whose Philharmonische Gesellschaft was one of the earliest in all the habsburg lands (1794, with its Music school established in 1816). indeed the Zagreb and Ljubljana societies maintained close contacts. the activities of the Musikverein included the organisation of concert life, both amateur and professional, and its extensive archives are instructive, since they include continuous lists of programmes through into the twentieth century.25 in the manner of these societies everywhere, the Musikverein opened a school of music just two years after its foundation (1829), and its yearbook gives comprehensive details of teaching programmes and personnel right through to 1937.26 Later, in the 1870s, the society moved into an impressive building with a concert hall, which was not just the site of professional concerts by visiting soloists but home to an amateur string orchestra. it also began its own publishing programme in 1865, offering modest opportunities to Croatian composers to see their music in print. By then, the Musikverein was under Croatian auspices, and had become the Društvo prijatelja glazbe (society of the friends of Music) and then the Hrvatski glazbeni zavod [Croatian Music institute], marking a major shift in the all-important battle of the languages.27 this shift was also reflected 25 i am grateful to nada Bezić for her help, and for showing me the unpublished ‘diary’ of the society prepared by anton gogla in 1927 (Hrvatski glazbeni zavod 1827–1927). see also Miklaušić-Ćeran 2001. Canonic tendencies can be traced from the mid century onwards (ivan Zajc dominated at this time), and in the early twentieth century there were ambitious operatic ventures undertaken by students at the national theatre. By the 1920s a modernist canon was well represented. 26 Later this would become a full-scale conservatoire. see h. pettan 1978. 27 see Šaban 1982.

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in the activities of the state-supported singing society ‘Kolo’ (founded in 1862), an influential, nationalist-orientated amateur association modeled on similar institutions in the germanic world, but with slavic repertory.28 the politics of language will be discussed in the next chapter, but in the early nineteenth century german was the principal language in Zagreb and throughout northern Croatia (in slavonia it was hungarian). newspapers and journals were published in german, while the permanent theatre was modeled on a typical german Stadttheater, i.e. run by a theatre society, which offered drama, opera and operetta in german-language productions; like many such theatres, it had a separate music section. it was only in the second half of the century that this situation changed. the theatre became officially Croatian in 1870, preparing the way for the opening of the Croatian national theatre in 1895. and the first music journals in Croatian also began to appear at this time, beginning with Sv. Cecilija in 1877.29 there was, in other words, a struggle for Croatian in the public sphere. and that returns us to some of those questions of periphery that were raised in chapter 5. Reciprocities: Modernising the Peripheries to focus on peripheries means to look afresh at how cultural traditions are shaped, supported and promoted through symbiotic processes of marginalisation and centralisation. general music histories tend to concentrate their discussion in a small handful of locations, and the habsburg cities of central europe are among them. the nub of it is that these cities played a prominent role in the european march to modernity, from which the Balkans was largely sidelined. this is the ‘grand narrative’ against which the ‘little stories’ of the peripheries might be plotted. they may instantiate the narrative, and even illuminate it. But equally they may revise it, not least by rescuing historical practices from retrospective readings and allowing us to see around the edges of familiar, canonised portraits of music, musicians, and music-making. in the case of the habsburg monarchy they invite us to critique, or at least to qualify, conventional readings of a centralised imperial culture, and they do so above all by highlighting reciprocities.

28 Blažeković 1985. 29 andreis 1971.

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homi Bhabha’s identification of what he calls a ‘complex process of “minoritarian” modernity’ – a powerful counter to familiar readings of centres and peripheries – has some purchase on habsburg culture in the nineteenth century.30 the key to this is the recognition that the major habsburg capitals of the lower Danubian region were themselves multi-cultural, multi-ethnic cities. Many of their immigrant communities functioned as relatively self-contained units, linguistically and culturally, but networking was active nonetheless. this means that Croats living in Vienna participated in the social and cultural circles of the capital, and at the same time disseminated ideas and values from those circles to their compatriots ‘back home’. such networking extended, moreover, to the movement of talented young musicians from the southern towns to the capitals, and the movement of teachers, notably from prague, in the other direction; it was, after all, one way to staff the newly instituted music schools in the southern provinces. nor was the networking confined to Croatian territories. We noted that a western culture also developed among the serbs of Vojvodina, responsive to the same modernising trends that we find in other habsburg-controlled territories. and at the same time the cultural capitals, including Vienna, trieste, pressburg and Buda, were enriched by the presence of serbian artists and intellectuals. tatjana Marković has documented this process in some detail, demonstrating how serbian communities in Vienna established choral and reading societies, founded periodicals, and promoted music education.31 her analysis goes beyond this, moreover, to demonstrate how political and social discourses conditioned by this Viennese context went on to influence the cultural ideology that we associate with serbian romantic nationalism. even in Ottoman Belgrade there had been a westernising ‘habsburg moment’ between 1717 and 1739. however, it was almost exactly a century later, in 1840, that Belgrade truly came into its own as the capital of a newly independent (or semi-independent) serbia. following recognition of serbia as an autonomous Ottoman province in 1831, prince Miloš Obrenović invited Josif Šlezinger (1894–1870) to modernise the musical life of its first capital, Kragujevac. the result was the ‘Band of the serbian prince’, as it was initially called, a military band of mainly wind instruments that performed on ceremonial occasions and also at the theatre

30 Bhabha 1994, xx. 31  Marković 2005.

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established by Miloš in 1834; the Singspiele performed there were of a kind characteristic of vernacular theatre all over europe in the early nineteenth century, a further mark of the West, but at the same time a symbol of the nation.32 Other key institutions rapidly followed, notably in pančevo in southern Vojvodina. here a serbian Church Choral society was established in 1838, followed by a theatre in 1844, and one might have hoped for much more from pančevo had its cultural life not been curtailed in the aftermath of 1848. By then Belgrade was the new capital of serbia, with a programme of westernisation instigated by alexander Karađorđević. the band and theatre had both been transferred there from Kragujevac in 1840, and the Belgrade Choral society was founded in 1853. this was much more than a choral society in our modern sense, incorporating a private music school run by Milan Milovuk, later converted into a singing school in the hands of Milovuk’s successor, Kornelje stanković (the fully-fledged Music school of the Belgrade Choral society was established rather later in 1899). then, in 1881, another major Belgrade choral society – the ‘stanković’ – was established, and it too evolved into an influential Music society, with its own Music school created in 1911, and with stanislav Binički (1872–1942) as its first director (schools of music were also founded in subotica in 1868 and novi sad in 1912).33 the choral societies were key components of serbian musical life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, partly because they formed a bridge between serbs from widely scattered regions, including Bosnia and herzegovina, Montenegro and the habsburg cities further north. in habsburg territories they had special political significance as they were among the few institutions that enabled serbs to meet together publicly. thus, in addition to presenting besede [public meetings, which could include music] and other public concerts, they could and did act as a focus for nationalist debate. Marković has documented the activities of the serbian academic singing society Zora in Vienna, and her case study

32 there had been other initiatives prior to this in different areas of musical life. for example, györgy arnold, regens chori in szabadka (now subotica), wrote church music, hungarian dances and operas (Kemény Simon, 1826), published a Yugoslav songbook and wrote a music encyclopedia. 33 it would be impossible here to do justice to the growth of the choral society movement in serbia; another of considerable importance was the Obilić Choral society, founded in 1884.

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crystallises something of the potent national symbolism carried by the choral societies in general.34 this came into focus in one of the key events in their history, a concert organised by stevan Mokranjac (1856–1914) in 1878 to mark 25 years of the Belgrade Choral society. it was structured as a history of serbian song, beginning with epic song accompanied by gusle, and proceeding through folksongs from Karadžić’s collection right up to the ‘modern school’ of Josif Marinković (1851–1931) and Mokranjac. such exercises in historicism and local canon formation were reinforced by the curricular and practical activities of the schools of music belonging to the societies. Yet these schools were also case studies in reciprocity, given that many of the teachers were immigrants. it is a familiar paradox: the international character of the national. and it is replicated in the history of opera in Belgrade. if we were to single out any milestone here, it would be the founding of the national theatre in 1869, at which point the tradition of plays with music, associated with earlier companies in Kragujevac, pančevo and Belgrade, found its ‘national’ home, albeit again staffed in large measure by musicians from the major capitals.35 the culture of Mitteleuropa,36 to use a term that seems to have originated from the deliberations of the Congress of Vienna, was largely defined by this reciprocity between the cultural capitals and the provincial towns, so that there was something of an empire-wide cultural infrastructure. it is striking too that early nineteenth-century discourses of political, social and cultural emancipation increasingly embraced the intelligentsia of the south-slavic communities, whether they were located in the capitals or the provinces. Our narratives of music history can easily miss this inclusivity by focusing mainly on the capitals, and by fixating on later political borders at the expense of a multi-national mobility whose reach was surprisingly extensive. it extended eastwards beyond Vojvodina to habsburg Banat,37 where austrian influences were marked (temeswar [german form of timişoara] was one of many towns known as ‘little Vienna’), and from there it proceeded yet further eastwards to transylvania.

34 Marković 2005. 35 a fuller account of serbian musical life would include the Belgrade Military Orchestra, established in 1899, which in due course became the Orchestra of the King’s guard (1903). 36 note the rather different resonance of today’s revisionist term ‘Central europe’, which emerged partly as a rejoinder to the ‘eastern europe’ imposed by the Cold War. 37 this region was ceded to the habsburgs in 1718.

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transylvania was united with hungary under habsburg rule soon after the recapture of Buda from the turks. as a result, the ruling aristocratic class promoted hungarian (or saxon german) rather than austrian culture, though the peasant population was largely romanian. there is evidence of a developed musical life stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including church music traditions that reflected the competing faiths of this region, as well as organ and lute repertories. Music was cultivated at the monastery schools and at the courts of princes and governors, and it reached a high point in the achievements of ioan Căianu (1629–87). the Codex Caioni, compiled between 1652 and 1671, is a compendium of arrangements of sacred and popular music, and it was followed by the equally important Cantionale Catholicum (1678), an anthology of religious songs. in general Căianu’s library was testimony to the sophistication of musical taste in cultivated circles in the seventeenth century. then, in the eighteenth century, an aristocratic musical culture began to gain momentum in transylvania, culminating in the activities of courts and bishoprics such as nagyvárad [Oradea], where both Michael haydn and Dittersdorf worked for a time. there were also the modest beginnings of an urban musical culture, notably in the capital Kolozsvár, and in german towns like Kronstadt [Brašov] and hermannstadt [sibiu], where – due partly to the Jesuits – concert series, music schools and amateur chamber music associations were established to promote a classical repertory. By 1814, musical life was sufficiently robust for two consecutive issues of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung to be dedicated to music in transylvania.38 Most important of all, hungarian musical theatre was cultivated. a key stage of this history was the institutionalisation of hungarian opera at the national theatre, founded in Kolozsvár in 1821. from there troupes regularly visited the other major cities of transylvania, and even on occasion the cities of Wallachia. and it was for Kolozsvár that the then conductor at the national theatre, József ruzitska (1775–1823), a slovak by birth, wrote the music for what would become an influential singspiel, Béla futása [Béla’s escape], performed just a year after the theatre opened, in 1822. Despite its slight musical content, this work had much the same symbolic significance for hungarian vernacular opera as had Jan stefani’s Cud

38 these were listed as Geschichte der Musik in Siebenbürgen in numbers 46–47, on 16 and 23 november (1814), 765–85.

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mniemany [the supposed Miracle] (1794) in poland, františek Škroup’s Drátenik [the tinker] (1826) in the Czech lands, and Josif Šlezinger’s Ženidba cara Dušana [tsar Dušan’s Wedding] (1840) in serbia. all were signals of a nationalist orientation shortly to come, and in due course they would be joined by the romanian singspiel Baba Hîrca [the witch hîrca], composed in 1848 by alexandru flechtenmacher (1823–98). it is typical of the distortions that flow from nationalist politics that we tend to think of Kolozsvár today as part of the periphery of european culture rather than as a centre in its own right. Yet it was a major site for the development of hungarian art music, and the organisation of its musical life in the nineteenth century followed patterns that were basically identical to those in other leading Danubian capitals. in addition to the national theatre, there were college choirs, and there was also folksong collection and transcription. But the most important institution was the Music society, founded in 1819, which not only promoted an active concert life but established a music school that in due course (1825) became a fully-fledged conservatory. in this way a modern bourgeois musical culture took shape in Kolozsvár, as it did in other cities around the southern and eastern edges of the habsburg empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. today Kolozsvár (as Cluj-napoca) is a romanian city, but its minority hungarian population remains. towards the end of the century, a bourgeois culture was instituted in one final habsburg location. Bosnia and herzegovina was the last major territory to be occupied by austro-hungary before the turn of the century, and in both sarajevo and Banja Luka the familiar institutions were accordingly established after 1878. reading rooms and choral societies on the model already well entrenched in Croatia, serbia and slovenia were instituted under von Kállay’s administration,39 and there was a sustained attempt to promote a distinct ‘Bosnian’ language that might help separate this territory from serbia and Croatia, a policy very much in the interests of the monarchy, though one that met with stiff resistance among the Bosnian intelligentsia. singspiel performances, designed mainly for the habsburg elites, were given by austrian troupes, symphony concerts were inaugurated in January 1881 for much the same public (initially given by the army band), and private music schools were established in Banja

39 the reading rooms also promoted besede or besjede [public meetings, often with music] in all these territories. see Vucinich 1978.

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Luka (1905) and sarajevo (1908), partly under the auspices of the serbian ‘national society’, Prosvjeta, established in the 1902.40 the foundation of the Zemaljski muzej [provincial Museum] in sarajevo in 1888 was of some significance, not least because it attracted the distinguished ethnologist Ludvík Kuba to Bosnia and herzegovina, where he undertook a major programme of collecting. indeed, as elsewhere in the wider region, Czech musicians played a key role in developing musical life generally. the foundations were laid, then, but it was really only in the post-war context of the first Yugoslavia that the essential components of a formal musical culture were properly instituted: the District Music school in 1920, the national theatre in sarajevo (with its own orchestra and an archive of programmes) in 1921, and the philharmonic society in 1923.41 The Principalities and Beyond to continue charting the structures of musical life, we need to extend beyond this area of habsburg influence. Our approaches to the south and east will necessitate a flanking movement around the centre of the Balkans, returning first to the adriatic littoral. the former Venetian territories of the adriatic preserved much of their italian character, but at the same time they were steadily modernised under habsburg rule. in split, for example, church-dominated infrastructures made room for vocal and instrumental academies, reflecting a more general challenge to the clerical monopoly on education and culture. a military band was founded, along with amateur music societies, singing associations, and a reading society: all the familiar scenery, in other words, of an emergent bourgeois musical culture. similar structures could be found in the other major cities on the littoral, extending right down the coast to Boka Kotorska. But as we drop further southwards we leave the habsburg lands behind, encountering first albania, and then epirus. there were sporadic glimmerings of western culture in albania in the nineteenth century – the usual Jesuit and franciscan activities as well as bands and singing societies – but the real flowering of art music there and in epirus awaited the twentieth century.

40 these ‘national societies’ were established as a reaction against the habsburgs. there was a similar Croatian society, Napredak, in Mostar, and a Muslim society, Gajret, in sarajevo. for an account of their activities, see Milojković-Djurić 2002, 156–79. On Gajret, see pinjo 2006. 41  romanić 2002.

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We will pass over these territories now, and take a short crossing to the ionian islands, where the story was very different. these islands made up yet another corner of the former Venetian empire, though synergies between greek refugees from Chios, Cyprus and Crete and a native ionian aristocracy helped preserve the greek language and its culture. this, combined with the influence of the Orthodox Church, ensured a measure of independence from the dominant italian culture. When the islands emerged from napoleonic rule they fell into British rather than habsburg hands, and it was as a British protectorate that they developed a modern musical culture in the nineteenth century, initially in Corfu (a prime mover was frederick north, earl of guildford, founder of the ionian academy),42 but soon reaching to the other islands, and in due course to mainland greece. two institutions were of special importance in the musical life of Corfu. One was the san giacomo theatre, which was established in the early eighteenth century, and functioned mainly as an opera house from the late eighteenth century onwards. its repertory was largely italian, but it was for this theatre that nikolaos halikiopoulos Mantzaros (1795–1872), father of the so-called ‘ionian school’ of composers,43 wrote the arias and cantatas, one in the greek language, that might be counted as among the first significant works of modern greek art music, unless we return to a truncated medieval-renaissance culture associated with Crete and Cyprus. the first opera given at san giocomo by a greek composer, though to an italian libretto, was franciskos Domenegini’s Markos Botsaris. But the theatre would be the venue for operas and cantatas composed by several generations of later ionian composers, as well as for their songs and instrumental music, until it closed in 1890 to make way for the Municipal theatre of Corfu. Mantzaros was also a major player in the history of the second major institution, the Corfu philharmonic society, founded in 1840 in part to provide band musicians for the st. spiridion processions, which had previously been accompanied by the Venetian garrison band. as so often with such societies, the Corfu philharmonic depended heavily on private sponsorship, but it soon developed its own educational programme, directed partly at wind musicians playing in the local bands. there was also tuition in voice, piano and strings, and in rudimentary theory, for

42 for an insight into this institution and its history, see henderson 1988. 43 an excellent introduction to music in the ionian islands is Kardamis 2007.

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which Mantzaros produced a textbook (much of the teaching made use of a ‘partimenti’ method of counterpoint teaching borrowed from southern italy).44 the more gifted pupils would typically move on to the neapolitan conservatory of san pietro a Majella to finish their training. the minutes of the philharmonic society’s board meetings are preserved from October 1840, initially written in italian, then in greek, and they offer insights into the developing musical culture of the island, as do the archives of the Corfu reading society (a treasury of opera libretti in particular).45 such reading societies were common in nineteenth-century cultural life, closely associated with the rise of national cultures. it was in Corfu that foundations were laid for the development of a tradition of greek art music that later spread to the mainland and to other islands sites. it was cultivated in domestic settings among social elites, but increasingly it established a formal culture, details of which are still being uncovered today. the importance of music in syros (in the Cyclades) is just now emerging, for example, due to research at the ionian university. thanks to the retreat there of many of the 1821 veterans, a bourgeois culture, with theatre, concert life and even a music journal, was established. as to the mainland, knowledge about the musical infrastructures of towns and cities is still partial. it seems that patras was influential, though athens gradually developed a musical culture of western orientation from the late 1830s onwards, not least because several of the ionian-associated composers moved there.46 among them were Dimitrios Digenis (1807–1880), alexandros Katakouzenos (1824–1892) and the italian rafaele parisini (d.1875), some of whose correspondence with Mantzaros is extant. these men worked at several pre-conservatory teaching and performing institutions, and in one case at the court. then, after 1864, when the ionian islands were transferred to greece, a second generation of ionian musicians moved to the capital. in 1871 rafaele parisini founded the euterpe philharmonic society, and at the same time the Music and Drama association was established, with the teaching staff made up mainly of foreign or ionian musicians. Other amateur associations followed, including the athens philharmonic society and first hellenic Opera, both of 1888, and the friends of Music association of 1893.

44 romanou 2009c. 45 i am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for sharing his extensive knowledge of these traditions with me. 46 Baroutas 1992.

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in the last quarter of the century music of distinction emerged from the ionian tradition. But a combustible blend of ideology and personal rivalry did it irreparable damage, beginning with the appointment of georgios nazos to the Directorship of the athens Conservatory in 1891. this will be discussed more fully in chapter 10, but in keeping with a germanisation of culture that grew ever more pronounced after 1889,47 nazos dismissed all artists who had italianate leanings and background. there was more to the modernisation of teaching than this, of course. it involved a shift from pedagogy grounded in the greek-Byzantine tradition to a Western training modeled on the german hochschulen. following a second round of campaigns against the ionian school, this time orchestrated by Manolis Kalomiris (1883–1962), the trajectory of greek music changed in a definitive way. it is no doubt significant that Kalomiris came from neither the ionian islands nor the greek mainland, but from smyrna in asia Minor. and his initial training in smyrna and in Constantinople is a further reminder that western music was alive and well among the greek communities of asia Minor. to tell that story, we need to turn to the second, eastern flank sweeping around the central Balkans, resuming our southeastward journey from transylvania. greater transylvania, embracing the Banat and Maramureş, is today one of the three major constituent provinces of romania. the other historical lands of romania, Wallachia and Moldavia, had long been Ottoman client states ruled by their own princes and later by phanariot hospodars,48 but as usual attempts to draw clean boundaries between habsburg and Ottoman domains meet with complications. Oltenia in western Wallachia came under habsburg control for a brief period in the eighteenth century, for example, while Bukovina in northern Moldavia (the ‘monastic archipelago’)49 remained habsburg until 1918. in general, as we move eastward from transylvania we also move away from the sphere of influence of Mitteleuropa, registering a stronger Balkan presence in Wallachia, and elements of polish-russian culture in Moldavia. the origin of the romanian people and their language is contentious. Lucian Boia summarises one argument succinctly by referring to three

47 One factor that played into this was the wedding of crown prince Constantine to the princess sophia of hohenzollern (Leotsakos 2004a, 50). 48 these two romanian provinces became principalities as early as the thirteenth century. 49 pascu 1999.

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historical phases: roman, Daco-roman and romanised Dacian.50 But at least the anomalies create a pleasing symmetry: a romance-language romania in a greco-slavic Orthodox space to the east; a slavic-speaking Croatia in a Latin Catholic space to the west. the other influences on the principalities are obvious enough. One was Ottoman, although the principalities were not actually settled by the Ottomans, and retained variable measures of autonomy right up to the moment of political independence. another was greek language and culture, promoted above all by the phanariot rulers of the eighteenth century, who were imposed on these territories by the sultan.51 and finally, there was russia, self-appointed protector of the Orthodox peoples, whose anti-Ottoman campaigns crisscrossed romanian territory constantly from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. this, then, was the background to the rapid modernisation of romanian culture in the early nineteenth century. Like their turkish overlords, the phanariot rulers were often resented by native populations, for their rule could be repressive, and they were closely tied to the sublime porte. this meant that Ottoman culture, including music, was a presence at their courts, sharing space there with greek post-Byzantine liturgical music; franz Joseph sulzer referred to the music he heard in Bucharest as ‘greco-turkish’.52 But the more enlightened of the phanariots had travelled widely, and were able to provide access to modern western thought and culture. it was thus partly through greek translations that enlightenment ideas began to circulate among native elites in the principalities, as indeed they did among the greeks of asia Minor, and european music was also performed at their courts.53 it was a phanariot associated with the greek Philiki Etairia [friendly society] in Odessa, alexander Ypsilantis, who made the first moves in what would become the greek liberation struggle, crossing from Bessarabia [Moldova] to Moldavia in 1821 in the hope of joining forces with a homegrown Wallachian revolt led by tudor Vladimerscu. Both revolts proved

50 Boia 2001, 41. Others have argued that the romanians originated as Latin-speaking Vlachs, who migrated into present-day romania after the late ninth century (hupchick and Cox 2001, Map 4). 51  the phanariots (from phanar [fener], the main greek area of Constantinople, where the patriarchate is located) were a prestigious and moneyed group, a kind of aristocracy of often western-educated merchants, and they were assigned key administrative posts within the Ottoman empire. 52 sulzer 1781. see plemmenos 2006. 53 plemmenos 2003.

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abortive, but they prepared the ground nonetheless for the more sustained War of independence. this effectively marked the end of phanariot rule (and the decline of greek influence) in the principalities, allowing native aristocracies to emerge again as a ruling class, basically conservative but now newly susceptible to western influence. the window to the West was opened yet wider, moreover, when the russians defeated the turks a few years later, in 1828–29, and Ottoman protection of the principalities was replaced by russian. Developing commercial links also created cultural ties, and it became common for the sons of intellectual and social elites in the principalities to seek an education in major european capitals, from where they transported modern thinking and occasionally modern cultural forms to the feudal estates. some of the phanariot rulers had already begun to model their salons on those of western cultural capitals. But a more crucial aspect of nineteenth-century modernisation was the rediscovery by the romanian intelligentsia of their (presumed ancient) Latinity, at the very time when they were developing a stronger sense of nationhood. undoubtedly it was this that persuaded the romanians of cultural affinities between themselves and more distant Latin lands, and to define their own emerging national identities by way of such affinities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was limited previous history of romanian-french cultural exchange, but from the 1830s onwards Bucharest developed an enduring, and largely unrequited, love affair with paris. if temeswar was a ‘little Vienna’, then Bucharest could be a ‘little paris’; increasingly it described itself as such, and it went on to develop architectural, artistic and literary fashions commensurate to the description.54 the everyday culture of the boyars and their circles (cuisine, dress, interior design, mores, and structures of sociability) was also in accord with this self perception, and even the native language increasingly registered francophile tendencies. as a result, the entire surface layer of romanian urban culture was transformed from an oriental to a West european one. greek lost its place as the language of high culture, the romanian language was written in Latin script, and the urban landscape was europeanised. the astonishing thing here was the speed of the transformation. Within a generation the swerve towards europe was all but complete, and that included the infrastructures of musical life in iaşi and Bucharest.

54 reportedly, one response to the description in france was ‘thank god paris is not a large Bucharest’ (Jezernik 2006, 26).

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to grasp the significance of this transformation of musical life, we need to consider the kinds of music commonly known and performed in the principalities prior to 1830. first, there were many layers of rural traditional music. second, there were highly distinctive traditions of urban popular music, associated with the lăutari, and ranging stylistically from Ottoman-influenced café music to free adaptations of native folksong. third, there was the music of the Orthodox Church, originally in both greek and slavonic, then increasingly in greek, but with the romanian language appearing intermittently in the eighteenth century, notably in the unpublished but widely circulated Psaltichia rumânească by filotei sân agăi Jipei (1713).55 a key stage here, and an important moment in romanian music history generally, was the publication in the vernacular of Macarie ieromonahul’s Theoretikon, Anastasimatarion and Irmologion (1823).56 and finally, in official phanariot circles and among some of the romanian boyars, there was Ottoman classical and mehter music. there was no doubt a fine line dividing the urban light music performed by rom musicians for turkish governors or romanian nobles and Ottoman classical music. But it is worth recalling that Demetrius Cantemir, educated in istanbul and one of the great composer-theorists of the Ottoman tradition, was from Moldavia, that he wrote one of the classic accounts of that land (Descriptiae Moldaviae), and that for a year he was actually its prince, before nailing his colours to a russian mast. it would be quite wrong to imagine that these different repertories were supplanted by european art music in the nineteenth century. rather they maintained a parallel existence alongside it, and remained in certain important respects quite unrelated to it. in other words, the space separating european art music from just about everything else was a considerable one. it was this space that troubled some romanian intellectuals in the nineteenth century, and especially a group of critics from 1860s iaşi, associated with the cultural society Junimea [Youth]. One strand in their argument stated the obvious. the critics pointed out that the rejection by the elites of existing cultural praxes created in effect a tabula rasa, and that for the most part the response was to fill it in as rapidly as possible with copies of the best european models. this resulted in a culture divorced from most of the people, bearing in mind that nineteenth-century romania 55 Windows to the Latin, Catholic West were by way of transylvania, and then hungary and poland. the romanian population of transylvania is predominantly greek Catholic. 56 in the library of the george enescu academy in iaşi there is a manuscript in the vernacular dating from 1610, but without musical notation.

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was still a feudal country, agrarian in economic base, localised as to civic law and government, and with an isolated (and insulated) court society and higher gentry. the other strand was more nuanced. the embrace of a modern european culture produced a collision of cultures, it was argued, and that collision was no less forceful and disorientating because it was eagerly sought and willingly accepted. european culture, in short, was perceived as a kind of external skin grafted rather too quickly onto the native body. the principal spokesman for Junimea was the critic and politician tito Maiorescu (1840–1917). in a famous article, Direcția nouă în poezia şi proza română [new directions in romanian poetry and prose], he made the case that this wholesale adoption of european culture amounted to forma fără fond [forms without substance].57 ‘We have politics and science’, Maiorescu argued, ‘we have journals and academies, we have schools and literature, we have museums, conservatoires, theatre, even a constitution. But in reality all these are dead productions, pretences without foundation, ghosts without bodies, illusions without truth [. . .], while the abyss which separates us from the common people becomes deeper every day’. it is an argument to which we will return when we come to consider the music of enescu, the canonic figure of romanian music, and perhaps the greatest composer to have emerged from south east europe. in the meantime, we may chart just a few of Maiorescu’s ‘forms’ as they applied to musical life. in volume 2 of his Hronicul Muzicii Româneşti, Octavian Lăzar Cosma points out that already in the late eighteenth century european music was performed in the domestic contexts of aristocratic circles.58 some of the courts had salles, and semi-formal concerts were given there in increasing numbers as the century turned. Visits from foreign opera troupes followed. they included a french company in iaşi, with its own orchestra amplified by local musicians (lăutari), and italian and german companies in Bucharest, where they rented halls and on occasion gave open-air performances.59 in addition there would have been benefit concerts from foreign musicians, though documentation is scarce (we know that in 1806 the german ‘cellist Bernhard romberg visited iaşi,

57 Maiorescu also wrote on music, including Wagner; see Cosma 1976, 539. 58 Cosma 1974. 59 the troupe directed by eduard Kreibig began its activities in Bucharest in 1830, while that of theodor Müller was engaged in timişoara in 1831 and Bucharest in 1833.

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and was astute enough to perform, inter alia, variations on local Moldavian melodies; he gave concerts in Bucharest six years later).60 the growing influence of russia, following the occupation in 1829, was beneficial to formal culture, and it was then that military bands of the modern type replaced the mehterhâne, performing operatic potpourris, marches and dances; they were introduced to iaşi in 1830 and to Bucharest in 1832. then, in 1833, a philharmonic society was instituted in Bucharest, with ion heliade rădulescu as the prime mover. it organised amateur concerts and produced singspiele, but from 1835 onwards it also offered formal instruction in its music school under the direction of ion andrei Wachmann (1907–63). in 1834 the russian occupation formally ended, but from this point until the end of the Crimean War the principalities were under russian ‘protection’ and enjoyed greater autonomy. this was reflected in the accelerating institutionalisation of musical life. 1836 witnessed the establishment of a proto-Conservatory in iaşi (it lasted three years), the singing association Chorul cântăreţilor in Bucharest, and the professional journal Gazeta Teatrului Naţional, to give just a few examples. this was in line with the early stages in the development of a bourgeois musical culture all over europe. it registered the growing penetration of bourgeois (merchant) circles by western musical culture, and that included the ubiquity of piano playing among the daughters of the wealthy.61 in the aftermath of 1848, these activities took on a more professional aspect, and this was even more marked with the newfound status of a united romania (de facto in 1859, de jure in 1862). thus, in 1860 a school of Music and Declamation was founded in iaşi with the support of the ruler alexandru ioan Cuza, and in 1864 it became a Conservatory under gheorghe Burada. in the same year the music school of the philharmonic society in Bucharest became a Conservatory, on the initiative of alexandru flechtenmacher, who became its first director (he had already established a philharmonic society in Craiova). Likewise the relatively informal ‘concerte spirituale’ made room for the orchestra of the philharmonic society, which gave its inaugural concert under eduard Wachmann (1836–1908) in 1866.62

60 Breazul 1970. traditional melodies presented by romberg are given in Ciobanu 1978, 55–6. 61  the co-existence of two cultures is neatly epitomised by a description of the musician Dionysios fotino, who settled in romania around 1800, and who was ‘an expert at playing the tambura and kemânçe, but who also played the piano’ (Ciobanu 1978, 18). 62 its later venue, the Ateneul Român, has become an architectural emblem of Bucharest.

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Just a year later gheorghe stephănescu (1843–1925) composed the first romanian symphony, a work closer to classical than late-romantic idioms. the philharmonic concerts were subject to increasingly rigorous reporting from the 1860s onwards, due to the onset of specialised music journals. such journals were usually short-lived, but at the end of the century, in Bucharest, a more substantial and longer-lasting journal, Romînia Muzicală, was established. the last decades of the century also witnessed several attempts to establish an Opera română by stephănescu, first in 1875, and then 1885, relying in the main on personal funding. it was really only in the aftermath of World War i that professional opera was established on a stable basis in Bucharest and Cluj (in the inter-war period iaşi had to rely on troupes from Craiova and from overseas). Yet despite this, operas by Mozart and rossini, and even Weber, were given from the early nineteenth century onwards, and the repertory was gradually expanded to include romanian works, several of which achieved great popularity at the time, though they have since receded from view. the link with paris had the further consequence that many talented romanian musicians went there to study, and especially to the scola Cantorum. among them was george enescu. it is generally agreed that it was with enescu (1881–1955) that romanian music came of age. even romanian musicologists are careful not to make extravagant claims for the music of his predecessors. indeed, just how we should understand the historical significance of the Kleinmeister is an issue that will be addressed in a later chapter. Yet even prior to unification and formal independence, romania was able to cultivate european art music at some level, and to develop the necessary infrastructures for its promotion. it was able to do so because these territories retained areas of limited autonomy even while they were Ottoman protectorates. there was no indigenous islamised ruling class in the principalities, and no resident population of turks. in contrast, those Balkan territories that were subject to direct Ottoman rule were more constrained. this we can see as we take the next step on our journey southwards. We arrive in Bulgaria, which remained under direct Ottoman rule, and with major repression in 1876, until the successive treaties of san stefano and Berlin two years later. as in Bosnia and herzegovina, there was little in the way of a developed musical culture of the modern european kind until after that date. again there was a tradition of Orthodox sacred music; again there were wind bands, often with foreign (and especially Czech) bandmasters; and again there were cultural clubs, singing associations and school choirs in which european harmony was appropriated. But it was all rather sporadic, and despite sustained

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attempts to create an immediate break with the Ottoman inheritance, it took some time for new Western-orientated institutions to be consolidated. as in albania and Macedonia, the history of Bulgarian art music begins to all intents and purposes in the twentieth century. it would be rather easy to infer from this that western music had neither presence nor prestige under the Ottomans. it is true that an Ottoman administration inhibited the development of european music in its Balkan subject territories. But in the centre, the picture was rather different. for culture and fashion, the Ottomans often looked directly to the West. indeed this was true almost from the start; witness their love-hate relationship with Venice. a hundred years after the peace of 1479, Vasari commented on how the sultans were still in awe of the famous paintings by gentile Bellini. Whatever the fortunes of war, Western europe could be smug about its art. from the eighteenth century onwards the Ottomans responded increasingly to cultural innovations from europe, beginning with the ‘tulip age’ (1718–30), during which greek phanariots played a major part in translating western texts into Ottoman-turkish, but with a gear change following the first tanzimat decree of 1839. as suraiya faroqhi argues, the embrace of european culture at this time was motivated partly by political expediency – an attempt to salvage as much as possible from an empire in decline – and partly by straightforward cultural curiosity about the products of the european enlightenment.63 the consequent secularisation of the intelligentsia and the assimilation of european thought and art was manifest in architecture, urban planning, the decorative arts and literature, with the latter including the beginnings of a print culture and of the novel as a primary genre. Most striking of all was the importation of european theatre, sitting easily alongside traditional Ottoman improvised drama and the karagöz. this was the context for the arrival of european classical music to anatolia. a western-style military band was established in istanbul following the dissolution of the Janissaries, and it was directed from 1828 onwards by giuseppe Donizetti (1899–1856), brother of the well-known composer, and by far the better paid of the two. he was the general instructor of imperial Music, and he established a school for Western music as early as 1831. under his leadership, western notation was taught in istanbul, italian opera was promoted at the so-called ‘french’ and ‘italian’ theatres of

63 faroqhi 2005.

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the capital (rossini and even Verdi were given, as well as gaetano Donizetti), and Western concerts were established. and from this point the alaturka – alafranka distinction became a familiar one in debates about music, with the latter acquiring socially elitist, fashionable connotations that were partly fed by the descriptions of european capitals emanating from Ottoman ambassadors and the merchant class.64 predictably, there were those who deplored the demotion of Ottoman music, so that even at the highest level there could be a seesaw of enthusiasm between the two categories. under sultan abdülmecid, for example, a new opera house was built (completed in 1859) staffed entirely by turkish artists; then under his successor abdülaziz, who reigned from 1861, western music more-or-less ground to a halt; and finally, with abdülhamit ii (from 1876), there was a renewal of european-orientated activity. nonMuslim communities in asia Minor also had their alaturka – alafranka debates, bearing on popular music in the case of Jews and armenians, but including classical traditions in the case of greeks (smyrna was one of the most cosmopolitan cities anywhere in the region in the late nineteenth century).65 in short, Western music was a presence in asia Minor. But it was really only in the post-Ottoman years that extensive institutions for its teaching and performance were established. under the sway of influential ideologues such as Ziya gökalp, who saw the musical future in a synthesis of rural folk [halk] music and Western art music, Kemal atatürk suppressed his own fondness for Ottoman classical music in the interests of a modern turkish nation state.

64 for a discussion of how Ottoman writers adopted the Western ‘alaturka’ term in the nineteenth century, and other things besides, see O’Connell 2005. 65 Milton 2008.

CHAPTER NINE

NATIONS The First Steps Let us return to two cases where music acts as a bridge between different worlds. The editors of the second edition of Albert Lord’s book The Singer of Tales remind us that the tradition of South Slavic epic songs recorded by Parry and Lord was essentially the same for both Christian and Muslim communities.1 Only the viewpoint of the texts (‘the ethnic identity of hero and villain’, to quote ronelle alexander)2 was different, symbolised by the antithetical but oddly similar Prince Marko and Alija Đerđelez. We may ask if there really was a divide to be bridged. the practice of sung oral poetry in the south slavic lands was of considerable antiquity and its integrity as a genre was not influenced by the precise content, as distinct from the metrical form, of the poetry. the language of the narration was the same for Christian and Muslim singers; the performance sites were also the same; and so too were the basic lifestyles of the guslars and their physical and cultural contexts.3 that some of the south slav populations converted to the Muslim faith only assumed ideological significance for the epic tradition when it was appropriated for nationalist propaganda in the nineteenth century. and this held more for the appropriating community – essentially an intelligentsia – than for the practitioners. it was the intervention of political ideology, and in due course of practical politics, that transformed religion into a mark of alterity, and Muslims into ‘minorities’.4 in our second case the divide is linguistic rather than religious. here we return to music of Grecophone and Vlachophone communities in epirus. again we have two communities who shared the same space, memories, occupations, customs and traditions. and whether Greek-speaking or Vlach-speaking (or for that matter albanian-speaking), they inherited 1  Lord 1965. 2 alexander 1985, 274. 3 But see Lord 1965, 16. 4 as Mark Mazower points out, religion was a principal mode of self-labelling right up to the twentieth century (Mazower 2000).

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common cultural forms, including music of considerable antiquity. of course the language difference needs to be accounted for. in brief, what we find among the Vlachs is the legacy of a more general Latinisation of indigenous populations; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they were by-passed by the more general re-hellenisation of Greek territories that took place following direct roman rule. Most Vlachs in epirus are bilingual (their romance language is an increasingly imperiled one), but it seems that even this diglossia may have ancient roots.5 in any case, exactly as with our south slav epics, it was the intervention of nationalist politics that created a ‘minority’.6 in most scholarly studies of nationhood, nation formation is taken to be a product of the modern era. Daniele Conversi fine-tunes this by referring to a ‘modern re-enactment of a pre-modern idea’.7 this formulation is useful, not least because it accommodates the ethnosymbolism of anthony smith, who sees nationalism as modern in itself, but based on deeper historical foundations, and in some cases on ‘pre-political’ identities, though this thesis has its detractors.8 the issue is clarified by Bernard Yack, who contrasts modern nationalisms with the separation of cultural and political identities characteristic of ancient Greece.9 Yack’s central point is that the Greeks carried their ethnos with them, but that they constructed the demos afresh in each new context. it is this separation that accounts for what he calls the ‘casualness of treason’ in the ancient Greek world. But Yack takes this further. his intention is to emphasise not just that the conflation of ethnos and demos is a singular product of modernity, but that this conflation is also closely bound up with self-identity, so that political betrayal becomes a form of self-betrayal. Modern european nationalism, in other words, is not just about an equation of nations and states. it also takes on the character of a belief system, albeit one entirely lacking in transcendental properties. in the words of Liah Greenfeld, it ‘sacralises the secular’, and substitutes ‘the social and political relations between men for the bond between man and God’.10 in doing so, it promotes the nation not just as a community, that meets essential and deep-seated human

5 Katsenevaki 1998. 6 For a discussion of Greek and albanian claims on epirotic polyphony, see Nitsiakos and Mantzos 2003.   7 Conversi 2007, 18.   8 For a discussion, see Özkirimli and sofos 2008, 6–11.   9 Yack 1996. 10 Greenfeld 1996, 169 and 176.    

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needs for bonding and belonging, but as a sacred community, worthy of self-sacrifice. the nation is in this sense a congregation. Yack’s analysis provides us with a framework for considering first the several ethnies that developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of Greco-roman antiquity, then the dependent paths that followed from these, and finally the several stages by which these interacted with protonations and eventually nation states. in the pre-modern world, there was a plethora of ethnies interacting across the wider region, with both religion and language functioning as primary constituents. smith’s definition does, after all, allow considerable room for movement, referring to ‘selfdefined group[s] possessing a myth of common origins, shared memories and a sense of solidarity’.11 Whether or not these ethnies would be forged into nations might then depend on the homogenising effects of emergent bourgeois high cultures (resulting, as ernest Gellner sees it, from a strengthening industrial-technological base in european societies),12 and/ or on the influence of european ideals of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism (defined as ‘core principles’ of nationalism by Greenfeld, though she recognises that these ideals are bound to be compromised by the reality of the nation state).13 these modernist prerequisites of the nation distinguish nineteenthcentury nationalisms from the seventeenth-century variety.14 in truth, there are cases that confirm and cases that defy Gellner’s and Greenfeld’s criteria, suggesting that nationalism takes many forms. What is clear is that once ideas of nationhood become part of the ideological status quo they take root rather quickly and easily, an indication no doubt that nationalist imperatives resonate with key human needs and drives. and since only a limited number of ethnies can become nation states, nationalism of its nature is invariably about power; it is a form of imperialism, where success can be achieved only at someone else’s expense. this may help us to understand our two case studies a little better. in both cases music is constitutive of a collective identity, and contributes to cultural continuities, but at a certain point it becomes prey to modern european state-building practices. it would be tempting to propose the French illyrian provinces as the most propitious candidate for modern nationhood, for it was here that 11  smith 2007, 327. see also ichijo and Uzelac 2005, 119. 12 Gellner 1983. 13 Greenfeld 1996. 14 For a discussion of different approaches to nationalism, see smith 1999, 13.

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the societal and ideological conditions proposed by Gellner and Greenfeld first obtained in south east europe. But in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars there was no real possibility to change the habsburg status quo in the interests of south slavic nationalisms. Conditions were actually more promising within a weakening ottoman empire, and with the possibility of Great power intervention. as it happens, the transmission of modern ideas of nationhood to the Balkans was in large measure down to the Greek diaspora by way of european philhellenism, and often in the Greek language.15 so perhaps it is not surprising that one of our two starting points in chronicling the struggle for national identity in the Balkans has to be Greece. the other is serbia. the birth of nations is invariably accompanied by violence. however in both serbia and Greece armed risings against the ottomans did not initially have a nationalist character. in serbia it was the influence of the émigré communities – the habsburg serbs – that transformed local, homesponsored revolts into a wider nationalist movement led by Karađorđe. in Greece it was the rise of a large merchant class in the eighteenth century that strengthened a sense of common ethnicity among the elites, and this was converted into a modern national consciousness under the influence of western philhellenes. in both cases initial rebellions were quashed, and it was only after wider international wars – professional wars rather than self-sacrificing struggles – that some form of national independence was achieved around 1830.16 serbia was recognised as an autonomous ottoman province governed by Miloš obrenović. Greece became an independent nation at a fraction of its present size, though the reality of its independence is another question, given the controlling (‘protecting’) role of foreign powers. K.e. Fleming reminds us that ‘Greece did not come into existence overnight’.17 When borders were provisionally drawn and national polities installed, there began an appropriation of the ethnos by the nation that has continued to this day. in serbia key constituents of the ethnos were faith, language and epic poetry, and music played a supporting role in channelling all three towards the nation. the first part of this story has already been told; it concerns the forging of a national church music from meeting points between post-Byzantine and Ukrainian traditions in sremski 15 tsiovas 2003, 5. 16 the idea of self-sacrificing warfare – for the patrie – as a mark of nationalism is discussed in hutchinson 2007. 17 Fleming 2008, 29.

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Karlovci. harmonised church music became part of the repertory of the first serbian choral society (the one in pančevo) in the 1840s, inaugurating a national tradition that would come to fruition later in the century. the key developments were down to Kornelije stanković, who spent some years in sremski Karlovci in the 1850s, but who had been born in Buda and studied in Vienna. stanković will be discussed later, but we may note here that while in Vienna he formed part of the circle of diaspora intellectuals that included the highly influential writer Vuk stefanović Karadžić [Vuk] (1787–1864), though it is not certain that the two men ever met. Vuk is widely regarded as the key player in the language reform and folklore collection that helped forge the nation, shifting the emphasis from orthodoxy to language as the foundational element. his formalisation of the language began when he created a vernacular grammar in 1815 and a dictionary in 1818, but it continued in the 1830s and 1840s when he increasingly sought to bring other south slav dialects into the fold. this achievement was not only of national significance in itself; it also bolstered the formulation of a south slav ideology, one that argued for the unity of south slav peoples from a slightly different perspective than the Yugoslavism developed in Croatia, though Vuk maintained a dialogue with this movement too. through his creation of a literary vernacular, Vuk contributed to the demise of Greek as the language of learning across the Balkans. at the same time he rendered accessible and open to manipulation a rich inheritance of sung poetry, both lyric and epic, that formed a crucial component of the serbian ethnos. effectively he transmuted oral epic into literature, literature into history, and history into ideology. the earliest of his folk collections appeared in 1814, but it was in the second collection Narodna srbska pjesnarica [serbian Folk songs], published in Vienna in 1815, that the familiar heroic songs and narrative histories in deseterac first appeared in print, collected from legendary guslars such as Filip Višnjić and ‘blind Živana’, representing men’s and women’s songs within his own classification.18 Later he published a four-volume collection in Leipzig (between 1823 and 1833), and finally a definitive, amplified four-volume version in Vienna (1842–1862).19 through these collections Vuk converted the tradition of oral poetry into an all-embracing, validating historical epic, and one that attracted wide attention in world literature. aside from

18 For a modern take on this distinction, see slapšak 2005. 19 Karadžić 1986–88.

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the ‘women’s songs’, there are tales of Dušan, of Lazar and the medieval kingdom, of the Battle of Kosovo, of the anomalous Marko Kraljević of prilep,20 and of the long years of turkish occupation. We may add here Njegoš’s verse play Gorski vijenac [the Mountain Wreath] (1847). even more than Vuk’s collections, this work transformed oral poetry into high (written) literature, while at the same time contributing to what ivo Žanić has called the ‘folklore matrix’.21 Njegoš effectively used the deseterac as the means to articulate a proselytising nationalism, a defiant call to arms in the name of Kosovo. this influential text, regarded by andrew Baruch Wachtel as a classic case study in the canonising of ‘Yugoslav’ culture,22 continues to resonate in the national imagination, and not always to the good. turks were vilified in the Njegoš play, but its harshest words were reserved for slavic Muslims. reading Gorski vijenac, it is not hard to see why a line came to be firmly drawn between Christian and Muslim epics, ruthlessly subordinating their musical and poetic commonalities to a nationalist ideology. in this way the guslar was assigned major significance for the new nationalism, and the rhythm of the deseterac became an element of serbian identity.23 No doubt this was facilitated by the rather specific relation between words and music that is characteristic of all long-established traditions of oral poetry. such was the symbiosis of words and music that, according to Lord, some singers were either unable to dictate songs without the gusle, or if they did so, would build lines that were significantly different from the sung versions.24 (the inseparability of meaning and music in the related albanian lahuta tradition is dramatised by ismail Kadare in the second of his Three Elegies for Kosovo.)25 it seems that within the oral tradition there was such an integral link between metre and melody that the thought itself would be shaped by the 4 + 6 rhythmic pattern of the deseterac and then articulated by way of ritually recurrent melodic formulae suitable for the openings of songs, for the endlessly repeated phrases of their main narratives, and for their endings.

20 popović 1988. 21  Žanić 2007, 22. 22 Wachtel 1998, 101. 23 tim Judah argues that a key document of this new nationalism was Načertanije by the politician ilija Garašanin (1812–74), a document that sets out long-term foreign policy objectives (Judah 1997, 56–61). 24 Lord 1965, 26. 25 Kadare 2000.

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the relation of metre to musical accent was not straightforward, however. a speech-derived musical accent, tied to long and short syllables, was normative, but the genre allowed considerable freedom and deviation for expressive purposes, so that prose accent and musical accent are not always congruent. indeed, as parry and Lord argued, it was precisely this flexibility that enabled the constant generation of new formulae based on the old familiar patterns. the exact mechanisms need not concern us here. What is crucial is that ‘rhythm and thought [were] one’, and for this reason music was heavily implicated in the appropriation of the genre by the ideological agenda. Lord put it well when he remarked of nineteenthcentury collecting that the ‘chauvinism of the day, a chauvinism not inherent in the tradition itself but fostered by nationalistic and political forces outside the tradition, was unfortunately mirrored in the songs’.26 in the case of Greece, music played into nation-building programmes in similar ways. We saw that post-Byzantine liturgical repertories were appropriated by the nation in the aftermath of independence, just as the church itself was appropriated by the state. as Dimitris Livanios points out, the history of the Church gave way to the history of ‘Greece’.27 there are parallels, moreover, between ensuing attempts to preserve the chant from foreign influence and certain high-profile moves in the linguistic field, notably the efforts of adamantios Korais to purify the language by purging it of Byzantine elements and of non-Greek vocabulary; for a good century his katharevousa was cultivated in opposition to demotic Greek, widening the gap between the literary and the spoken language. Korais’s project was distant from Vuk’s in serbia in important respects. Vuk was classifying existing practices, whereas Korais was constructing something new. But they did have in common nationally motivated language reform and a vigorously proselytising agenda. indeed the Greater serbian ideology had its counterpart in i megali idea, which shaped so much of the thinking of Greek intellectuals in the nineteenth century,28 and which motivated those re-hellenising linguistic agendas of which Vlach and Muslim populations fell foul. Moreover, since the Greek people were scattered right across the eastern Mediterranean (their ‘economic empire’ included much of the Balkans, the Middle east and North africa), and had validating roots in both a medieval empire and 26 Lord 1965, 137. 27 Livanios 2003, 82. 28 the term was first used by ioannis Kolettis in a speech to the National assembly of 1844.

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an ancient civilisation, the project could be one of almost limitless ambition, linking the Greeks across many lands and across many centuries; it is also worth remembering that since the Fall of Constantinople there had been a substantial presence of educated Greeks in Western europe. the failure to realise the irredentist ambitions of i megali idea in political terms (a labyrinthine story of many parts and many parties) had major repercussions on the cultural ambition of the Greeks. the appropriation of klephtic ballads by Greek nationalists and philhellenes was likewise analogous to the hijacking of south slavic epics by serbian romantic nationalists. these ballads were anonymous tales of chivalric defence of the homeland set in a world of often charmingly animised nature, and like their slavic counterparts they were associated especially with the more remote, mountainous, regions of the country. But, as part of a more general idealisation of the klephts in the wake of the war of independence, the klephtic ballads came to assume a national status, forging continuities with earlier heroic traditions: the vernacular epics of the Byzantine era (Digenis Akritas), and the epics of antiquity. Baud-Bovy commented at length on these associations.29 Moreover, just as Njegoš wrote ‘in the manner of’ the south slavic oral tradition, so poets such as Georgios terzetes (1806–1874) and aristotle Valaorites (1824–1879) turned to the vernacular of the klephtic ballads from epirus. it was through these ballads that some of the first steps were taken to harness components of Greek popular culture – constituents of the ethnos – to the nation. as in serbia, defining the nation was the job of elites, and it was some time before the national consciousness they cultivated ‘trickled down’, to use Wachtel’s phrase, to the population at large.30 Faith, language and sung poetry were once more the starting points for this process, but other constituents of the ethnos, including urban popular music, were also groomed for a nation-building role. and in due course, partly thanks to so-called cultural associations, selected threads from the highly diverse stylistic tapestry of regional music and dance – from the mainland, the islands and the asia Minor communities – were drawn out, straightened (i.e. formalised) and woven into a simpler national design. they became national songs and national dances, though the impulse underlying this was no less western than the transformations of architecture and indeed of political institutions. indeed, it was partly thanks to the collecting

29 Baud-Bovy 1958. 30 Wachtel 1998, 31–38.

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activities of western outsiders such as Louis-albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910) – his Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient were published in 1876 – that a trail was blazed for ‘la muse populaire’.31 From this point the tempo quickened. When Bourgault-Ducoudray’s student, Maurice emmanuel (1862–1938), wrote his important thesis on Greek dance, he was one of many outsiders to engage in both scholarly and creative ways with these repertories; they were, after all, not just exotic but notionally linked to the wellsprings of european civilisation. the seductive idea that there might be unified schemata (modal and rhythmic) underlying ancient Greek, Byzantine and so-called ‘folk’ music was explored by Bourgault-Ducoudray in particular, and this in turn enhanced the prestige of folk music among Greeks themselves.32 Growing numbers of collections were published around the turn of the century, several of them in Byzantine notation, and quite a few funded by wealthy Greeks living overseas. Constantinos psakhos published a collection of folksongs notated in both Byzantine and staff notation, for example, and both he and ioannis sakellarides (1853–1938) were instrumental in presenting folk music on the concert platform. this activity culminated (in 1910) in the first recordings of Greek songs using a phonograph.33 the transformation of traditional music from a ritual practice to a prestigious object of study and a powerful symbol of the nation was complete. Two Nations the intellectual elites of emergent Balkan nations subscribed to a prevailing belief that nations had a clear sense of cultural identity, enabling the ‘cultural nation’ to present an image of authority that might challenge even that of the church. it was in the realm of high rather than popular culture that this idea circulated. in the first place, it demanded the validation of nationhood by history. roots became all-important, and if necessary they could be refashioned, or created afresh, to meet the task, for myth and history were intertwined in the job of building the cultural

31  the process began much earlier, of course, notably with Claude Fauriel’s 1824–25 collection Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne. For a detailed account of the history of archives and the collection of regional music, see Katsanevaki 2008. 32 romanou 2008. panos Vlagopoulos presented an interesting paper on the cultural politics of Bourgault-Ducoudray at the 2009 Biennial euro-Mediterranean Music Conference in Cyprus, unpublished at the time of writing. 33 ibid.

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nation. We have here the necessary context for repeated serbian reflections on Kosovo and the medieval kingdom, on hilandar, and on the lineage of language. We have too the framework for endless debates about Greek ancestry, bearing in mind that the double-descended status of the Greeks, ideally synthesised by i megali idea, could just as easily generate a sense of divided identity. in the second place, it was expressed through the attempts of elites, including composers, to make symbolic capital out of the culture of the folk. traditional music had special richness and vitality in the pre-modern rural communities of south east europe, and it was read – somewhat spuriously – as a collective expression of national (as opposed to social or regional) identities, very much in the spirit of herder. there was nothing new in composers turning to such music. What was new from around the mid century was the spirit in which it was deployed, as it came increasingly under the sway of a nationalist ideology. even when presented in the form of simple transcriptions, folk and popular music was claimed by the nation. this kind of cultural nationalism exhibited a paradoxical condition. it staked its claim on a respected contribution to a generalised high culture. Yet at the same time it asserted its distinctiveness by drawing elements of suitably sanitised rural folk culture into a synthetic national tradition. in a sense, then, each nation displayed a variant of a single bourgeois culture, while at the same time competitively elevating, asserting and promoting the uniqueness of its particular variant. this project may have been grounded in the cities, but its task was to sell the nation.34 hence the tension that developed between city and nation in the later nineteenth century, mirroring the receding tension between city and court. the real job in hand was to impose cohesion on the cultural nation and to invest authority in it; and that in turn was presumed to foster some measure of integration at the level of the socio-political nation. it is in this sense that cultural nationalism sometimes acted as a seedbed for political nationalism in the Balkan territories, though, as i will argue towards the end of this book, this was not always the sequence. When Josif Šlezinger arrived at the court of Miloš obrenović in 1831 he laid the groundwork for serbian art music, first in Kragujevac and then (following the accession of alexander Karađorđević) in Belgrade,

34 For a broader view of how music spoke into nationalism and ethnonationalism, see Bohlman 2004b.

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where he worked at the Teatar na đumruku [theatre at the Customs]. his principal activity was to supply or arrange music for plays, many of which mined the vein of serbian myth-history in a spirit of national selfdefinition. this is evident from the titles: San Kraljevića Marka [Kraljević Marko’s Dream], Zidanje Ravanice [the Building of ravanica], Sraženije Kosovom polje [the Battle of Kosovo], and above all Ženidba cara Dušana [tsar Dušan’s Wedding], which came close to exceeding the genre of play with music. the tradition was continued by a later generation of composers, including Nikola Đurković (1812–75), who arrived in Belgrade from the adriatic in the 1840s but then moved to pančevo, where he remained until the upheavals of 1848. in pančevo he was active in the choral society, for which he composed harmonised church music and folksong arrangements, but also in the theatre company he himself formed and for which he composed and arranged musical numbers, including songs of explicitly nationalist orientation such as Ustaj, ustaj, Srbine [rise, serb, rise].35 this tradition of patriotic theatre with music extended right through the century, culminating in one aspect of the work of Davorin Jenko (1835–1914) at the National theatre from the 1870s onwards. again the titles say it all: Markova sablja [Marko’s sabre], Dušan silni [Dušan the Mighty], Seoba Srbalja [the Migration of the serbs], and so on. again, these are sung plays, but with Vračara [the sorceress] of 1882 Jenko composed what is often regarded as the first serbian operetta, and with his music for Dragutin ilić’s Pribislav i Božana [pribislav and Božana] (1894) he came close to full-blown opera. he also laid the groundwork for serbian orchestral music, and wrote numerous choral pieces on sentimental or patriotic themes. Jenko was slovenian by birth, and remarkably enough composed two pieces that would become the slovenian and the serbian national anthems respectively. several of those who turned to serbian (in effect south slavic) traditional music in a new spirit of nationalism were immigrants like Jenko. they included some of the Czech musicians who settled in Vojvodina, and also the austrian alojz Kalauz, who published volumes of Srbski napjevi [serbian melodies] in 1850 and 1852. however it was Kornelije stanković who first collected systematically. stanković spent his formative years in central europe, and it was there rather than in the heartland of serbia that he cultivated a nationalist aesthetic, spurred on by the climate of slavonic nationalism in Vienna. his four volumes of harmonised serbian melodies, published in Vienna

35 at this point Đurković returned to Belgrade and apparently left music behind.

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in 1858, 1859, 1862 and 1863, stand alongside his ecclesiastical music as foundation stones for the later development of serbian music, though their significance is as much symbolic as artistic. Moreover, by introducing harmonised folk songs to the repertory of the Belgrade Choral society, stanković established a practice that would become emblematic of serbian music well into the twentieth century. his activities during a short lifetime were manifold. he energised the Choral society and founded its ‘preparatory choir’; he proselytised for traditional and liturgical music through his publications and performances; he gave concerts as a pianist all over serbia; and he laid the foundations for the first school of music in Belgrade. in all these respects he justified his later reputation as a father figure of serbian music. his achievements were consolidated and developed further by Jenko, his successor with the Choral society, and then by Jenko’s own successor Josif Marinković. Marinković is sometimes described as the father of serbian romantic art song, and as this suggests he was not primarily orientated towards folksong-based composition; in addition to the songs, his most significant works are probably his dramatic cantatas for chorus accompanied by piano. Nonetheless it was he who popularised the already existing practice of grouping choral folksong arrangements into suites, or as he termed them, kola [round dances]. he composed eleven such kola, and they might be regarded as immediate forerunners of the important rukoveti [garlands] by his contemporary stevan Mokranjac. it is with these rukoveti that serbian music truly came of age. From this brief summary, we can see that composers in serbia asserted the cultural nation through the institutions of church, theatre, and choral society, and through the collection and adaptation of traditional music. there are parallels in Greece, of course, but also differences. right at the outset, we need to confront persistent prejudices in relation to Greek music history. i mentioned earlier the anti-ionian campaigns of Nazos. these were bolstered by a sustained polemic from Manolis Kalomiris, lasting roughly between 1908 and 1912 and directed towards the establishment of an influential project of ‘national music’, a project that effectively set a new agenda for Greek music (not really to be equated with the Germanising policies of Nazos). in brief, Kalomiris pointedly rejected the achievements of nineteenth-century ionian composers as derivative of italian models and therefore inauthentic, by which he meant insufficiently ‘Greek’. to appreciate the bias in this position, we might compare it to dismissing elgar as insufficiently ‘english’ on the grounds that his musical style is

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transparently indebted to austro-German late-romanticism. today we are less censorious, and on two grounds. First, we are more inclined to follow Carl Dahlhaus in locating the aesthetics of nationalism not so much in musical materials as in a poetics of intention and reception.36 and secondly, from our present perspective some way beyond the exclusionist mentality of the modernist fortress, we can accept more readily that the value of a musical work may be separated from its aesthetic and stylistic allegiances, and are less anxious to dismiss as derivative works that hone to perfection an idiom established elsewhere. it now seems possible to restore to members of the ‘ionian school’ their credentials both as deserving composers and as Greek composers, though we also need to keep their achievements in perspective. the Aria Greca, composed by Mantzaros in 1827, has symbolic significance here. Written for a ‘benefit’ in Corfu by the singer elisabetta pinotti, its style is rossinian, but it is the earliest-known setting of a Greek-language text by an ionian composer. in an informative liner note, haris Xanthoudakis tells us that an anonymous reviewer in the ionian islands gazette, published just a few days after the première of the work, urged Mantzaros to continue setting Greek rather than italian poetry, though there were major disincentives due to the shortage of competent Greekspeaking singers. in any case a year after the Aria Greca Mantzaros set part of the seminal Zakynthian poet Dionysios solomos’s lengthy Hymn to Freedom, inspired by the War of independence and later selected as the Greek national anthem.37 as in serbia, theatre was of key importance in defining Greece musically. the myths and legends of antiquity were too much of a universal property of opera to do the job, but it soon became a commonplace for ionian composers to turn to more recent Greek history – to the familiar stories of the Klephts, to the tales of ali pasha, and to the War of independence – as subject matter for opera, albeit initially in the italian language (italian librettists also commonly turned to the War of independence at this time). Many of these works are lost – composers include Frangiskos Domeneginis (1809–74), himself a political activist, and the Mantzaros pupil iossif Liveralis (1820–99) – but among the most significant of the extant operas are those of the Zakynthian pavlos Carrer (1829–96), including several on ‘national’ themes; thus, Markos Botsaris celebrates a

36 Dahlhaus 1980. 37 there are two versions of this hymn, the second fuller and more complex.

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much-dramatised hero of the independence struggle,38 while Despo, iroïs tou Souliou [Despo, heroine of suli]39 and I Kyra Frossyni [Lady Frossyni] both deal with heroic deaths at the hands of ali pasha. Carrer’s musical idiom is unambiguously italianate, but there is also, and especially in his final opera Marathon-Salamis, some atmospheric tone-painting that looks beyond this stylistic framework, and some programmatic use of Greek traditional melodies set in opposition to alaturca idioms (there is also one song O Yero Demos [old Demos] that has attained the popularity and status of a folksong). in 1867, the opera O ipopsifios vouleftis [the parliamentary Candidate] by spyridion Xyndas (?1812–96) was given at san Giacomo. Not only was this the first opera to set a Greek text; it also employed traditional melodies, albeit within a musical idiom indebted to italian models. this was characteristic of the approach of ionian composers to folklore, including the virtuoso piano work Le reveil du klepht, composed by iossif Liveralis in 1847 and comparable in significance to stanković’s technically simpler Što se bore misli moje [Why do my thoughts torture me] in serbia. there are many such instances of the appropriation of traditional melodies, right through to the early works of samaras. But it would be easy to overstate the significance of this. George Leotsakos, to whose painstaking research we owe so much of our knowledge of the ionian composers, has argued that ‘the recurring presence of folk elements’ in their music contests Kalomiris’s rejection of this music as italianate and his monopolising of ‘national’ music.40 But when we consider this body of music as a whole, from the pioneering works of Mantzaros, through the programmatic symphonic music of Dionyssios rodotheatos (1849–92)41 to the operas of the Corfiote spyros samaras (1861–1917), folkloric elements hardly seem crucial to its definition. samaras represented the culmination of the ionian tradition, and during his lifetime he was known internationally. Following studies in athens and paris, where he composed some surprisingly complex piano music, he

38 there are four operas by ionian composers on this subject, by Domeneginis (unfinished), Nikolaos tzanis Metaxas (considered lost), iossif Liveralis (1852, considered lost) and Carrer (finished in 1858, premièred in 1861). 39 Carrer’s one-act Despo (1875), based on antonios Manoussos’s libretto in Greek was originally intended as a ‘showpiece’ for the students of the athens Conservatory, though it was rejected on the grounds that there were insufficient forces. it was performed in late 1882. i am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for information on this. 40 Leotsakos 2005a. 41  on this, see Leotsakos 2004b.

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settled in Milan in 1886, producing most of his operatic works there before repatriating in 1911 to Greece. his reputation was staked not on nicely executed Greek-language songs and operettas composed in these later years in Greece, however, but on the major operas he composed in the 1890s and beyond, all setting italian libretti. here he made a distinctive contribution to the italian operatic tradition in a musical idiom that has been justly compared to puccini. only one of his operas, Rhea (1908), has a Greek setting, and there are elements of Greek traditional music in the score (just as in Le Martyre there is traditional music to represent romania). But musically Rhea still belongs clearly to the world of post-Verdian italian opera. it absorbs elements of the earlier operas – the couleur locale of Medgé (1883–88) and Flora mirabilis (1886), with its supernatural ballets, the proto-verismo characterisation and leitmotivic structures of Le Martyre (1894), and the psychological realism of Storia d’amore (1903) – but it adds an element of straussian intensity and an overall dramatic coherence that allows us to rate it as his highest achievement, and justifies some of the claims made for his music by aficionados such as Leotsakos and Byron Fidetzis. Given the stylistic orientation of samaras’s music, it should not surprise us that he fell foul of Kalomiris on his return to Greece, and at some personal cost. there is a patriotic thread running through the collective achievement of the ionian composers, expressed in subject matter and in musical materials. and at a late stage of the tradition, a more self-conscious Greek nationalism began to emerge, associated especially with Dionysios Lavrangas (Greek suites; introduction and Fugue on Greek themes) and Georgios Lambelet (1875–1945), whose polemic National Music appeared in 1901. olympia Frangou-psychopedis depicts this as a transitional stage between the ionian and the National schools of Greek music,42 but in reality the agendas of Lambelet and Kalomiris were in direct competition, and their musical styles, too, were poles apart. Both committed to folksong as the basis for a national music, but the former envisaged an idiom that would remain relatively free of foreign influence, cultivated a cool, restrained approach to traditional materials, both demotic and Byzantine, and went some way to exploring appropriate harmonisations (his enthusiasm for the demotic even extended to jazz, though one might question what he really understood by this). the latter sought rather a symbiosis of folksong and modern european art music, taking inspiration

42 Frangou-psychopedis 1990.

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from existing models of romantic nationalism, notably russian, as well as from post-Wagnerian German traditions.43 the Kalomiris formula proved to be the winning one, not least due to his gifts of self-promotion, and the emergence of a so-called ‘national school’ centred on his entrepreneurial activities effectively sounded the death knell of the ionian tradition. the attempts by some Greek musicologists to invest ionian traditions with more significance than they can really sustain (the appropriate comparator would be music and musical life in certain provincial italian settings) are really all about integrating Greece within europe and lifting it clear of associations with the east. there is as much of an agenda here as in the Kalomiris manifesto. it is true that the pendulum had to swing away from the narrower definitions of national style that stemmed from Kalomiris. But it should perhaps not swing too far. to return to an earlier analogy, we can appreciate Vaughan Williams without dismissing elgar; but it should work the other way too. the Kalomiris circle – a loose assembly of individuals ‘driven’ by an ambitious ideologue – produced an important and distinctive body of music, and one that was highly differentiated stylistically (it will be discussed in chapter 12). it does their achievement no service to allow ideology – even an ideology proposed by the composers themselves – to characterise and define it in an exclusive way. there is more than one way to be a Greek composer. The Berlin Balkans the quest for national identity soon became unstoppable throughout south east europe, and if we follow its chronicle, we will move directly from Greece to romania. setting aside transylvania, it is worth recalling that Wallachia and Moldavia were politically separate provinces, and even at times provinces at war with each other, prior to the brief and purely strategic ‘union of 1600’ under Mihai Viteazul, prince of Wallachia. the broader context for the subsequent development of romanian cultural nationalism has already been discussed, and need not be elaborated here beyond some summarising observations. as in serbia and Greece, stories of ethnic origins and language were orientated by the intelligentsia towards a national narrative that was already well established by the time of the revolutions of 1848. 43 For a useful discussion, see Little 2001, 96–98. Little offers a comparison of writings by Lambelet, Kalomiris and Constantinidis.

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the ‘discovery’ of Latinity was crucial. Not only did Latinity invade orthodoxy; it invited links with elite cultures in more distant Latin places, and served to particularise, and to claim for the nation, the popular music of the lăutari. all this was grist to the nationalist mill. But so too was a developing interest in folksong from the early nineteenth century onwards. in 1830 eftimiu Murgu published an anthology of folk songs in Bucharest, and in 1834 François ruzitski published in iaşi his surprisingly exotic piano transcriptions, Muzică orientală, 42 cîntece şi dansuri moldoveneşti, valahe, greceşti şi turceşti. then in 1848 ion andrei Wachmann completed his four nationally specific collections, designed in part for his private piano teaching;44 and two years after that henri ehrlich published in Vienna his Arii naţionale româneşti.45 these performed the same functions, and suffered from the same limitations, as nineteenth-century collections all over europe. Not least, it was widely felt that such collections would help romanian composers create a national style. in these ways cultural nationalism prepared the ground for unification in advance of the political reality. Unification was not universally welcomed – there was opposition from conservative forces within the principalities – but among its advocates the ‘union of 1600’ was seized upon, and its historical meaning was transformed utterly as a means of validating the would-be modern nation. one of the outstandingly popular operas of the mid century – essentially a Singspiel or vaudeville – was Mihai Bravul în ajunjul bătăliei dela Călugăreni [Michael the Brave on the eve of the Battle of Călugăreni], composed in the revolutionary year of 1848 by ion andrei Wachmann. Nor was this the only opera on the topic of Mihai Viteazul, for the ‘union of 1600’ was later treated as an originary moment in romanian national consciousness.46 Likewise, mythology was tapped by composers, as in the opera Meşterul Manole [the master builder Manole] by Mauriciu Cohen-Lînaru (1849–1928), a pupil of Bizet and César Franck (the story is the familiar one where Manole must wall up his wife as a sacrifice in order to complete the Curtea de argeş Monastery in Wallachia; it is known especially through the epic poem Monastirea Argeşului [the monastery on the argeş], and we will encounter a version of it again in our discussion of

44 these were Roumania; Bouquet de mélodies valaques originales; L’Echo de la Valachie; and Les bords du Danube. 45 Folksong collections continued to appear, including publications by anton pann, Carol Mikuli and alexandru Flechtenmacher. 46 see Lajosi 2008, 215–17.

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the first opera by Kalomiris).47 Meşterul Manole, together with his piano sonatas and song-cycles, earned Cohen-Lînaru a place as a leading romanian composer of the late romantic era, though its music is simple and frankly anachronistic. he was rivalled by Ciprian porumbescu (1853–83), by Chopin’s pupil Carol Mikuli (1821–97), whose compositions include a Missa Romena for choirs and organ (though he spent most of his working life in Lwów [L’viv]), and by eduard Caudella (1841–1924), best known today as the teacher of George enescu. all were engaged in modest ways in the project of building a national music. When unification was finally achieved, it was only made possible by Great power politics. such has always been the way in the Balkans. in the case of romania it occurred in the wake of the Crimean War of 1853–56. and it was also in the aftermath of Crimea that another Balkan would-be nation began to stir. Unlike romania, Bulgaria lay right at the heart of the ottoman territories in europe, and accordingly the kind of cultural nationalism cultivated in romania had little opportunity to develop until towards the end of the nineteenth century. in the aftermath of Crimea, however, sultan abdülmecid i extended the reforming policies of the Tanzimat in an attempt to stem the tide of nationalism in the Balkans. among other things, he called an orthodox Church council to reorganise the millet, and it was at this point that the ‘Bulgarian Church Question’ raised its head, as the Bulgarians, prompted by russia, staked their claim to an independent Church. this led to a decade of dispute between the Bulgarians and the Greeks, culminating in the establishment in 1870 of a Bulgarian exarchate in istanbul. there were no implications for doctrine, confirming that the debate was unambiguously about national identity. and from this point onwards, church music in Bulgaria was vulnerable to nationalist appropriation. there were complex demographic issues at work, as between Bulgarian peasant populations, Greeks and gudilas (hellenised Bulgarians).48 But in general there was a growing sense of Bulgarian ownership of the liturgical sources in the monasteries, including musical sources, and at the same time there was an increasing attempt to separate the music from its Greek parentage; the formation of the Bolgarski pevcheski tsarkoven khor [the Bulgarian Church Choir] in 1870 had just such an aim, and the discovery

47 this theme (the walled-in woman) crops up in oral culture, especially balladry, all over the Balkans, notably in albania and Greece. see o. augustinos 2003. 48 For a useful account of this, see Detrez 2003.

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of Bolgarski rospev in russian manuscripts (see chapter 6) was crucial. all this was part and parcel of the national awakening, along with the appropriations of folk culture by the Miladinov brothers, and the early attempts, notably but not exclusively by Dobri hristov (1875–1941), to lay the foundations of a national music both through institutional work and through compositions. in the early 1870s there was growing ferment in the Balkans, resulting from three intertwined forces: social discontent at lower social levels, national revival movements promoted by native elites, and Great power politics. thus, the herzegovina rising in 1875–76 had little to do with nationalism,49 but it did provoke serbia into a nationalist war against the newly bankrupted ottomans, and that in turn galvanised russia, Britain and the habsburgs. soon just about everyone was involved. Bulgarian nationalists took the opportunity to stage an ill-fated revolt in 1876 (brutally suppressed), russia declared another war on the ottomans, and romania joined in and declared its full independence.50 When the British sent a fleet to prevent russia seizing istanbul, russia signed the treaty of san stefano with the ottomans (March 1878), effectively creating a massive Bulgarian state that included Bulgaria proper, all of Macedonia and most of thrace. in the end, it was universal outrage at this treaty that led to the Congress of Berlin in July 1878, and the result was all but a death blow to the ottoman empire. the ‘Berlin Balkans’ formalised the victory of nation state over empire. it confirmed the full independence of serbia, Montenegro and romania, and it created a Bulgarian state that cut the san stefano Bulgaria down to a quarter of its size. so what was left for the empires? perhaps the most surprising part of the treaty was the license it gave for the occupation of Bosnia and herzegovina and the sandžak of Novi pazar by the habsburgs, who would go on to annex Bosnia and herzegovina formally thirty years later. this left the habsburgs in control of Croatia, Vojvodina, part of the Banat, Bosnia and herzegovina, transylvania and Bukovina. the ottomans were left with exiguous territories, a mere remnant of their earlier possessions. they retained thrace (including the autonomous province of eastern rumelia, with plovdiv [Filibe] as its capital, at least until 1885), Macedonia (including present-day Greek territories) and epirus/albania. 49 there is an interesting discussion of Vasa pelagić’s history of the uprising in the ‘epilogue’ of Milojković-Djurić 1994. 50 a fascinating report of russian responses to the uprisings in the Balkans is Dostoevsky 1993.

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Not all aspirations were fully met at Berlin. serbia, Greece and Bulgaria all looked hungrily at Macedonia, while serbian claims on Bosnia and herzegovina were thwarted, with well-known consequences. the efforts of Benjamin von Kállay to keep serbian, Montenegrin and Croatian ambitions for Bosnia and herzegovina at bay failed to stave off the impending political crisis. Moreover, a new generation of nationalists was emerging in albania and Macedonia. here too there were musical manifestations, though some of these are read somewhat ‘after the fact’. in particular, the albanians began a process of territorial expansion following the serbian migrations. they consolidated their presence in Kosovo and Metohia, and also western Macedonia, and by augmenting already substantial populations in these regions they created one of the key elements in what ivo Banac called a ‘human garland’ strung around the Balkan slavs.51 the albanians were not represented at the Congress of Berlin, and partly because of that they established the League of prizren in 1878.52 it was a key player in the Rilindja kombëtare [National revival] associated with the Frashëri family and linked to the Bektaşi [Bektashi] order. in the wake of familiar nationalist moves, albania gained an initial independence on the eve of World War i. But the subsequent status of the nation was far but secure, and the nationalist imperative, grounded in language more than anything, remained a live issue, partly because the cultures of the north and south are so distinct. in this connection Jane sugarman has made a suggestive link between developments at the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. she refers to one major product of the heritage gathering of the late nineteenth century, the folkloric collection of Bëleta Shqypëtare [albanian Bee], published by thimi Mitko in 1878. this includes ‘chronicle’ songs, many of them dealing with events in and around Janina, with accounts of ali pasha from both sides of the political divide.53 she then demonstrates a link between these and songs performed by present-day prespa albanian villagers, sung lartër: ‘in full voice, at a high pitch level, in a non-metric manner, and with dense ornamentation’. in doing so she points to a specifically musical expression of albanian nationalism in the late twentieth century, and one that embraces the radically different cultures of the north and the south. the chronology

51  Banac 1984, 46. 52 one can still visit the (partly reconstructed) building in prizren where the delegates met. it now houses a museum. 53 sugarman 1999.

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here is telling. it emphasises that even after the Versailles settlement, the task of nation building in this part of the Balkans was far from complete. the unresolved issues in Bosnia and herzegovina, Macedonia and albania draw attention to the heavy price that had to be paid for all these nation-building enterprises. Borders, which once had little meaning, were now subject to dispute. the national histories constructed all around them not only overlapped, but worked to squeeze out, marginalise or physically displace the various minority communities: ethnic, confessional and linguistic. such minorities – characteristic components of dissolving multinational empires – typically found themselves caught up in several national narratives simultaneously, while all the time trying to build one of their own, and naturally looking to West european societies for what they perceived to be successful models. in this sense displacement and periphery were the invariable by-products of the rise of nationalism in south east europe. and in such cases, ethnicity was not the only marker of difference. religion also played its part, and increasingly class discourses, emergent in the nineteenth century, played into the national narratives.54 Yugoslavism a complicating factor in nineteenth-century nationalism was the strengthening sense of ethnic allegiance that gave rise at various times to panslavic, pan-German, pan-hellenic, and even pan-Latin movements.55 this intersected with nation-state nationalism, sometimes bolstering it, and sometimes at odds with it. it was given expression in the emergent illyrianism – a Kollár-inspired ideology of south slav unity – that developed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic years as a subset of the wider pan-slavic movement. in principle one might compare this to the drive to unification in italy and Germany, with the role of serbia analogous to that of piedmont and prussia respectively (it has often been observed that italy and Germany were conquered rather than unified). as Denison rusinow has pointed out, it is not always easy to distinguish Yugoslav nationalism from the nation-specific variety, for the basic argument of Yugoslavism – that south slavs have similar tribal origins and speak variants of the same

54 on this, see turda 2009. 55 pan-Latin movements came into prominence in the early twentieth century, and were focused on some of the discourses associated with World War i.

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language, ergo they are the same people – was interpreted rather differently by the three major players.56 the slovenes, historically subject to Germanisation, tended to group themselves with more northerly slavic nations within the habsburg empire, notably the Czechs, and were initially lukewarm towards the idea of south slav unity. But in due course they came to view Yugoslavism as a necessary tool in the struggle against domination, and in the end they played a key role in unification. the serbs, on the other hand, having already achieved independence and carrying a strong historical sense of national identity, were from the start irredentist, and driven above all by an ideology of a Christian (serbian) Yugoslavia. this too was premised on the idea of a common people, but it was less about federalism than expansionism, and its most concrete aim was to unite all serbs within a single state. Croatia, caught between austrian and hungarian ambitions, shared with slovenia the struggle for independence, and there were many who sought a genuine federalism that would exclude the possibility of separate states. But there were others who looked rather to a Greater Croatia by analogy with a Greater serbia.57 there were, in short, many shades of opinion as to what Yugoslavism really represented. as to what rusinow calls its ‘core idea’, this was first promulgated by intellectual elites in the south slav territories of the habsburg empire. We can trace it to Ljudevit Gaj (1809–72) and the so-called ‘illyrianist awakeners’, who already in the 1830s cultivated the classic strategies of nation building: the appropriation of language and culture, and the invention of history. Language was crucial from the start, and here the work of the illyrianists converged with that of Vuk in serbia. in both cases, the impulse was to ‘recover’ a national language, though in practice that invariably meant formalising particular dialects at the expense of others. it was a help that the Štokavian selected by Gaj was close to the peasant dialect codified by Vuk, and this proximity enabled the Vienna Conference of 1850 (a follow-up to the prague pan-slav Congress of 1848) to arrive at a standardisation of language that would come to be known as serbo-Croat.58 it was perhaps more difficult for Croatia to forge an independent cultural voice than for serbia, given that Croatia was so deeply embedded within 56 rusinow 2003. 57 see Banac 1984, 74–75 for the historical background to pan-Croatism. 58 the rise and fall of serbo-Croat will be briefly touched on in a later chapter. see Greenberg 2004.

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the habsburg empire. indeed the inclination of many Croatian illyrians was to regard south slav affinities as a counter to the specific Magyarisation policies imposed by a hungarian ascendancy, while still thinking in terms of limited autonomy within the empire. Croatia had its counterpart to Vuk in the poet ivan Mažuranić, who not only collected south slav epics from the oral tradition, but (in 1845) penned a Montenegro-based epic Smrt Smail-aga Čengića [Death of smail-aga Čengić] that turned out to be hardly less influential than Gorski vijenac. Yet it was often difficult to separate Croatism from Yugoslavism in agendas of cultural nationalism, and perhaps especially in music. the two often seemed interchangeable within the nationalist rhetoric associated with illyrian agendas.59 it is possible anyway to exaggerate these agendas in Croatian music. the principal concern of the Croatian Music institute was less the promotion of illyrianism than the need to raise musical standards generally, to educate. in practice, agendas for Croatian or illyrian nationalism tended to follow much the same course that we have traced in national movements elsewhere in south east europe. again music formed a natural alliance with vernacular poetry, and here Gaj’s collaboration with the composer Ferdo Livadić (1799–1878), resulting in a rousing patriotic anthem Još Hrvatska nie’ propala [Croatia has not yet fallen], might remind us of solomos and Mantzaros in Greece, or of Đorđević and Jenko in serbia. again the theatre was an all-important forum. Livadić contributed music to Croatian-language theatre, and notably for the popular illyrian drama Juran i Sofija [Juran and sophia] by Franjo Kukuljević (1840). then in 1846 there was a landmark performance of what is usually taken to be the first Croatian national opera, Ljubav i zloba [Love and malice] by the leading composer of the illyrian movement, Vatroslav Lisinski (1819–50). Lisinski’s musical style belonged in reality to european mainstreams, with an orientation towards German early romanticism, but in the context of his time and place, Ljubav i zloba stands as an illyrian landmark. and in Lisinski’s more highly regarded second opera Porin, which turned to the national history (the liberation of Croatia from the Franks in the ninth century), there are hints of a national style in the making.60 Porin was not performed at the time of its appearance in 1851, in part because of changes in the political climate. the aftermath of the 1848

59 these agendas culminated in the institution of ‘the National illyrian Music society’ (1839) and ‘the First illyrian Music society’ (1840). 60 Majer-Bobetko 1998, 81.

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revolutions witnessed a period of neo-absolutism in the eastern habsburg lands, with the so-called ‘Bach system’61 ensuring that the administrative structure of the empire remained centralised, highly bureaucratic and German-dominated. the long-term effect of this return to centralist and repressive policies – explicitly anti-slav – was to sharpen a sense of periphery and thus of national identity among the subject peoples of the empire, but its short-term outcome was to inhibit the illyrian movement; indeed virtually to close it down. the leading Croatian composer of the later nineteenth century was the internationalist ivan Zajc (1832–1914). Zajc, who was Czech-born, had made his name as a composer of operetta in Vienna during the 1860s, and could no doubt have remained there. that he developed a sense of obligation towards Croatian culture was partly due to his contacts with the churchman and politician Bishop Josip Juraj strossmayer (1815–1905), the leading neo-illyrianist of the later nineteenth century. strossmayer was a key figure, and merits a brief excursus. With his motto ‘everything for the faith and the homeland’, his position as to religion was broadly ecumenical, while in politics he was a passionate pan-slavicist and federalist, but always under the aegis of the monarchy. together with his fellow idealogue, the historian Franjo rački, he was a power behind both the Yugoslav academy of sciences and the University of Zagreb, and his publishing activities included not just Glagolitic missals in support of ecumenical ideals but collections of Bulgarian folksong by the Miladinovs, key figures in the Bulgarian national revival (though later appropriated by Macedonian liberation movements). Just how far Zajc supported all the many strands of this programme seems open to question, but he (Zajc) was in any case persuaded to leave Vienna and move to Zagreb in 1870, in the newly established context of the Dual Monarchy. Zajc’s two principal tasks in Zagreb were to take charge of the National Music institute, a second change of name for the old Musikverein, and to run the (now fully Croatian) opera. Yet his orientation was really very different from that of the illyrian generation. Like samaras, he had little interest in folk music, pinning his colours rather to the italian mast. Like an eighteenth-century Kappellmeister, Zajc seemed to find no difficulty in producing an endless stream of music in all genres, despite demanding roles as an administrator, teacher and conductor. this sits a little

61 alexander Bach (1806–67) was Minister of the interior in the restored habsburg monarchy.

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oddly with prevailing tendencies in late nineteenth-century music, and the modernist generation of the first Yugoslavia rejected Zajc for ideological as well as for purely musical reasons (here again the fate of samaras comes to mind). the case against him should be differently constructed today, for the issue is not really about cosmopolitanism or nationalism, but about quality and originality. Zajc’s facility carried penalties in an age inclined to translate excellence to greatness, craft to art. Understandably, Croatian writers single out from an output of more than a thousand works those that tell the national story, and above the opera Nikola Šubić Zrinjski (1876). this opera is still performed today (its final aria was once a crowd puller). it is often known as the Croatian Nabucco, and early or middleperiod Verdi is perhaps its closest stylistic referent. it recounts Zrinjski’s battles against suleiman and his heroic death in 1566 through tuneful melodies and stirring martial choruses, including well-worn stylisations of the turkish harem. Yet its Croatian credentials are not straightforward. in a detailed discussion, John Neubauer not only discusses joint claims on this particular hero from Croatian and hungarian literary traditions (the great seventeenth-century hungarian epic by Zrinski’s great-grandson was given in a Croatian version by the poet’s brother), but also notes that the libretto, by hugo Badalić, was based not directly on the epic but on theodor Körner’s anti-Napoleonic German play Zriny (1812).62 this play in its turn was inspired by Friedrich schlegel’s Vienna lectures on literary history, lectures that effectively inaugurated a modern national view of literature, and it came into its own a century later as a popular patriotic inspiration to the Germans during World War i. surprisingly, Körner’s play was well received in hungary, when in hungarian translation it was given at the newly established National theatre at Kolozsvár in 1821. as to the opera, Neubauer argues that Zajc and Badalić may have been getting round censorship by basing it on an austrian play, neutralising the hungarian patriotic element, but in ways that the hungarians could not easily condemn. in any event, the opera became a potent symbol of Croatian nationalism, and it opened the Croatian National theatre in 1895. in a nutshell, Neubauer’s dissection demonstrates that Körner de-hungarianised the epic to create a pro-German propaganda, while Zajc and Badalić re-nationalised the play in favour of

62 Neubauer 2004.

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Croatia. thus could nationalism draw upon the widest possible range of sources, bending them to its will. the other dominant figure in Croatian musical life of the later nineteenth century represented a radically different tendency, closer to the illyrianism associated with the singing societies than to Zajc’s pro-european orientation. Franjo Kuhač (1834–1911) was a composer, but not primarily so. First and foremost, he was a pedagogue and a musical scholar, and one who worked in the spirit of Bishop strossmayer’s larger pan-slav programme (there is an extensive published correspondence between the two men).63 his pioneering significance for the later development of musical scholarship in the slavonic Balkans could scarcely be exaggerated. When he arrived in Zagreb a year after Zajc in 1871, Kuhač brought with him extensive collections of folk music from all over the south slav territories, transcribed during a decade of extensive travels. in this, he was of course taking the path indicated by herder and followed by slavonic nationalists elsewhere. But Kuhač was also a pioneer in the systematic classification and comparative analysis of folk materials, even if not all of his approaches and findings have stood the test of time. he was a serious historian of national traditions, and the first to argue for the presence of Croatian folk melodies in haydn and Beethoven, though his controversial thesis about haydn’s Croatian ethnicity, widely popularised for a time, was soon discredited.64 the main fruits of his work were the four volumes of Južno-slovjenske narodne popievke [south slav Folksongs], published between 1878 and 1881, and provided with simple piano accompaniments. a polemicist, who placed his Croatian nationalism in the wider illyrian context, Kuhač made a forceful case in his teachings and voluminous historical writings for a Croatian or south slavic national style based on folk music, and he was undoubtedly a prime inspiration to the younger Yugoslav composers of the inter-war period in the twentieth century. in his summary of the polemic between nationalist and cosmopolitan orientations in Zagreb at the end of the century, stanislav tuksar placed Zajc and Kuhač at the centres of two very different circles.65 Zajc, encircled by numerous composers of various nationalities, stood for a conservative nineteenth-century internationalist position. Kuhač was part of a smaller

63 Franković 1978. 64 one popular study which promoted Kuhač’s theory was hadow 1897. 65 tuksar 1998b.

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circle of slav intellectuals, committed to the idea of a national culture, whether conceived as narrowly Croatian or more broadly south slavic. tuksar uses the debate about eduard hanslick, a debate that was replicated just about everywhere in europe, to focus the polemic (his point is that Kuhač’s objection to the hanslick thesis was based on a misunderstanding of it). What one might claim is that the issue of music’s expressive potential, as foregrounded by hanslick, came to seem especially germane to nationalist ambitions everywhere in the late nineteenth century, even if few composers in Croatia explored the programmatic route followed by other east european nationalists. in any case, with a slightly younger generation the configuration began to change. Categories are anything but watertight, but we can speak of a circle that promoted international contemporary idioms, including composers such as Blagoje Bersa (1870–1954), Josip hatze (1879–1959) and Dora pejačević (1885–1923), and a circle that stood for a nationally-orientated composition, centred mainly on antun Dobronić (1878–1955), but given a genuinely modernist character by Josip Štolcer slavenski (1896–1955). it was this latter group, working mainly between the two world wars, that followed Kuhač’s lead. Like several serbian composers of the same generation, these composers began to find creative potential in an engagement with south slav music more generally, suggesting that there might indeed be a music of Yugoslavia. it was through the Yugoslav ideal that slovenia was drawn for a time into the Balkans. subject to a mix of italian and German influences, largely free of ottoman interference, and supported by a bourgeoisie that emerged relatively early, slovenian elite culture was quickly brought within the orbit of West european traditions. Much of this culture belonged to italian- or German-speaking rather than slovenian-speaking populations, however, and it is hardly surprising that the growing strength of slovene nationalism resulted in a sharp division in the organisation of musical life. performing forces and venues were increasingly segregated along national lines, right down to the separation of the philharmonische Gesellschaft and the Glasbena Matica, established for native populations in 1872, somewhat on the model of the Dramatic society founded in 1867; its school of music followed in 1882 and its choir in 1891. in the late nineteenth century, then, there was developing intellectual support for nationalist activity, initially conceived within a habsburg framework as a kind of austro-slavism, but later directed towards a full-scale independence movement. although always concerned to protect specificities of language and culture, slovene intellectuals (for example the leading writer ivan Cankar,

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whose 1907 lecture ‘the slovene people and slovene Culture’ was influential) came to view solidarity with other south slav peoples as the only realistic way to fulfill their nationalist goals. Yet there was little in the music of nineteenth-century slovenian composers that betrayed any real enthusiasm for national styles of the kind we noted in serbia and Croatia. Composers such as Benjamin ipavec (1829–1908), Fran Gerbić (1840–1917) and anton Foerster (1873–1926) developed a cosmopolitan late-romantic idiom influenced by Brahms and Dvořák, with occasional nods (as in risto savin’s opera Lepa Vida [Lovely Vida] of 1907) towards Wagner. it was really only in the early twentieth century, and especially during the inter-war period in a newly independent federal state, that some slovenian composers joined forces with serbs and Croatians in the movement known as Yugoslav moderna. the ambivalence at the heart of the various attempts to create national cultures – were they working for narrow nationalist goals or for some form of genuinely communal south slav culture? – also pervaded the political sphere, with Belgrade and Zagreb in very obvious competition over the leadership of an avowedly integralist south slav movement. in the end it was the larger political map that orientated the players towards some kind of unification scheme. there was of course no logical reason that Bulgaria should not have been included in discussions of the unification of south slav Christian lands. indeed in intellectual circles it often was. as Ljubinka trgovčević reminds us, there were several meetings of writers and journalists from serbia, Croatia, slovenia and Bulgaria between 1904 and 1906, and at the second Congress held in sofia in august 1906 the declared aim was to work towards ‘unification of south slavs in the cultural field’, and that included Bulgaria.66 Likewise the association of south slav artists, Lada, included Bulgaria. it was really the Macedonian question that drove a wedge between Bulgaria and the rest. Despite the temporary alliance of Balkan states that produced the First Balkan War (1912), effectively expelling the ottomans from europe, serbia and Bulgaria remained at odds over Macedonia, and Greece too maintained its claim. the second Balkan War (1913) resulted in a further loss of Bulgarian territory and effectively a carving up of most of Macedonia between serbia and Greece, establishing borders that have remained more-or-less intact until today. the history was involved, but in the end the Balkan wars laid the foundation for a modern Yugoslavia,

66 trgovčević 2003.

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though it could never have become a reality without the Great War. Bulgaria found itself on the side of the Central powers rather than the entente in that war, and paid a heavy price at Versailles. serbia, on the other hand, had entered the war on a Yugoslav prospectus, and emerged from it as the acknowledged leader of a new south slav state, known as the Kingdom of serbs, Croats and slovenes.67 With this, the first Yugoslavia was born.

67 Unification was based on the so-called Corfu Declaration of July 1917 in which the serbian government on Corfu and the London Yugoslav Committee called for the unification of the south slavs in order to preempt any attempt at unification from within the habsburg empire.

CHAPTER TEN

INSPIRERS Building the Pyramids: Reflections on High Culture The national awakenings in the nineteenth century led to a growing preoccupation with territorial borders in the Balkans. The babble of many languages was to be replaced by the languages of nations. Music was to be Greek or Romanian; it was to be Serbian or Croatian; later it might be Yugoslav. Earlier cultural borders had been more obviously aligned either to religious or to social communities. Such borders were never rigid. But formal culture could firm them up in various ways, even if this sometimes flew in the face of lived experience. We might draw a rough line between the formal musical cultures of Islam and Christianity, for example, as also between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. and we might also draw lines between the musical practices of different social groups, contrasting Ottoman music-making associated with Muslim social elites in the eastern Balkans (bearing in mind that Ottoman society did not have a hereditary aristocracy) with the transplanted european music associated with aristocratic, and later bourgeois, cultures further west. We might then draw further lines separating these practices from urban popular music, distinguishing eastern and western varieties of this, and differentiating both these varieties from rural traditional music. By this time our map will look fairly complicated. It is a comment on the power of nationalism that the borders surrounding the nation state eventually came not just to supersede faith-based and socially determined borders, but to cut across them and even to make use of them, controlling cultural perceptions to a marked degree, even in the face of blatant contraries. this simplifies the map, but at quite a cost. national borders could separate cultures that were essentially the same, just as they could gather cultures that were essentially different. this is most apparent with traditional and popular musical repertories. But even with elite cultures, fact-finding missions on concert programmes have reinforced the message that surprisingly similar music was heard in

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provincial towns right across europe as a whole.1 In other words, we learn that just as cultural capitals were multi-national, so provincial venues were uni-repertorial. how are we to account for the capacity of nationalism to override these basic realities? the point was made in the last chapter. Modern nationalism may have been an ideology created by bourgeois intellectual elites, but its longer-term success was due to its appropriation of social and cultural practices that were already firmly in place. emergent nations were not exactly reclaiming a culture when they looked to the past, then. rather they were promoting as a national culture what had previously been selfdefined, and in doing so they harnessed universal human instincts (to form groups, to belong, to compete). this was a wider european development, by no means just a Balkan one, and the alliance of culture and politics that it represented was never really a benign one. During the interwar period it came to assume an even darker significance, when an ethos of cultural purity was allied to political fascism with consequences known to all. In south east europe, the triumph of the nation state was already signalled by the outcome of the Balkan Wars, but it was formalised by the treaty of Versailles. Immediately following the second Balkan War, the picture looked roughly as follows: Greece was as it is today, having secured southern epirus and southern Macedonia; Bulgaria and romania were more-or-less as today; a newly independent nation state of albania had been created, with contested borders; serbia included much of northern Macedonia; Montenegro was an independent state, though soon to be welded to serbia; and Bosnia and herzegovina, Croatia and slovenia were under habsburg rule. Following the treaty of Versailles and the collapse of the habsburg empire, the major alteration to this picture was the establishment of the first Yugoslavia, which incorporated Macedonia, Bosnia and herzegovina, and much of slovenia. this outcome effectively ‘resolved’ a conflict at the heart of Balkan politics – indeed european politics – during the nineteenth century: a conflict between dynastic government and the nation state. In the end the nation state prevailed, as the Ottoman, habsburg, hohenzollern and romanov dynasties crumbled one by one. the new nations had an arbitrary enough character, formed as much from expedient alliances as from

1 helmut Loos is engaged in such a collaborative project involving Music and the City. his published work on Central and eastern europe includes Loos and Möller 2005. For a specific comment on programmes and repertories, see Loos 2008.

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any genuine ethnic or geographical rationalisation. Indeed I highlighted some of the exclusions, and the refusals, that resulted from a nationalist ideology earlier, and in particular the creation of so-called minorities. But it was a resolution of sorts, even if a temporary one. the triumph of nationalism was hard-won in the Balkans, and how could it have been otherwise given the ethic diversity of these territories? It was also insecure, since it lacked the social underpinnings that held it fast in Western europe. Increasingly, a professionalised high culture, under construction in the Balkans in the second half of the nineteenth century, became synonymous with a series of national cultures promoted by ruling social elites. that was the rhetoric, and indeed the creative project, of the awakeners. another way of saying this is that while elite national cultures presented themselves as affirmative of distinctive, ethnically determined, world views, they were in reality species of a common european high culture, and had only limited success in percolating down through the social layers to the ‘ordinary people’. this anomaly exposes the utopianism of the culturebuilders, who liked to believe that they spoke on behalf of all. Indeed the whole enterprise of culture-building was essentially top-down; the values of social and intellectual elites were represented as aspirational values. We are reminded of Matthew arnold’s remarks in Culture and Anarchy (1869), unlikely though such a leap may appear.2 a high culture in the fullest sense – ‘the study and pursuit of perfection’, as arnold described it, with a glance towards hellenism – could develop only when the general standard of education had been raised to an acceptable level in a process of progressive enlightenment. In practice this democratisation of culture could proceed only so far, however, such were the barriers of social class in nineteenth-century europe, and the idealism of the liberal intelligentsia could quickly turn to an intolerant elitism when the populace seemed unworthy of their efforts. setting that aside, arnold’s point was that a high culture could only flourish when it rested on a strong institutional foundation. he was a poet, of course, not a musician, and that makes an important difference. Both arts need institutional development, but music has transparently the greater need. On arnold’s analysis, then, the odds were firmly stacked against significant music in the Balkans until the twentieth century.

2 arnold 1993.

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Given the under-developed state of nineteenth-century musical institutions in the Balkans, it is no surprise that leading composers felt little inclination to compose musically challenging works. they knew that if they did so, they would have little opportunity to hear the results, at least in serviceable performances. For this reason it is hardly to the point to remove them from local contexts and evaluate their achievements on some absolute scale of values. they were for the most part exceptional men (invariably men), but they were in the business of building local cultures. they worked to create professional standards, to educate, to proselytise, and to shape local tastes, and their compositional activities served these aims. In other words, our interest in these figures lies in their careers as composers rather more than in their music. If we widen the lens, we will conclude that the music remained for the most part in imitative mode throughout the nineteenth century. new research may change the picture slightly, but it is unlikely to sweep many reputations to new heights in a surge of critical acclaim. It is better to accept this than to make unreasonable claims. Most nineteenth-century composers in the Balkans were in reality Kleinmeister – local ‘geniuses’, to misuse a term that will be explored more fully later – positioned at the summits of small, regionally constructed pinnacles of culture. the term ‘culture’ might even incorporate such pinnacles within some of its numerous meanings. Vjera Katalinić has suggested as much, arguing that a musical culture consists of the activities of both major and minor masters, forming a pyramidal system where the great pyramids, peaked by the great composers, rest on a ‘mosaic of smaller pyramids’.3 there are echoes here of the arnoldian philosophy. and we should note that culture here means ‘high culture’, a monadic construct of highly developed practices, sophisticated institutions and refined tastes, assumed to be superior to ‘low culture’, and for that very reason much sought after by aspiring nations. the basic premise is not dependent on the particular values attached by arnold, and by the pyramid builders themselves (and the term ‘builders’ has the right resonance), to high culture. In other words, we may take a more relativistic view, but still accept that cultural practices need an institutional foundation, and that significant artistic achievements within so-called high culture are unlikely to be possible until this has been established. the slow start to culture-building in the Balkans partly explains, then, why this region played very little part in one of the central tendencies of nineteenth-century musical life, the increasing separation

3 Katalinić 1995.

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of the work-as-text from the work-as-performance. this tendency was registered in the structures of concert life, in publishing enterprises and in pedagogy, and it really amounted to a gradual shift from a genre- and performance-orientated culture to a work-oriented culture. such moves were considerably delayed in the Balkans, where by and large musical life remained focused on events (performances) rather than on objects and concepts (works and their interpretations) until well into the twentieth century. another way of saying this is that in this region the profiles of individual works took longer to emerge sharply from music as a whole, and specifically from larger generic groupings. It also follows that a differentiation of popular and significant (formulaic and original) repertories was much less marked in the Balkans. It seems important to view the achievements of individual composers against this background, a background in which elite cultures were still in the making. there is, however, a corollary to this. precisely because these cultures were at the planning stage in the nineteenth century, they depended on strong personalities to energise them, and were at the same time subject to the individual agendas, including the political agendas, of those personalities. It is a phenomenon that one can still see today in those parts of south east europe where modernisation has been slowest to arrive. present-day musical life in Macedonia and albania, for example, owes an enormous amount to a small handful of dynamic personalities, men (again, invariably men) who have the charisma and energy, and almost by definition the ego, that enable them to motivate others and to make things happen. such men are the inspirers, and it is they who set the agendas for change and development. the inspirers are not without vested interests. typically, they will be encircled by younger colleagues, who work under clear instruction, and derive enormous benefit from so doing, but who have little opportunity to influence the general direction of change and to develop a capacity for independent thought and action. there are pros and cons. But in any case, our observation of present-day culture building ab initio can teach us something about the role and importance of individual agency in shaping nineteenth-century practices. Vested interests, egos and personal rivalries are in plentiful supply wherever we look, but in more established cultures they are at least partly held in check by the constraints of history and tradition. such constraints are in short supply in the Balkans. traditions there have shallow roots, and for that reason cultural life is more than usually susceptible to new directions, alternative visions, and transformative innovations.

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We can locate music history within a larger history of human consciousness, where it unfolds in intangible places lying beyond the direct control of individuals. It is marked by epochs and periods, and driven by what adorno described as the ‘inherent tendencies of the musical material’. arguably this approach, which generates our pedigreed grand narratives, fetishises history in the ways hayden White has written about, so that ‘the events seem to tell themselves’.4 an alternative approach is to locate music history within a history of human communication.5 If we do that, we will see it in a rather different light. Focusing on agency, and on the many and varied uses made of repertories in different places and at different times, we will gravitate towards local contexts and little stories. and the little stories of music history in the Balkans are replete with intriguing characters. I will revisit three moments of change in Greek music history, and then introduce a fourth. any whistle-stop tour through that history will highlight the importance of agency. there are many players in the drama: composers and performers, entrepreneurs, financial backers and politicians. these individuals were not passive products of the inexorable sweep of historical forces; they intervened directly. earlier I drew attention to certain prejudices at work in the discourses of Greek music history. But prejudices do not amount to a ‘malfunction’ in the history, as some have claimed; there is no ideal path to be followed, from which real history may be in some sense diverted.6 to see history in this way is to give it moral force, and even to link it to something akin to destiny. In reality, Greek music history is no different from any other. It has been shaped alike by larger collective movements – of politics, society and ideas – and by individual agents with their personal agendas and beliefs. Like its political history, Greek music history has been marked by abrupt changes of direction, often highly charged ideologically. 1815 is a possible starting-point. We return to the twenty-year-old nikolaos halikiopoulos Mantzaros, who in that year composed a cluster of works (three ‘insert’ arias and the one-act opera Don Crepuscolo) for the san Giacomo theatre in Corfu, bequeathing us some of the earliest extant manuscripts 4 White 1987, 3. 5 see, for example, Chartier 1988. 6 Leotsakis 2004a, 58. highly polemical readings of music history are characteristic of even the most recent Greek scholarship. see tsetsos 2011.

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of modern Greek art music.7 they are essays in the pre-rossinian idiom of Italian opera associated with composers such as Cimarosa, paisiello, Zingarelli and Mayr. Mantzaros never became a professional musician; indeed it was not really an option, as he was from a noble family. In a way, this released him to become one of the inspirers. a decade after these early compositions, he had transformed his home into a ‘philanthropic’ conservatory where local musicians were trained, and a little later (as noted in chapter 8) he became a prime mover in the philharmonic society, itself a monument to philanthropic agency. nineteenth-century musical and theatrical institutions (including opera houses) were still funded more from private donations than from the state. Compositionally, Mantzaros remained locked in an idiom akin to that of his teacher niccolò antonio Zingarelli in naples.8 We might expect that of operatically conceived works. But it was no less the case when he turned to sacred and instrumental music. his one-movement symphonies (surviving in piano score, and written only in that form) are really Italian sinfonias modeled on those of his mentor, while his partimenti for string quartet adopt the neo-baroque contrapuntal methods also employed by Zingarelli in this semi-pedagogical genre. as all of this suggests, there is little Mantzaros that will hold the attention of international audiences today, but he served nonetheless as a model for a later generation of Greek composers, and as a figure of major pioneering significance. he was one of the pyramid builders, and it was partly his inspired teaching that made possible the subsequent flowering of Greek art music in the nineteenth century. the climate of ideas may have been conducive, but it needed a Mantzaros to galvanise musical life, and the trajectory he established remained constant for a century in which Greek music was dominated by heptanesian (Ionian) traditions. One crucial point here is that the Italian foundations of Ionian music, and the subsequent Ionian presence in mainland Greek music, ensured that for most of the nineteenth century Greece did not have extensive contacts with developments in other european musical centres, notably in France and Germany. Despite some attempts to argue otherwise, and a few exceptions such as

7 the extant sources for these works are the autographs currently held by the Benaki Museum in athens. a modern critical edition appeared in 2006, published by the hellenic Music research Laboratory of the Ionian University, Corfu. the most detailed study of Mantzaros is Kardamis 2008. 8 his populist, patriotic music written for local people belongs to a rather different tradition again.

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Dionysios rodotheatos, those familiar features of nineteenth-century music that we associate with the German tradition – including cyclic symphonism, highly developed orchestral styles, sophisticated piano and chamber music repertories, and ideas of unity, inspiration, originality and even genius – were largely absent from Greek musical life until the end of the century. this was reflected both in the activities of Greek composers and in the basic structures of concert life and education. significantly, when a major change of direction came in the early twentieth century, it was again associated with a powerful personality, an inspirer. this second turning-point was marked symbolically by an ‘event’ of 1908, a concert of music by Manolis Kalomiris at the athens Conservatory organised by the composer himself, and with a programme note that effectively announced a Greek national school. But if we look backstage, we find an evental site with its own mini-histories. the appointment of the German-trained Georgios nazos to the Directorship of the athens Conservatoire in 1891 has already been noted. nazos undoubtedly went about the job in a ruthless and prejudiced fashion, and he has been duly castigated by those who are anxious to give due measure to the Ionians. Yet he did undertake major reforms at the Conservatory, raising it to a level that was capable of nurturing significant talents, mainly by following european models. thus, he introduced music theory (as distinct from the pragmatically-based teaching familiar in Ionian institutions) and modern piano pedagogy, established a symphony orchestra, and ensured that canonic works were heard in athens.9 nazos was not the prime mover. he was himself a fairly mediocre musician, but he was a member of an influential family, and he had the backing of a more powerful player. When the wealthy banker andreas syngros, one of the founders of the Bank of Constantinople, moved to athens in 1871 he engaged in numerous works of public philanthropy, of which the most famous was the completion of the Corinth Canal. and it was really syngros’s internationalist agenda – backed by his money – that changed the direction of the Conservatory. he appears to have insisted on the appointment of nazos, and on the replacement of the entire administrative board of the institution. this needs to be viewed in the context of a much wider debate about the anti-clerical modernisation of Greece, and

9 For the transformation of repertory, see romanou 1996. For an account of the severely limited standards of instrumental pedagogy, see Leotsakos 2004a, 59.

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about Germany as a role model, widely regarded (and regarding itself) as a kind of neo-hellenic incarnation in the modern world. an anti-Ionian bias was thus already well established at the athens Conservatory prior to the Kalomiris concert of 1908. at the time, Kalomiris was employed at the Obolensky Lyceum in Kharkov, russia [now Kharkiv, Ukraine], and he returned to athens specifically for the concert. In the years that followed, prior to and immediately following his appointment as a professor at the Conservatory (1911), he followed up the manifesto of the concert with a concerted press campaign – mainly in the weekly literary magazine Noumas – against the Ionian composers and in favour of a nationalist orientation that he contextualised within the larger demoticist movement in Greek letters at the time.10 his aim was the familiar one of linking traditional music (music of the ethnic nation) with modernist art music, somewhat on the model of russian composers in the 1860s (to whom Kalomiris made reference in his 1908 note), and with the same division into power bases, the same rhetoric, the same personal rivalries, and the same intolerance of the other point of view. I might add that he was even accused by hostile critics of working to a russian (anti-Greek) agenda. Kalomiris was a canny politician, and in his role as a critic he played a key opinion-forming role, invariably to his own benefit. Unlike Mantzaros’s philanthropic agency, we see here a more hard-edged political agency, where personal ambition, idealism and political instinct combined to produce major collateral benefits. By 1919 Kalomiris had consolidated his position to the point where he could wage war on nazos, resign from his post and found his own hellenic Conservatory. then, in 1926, he left that to found the national Conservatory, of which he remained Director until 1948. But most important of all, he was a gifted composer and an inspirational teacher, and in a short time he had gathered together a diverse group of exceptionally talented composers working to his agenda. no less than Mantzaros, he set a new compass reading for Greek music, ensuring that it was his national school, rather than either the established Ionian or abortive modern schools (his own classification), that counted. Kalomiris’s project cut right across the ‘catastrophe’ of 1922, which put an end to any real political hopes for a Greek irredentist programme. the

10 Noumas was closely associated with Kostis palamas and the demoticist movement generally in Greek letters, a movement for which the Memoirs of Yannis Makriyannis served as an almost cultish originary text.

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performance of his Levendia symphony in 1920 at the herodos atticus theatre in athens was of major significance here and was read by all as a celebration of irredentism. With the destruction of smyrna (his birthplace), however, it was immediately clear that the national school could have little meaning as cultural propaganda for political goals, and from this point on it assumed rather a symbolic character. as such, it survived the right-wing dictatorship of the ‘thirties, but not the occupation and the civil war that followed it. In the post-war years the national school lost both status and contemporary relevance in Greek music, though Kalomiris went on to compose some of his finest music right up to the early 1960s and other composers continued into the 1970s. It is probably true to say that the Kalomiris era was effectively over in the 1950s; indeed such movements were widely regarded as anachronistic all over europe at this time. panos Vlagolopoulos has an intriguing way of contextualising the change of direction that followed in the 1950s, relating some of the music of that era to the so-called ‘thirties generation’ of modernist writers. In analysing the response of intellectuals to the crisis of post-catastrophe Greek identity, he argues that the key was a ‘double continuity’; in addition to the diachronic continuity of three historical eras (i megali idea), in which there was now a major loss of faith, he proposes a synchronic continuity that linked popular culture to elite culture. this he sees as informing the response of the ‘thirties generation’ of writers to dilemmas of Greek identity, not least in their reception of the classic nationalist cults of Makriyannis and theophilis. It was only through the establishment of this second continuity, enabling what Dimitris tziovas described as a ‘middle way’ between ultra-nationalistic helleno-centrism and mimetic europeanism, ‘that the present could remain in the positive light provided by the first continuity’.11 and it is against this background that we may consider the third turning-point in Greek music history, associated with the postCivil War years. again the focus was an ‘event’, or rather a pair of events, and again they were associated with powerful personalities. the first was the 1949 lecture by Manos hadjidakis (1925–94) on rebetika, and the second the 1958 song cycle Epitaphios by Mikis theodorakis (b.1925), settings of the leftwing writer Yannis ritsos. again there was an evental site, taking us from the proscriptions of the Metaxas years, through the partisan movements of

11 Vlagopoulos 2008.

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World War II and into the political instabilities of the immediate postwar years. this will be explored more fully later, but we may note here that, according to the testimonies of Yannis Constantinides (1903–84) and alekos Xenos (1912–95), the propagation of rebetika by the radio in the aftermath of the second World War was a response to direct intervention from the ultra-conservative military forces that backed a succession of weak governments just prior to the Civil War. rebetika, it needs to be recalled, were denounced not just by the right-wing Metaxas dictatorship but also by the Communist national Liberation Front.12 and it was against this background that the hadjidakis lecture took place in 1949, coinciding with the military defeat of the Left. the effect was to validate a new, cleaned-up image of rebetika by treating them with intellectual seriousness, downplaying their lowlife connotations and stressing instead the expressive power, technical skill and emotional authenticity of musicians such as Markos Vamvakaris (1905–72) and Vassilis tsitsanis (1915–84). this marked the beginning of an appropriation of rebetika by a bourgeois public that was confirmed by hadjidakis’s own adaptation of well-known rebetika in his Eksi laikes zografies [six portraits from Folklore] of 1951. and it was thanks to this new status that so-called ‘popular art songs’ could become associated once more with the politics of protest. this was above all the achievement of theodorakis in his settings of ritsos. his take was very different from that of hadjidakis, but the combined achievement of both men was to transform this classicised popular music into the true successor of Kalomiris’s national school, and to define for years to come the musical image of Greece in the eyes of the world. Like Mantzaros and Kalomiris, they changed the direction of Greek music. and for theodorakis in particular, agency was closely tied to propaganda. a fourth turning-point might be briefly mentioned at this point. the ‘event’ was the formation of the hellenic association for Contemporary Music (and, related to this, the Greek section of the IsCM) in 1965, and the powers behind it were two men sharing the name Yiannis papaioannou, one a musicologist and one a composer. Both may be justly termed the inspirers of a whole new chapter of Greek modernist music. they provided an alternative response to the demise of the national school, this time at the elitist end of Vlagolopoulos’s ‘second continuity’. there had been earlier ventures into musical modernism in Greece, associated

12 Leotsakos 2004a, 63–4.

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especially with Dimitri Mitropoulos and nikos skalkottas. But neither composer made real inroads to musical life in Greece itself. Mitropoulos more-or-less gave up composing around 1930 to follow a successful conducting career in north america. skalkottas returned to athens in 1933, but spent his later life in obscurity, and achieved wider recogition as a composer mainly posthumously. the musical establishment in athens greeted his music with neither sympathy nor comprehension during an era dominated by the national school and by an imposed Kulturbolschewismus. that he was highly rated by his teacher schoenberg would have been no recommendation at all. It was in the 1950s that a new wave of Greek modernists emerged. Of the three major composers associated with this development, Jani Christou (1926–70), who spent only the last decade of his short life in Greece, remained an isolated figure, while Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) went on to forge his reputation abroad. It was the third of the modernists, papaioannou (1910–89), who led the way in Greece, as a composer of course, but no less importantly, as a teacher and administrator. the political climate was newly receptive to such ventures, and they were supported by american and German money and effort. papaioannou’s own music moved through several phases, but it was in the 1950s – really from his third symphony (1953) onwards – that he began to make systematic use of schoenberg’s methods, and it was in the 1960s that he came into his own as one of the inspirers. he was known simply as ‘the teacher’, and his influence on several generations of composers at the hellenic Conservatoire was immense. haris Xanthoudakis tells me that he was for some time the only Greek teacher who taught modern techniques of composition efficiently and with real inside knowledge. the real significance of the establishment of the association for Contemporary Music in 1965 was that for the first time modernism was institutionalised in Greece, and to that extent there was some conformity with the official sanctioning of ‘new music’ elsewhere in europe. this matter will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 20, and something of its relationship to Cold War politics will be probed at that point. But I want to stress here the role of the other papaioannou, the musicologist (usually known as John G. papaioannou). Under his direction, the association organised the so-called ‘weeks’ of contemporary music, in which local and international composers were placed side by side, rather on the model of the betterknown ‘Warsaw autumn’ festival, and he (along with Manos hadjidakis) was a prime mover too in the composition competition that was established at the technological Institute of athens. as with our other three

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turning points, we can justifiably argue that the time was ripe for these developments. We can show that a failed project of musical modernism in Greece became a success story in the end primarily because of a major change in politics. But this does not diminish the importance of agency. Without the pioneering and tireless efforts of the papaioannous, it is hard to imagine that Greek music could have entered the modern age. . . . and other Agents I will discuss here the role and importance of inspirers at the birth and during the adolescence of two further national traditions, in serbia and romania respectively. Like Greece, these nations or would-be nations built their western culture ab initio in the nineteenth century, and again they depended heavily on the initiatives of a small group of enablers. In serbia the key figure was Josif Šlezinger. Born in 1894 in sombor (Vojvodina), Šlezinger was a versatile musician trained in a practical way by playing in the orchestras attached to Central european aristocratic courts, and prior to his arrival in Kragujevac in 1831 he had already gained a reputation as a teacher and entrepreneur, working both in Šabac and in novi sad. But it was his pioneering work in serbia proper, first in Kragujevac and then in Belgrade, that jump-started a national tradition of art music. Both at the theatre and with his ‘Band of the serbian prince’, Šlezinger had the flair, enterprise and managerial skills necessary to meet the challenges associated with culture building. and for this reason his contribution to serbian culture was out of all proportion to the quality of his surviving music. to grasp something of his pioneering significance we need some sense of the base line for his initiatives. Just what were the conditions facing Šlezinger as he set out to modernise and westernise musical practices at the behest of Miloš Obrenović? We may turn first to the Band of the prince. Ostensibly there were two separate orchestras at the court, ‘military’ and ‘theatre’, but the former was really a wind band, and in practice the two groups had to join forces for any concerts involving even a modestly ambitious repertoire. the general level of performance was low, for there were relatively few musicians with a solid professional training. Local performers either relied on foreign teachers, who might not stay, or else they studied abroad, and might not return. add to this the low quality instruments, and the poor social status of musicians, and you gain some impression of the major obstacles to the presentation of serious repertoire, let alone to the composition of demanding new works.

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as to the theatre, it faced all these, and yet greater, difficulties. Of its nature, theatre relies on entrepreneurial acumen, and in the nineteenth century it was a site where money could be made. If anything it could be made all the more easily where infrastructures were inadequate; the less rigid the structures, the more room there was for opportunity. But, as Šlezinger quickly discovered, the problems were daunting. First there were the technical and administrative demands placed upon him, combined with the antagonism of the drama section, which tended to view musical fare as a distraction from serious literature. then there were the audiences. In the early days of the theatre these consisted mainly of clerks and officials of the principality, and of course the royal family. aside from the prevailing conservative tastes, both Šlezinger and his poet collaborator Joakim Vujić, so-called ‘father’ of serbian theatre, were constantly constrained by the demands of prince Miloš Obrenović, who disliked instrumental numbers, and insisted on hearing his favourite songs regardless of the content of the play.13 Šlezinger witnessed abrupt political changes during his lifetime: the demise of one world, and the enabling of another. But in keeping with other ‘men of the theatre’, he knew how best to use the institution to transform the cultural world in accordance with changing political imperatives. at the heart of this transformation was the triumph of the vernacular. the theatre played a major part in that triumph, but it is perhaps too simple to tell its story, or at least to tell it exclusively, as one of national identities and the cultural expression of those identities. theatre prioritises communicative immediacy, and accordingly the ascendancy of vernacular theatre in serbia, as elsewhere in europe in the nineteenth century, was as much about the democratisation and enlargement of the audience – in other words, about accessibility and communication – as it was about nationalism. In the pragmatic world of the theatre, agendas can seldom be monolithic. at the same time, as a prominent part of the public sphere, the theatre was undoubtedly an ideal forum for the dissemination of nationalist ideals.14

13 as Katarina tomašević remarks, ‘the audience in the first part of the century expressed openly and aloud their dissatisfaction or approval regarding the activities on the scene, identifying dramatic persons with people around them and seeking the very life of the people inside the theatre. For the audience, the theatre represented a direct transposition of real life, of life itself divested of all illusions.’ Quoted in Milanović 2009, 18. 14 habermas 1989.

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Initially, music was assigned an ancillary role in an emergent serbian theatre, and the exact moment at which popular vaudevilles were transmuted into opera is one that might be debated. Conventionally, Šlezinger’s Ženidba cara Dušana is frequently cited, but this stretches a (generic) point. the work did at least represent a moment of symbolic importance, paving the way to a definable genre of national opera, with librettos in the vernacular, subject matter drawn from native history and myth, and material either recognisably indebted to native musical traditions, or participating in the construction of such traditions. the shift that took place here was rather fundamental, amounting to a revision of the means by which opera might model society. By turning to the vernacular, and treating folk and popular cultures with new-found dignity, composers and librettists transformed class-based into nation-based paradigms. national operas, in other words, came to be regarded as important contributory factors in the national awakening more commonly associated with linguistic and literary initiatives, and a close collaboration between composers and ‘national’ poets was entirely symptomatic. not least because of the collaborative nature of theatre, the written trace of Šlezinger’s music hardly does justice to his role and influence. It is thanks to the archiving instincts of Franjo Kuhač that any of his music survives, and a collection of his ‘scores’ is preserved in the archive of the serbian academy of sciences. they are sketches rather than scores, designed for Šlezinger’s own use in his role as a conductor dealing with amateur performers who were semi-literate musically. It is only through reconstruction that any impression at all can be gained of this repertory, which consists mainly of popular theatre songs that would have been inserted into the popular plays (mainly comedies) of the time. the reconstructions made by Katarina tomašević and published by the national theatre in Belgrade give us some sense of these early stages in the development of an art music tradition in serbia.15 they remind us too that composers were very far from the centre of things in the theatrical world. they took their place within a cooperative system of mutually dependent agents,

15 In 2001, the national theatre in Belgrade produced Komendijaši. Medaljoni iz starih srpskih komedija [Comedians. Medallions from Old serbian Comedies], which included part of Joakim Vujić’s play Šnajderski kalfa [the taylor’s apprentice]. Šlezinger had ‘composed’ music for this play (still in manuscript), though this amounts to little more than sketches for his own use as conductor. Katarina tomašović reconstructed several of the songs for the production. see tomašević 2001.

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including actors, performers, directors and impresarios, and within that system they had to fight their corner. Šlezinger merits his prominent place in serbian music history. It was from his modest arrangements for the ‘Band of the serbian prince’ that a tradition of orchestral music grew. and it was from his simple theatre songs that a tradition of opera developed. the institutional basis for this has been touched upon, but we might note that the national theatre at novi sad was of some importance, not least because its visits to Belgrade helped create the momentum for a national theatre in the capital. as for composers, the mantle of Šlezinger passed above all to Davorin Jenko, whose entrepreneurial work was in much the same spirit. It was only in the early twentieth century that plays with music began to translate into works that might be legitimately called operas. serbian national opera (as distinct from operetta) really dates from those years, and as elsewhere in the region it drew eclectically on existing traditions: Italian opera buffa, German Singspiel and French grand opéra. Very few of these early operas are known today. Biljana Milanović cites works on national themes by Božidar Joksimović and Vaclav Vedral. But it is only with Na uranku [at Dawn] (1903) by stanislav Binički that serbian opera came of age.16 the significance of alexandru Flechtenmacher to vernacular theatre in the principalities was analogous to that of Šlezinger, though he was born (in Iaşi) some twenty-nine years later. Like Šlezinger, Flechtenmacher clearly had the dedication and flair essential to a successful man of the theatre; rodica Oană-pop tells us that Joseph Böhm, his distinguished violin teacher, was struck by his capacity for self-discipline and organisation even in student days.17 and again like Šlezinger, he trained abroad; indeed he was of German descent. having received his first musical training in Iaşi, he then moved to Vienna where he became Konzertmeister of a theatre orchestra. subsequently, back in romania, he was made orchestral conductor at the national theatre in Iaşi, and later at the national theatres of Bucharest and Craiova, where (as noted in chapter 8) he founded a philharmonic society. It was in these capacities that his compositional activities began in earnest, including overtures and incidental music to plays and operettas, but also operatic fantasies for solo violin and orchestra and several arrangements of romanian songs, some specified as Moldavian (compare Ion andrei Wachmann’s collections of Wallachian songs).

16 Milanović 2009. 17 Oană-pop 1964, 11.

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Flechtenmacher was another man of the theatre, and he began his compositional career writing vaudevilles for the Iaşi theatre in the late 1840s. several of these were by the prominent revolutionary and romantic poet Vasile alecsandri, who later remarked: ‘I became a poet in the eyes of the romanians only the day that my verses were set to music by Flechtenmacher’.18 no fewer that twelve of these vaudevilles were produced between 1844 and 1848, at which point Flechtenmacher wrote Baba Hîrca [the Witch hîrca], the work with which he is most associated today, and which has the same significance for romania as does Šlezinger’s Ženidba cara Dušana for serbia. Like Šlezinger, he knew how to capitalise on the prevailing political tendencies of the time. a year before Baba Hîrca he had composed his Uvertura naţională Moldavă (1847). and later key dates in romanian political history were similarly marked: his Adio Moldovei: romansă naţională in 1859, and his Libertatea naţională in 1877. these works, together with his patriotic choruses and solo songs, earned him a place as a pioneer of romanian music, and works such as Hora unirii [hora of Unity] achieved the status of a patriotic symbol. Yet neither Šlezinger nor Flechtenmacher can really be described as ‘national’ composers. Both were involved in culture building, and both were key protagonists in the struggle for european rather than oriental music. Much the same was true of the other key figure in the early stages of musical theatre in romania, Ion andrei Wachmann, though Wachmann did produce one work that was assigned national significance. It is noteworthy that he was ethnically German and had been born and raised in Budapest (just as Šlezinger was by origin a German Jew, and Jenko was slovenian). the early stages of culture-building were in some measure the achievement of ‘adopted’ composers, for whom nationalist agendas were born more of expediency than conviction. It would be left to others to cultivate more self-consciously national styles in a spirit of herderian authenticity. But this did not preclude the appropriation of vaudevilles by nationalist agendas, as in the case of Wachmann’s opera on the theme of Mihai Viteazul. Krisztina Lajosi has tracked the transformation of Mihai’s image in romanian historiography of the 1840s, and also the representation of this figure in what she calls ‘the romanian literary and artistic conscience’, including a play by Gheorghe asachi, and one by the major poet and ‘Latiniser’ Ion heliade rădulescu.19

18 Cosma 1962, 68. 19 Lajosi 2008, 206–20.

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the rădulescu drama formed the basis of Wachmann’s opera, Mihai Bravul în ajunjul bătăliei dela Călugăreni [Michael the Brave on the eve of the Battle of Călugăreni], which some regard as the first romanian national opera. as with Flechtenmacher, the dates are significant. the first version was produced in 1848, and the second in 1859. however, Lajosi also tells us that this was very far from a national opera in the normally understood sense. the music consists of just three numbers, and the musical idiom has relatively little to do with anything that could be called romanian. she also points out the importance of the chorus, representative of a militant romanian people as they await the Ottoman attack, and she notes that in the political context of its performances this might well have been viewed as an attack not just on the Ottoman invader but on romanian aristocratic society of the time. there is an emancipatory dimension to this choral presence, linking national propaganda with a wider democratising mission. Moreover it keys in to Wachmann’s characteristic role as a pyramid builder, for he was an educator and conductor as well as a composer. Like the other players in our story, he paved the way for others. Either/Or: Reflections on Modernism With very few exceptions, the music composed by nineteenth-century Kleinmeister in the Balkans is rarely performed nowadays. It is not just that it exports badly; it is given few outings even in native settings. Most of this music is of limited artistic merit, and where the composers have their names inscribed in the history books it is thanks to their status as pioneers. If our primary interest is in the music of this region – as distinct from its musical culture – we are likely to prick up our ears only when we encounter twentieth-century repertories. and at that point we might well feel that there is some justice in local complaints that these repertories are scarcely given their due either on international platforms or in scholarly debates. If we need a label for this twentieth-century repertory, we might describe at least some of it as ‘modernist’, but with the cautionary note that most Balkan countries have understood ‘modernism’ in music rather narrowly, usually referring to a well-defined movement in music history, a so-called moderna that remains distant from the wider connotations of the term within more recent Critical theory. If it was with the moderna of the early twentieth century that significant art music began to be composed in the Balkans, we are obliged to ask just what conditions made this

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possible. at the beginning of this chapter, I turned to Matthew arnold for one view of the prerequisites for a flourishing high culture, and for individual achievements of distinction. Let us turn now to another englishspeaking poet and critic no less concerned with the diagnosis of culture. this one, however, belonged to a later generation, and that made all the difference. nearly forty years after arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy, t.s. eliot penned his famous 1919 essay, ‘tradition and the Individual talent’.20 he was making a point about the nature and value of self-expression in art, but his essay also articulates what we would now recognise as a modernist symbiosis between the necessity of the new and the claims of tradition. Implicit throughout is the idea that significant art is not just new (in the sense that it does not repeat what has been said) but also refashions the living tradition of which it is a part. eliot’s anatomy of, and prescription for, a thriving high culture differs from arnold’s, however, in that he wrote from within the modernist citadel; indeed, we could argue that his analysis was in a sense imprisoned within the walls of that citadel, trapped within what peter Bürger would later describe as a bourgeois ‘institution of art’.21 there is no reference to the political world that figures so prominently in arnold’s essay, nor indeed to arnold’s social classes and institutions. eliot leaves out of account any hint that the tradition of his title might be dependent on anything outside the world of ideas. that said, he recognises the evolving, and essentially organic, nature of tradition. the essay is careful throughout to differentiate a tradition, which lives and breathes, from a canon (though the term is not used), which has become reified into something akin to a syllabus. and most important of all, eliot argues for the indispensability of tradition to creativity, and therefore to significant art; indeed for him it is the decline of tradition (not of a canon) that has resulted in the decline of high culture. the relevance of all this to present purposes is that if we apply to music eliot’s modernist symbiosis of the imperative of the new and the claims of tradition, we might argue that, no less than with arnold’s socially grounded analysis, the prerequisites for significant music simply did not exist in the Balkans at least until the early twentieth century, coinciding with the climactic years of european cultural modernism.

20 eliot 1920. 21  Bürger 1984.

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It seems necessary to say more about that larger european narrative, before returning to the Balkans. Modernism is not the same as modernity. Where Western europe is concerned, modernity conventionally refers to political, social and intellectual transformations that took place mainly in the seventeenth century, and reached a crucial defining stage – a kind of gear change – in the late eighteenth century. In addition to social modernisation, they included transformations of the idea of the past and the invention of the autonomous subject. It is in this sense that Karol Berger proposes that modern music began with Mozart, based on a shift in the perception of time that was simultaneously occurring in philosophy and historiography at that time;22 and it is also in this sense that it has been argued by John Butt that the whole orientation of what we have come to call western Classical music (something distinct from so-called early Music, and something marked by its self-aware exceptionalism), is a product of modernity.23 Modernism, on the other hand, tends to refer to cultural praxes that responded to modernity in a self-conscious way by negotiating between what I earlier called the imperative of the new and the claims of tradition. Modernism, in other words, is an ideology of the modern, and if we have to put dates on it for music history we will probably track it back to the 1850s. It was marked by a firming-up of borders that translated difference into alterity; in a word, by the formalisation of an either-or mentality proposed by enlightenment thought. Bernard Yack comes close to describing this in his book The Fetishism of Modernities,24 reminding us that the ideology of the modern reduced human states to notionally coherent and integrated wholes, even when it seemed to be arguing just the opposite. as a result, identities were created through mechanisms of contrast or opposition rather than of interrelation, while the competition inherent in this created winners and losers. arguably, modernism represented the final celebration, if not the last gasp, of the idea of creative genius. the formation of Bürger’s institution of art brought with it a newly privileged status for the artwork, and that status produced ideal conditions for the flourishing of creative genius. Indeed the very idea of genius became institutionalised. the affirmative or celebratory function of music within host institutions such as church

22 Berger 2007. 23 Butt 2008. 24 Yack 1997.

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and court was not abandoned, but it was increasingly subject to individuation (Laurence Dreyfus is illuminating on this in relation to Bach).25 Later, when transferred to the public arena, that affirmative function tended to equate either with a developing canon (a middle-class badge of identity), with Kunstreligion (art as a kind of belief system), or with developing ideas of the nation. But in the context of a developing culture industry, this same process of individuation allowed each of these categories either to provoke or to become a model of dissent, a form of culture critique or avant-garde. an avant-garde may be at odds with the institution of art, but it also depends on it; even iconoclasm needs structures of dissemination. In the end, creative genius could be harnessed by any of these several options, or any combination of them, once an institution of art had been fully established. each of them might be understood as the ground for a significant music. the point here is that what we have come to think of as great music, a product of creative genius, is a construction that depends on much more than exceptional talent, even if we allow the notion of talent in the first place, and many psychologists do not. exceptional talent, whether innate or acquired, is ever-present in human history, whereas creative genius only seems to appear at particular times and in particular places; the issue is brought into very sharp focus through harry Lime’s celebrated reference to the swiss and the cuckoo clock in Graham Greene’s screenplay for the Carol reed film The Third Man. Creative genius, in other words, is not just the successful projection of a strong creative personality; nor, conversely, is it solely contingent on a particular ecology or set of agencies. there are quite simply too many exceptions that prove the rule when we try to analyse it in these terms. If we are to probe the historical nature of creative genius as a perceived category – from its rise in early Modern europe, through its flowering in the age of romanticism and culmination in the Modernism of the early twentieth century, to its decline in our own age – we may note that it depends on a convergence of exceptional talent with the kind of significant project, uniquely defining of both its time and its place (in other words, ‘rooted’), that is enabled by an institution of art.26 all three components – talent, project, institution – are necessary constituents, and it 25 Dreyfus 1996. I am thinking especially of Dreyfus’s references to Bach composing ‘against the grain’. 26 Bürger’s ‘institution of art’ signifies the disengagement of art from other social institutions and the subsequent and consequent development of its own institution. Of its

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is only at particular times and in particular places that all three come together. this, then, might be one reading of the background to that final flowering of creative genius in the age of Modernism. It was given its most single-minded formulation in the music of schoenberg, and in the thought of adorno. schoenberg paid lip service to future significant music in C major, but in practice he was ruthless in his dismissal of conservative repertories. We are back to an either-or mentality, which of its very nature promotes definite views about value and authenticity. art in this modernist climate should be constructed according to certain principles rather than others, and it should remain in close agreement with the material of which it is made; this was the schoenbergian and adornian view, and we can recognise in it a distinct continuity with the ideas expressed in the Weimar debates of the 1850s. already in those debates we have a discourse that separates repertories into mutually exclusive and mutually defining categories in a manner that would characterise modernist thought, and expressed by way of a distinctly modernist rhetoric. Moreover, the categories themselves – we might label them respectively modernist, classical and commercial – remind us that ‘modernist music’ was from the start understood in a relational way. One corollary of this is that attempts to rethink modernism are also an implicit rethinking of conservatism. how, then, do the little stories of the Balkans speak into this grand narrative? In one respect they conform. I refer here to musical discourses centred on nationhood and ethnicity. What really happened here is that the music of pre-modern peasant societies became part of the idealised past created by modernism from the mid nineteenth century onwards. It goes without saying that the peasant societies themselves were largely unaffected by this. an either-or mentality cannot exist where choice does not exist, or barely exists. and that, as has often been argued, was precisely the condition of the pre-modern rural societies of south east europe until well into the twentieth century. social modernity, in other words, arrived belatedly to these societies. Indeed it was profoundly disillusioning to many Yugoslav-watchers from the west that with the advent of modernisation, and the possibility of choice that accompanied it, the peasant population made the ‘wrong’ choices (to place it on a trivial level,

nature, an institution of art will promote those qualities that refuse to yield to contingent explanation (Bürger 1984).

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they preferred machine-made kitsch to exquisitely-designed hand-made costumes). It was disillusioning precisely because those peasant societies had been constructed by the modern world as uncontaminated and supposedly ‘natural’. and it is on this level – the level of appropriation by an intelligentsia – that what I have called the modernist either-or mentality operated. It provides us with a further explanatory frame for the tendency to force popular repertories either side of a line demarcating progress and degeneracy.27 to reiterate an earlier discussion, rural ‘folk’ music had to be cleanly separated from, and opposed to, urban popular music, which was thought to be hybrid in a negative sense. In the end, folksong was imbued with a kind of authenticity, and it was not so different from the authenticity attributed to the modernist artwork. this was a powerful conjunction, and it would influence not only discourses about music in south east europe, but eventually the compositional praxes of modernist composers too. here we come close to identifying the significant project that would in due course enable significant music in the Balkans, though the project had greater specificity – was more definitive of its time and place – than simply a conjunction of peasant music and modernist music. It was delayed by the belated establishment of an institution of art in south east europe, a delay that accounts in some measure for the failure to develop robust schools of national music in the region, as also for the fact that in the early twentieth century even composers who embraced the rhetoric of modernism often seemed stranded stylistically in an earlier age. typically we are left with ‘local’ forms of movements bearing labels such as ‘impressionist’, ‘expressionist’ or even ‘avant-garde’. In some cases these tendencies really signal nothing more than the willingness of composers in the Balkans to mimic the larger european narrative in creating their modernisms, even as they were sidelined by it. But this is not the whole story. there was a body of music composed in the Balkans in the inter-war period that amounts to the closest thing to a canonic repertory to have emerged from the region. It took many forms, but there is nonetheless an underlying unity that is grounded in its time and place in just the ways I have been trying to express here. this music articulates precisely that quality of transition that, for some

27 Daniel pick (pick 1989) provides a context for this. his thesis will be discussed in the final chapters of the book.

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commentators at least, more than anything else defines this region. For Maria todorova, and for some other students of the cultural history of south east europe, transition is one of the constituent categories that can distinguish Balkanism from Orientalism.28 at the very least, this invites us to open up for investigation the question of transition, and to consider the true nature of transitional states. It suggests that we should perhaps try to give these states their due, viewing them as something more than sites of theoretical transformation which contain elements of two worlds, though they are that of course. We might, in other words, consider their value as states in themselves. We might explore their ontology.

28 todorova 1997.

part three

MUsIC In transItIOn

Chapter eLeVen

MIXInG It Discourses of Transition In The Location of Culture, homi Bhabha explores the interstices within and between primary categories of cultural identity (race, class, gender, nation).1 The categories themselves are not so much splintered and fragmented as opened up to negotiation across a range of differences. Subjects are formed ‘in-between, or in excess of, the sum of the “parts” of difference’.2 The point of transit and the liminal space, products of cultural displacement, are what interest Bhabha, and the bridge is an inevitable metaphor. He quotes Heidegger on the bridge: ‘The bridge gathers as a passage that crosses’, a phrase that invites us to invest in transition.3 Yet Bhabha, post-colonialist that he is, would balk at anything quite so crude as a transition between East and West. That has all the mark of the modernist script. The ‘post’ in his post-colonialism is not just about sequence – it is also about reaching beyond boundaries – but there is an element of chronicle to it all the same. As he puts it: ‘beginnings and endings [are] the sustaining myths of the middle years’.4 Bhabha’s ‘in-between’ identities take a step beyond those sustaining myths, beyond the either-or mentality of modernist discourses. They are ‘post’ those discourses; they deconstruct them; and they illuminate aspects of lived experience – on the edges of things – that are obscured by them. His restless identities are worldwide products of a post-colonial age. But his investment in transition, in the ‘passage that crosses’, has a direct bearing on discourses of Balkanism, a loosely related set of ideas about South East Europe that sits somewhere between the myths of the middle years and the complexities that lie beyond those myths. Transition, whether as an intransitive condition or as a cultural project, lies close to the heart of these discourses.

1  Bhabha 1994. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Ibid., 2.

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Two obvious reference points for a symbolic geography of the Balkans are Said’s Orientalism and Wolff ’s ‘invented’ Eastern Europe.5 Both formulate geographies of alterity in relation to western post-Enlightenment norms of progress and rationality. They take separate paths, with the former converting imperial domination and exploitation into a compensatory oneiros, while the latter translates marginalisation into a paradigm of backwardness. But they have in common a sense that the West has constructed their respective places to its own specifications. One way of locating the Balkans in relation to these discourses would be to invoke Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of nesting orientalisms, which is really about relativising the East.6 Some Easts are more east than other Easts. The ‘East’, as Bakić-Hayden puts it, is a project rather than a place. And this accords with familiar, historically evolving understandings of it; the Near East began with the Ottoman Balkans in the nineteenth century, shifted to the levant in the 1920s, and disappeared altogether in the 1950s, at which point a tripartite division of Asia (Near, Middle and Far) yielded to a bipartite division (Middle and Far). Such readings were first elaborated in an account of ‘orientalist variations’ by Bakić-Hayden and Hayden,7 in which the rhetoric of Orientalism was shown to have a kind of afterlife in both East and West, thus dissolving the boundaries between them (there is a west in the East; and an east in the West), and they have informed studies of Balkan historiography and criticism ever since, culminating in the collection Balkan as Metaphor.8 Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans is related to this tradition, yet sits at a slight angle to it. Todorova attempted something rather distinctive in this landmark book.9 She carved out a unique discursive space for Balkanism, which she regards as something more than a subset or variation of Orientalism. For Todorova, Balkanism is distinguished not just by the relative proximity and (starkly negative, dangerous) concreteness of the Balkans, as opposed to the remoteness and (oneiric, fantasy-like) intangibility of the Orient, but also because it deals with differences within a type rather than differences between types, because it has no discursive pre-history comparable to that of Orientalism, and because the Balkans is predominantly Christian, and as such inextricably linked to certain core

5 Said 1978; Wolff 1996. 6 Bakić-Hayden 1995. 7 Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992. 8 Bjelić and Savić 2002. 9 Todorova 1997.

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European values. But above all, it is marked off from Orientalism by its character as transition: it is not quite Europe, not quite non-Europe, but a place of crossroads, where very specific identities have been structured and restructured on a fragile ground of liminality. It is this quality of liminality that is stressed in another wide-ranging study.10 like Todorova, K.E. Fleming is keen to separate Balkanism from Orientalism, but she argues that the liminal status of the Balkans ‘is tantamount not so much to marginality as to a sort of centrality’, and not just in the obvious geographical sense that if you are between two worlds you are at the centre. Fleming, in other words, holds on to, and gives positive value to, Todorova’s transition – to the ‘inbetween’, ‘the interstices between worlds, histories, and continents’ – as the ground for a unique identity for the Balkans. It is, in her compelling reading of it, neither one thing nor the other, but something else. It is no doubt ironic that Fleming commits to transition just as Todorova herself in recent work seems to want to release it in favour of a more complex network of path dependencies, moving closer to the position adopted by several of the authors in Balkan as Metaphor. These authors resist monolithic readings of the Balkans, especially the Balkans of today, preferring to analyse real situations in all their diversity than to identify reductive explanatory categories. They seek, with Homi Bhabha, to do justice to the complexity, infinite variety, and multiple transitions of minoritarian identities on shifting sands of history and culture. Fleming, on the other hand, is loath to ignore the active legacy of those collective identities that have marked a division of East and West in the past; the history, after all, is a long one, and it is rooted in empire (Holy Roman-Byzantine; Habsburg-Ottoman), in religion (Christian-Muslim; Catholic-Orthodox) and in political ideology (Capitalist-Communist). It is, Fleming rightly implies, an evasion to exclude such collectivities from the picture. They characterise what we may call a middleground level of Balkan identities, which is what renders them distinctive to the outside observer. For it is the profusion of possible allegiances bequeathed by these overlapping historical dichotomies that gives this region its homogeneity, resulting in a unity of small differences; as Fleming puts it, ‘discourse on the Balkans is one both of sameness and of difference’.11 At the same time it is these same dichotomies that help define the self-perception

10 Fleming 2000. 11  Ibid., 1219.

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of the region, for it is in relation to collectivities that individual choices are made. Transition, then, may operate at foreground levels, where Balkan identities are uncertain and anxiety-ridden, even when most forcefully articulated. They lurk between multiple lines of difference. But it may operate too at a middleground level, where identities are given substance in a domain of ‘betwixt and between’, where new centres of orientation are established on the edges of those clearly marked, tried-and-tested, and discursively privileged spaces that have represented East and West in the past. Inevitably we return to the bridge, which is, of its nature, against the status quo, but which, to reiterate, ‘gathers as a passage which crosses’. Todorova even extends the metaphor to refer to a bridge between different stages of growth as well as between different centres of power, and in doing so she briefly invokes an anthropological and psychoanalytical literature of transition stemming from Arnold van gennep in the early twentieth century.12 In The Rites of Passage, van gennep identifies territorial passages – the crossing of thresholds – but also birth and childhood (and later initiation) passages, involving rites of separation, transition and incorporation. Both categories of passage have rich metaphorical potential for Balkan identity formation. The former can model underprivileged, outsider or marginal states, existing somewhere on the edges of, or somewhere between, status positions; one thinks of Roma communities or of transits from home to abroad or from rural to urban settings. The latter can model modernising processes, where identities are incomplete, not (yet) fully realised; the identities are ‘not mother or self, although feelings of mother and self are invested in them. They are “something else” – something other than mother or me, although filled with the latter two’.13 Both transits – of space and of time – describe a state of ambiguity, a liminal, unbound, prop-less region, where there is a loss of previous status and not yet an incorporation of the new. There is a conceptual difficulty with temporal transition that requires us to fine-tune the concept. The ‘new’ to be incorporated has to be an oxymoronic ‘known new’ to justify the term transition. Otherwise transition is really a misnomer for a process better labelled development or evolution. This has a distinct bearing on music history. Music, one might argue,

12 van gennep 1960. 13 Jeffrey Miller, quoting Michael Eigen (Miller 2004, 86).

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is either never or always in transition, and it is an abuse of the term to single out a particular period (as I once did myself) as transitional.14 What one can call transition is a passage between two stable states, whether they are representations of place or known stages of growth. In the latter case, a modernising process is transitional to the extent that there is an already existing ‘modern’, for example in the shape of a developed, and sought-after, western culture. With this in mind, I will review three categories of music in the Balkans. The first, traditional or ‘folk’ music, presents so many commonalities between Balkan and Anatolian repertories that it is unrealistic to condense its multiple spatial transitions into the simple binary East – West. As to modernisation, this process more often than not eschewed or bypassed transition altogether. Either the repertory would die out completely, existing only in self-conscious revival by activists; or it would be appropriated for ideological purposes, as with Communist folkorisation; or it would be reinvented, as in the newly composed folk music that developed in Yugoslavia following the transfer of rural populations to the towns. In none of these cases, which will be reviewed in Part 4, can we truly speak of a moment of transit. With the second category, urban popular repertories, there often existed that symbiotic relation between two states – spatial and/or temporal – that is a precondition of transition. There was a crossing-over, a transfer of elements, from one known state to another, and there could also be return journeys. Much of the professional or semi-professional popular music performed in the Balkans, especially in partially Islamised territories, see-sawed in just this way between idioms that came to be described (notably following the incursion of European music into Asia Minor in the nineteenth century) as alaturca and alafranca. Such music transferred materials and meanings from one category to the other, and as it did so the places of transit – places of partial loss and partial incorporation – gave rise to a new identity status. As is often the case, the best fiction can get to the heart of the matter. To labour our metaphor, it was the bridge itself in Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina that served as the gathering place for the people; it was both outside the centres of power and itself a centre for orientation. It is an apt metaphor to illuminate a corpus of distinctive popular music in the Balkans. The music in question occupied its own territory; it constituted

14 Samson 1977.

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in effect a kind of third state, a state-in-itself that contained elements of the other two states, but remained independent of both. This ‘in-between’ status of urban popular music will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter, and there will be an attempt to introduce in summary form some of the technical issues involved. In subsequent chapters, I will pick up a thread from the last chapter, where it was suggested that transition also informs significant art music from the Balkans in the early twentieth century. With this third category of music, we might indeed speak of a project of transition, by means of which modernist composers from South East Europe tried to make sense of their time and place. It is possible to understand much of this music in nationalist terms, but this hardly does full justice to the major figures we will discuss here, for they were as much preoccupied by a Balkan identity as by a national one. Indeed the two identities are connected, since the rise of nationalism served to highlight the peripheral status of the Balkans, in relation to both East and West. In The Days of the Consuls, Andrić, in the persona of the physician Cologna, described what it meant ‘to have two homelands, and yet have none [. . . .] drifting painfully between East and West, belonging to neither and beaten by both’.15 This describes dilemmas of identity that were already characteristic of the region during the Napoleonic era, the ‘days of the [Bosnian] consuls’, but were yet more defining a century later. The early twentieth century, a time when political unrest and violence in the Balkans coincided with maximal superiority complexes on the part of western imperial powers, represented a key stage in the portrayal of the region as an embodiment of liminality. For Manolis Kalomiris and the national school in greece, for george Enescu in Romania, and for several of the composers of Yugoslav moderna between the wars, the quest for voice was closely linked to the symbolic geography of the Balkans. So-called ‘folk music’ and socalled ‘popular music’ could carry all the usual connotations associated with elite appropriations, but in addition these categories had a powerful spectral significance. There were two myths here, and two bridges to cross. One spanned the gulf between elite culture and the notional purity of a peasant culture. The other reached to the East.

15 Andrić 2003c, 240. See also several essays in Mardin 1994.

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Nuts and Bolts: Elements of Popular Music Makam, as taught in Turkey today, is presented as a system, albeit transmitted orally for the most part, subject to transformation as it passed from generation to generation (in general in the direction of modal ‘openendedness’),16 and variously notated and theorised.17 The most commonly used theoretical description of the repertory of Turkish classical (sanat) music is the one usually known as the Arel-Ezgi system, briefly mentioned in chapter 6.18 Arel and Ezgi, taking their cue from a pioneering study by Rauf Yetka,19 attempted to theorise an existing practice in ways that were rooted in traditional understandings of makam while at the same time enabling both pedagogical efficiency and some degree of alignment with Western conventions and Western notation. One English-language introduction to this method is Karl Signell’s book,20 though Signell also advances independent theory, and is alive to the points at which theory remains inadequate to practice. As he points out, Arel and Ezgi proposed a division of the octave into twenty-four intervals, and by working with derived combinations of tetrachords and pentachords (on the Systematist model) they were able to generate basic makam scales, together with possible extensions, and to define the relations between these scales. Signell discusses other qualities of makam-s, including their distinctive seyir [progression], articulated by the hierarchical functions of specific pitches within the scale, by tessitura, and by archetypes of melodic direction, together with formulaic motives. Some, but not all, of this discussion is present in Yetka and Arel-Ezgi. Signell also summarises the Arel-Ezgi theory of modulation, a sophisticated process within modern Turkish classical music, allowing the commonalities between tetrachords and pentachords to create ‘roads’ between makam-s. The Arel-Ezgi system rationalises a practice that appears to extend back only to the late eighteenth century. If we seek a more historically attuned

16  Walter Feldman, referring to Powers’s terminology, in Feldman 1996, 299. 17  For a discussion of earlier Ottoman theory, see Feldman 1996, 195–299; also Signell 1977, and Zannos 1994. A good general account of maqām theory in the Arab rather than the Ottoman world is Marcus 1989. 18  Turkish theorists have distinguished the makam-s employed in classical music from the ayak-s found in folk music, though in practice matters are not so straightforward. 19  Yetka 1921. 20 Signell 1977.

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understanding of the evolution of makam theory as well as practice, and one that takes due account of traditional meşk pedagogy, we need to turn to scholars such as Owen Wright and Walter Feldman.21 Feldman’s book in particular is a magisterial, and formidably documented, synthesis. Cantemir looms large in the theoretical section, but his notations and writings are placed in a much wider context within the early history of Ottoman theory, and in ways that enable well-informed understandings of historical practice. It is clear from these accounts by Feldman and Wright that in Cantemir the elements of music, characteristically identified in relation to a TurcoArabic ‘general scale’ of two octaves mapped onto the tanbûr fingerboard, differ from those of modern practice. The arrangement of these elements (the makam-s) is also somewhat different, and the Systematist-derived genera of Yetka and Arel-Ezgi are absent altogether, as apparently they are in all earlier Ottoman theory. Feldman also looks into the historical evolution of the concept of seyir, and he includes an extended discussion of the improvisational taksîm, which more than anything gave the measure of a musician, as a means of differentiating the concepts of modulation employed in the early history of Ottoman music from modern theory and practice. While Feldman’s primary concern is with early Ottoman repertory, his exposition allows us more general insights into how makam was taught and understood by musicians right up to the early twentieth century. The balance between core uniformities and local particularities within a memory-based meşk system is hard to gauge, but one might surmise greater uniformity in rhythmic, formal and generic processes than in pitch organisation. As to genre, the centre of the tradition was the fasil, which had arrived at its ‘modern’ arrangement by the late eighteenth century, and whose instrumental type [ fasil-i sâzende] represented something akin to an emancipation of instrumental music. As noted in chapter 6, the counterpart to the fasil within the tekke was the Mevlevî âyîn, which encloses the four selâm-s [salutations], usually preceded by a taksîm on ney and a peşrev, and followed by another taksîm and then a son [concluding] peşrev and yürük semâ’î (in a six-beat usül, like a 6/8 metre). It is not easy to assess just how far these genres penetrated the Balkans. Mevlevî orders were found in several parts of the wider region, and the full âyîn would have been performed in Islamised areas (among Turkish

21 Wright 1988; Feldman 1996.

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communities in Macedonia, for example, and among certain Dervish communities in Albania and Bosnia). likewise, Ottoman classical music was certainly performed at the courts of Pashas right across the empire (and in the eighteenth century at Phanariot courts of the Romanian Principalities), and it would have been familiar in the circles of Turkish social elites elsewhere in the eastern Balkans. But the fasil, at least as part of an art music tradition, would not have been so familiar among indigenous populations. On the other hand, the tradition left a very clear imprint on the Balkans in the form of semi-classical fasil ensembles, dominated by Roma, for these performed in nightclubs and cafés right across the region. Here makam and usûl remained alive and well in the twentieth century. This was an ‘oriental’ style that co-existed with western popular styles, and in this sense oriental music was perceived to be a distinctive genre; indeed to this day Rom musicians, performing at weddings and festivals, speak of ‘oriental music’ in just this way, distinguishing it generically from, for example, jazz or rock. At the same time the music of the fasil ensemble took on a rather different character when it migrated to the Balkans. Influenced by indigenous traditions, it came to occupy a kind of middle ground between Ottoman traditions and Europe: a transitional territory. We may add to this transitional category the other genres of syncretic popular music that arose from contact between East and West, including traditions that have already been discussed in general terms: muzica lăutărească, čalgija, rebetika, sevdalinka, saze. All of them register an Ottoman legacy. With varying degrees of theoretical understanding, the musicians worked with makam-s rather than western tempered scales, though, as Signell points out, Rom performance practices tended to alter the classical intonations.22 likewise, the many usûl-s, which included extended forms such as usûl muza’af devr-i kebîr (56/4) with complex patterns of light and heavy beats, were winnowed down to a handful of simpler patterns, which could be treated more as metre (even if asymmetrical, as in the Aksak usûl [9/4]) than as cycle. We are helped in our understanding of this middle ground by the work of Risto Pekka Pennanen, who has presented analyses of greek popular music in his published thesis and elsewhere.23 This work was pioneering in its attempt to make technical sense of processes of westernisation

22 Signell 1977, 45. 23 Pennanen 1999.

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in greek music, and in its nuanced understanding of the intertwining of different systems of musical thought. In tracing the transition to Europe, Pennanen is anxious to avoid any suggestion that makam-s were replaced in a straightforward way by a major-minor key system. At the expository level of discussion appropriate here, it is enough to point out that makam-s were able to retain many of their defining characteristics (their seyir, tessitura and melodic formulae) even when equal temperament was adopted, and that they did so in many rebetika. Pennanen also discusses the relation between Ottoman makam-s and greek dromoi (his paradigm is makam Segâh – dromos Houzam), and he goes on to analyse the formulae associated with dromoi in rebetika. His fieldwork confirms that many of the leading rebetika performers, far from abandoning the older models, made deliberate play on the co-existence of two systems in a spirit of transition. In a subsequent study incorporated into his book, he examines different modes of interrelation between makam-s and chordal harmony. In much of this music classical tonal functions appear to be present, but in reality they form an independent layer that is non-congruent with the melodic composing-out of the makam or dromos. At its simplest this is because chords built on a makam do not necessarily map onto the ‘tonal centres’ dictated by the seyir in a conventional way, to say nothing of the fact that in makam the upper octave may not be equivalent to the lower. In other words, the conventions informing melodic structure are not subordinated to western-influenced chordal harmonies; more often the latter are obliged to adapt to the former, so that the chordal harmonies take on a fresh meaning. Pennanen’s conclusions in his case study of dromos Sabah strikingly articulate the resulting transitional state, and in terms that confirm the ‘in-betweeness’ discussed earlier. ‘Music analysis of rebetika calls for elements from the theories of Ottoman and Western music, and ultimately a special rebetika theory that remains to be constructed’.24 In the later sections of this study Pennanen makes a start on just such a theory, using dromos Sabah and makam Karciğar. It is impossible to do justice here to his analysis. But it should at least be stressed that in addition to unpicking the technical processes at work in rebetika, he traces an historical chronicle, taking us from the earliest recordings right through to the ‘tourist music’ of the 1960s. And in the course of this he demonstrates that the direction of transfer was not exclusively towards the West. As

24 Ibid., 81.

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we noted earlier, the ‘oriental surge’ was an active impulse in popular musics in the Balkans generally. Rebetika, we are reminded by Pennanen, embody ‘a mixture of Eastern and Western elements, and sometimes it is difficult to say if the fusion is more Eastern than Western, or vice versa’.25 There is a large corpus of recorded rebetika, taking us from the earliest acoustical recordings, including Fred gainsberg’s recordings of amanedes made in Smyrna for the gramophone Company, through to the era of electric recording introduced in the mid 1920s, at which point a gramophone industry was established in Athens-Piraeus, and beyond that to the caesura that resulted from the occupation in 1941. Moreover, a parallel industry was established in North America in the 1920s (notably Columbia and RCA victor). The recording industry was of course a product of the West. It was a triumph of technology, and it carried its own western values with it into the realm of ‘betwixt and between’. Nevertheless, in its earliest stages in greece (Panhellion, and then the greek Record Company) it was mainly the oriental tradition that featured, partly because professional musicians from Asia Minor were better organised and often better educated than their native (predominantly amateur) counterparts; they quickly set about forming musicians’ unions and establishing music cafés on the model of Smyrna and Constantinople. I noted in chapter 3 that western influences on greek repertories were not a direct result of the exchange of minorities, since they were at work in Ottoman popular traditions much more widely. Indeed many of the early recordings by greek musicians following the catastrophe are distinguishable within a generic Ottoman popular music only through the greek language. This is true of amanedes recorded by Dimitris Atriadis (from Constantinople), Kostas Nouras (from Smyrna), and many others in the late 1920s and 1930s, where the idiom is close to that of the Ottoman gazel, itself relatable to other lyric forms from the wider Middle East.26 There is very little, in short, to distinguish pre-catastrophe recordings from Smyrna from post-catastrophe recordings from Athens. By the early ‘thirties, however, the ‘Piraeus school’ had also begun to engage with the commercial world and with what we might call an ethos of professionalism. This transformation could sustain a separate monograph, as a case study in the meeting-point between ‘do-it-yourself ’ 25 Ibid., 65. 26 Among the CD collections of these ‘oriental’ rebetika, one might cite Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style. The Golden Years: 1911–1937. Folklyric CD 7005.

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countercultural music and the world of hard-headed managers and musical directors (there are parallels in the morphing of British skiffle groups into a rock culture in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties). The developing professionalism came at some cost, but the result was that the bouzouki school began recording in greece at this time (notably with vamvakaris’s ‘Piraeus Quartet’), shortly after similar recordings had made their appearance in the United States. And it was partly due to the recording industry that stylistic boundaries between the two schools of rebetika were increasingly blurred. They did after all share a common grounding in traditional dance genres that belong to a wider Balkan-Anatolian region. Indeed at this level of basic form and genre, it is more realistic to speak of many local varieties of a shared culture than to identify a clean East-West divide. Thus, the many hundreds of recordings made by performers such as Rita Abatzi, Marika Papaghika, giorgos vidalis, Kostas Roukounas and Antonis Dalkas, either on the greek mainland or in North America, are invariably identified by means of dance genres that have already been cited in this book, and may be summarised here. They include the ballos (a couples dance originally from the islands of the eastern Aegean), zeibekiko [zeybek] (a 9/4 male solo ‘warrior’s dance’, originally from western Anatolia), tsifteteli (the musical genre most closely associated with modern belly dancing), Karsilama (a 9-beat couples dance from Asia Minor), hasapiko (the so-called ‘butcher’s dance’ in fast tempo, and often with Jewish associations), sirto (a category of couples dances in 3/4) and kalamatianos (another couples dance in 7/8). very often in these recordings the dance itself is preceded by an improvised taximi [taksîm], which might also appear as a ritornello between verses and at the end. On a common ground of such Balkan-Anatolian dance genres, we find a mélange of stylistic features drawn from Ottoman semi-classical traditions, from Balkan folk music, and from European popular music. As such, the many extant greek and greek-American recordings constitute a laboratory for studying the ‘middle ground’ between oriental and western traditions, especially as they include multiple recordings of the same songs. Discographical studies have begun to create some order in this chronologically wayward corpus.27 But it need hardly be said that such fine-tuning is far beyond the scope of an exposition such as this. My aim in what follows is illustrative rather than synthetic. The intention is to open a window on to the transitional status of a cross-section of urban popular music, as we

27 Pennanen discusses this in Pennanen 1999 and elsewhere.

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know it today from a recorded legacy that may be fairly easily consulted by anyone interested in venturing further. Most of the other traditions I will consider were not taken up by the early recording industry in the manner of rebetika. Where early recordings exist at all, they are usually the product of ethnological research and of a more general impulse towards culture conservation. This is certainly the case for the zurla-tapan ensemble of the Roma, which never really entered the commercial world. As for Macedonian čalgija, this was partly taken up by a later recording industry (unlike, for example, a parallel tradition of Albanian saze), but in a reconstructed form that is often hard to separate out from so-called ‘Macedonian folk music’. The other repertories – Sephardic music, muzica lăutărească and sevdalinka – were more comprehensively appropriated by the culture industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and that resulted in further transformations both of their musical materials and of the patterns of their reception. On the Record: Surveying the Legacy A small sample of rebetika recordings, all made in Athens during the 1930s, is indicative of Pennanen’s ‘mixture of Eastern and Western elements’. We might start at the eastern end with two amanedes, both in makam Sabah.28 The first is ‘Aniksete ta mnimata’ [Open the tombs], sung by Stratos Payumdzis (from Ayvalik in Asia Minor) accompanied by Spiros Peristeris on bouzouki. The text, reminding us that we cannot tell from their bones who is rich and who is poor, is preceded by an improvised taximi in Sabah. This recording undermines the stereotypes, in that a singer known for ‘Piraeus’ rebetika is here at home with the oriental manner, just as Peristeris’s bouzouki can mimic a style associated with the outi. Without elaborating technically, we may note that the tonal framework is similar in the second recording, this time in makam Neva Sabah. ‘Tin ora tu thanatu’ [The hour of death] is sung by Rita Abatzi with lambros Savaihis on kanonaki and Dimitris Semsis (Salonikios) on violin. Its theme is transience, and the underlying dance rhythm, as often with amanedes, is tsifteteli. This is unassertive initially, but it becomes explicit in the closing taximi (son taksîm), a short, lively dance on violin, as though to lift the mood. This gesture is typical of the style.

28 Both can be found on Folklyric CD 7005.

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At the other pole we might place two zeibekiko songs, ‘Alana Pireotissa’ [Piraeus tramp woman] and ‘Otan me vlepis na perno’ [When you see me go by], recorded by vamvakaris, where the makam-s are smoothed out into equal temperament, and the bouzouki has a ritornello function.29 The structure in both songs is formalised, alternating vocal stanzas (unvaried in the first song, varied in the second) with ritornelli (regular 9/4 phrases in the first song, irregular and progressively lengthening phrases in the second). As to harmony, ‘Alana Pireotissa’ maintains a single harmony, dominant-quality in classical terms, for the entire song, allowing ‘tonicisation’ only at the end of each ritornello and each stanza. In ‘Otan me vlepis na perno’ the pattern is more diversified, though the underlying schema – in classical terms, we might describe it as [i – III – v – i] – is consistent across both ritornelli and stanzas. Somewhere between these two styles we might locate two recordings made by Roza Eskenazi, also in the 1930s. In the first, a composition by Dimitris Semsis whose title ‘Min orkizesai vre pseftra’ is usually translated as ‘Don’t swear to me, you liar’, the makam is Husseini, and the song itself is enclosed within an improvised taximi on outi, in the extempore, oriental style.30 There is also a central taximi and a rather more regular closing taximi [son taksîm] on violin. The two stanzas are makam-based, and chordal harmonies are conspicuous by their absence. In the second song, ‘Yati fumaro kokaini’ [Why I smoke cocaine], by Panayiotas Toundas, on the other hand, we find the same negotiation between makam and diatonic minor that characterised the vamvakaris recordings. This song, a cautionary tale, consists of two stanzas, each bi-partite, and as in the first vamvakaris recording the melodic structure encourages the sense of an underlying dominant function. What greatly strengthens this function in the Eskenazi recording is the brief appearance of a sub-dominant in each stanza. It may not be classical harmony, but the orientation to the west is stronger nonetheless than in ‘Min orkizesai vre pseftra’. The story of Eskenazi, a Sephardic Jew who was born in Istanbul and spent her early life in Salonika and Komotini before heading for the recording studios of Athens and Piraeus, is emblematic of the intersection of Ottoman-greek and Ottoman-Jewish musical cultures in the early twentieth century.31 Her recorded output is mainly in the greek language, 29 Both are on The Rough Guide to Greek Music. Hellenic Records TgR – 207. 30 See the CD The Rebetiko Song in America Vol. 1 1920–1940. FM Records: The greek Archives 627. 31  Commonalities between Sephardic and greek repertories are explored in Dragoumis 2007, which also demonstrates the antiquity of some of the rebetika.

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but she also sang in ladino and in the 1950s she revisited Istanbul and recorded several songs in Turkish. Borrowing across the communities in this way was fundamental to late- and post-Ottoman music. given the same melody, all kinds of adaptations were possible. Changes of language and song text could convert Ottoman-Turkish popular songs into rebetika on one hand and Jewish copla-s on the other, just as changes of performance site and function could transform Ottoman classical repertory into Jewish liturgical repertory.32 Cross-cultural commonalities of this kind are much in evidence in the vast archive of recordings made in Anatolia, greece and North America during the first half of the twentieth century, a substantial corpus of them now reproduced in modern CD format. In later dissemination, on the other hand, the repertories were separated out in ways that reflected much wider political and cultural perceptions (the cataloguing in Sound Archives can be instructive). very crudely, the tendency was to draw a line between Turkish and greek repertories, and to assign the former to the East and the latter to the West. Jewish culture was a different matter. Jews were widely regarded as ‘a people that dwells alone’, and constituted a convenient Other not only for developing national identities, but also for a developing European identity. The Jewish expulsions from Europe in the Middle Ages (like their Muslim equivalents) were primarily about religion, but they were also about perceived ethnicity, and they tapped into a widespread and longstanding European perception of the Jews as ‘oriental’. No less than greek popular music, Jewish secular music, especially of the eastern Mediterranean area, occupied a world of ‘betwixt and between’. If we were to understand that transitional world in the terms of a forcefield, we might inspect its poles by considering two very different approaches to a single Sephardic song. They are associated with two musicians who came from the same corner of Asia Minor, in the vicinity of Smyrna, a centre of Jewish as well as greek culture at the turn of the century. Tres hermenicas exists in numerous versions, collected by Manrique de lara and Isaac levy among others.33 In addition to significantly different versions of the poetic text, there are two principal recorded melodies, or ‘tune-families’, as Judith Mauleón-Berlowitz describes them, and 32 Pamela Dorn has discussed the association of these two in Turkey, an association that survived westernising tendencies and was largely untouched by questions of personal taste (Dorn 1991b). 33 See also the collections made by Rina Benmayor in los Angeles and Seattle, discussed in Benmayor 1979, 48–57. Benmayor examines at length the different manifestations of the Hero and leander myth in serious and popular literature.

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they are of sharply contrasted character.34 It is the slow, expressive (rather than the triple-time folk-like) melody that concerns us here. When Alberto Hemsi noted down a version of Tres hermenicas sung by his aunt in 1921 in the family home in Cassaba [Turgutlu], some seventy kilometers east of Smyrna, this was the melody he heard. Already by then Hemsi had studied western music, first at the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Smyrna and then at the Milan Conservatory, where his studies were curtailed by the war.35 When he later set the song for voice and piano, including it in his Coplas sefardies, he returned it to Europe, and specifically to Spain (the pianistic idiom has affinities with granados or Albéniz).36 Hemsi’s version is not simply an accompanied folksong, then; the piano accompaniment transforms it into an art song, with intricate voice-leading, subtle motivic working and long-range harmonic thinking. In La musique orientale en Egypte, he spoke of a ‘harmonious rapprochement between Eastern and Western musical thought’.37 This perfectly articulates a project of transition, but in the hands of a composer whose true cultural orientation was towards the West. Technically speaking, it is the subdominant in these bars that closes off any possible ambiguities between makam and key, ensuring that chord v functions as a real dominant. The second interpretation of Tres hermenicas is a recording made in 1984 in lodd (Israel) by Josepo Burgana, currently lodged in the National Sound Archives in Jerusalem.38 An immigrant to Israel, Burgana was a native of Smyrna, but unlike Hemsi he remained steeped in the traditions of Turkish classical music. Typically, as in this recording, he accompanied himself on the cümbüş, a kind of cross between oud and banjo, popular for a while among Turkish Roma and in some rebetika recordings. Burgana’s recording of Tres hermenicas is unambiguously oriental music. The melody is the same as in Hemsi’s notated version, but Burgana performs it in micro- and macrotonal temperament and within a heterophonic

34 Mauleón-Berlowitz 1995. 35 With the declaration of war Hemsi was enlisted in the Italian army. 36 Tres hermenicas is to be found in the sixth volume of the series of ten, published as Coplas sefardies (Hemsi 1932–73). Hemsi’s work on this volume and on volume 7 dated from the 1960s. In his ‘Author’s Note’, he discusses the extensive Jewish community of Smyrna. 37 See the reference in Hemsi 1995, 29–30, along with a discussion of possible reconciliations of makam-s and western polyphony (compare Erlanger 1930–59). 38 The recording can be found on a CD produced by Susana Weich-Shahak, Cantares y romances tradicionales sefardíes de oriente vol. 2 (Saga: KPD – 10.906).

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rather than a chordal setting. Moreover, the vocal style is ornamental in character, and employs the wide vibrato and nasal-centred voice production associated with Turkish music. In all these respects, Burgana’s performance might be compared with recordings by other Anatolian Jewish singers, including those (made by Rina Benmayor) of Sultana levy in 1970s los Angeles. Indeed, partly for political reasons, an alaturka idiom for Sephardic secular music is more prevalent in Israel and North America than in Turkey itself. It may be interesting to reflect a little on this sequence. A song familiar to the Jewish community of Smyrna in the early twentieth century, and probably performed mainly by women in a simple a capella manner,39 is drawn by Josepo Burgana into the world of Turkish semi-classical music, with an elaborate cümbüş accompaniment. Conversely, it is pulled by Alberto Hemsi towards the world of European art music, marked by sophisticated harmonic and textural contexts. Even the ‘Spanish tinge’ in Hemsi’s setting belongs to a stylised oriental idiom that is recognisably European in character and inception, and traceable stylistically as much to French as to Spanish composers. These two versions, oral and notated, stand in a way for East and West in the representation of Sephardic song, and there are countless recorded performances that negotiate the territory in between. Yet musical performance can wreak havoc with any such hard-and-fast categories. The chasm separating geo-cultural worlds can be crossed by music with surprising facility. When the singer Pedro Aledo, a specialist in the popular musics of the Mediterranean, recorded a selection of Hemsi’s Coplas sefardies, including Tres hermenicas, his performance promoted that ‘harmonious rapprochement between Eastern and Western musical thought’ to which Hemsi aspired.40 Aledo’s vocal style, rooted in Andalusian popular traditions, is Spanish in a more fundamental sense than Hemsi’s stylisations, and it sits interestingly with the sophisticated accompaniments of the Coplas sefardies, returning an elitist idiom to something a bit closer to the origins of the repertoire in popular song. In this way the traces left by oral traditions can shade and inflect musical meanings, opening them up to suggestive cross-references and fragile alliances, and resisting the fixities of the notated text. 39 See the recordings of Sephardic music made in Istanbul in 1906, probably the earliest recordings of this repertory. I am grateful to Joel Bresler for information on this. 40 This recording, part of the Collection patrimonies musicaux des juifs de France, is listed as SOCADISC 860109.

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Aside from the Jews, one other group has been treated as an oriental import to Europe. The epic migrations of the Roma from northwestern India have been tracked to around the middle of the first millennium, after which they settled (in a limited sense of the term) in numerous regions across the Middle East (especially Persia, as reflected in dialects of Romani) and North Africa. They enter our story with the Ottomans in the fourteenth century, first escaping from, and then accompanying, Ottoman armies into Europe. A second wave of migration then followed during the second half of the nineteenth century after the release of the Roma in 1856 from what really amounted to centuries of enslavement in Romania. Recent scholarship qualifies a view of the Roma as a single people in diaspora, a view promoted above all by the eighteenth-century scholarship of Heinrich grellmann and subsequently much loved of nineteenth-century racial theory. Rather it is argued by some that stigmatisation (much more than ethnicity) has been the key determinant of their group identity.41 However we account for it, Rom communities have consistently maintained different values from those of the gadže (non-gypsies) against whom they define themselves. Responses to those differences by host communities have ranged from an initial fascination with alterity (nineteenth-century cultural appropriations) through persecution (culminating in the Third Reich) to attempted assimilation (notably by East European Communist regimes, especially in Bulgaria and Romania). Only through music and dance have the Roma been valued, bringing attendant privileges to esteemed performers, but exclusively in relation to their professional roles (there are obvious analogies here with Black musicians in Britain and America today). The seminal contribution of the Roma to music history – transforming, disseminating, blending and conserving – has already been noted. Yet documentation of that contribution prior to the age of recording is exiguous. What we do have is an abundance of testimony as to their musical prowess, and from sources as widely dispersed as eleventh-century Persia, Renaissance Italy, Restoration England, eighteenth-century Russia, and the nineteenth-century Balkans. Rather than subscribing to some mystical sense of special powers, it is more reasonable to understand Rom virtuosity in terms akin to the 41 A key revisionist text here, challenging not just grellmann but more recent scholars such as Angus Fraser (Fraser 1992), is lucassen, Willems and Cottaar 1998. This confronts some of the myths about origins, language and culture associated with the Roma; see also Willems 1997.

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task-specific training associated with trades and their guilds. For the Roma, music was an itinerant, and increasingly specialised, profession. It was associated with particular families – the children would learn several instruments from an early age – and even with particular villages, and building, repairing and selling instruments were all part of the package (there are very clear parallels here with the klezmorim of Eastern Europe). Once professional ensembles began to appear in the late nineteenth and especially the early twentieth centuries, an increasingly cosmopolitan idiom was adopted. It is something of a paradox, then, that in Hungary and Spain this came to be identified by some as a kind of national style. For the more successful and well-organised musicians, it made sense to settle in the cities, where there was a greater demand for their craft, but even in village communities Rom musicians in the Balkans acquired a very clear social function as the providers of ritual and entertainment music for dances, weddings, funerals and the rest. It is no adverse criticism to suggest that the Roma do not possess a music of their own.42 Quite apart from the distinction drawn by some Rom musicians between music for themselves and music for others (just as some will de-exoticise in private the stereotyped images they subscribe to in public), their entire ethos as entertainers has always depended on the appropriation of what is local – and therefore marketable – and its transformation in performance into something unique. As liszt recognised at an early stage, and as we noted in chapter 4, the distinctive identity of Rom music has less to do with repertories than with practices.43 The Roma traditionally carried styles from A to B, and when they settled in B they infused the surface styles of B with trace elements from A, often resulting in a form of urbanisation, and one might say orientalisation, of village idioms. Partly this describes a transit between East and West.44 The stages of that transit might be represented symbolically by way of three repertories associated with the Roma. All have been discussed in general terms, but the last of them will be given more detailed treatment here. First there is the zurla-tapan ensemble, which seems to vary little from region to region and exists today in a form that has changed little over the years. This can be demonstrated by comparing recordings

42 On this, see Hemetek 2007. 43 liszt 1859. 44 A recent detailed study, based on many years of ethnography with Macedonian Roma both at home and in diaspora (mainly New York), is Silverman 2012.

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made by Columbia Records in Turkey in the 1920s45 with ones made some fifty years later by Wolf Dietrich in gypsy camps in greek Macedonia and western Thrace (xanthi and Komotini).46 The continuity is striking, despite the fact that the dance in the Turkish field recording is particular to the specific locality. Moreover recordings made by Dietrich in Albania, A.l. lloyd in Macedonia, and more recently lozanka Peycheva and ventsislav Dimov in Bulgaria (Pirin Macedonia), Svanibor Pettan in Kosovo, and Ankica Petrović in Bosnia and Herzegovina all confirm that this has been a genre stubbornly resistant to change.47 Secondly, there is čalgija, an urban (old town) music associated especially with the central and eastern Balkans, and with a notable tradition in towns such as veles, Ohrid and Bitola. In the course of time, Macedonian čalgija, whether performed by Macedonian or Rom musicians, developed its own specific tonal dialect and expression, and with a pronounced oriental influence. Dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, it was never really a unified tradition – each city in Macedonia had its own type of čalgija in the past – but in general it negotiated a territory somewhere between the music associated with the Turkish fasil ensemble and the traditional village music of the eastern Balkans. This is evidenced above all by the prominence of many varieties of the fast (lake) circle dance (oro) and the Rom čoček. It is characteristic that čalgija repertory is often couched in asymmetrical rhythms. There are parallels between Macedonian čalgija and some of the instrumental music performed by Asia Minor greeks in the kafe aman and elsewhere. However, the Macedonian and Rom musicians who cultivated čalgija were less shrewd than their greek counterparts when it came to making the most of a burgeoning recording industry. There is no Macedonian equivalent to the plethora of recorded rebetika produced in the early part of the century. Some early field recordings can be found in the sound archive of the Folklore Institute ‘Marko Cepenkov’ in Skopje, and there are professional recordings in the archive of MRT (Macedonian Radio and Television), dating from the mid-1940s. Unhappily there are difficulties 45 Matrix Number CTZ 5704. 46 TOPIC TSCD 914. 47 The Dietrich and lloyd recordings are all available in the Sound Archive of the British library. For the Bulgarian recordings, see Peycheva and Dimov 2002; among the Kosovo recordings are those in Pettan’s video Kosovo through the Eyes of Local Rom (Gypsy) Musicians. Krško, Slovenia (1999); for Bosnia and Herzegovina, see the relevant tracks of the 1993 CD Music from an Endangered Minority: Bosnian Muslim Music (Washington DC: Smithsonian Folkways Records: SF40407).

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of accessibility for external researchers. Some older musicians – above all Petre vasilev (‘Pece’) Atanasovski – maintained a point of contact with older performances of čalgija in some of their recordings. But at the same time they were happy to forge a link between this sound world and the reconstructive practices of national ensembles such as Tanec (which Atanasovski joined in the early 1950s just when it was in the process of formation), the Orchestra of Folk Instruments of Radio-Televizia-Skopje, developed by Živko Firfov, and the Makedonija Folk Ensemble. Recordings made by these secondary ensembles, as also by current groups performing on traditional instruments such as the folk orchestra of the Macedonian Academy of Music or the Australian-based Tsrvena Kniga, are really much closer to a modern form of ‘Macedonian folk music’ than to traditional čalgija. For the most part, they perform a hybrid music akin to that developed by similar ensembles in Bulgaria. It is really an orchestrated form of village music, a product of today’s (or, more specifically, yesterday’s Communist) world. On the other hand, there are more conscientiously reconstructive recordings of čalgija, such as those made by Wouter Swets. Of one song from lazarapole, Swets remarks: ‘Possibly it sounded like this in the Ottoman Macedonian towns’.48 Čalgija is the term used to describe this urban repertory in Macedonia. But the phenomenon itself was much wider. There are similar urban repertories in Albania, for instance, where they are known as ahengu in the north or saze in the south (see chapter 7), and again there was very significant variation from town to town. An ensemble in the Italian-orientated Korça, better known for its mandolin ensembles, was very different from one in Shkodër in the north of the country. This latter, the ahengu shkodran, had a more oriental, makam-based idiom, again typically performed by Roma (early recordings can be heard at the Institute of Folkore in Tirana).49 But among the earliest of all are Odeon recordings dating from around 1920 of saze from Korça and Permeti, performing dance music and accompanying male polyphonic singing groups. Characteristically the instrumentation is clarinet, violin and lahuto, and it is common to find a highly ornamental ‘weeping’ clarinet (or wailing glissando vocal

48 See the liner notes to Swets’s CD Čalgija: Music of the Balkans and Anatolia 2 (PAN 2007CD). 49 For an historical perspective on this, see Zadeja 2006. It is worth noting here that the strong pentatonic basis of southern Albanian traditional music may well have acted as a kind of bulwark against the incursion of the makam-based idiom found in the north of the country. This point is made in Koço 2004.

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lines) over a strumming background and culminating in a lively dance. Many of these recordings are associated with leskovik in southeastern Albania. Pirro Miso, in a wide-ranging account of the different traditions of saze, tells us that the influence of the leskovik musicians was immense and geographically widespread.50 The third repertory associated with Rom musicians is muzica lăutărească. As Robert garfias has pointed out,51 it was Roma above all who played the key role in preserving Turkish elements in Romanian music, grafting these on to a wide range of highly specific regional styles that were centred on the violin and/or nai (panpipes), accompanied originally by cozbă (shortnecked lute) and later by tambal (dulcimer) and/or accordion. Tacîm-s (later taraf-s) were widespread in the Romanian world, including Moldova in the east and Wallachian villages such as Miroč and Radujevac in eastern Serbia. Yet for all the very wide regional variation, there was a clearly recognisable common framework of songs and dances based on traditional rural repertory. These included lyric songs (notably the cântec doina and cântec de dragoste), ballads and epic songs (cântece bătrâneşti [literally, ‘old people’s songs’]), as well as dances such as the hora, sîrba (a mixed circle dance), brâul (a belt dance) and bătuta. They were, and are, often presented as a suite of songs and dances, adapted to individual needs for performance at village celebrations, dominical feasts, weddings and the like. As to performance style, the technique of the lead violin is semi-improvised, with elaborate melodic floricele, wide vibrati and extensive glissandi. To present-day ears, this idiom probably sounds closer to western traditions than either the zurla-tapan repertory or Macedonian čalgija. We are likely to hear it as a species of something we can recognise as ‘Romanian folk music’. Yet, despite the equal temperament, the melodic basis of the music is rooted in makam, as garfias demonstrates, and much of the ornamentation has origins in Ottoman traditions. A good introduction to the idiom is the 1988 Ocora disc, Roumanie: musique des tsiganes de Valachie. Les lăutari de Clejani.52 Here the musicians of this now-famous village are presented in a series of lovesongs, dance suites and ballads. 50 Miso 2006. 51  garfias 1981. 52 Ocora C 559036. See also the last track of the lP Rumania. Traditional Folk Music (UNESCO Musical Atlas Collection: EMI Odeon C 064 – 18120). For a more recent CD of the Clejani musicians, but one that preserves traditional conventions, see Outlaws of Yore (CD 003), recorded mainly in 1991, before they became internationally famous as the Taraf de Haidouks.

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Compilation is the typical mode of presentation. Even the cântec de dragoste, speaking of love and its vicissitudes, is made up of two separate parts, one in peasant style, and one oriental, and characteristically it ends with a binary circle dance (hora). The suites are elaborate. One consists of a cântec doina using horsehair technique, followed by another cântec, an hora, a doina of the Haidouks, another hora, and a closing sîrba. Another rind de hore (suite of dances) has a sîrba followed by hora followed by sîrba followed by brâul.53 These, then, are some of the distinctive repertories of urban popular music in the Balkans, all closely associated with Roma. But one might also cite the widespread cultivation of sung ‘oriental’ poetry with texts in local vernaculars (in some cases, as in the ‘ashiki songs’ of Bektaşi [Bektashi] circles in Albania, they may be written in Arabic script). Of the many meeting-points between Turkish and South Slavic traditions of this kind, special interest attaches to Bosnia. The tradition of sevdalinka, briefly introduced earlier, represents one of the most expressive of the transitional urban genres of the Balkans. These love poems – usually short, with 8- or 10-syllable lines, and drawing on both Turkish and native sources – can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century. Indeed there are references to such poems in travellers’ diaries from a century before that, and there are specific texts (without music) in the otherwise Turkishlanguage Sarajevo Chronicles that appeared annually from the eighteenth century onwards (lodged in the gazi Hüsrev Medresa). likewise there are lyrics included in private letters from the nineteenth century, prior to the more extensive collections that appeared later in the century following the change of administration in 1878. Typically, sevdalinkas are songs of love, and they either celebrate women’s beauty in the abstract or address the beauty of particular persons in an idealised, elevated manner, often with a tragic or melancholy tone (Martin Stokes, writing of Turkish arabesk, refers to ‘discourses of sentiment’).54 But there are also public songs, sometimes patriotic in character, or describing particular towns and regions, or (and especially when the genre migrated to the hans in the nineteenth century) adopting a coarsely erotic tone (traditionally there was a separation between women’s and men’s songs). It seems that sevdalinka remained an unaccompanied

53 On the track ‘Dragoste’ [love] the doina is performed by lǎutari. Although the metre is regular, the recitative style is characteristic of the doina. 54 Stokes 1992, 11–14.

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genre until the nineteenth century, at which point there was some diversification in performance practice, just as there was a widening public for the songs, among Serbs as well as Bosnian Muslims. In addition to unaccompanied solo singing, male choruses were used, and instrumental accompaniments began, initially with saz, but later with accordion. It was also in the nineteenth century that serious collecting began, notably by ludvík Kuba and Franjo Kuhač, and in the early twentieth century by gerhard gesemann.55 gesemann was among the first to address the genre in a scholarly way, though his understanding of it as primarily a product of the higher social classes presents a highly partial view of its origins. In a later monograph, vlado Milošević suggested prototypes in socalled ‘flat songs’ [ravne piesme]), and went on to discuss the syncretic nature of the genre (including influences from Sephardic repertories), but he too subscribed to the values of his time and place, favouring intimate, domestic songs and regarding the more heavily ornamented songs associated with the han as degenerate.56 All this raises questions about the specifications and limits of sevdalinka. The genre title itself (sevdah is ‘love’ or ‘ecstasy’ in Turkish) belongs to relatively recent times. Traditionally these songs were known simply as Turkish songs, and this is how they are still described in eastern Serbia. More crucially, the term sevdalinka has itself been broadened out in recent years to cover a wide range of popular styles, including some ‘newly-composed folk music’, so that its use is now permissive. Even traditional sevdalinkas are adapted these days to contemporary tastes, through jazz fusions, classical arrangements and electronics. Historically, the turning point in the evolution of the genre came with the introduction of European instruments, at which point the intimate soundscape of voice and saz gave way to the louder and more open sound associated with an accordion-based ensemble. It is ironic, then, that some of the earliest extant recordings of sevdalinka, dating from 1907–8, are with accordion-dominated ensemble rather than saz. However the use of the ensemble here is very far removed from the familiar folkloric sound world. A comparison of two performances of ‘Kad ja podjoh na Benbašu’ [When I went to Benbassa], one recorded by the Trio Mustafa Sudžuka i Merkuš in 1908 and the other by Nada Mamula and the orchestra of RTv

55 gesemann made a number of recordings in 1937 (gesemann 1937). His fieldwork incidentally was an influence on Parry and lord. 56 Milošević 1964.

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Sarajevo in 1984–5 is revealing, not just because the early recording uses a different tune family, but because the accordion avoids conventional chordal harmony and joins voice and clarinet in a heterophonic presentation of the melody (with harmonic ‘thickening’) over a regular pulse on ‘def’ frame drum.57 There is a space separating this performance, which no doubt conveys something of a nineteenth-century tradition of performance practice, from the conventional folklorism cultivated by the Radio Sarajevo recording in the post-war years of Communist Yugoslavia. Even the older generation of sevdah singers contributed to this kind of folklorism, about which I will say more in chapter 19. But several of these singers were also committed to safeguarding the tradition of performing sevdalinkas with saz, complete with unequal temperament and makam-s. The ethnomusicologist Tamara Karača-Beljak has transcribed performances by six such musicians over a period of some fifteen years, including Selim Salihović, the Rom musician Sofka Nikolić, and the diva of the genre Emina Zečaj, the only one of the six who is still alive, and still performing, today.58 It would be wrong to suggest that such performers are involved in historically informed reconstructions. Rather they represent the continuation of a largely unbroken tradition, and because of this they can offer us real insight into the transitional status of the genre. It is not uncommon for the texts of sevdalinkas to make specific reference to the saz, or ‘nacre’ (pearl-inlaid) tambura, prompting reflections on the reciprocral relations of voice and instrument historically. The saz would only have been played by a man, and the later meeting-points between its highly ornamental performance style, surrounding the key notes of the makam with improvised embellishments, and the intimate, ‘interior’ style of women’s singing undoubtedly resulted in a uniquely poetic synergy. A perfect illustration is Emina Zečaj’s recording of the evocative, highly expressive sevdalinka ‘Il’ je vedro, il’ oblačno’ [Is it clear, is it cloudy?] with Mehmed gribajčević accompanying on saz.59 Aside from its tonal and mood-setting functions – establishing the ison, defining the scale and creating the appropriate melancholy Affekt – the saz weaves a delicate web of melodic tracery around the voice, conforming to the general melodic direction (seyir) of the song, but at certain times anticipating and at other times reacting to the inflections of the vocal line. Something

57 Piranha CD-PIR 2113. 58 See Karača-Beljak 2005 for an account of the evolution of the genre. 59 gramofon gCD 2001.

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of the subtlety and expressive nature of this vocal-instrumental dialogue can be gauged by comparing Zečaj’s recording with Alma Bandić’s performance, this time unaccompanied.60 Bandić too sings in the ornamental idiom, but in her recording the absence of saz changes the character of the song into a more conventional kind of folksong.61 And in any case, what both recordings tell us is that this is a tradition utterly dependent on unwritten conventions of performativity. There are notations of sevdalinkas, made of course ‘after the event’, and they include ‘Il’ je vedro’.62 But these underdetermine the music to such an extent that they tell us little. It is widely felt by aficionados of sevdalinka that, rather as with rebetika, the quality of a sevdah performance depends heavily on the emotional ‘authenticity’ conveyed by the singer. The word ‘soul’ is much used, and in some recent performance traditions, the grainy, bluesy quality of the performance becomes almost fetishised. The most familiar case is the multi-ethnic band Mostar Sevdah Reunion, the central protagonists of the film Sevdah: the Bridge that Survived, which describes the reunion of the musicians ten years after the destruction of the famous bridge. In the liner note to their album A Secret Gate, a local journalist writes about the singer Ilijaz Delić: ‘With every song he loses five minutes of his life’.63 This is symptomatic of the mystique of suffering that surrounds this music, intended to catch something of the resonance of Mostar’s pain and that of former Yugoslavia more generally in the aftermath of the wars of succession (one might almost transfer Martin Stokes’s description of arabesk as ‘no longer [. . .] just a form of music, but [. . .] a form of social and cultural existence’).64 Here the sevdalinka idiom merges with the earthiness associated with some Rom traditions, and it is notable that Mostar Sevdah Reunion has collaborated with both ljiljana Buttler and Šaban Bajramović. It is all a very long way from the sophisticated but entirely unaffected melancholy of Emina Zečaj in her discreet dialogues with the saz, and it is an equally long way from the more sanitised performances of sevdalinka promoted by RTv Sarajevo in the time of Communist Yugoslavia. Again a direct comparison makes the latter point. In her earlier years Zečaj could 60 This recording, made in 1984–5, is on the Smithsonian Folkways recording, CD Music from an Endangered Minority: Bosnian Muslim Music SF40407. 61  Of the next generation of singers, Hanka Paldum has an outstanding reputation, with a room dedicated to her in the museum of sevdah in Sarajevo. 62 See, for example, Žero 1995. ‘Il’ je vedro’ is No. 87. 63 Snail Records CC50014. 64 Stokes 1992, 91.

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be heard (and seen) performing with other sevdah stars accompanied by the National Tamburica Orchestra of Sarajevo. Her brisk, restrained, almost coy, performance of ‘Što li mi se Radobolja muti’ [Why is the Radobolja River so Troubled?], really belongs to the world of professional, classicised folklore that was familiar fare in the eastern bloc at that time, and it bears not the slightest relation to the pain-filled rendition of this same song by Mostar Sevdah Reunion on the first track of The Secret Gate.65 The recorded heritage allows us, then, to follow the fortunes of a single genre as it makes its way through different social and political settings, transforming its performance styles to meet the changing needs of particular institutions and the desires of particular taste publics. Sevdalinka can be an oriental lyric; it can be a Bosnian folksong; it can be an urban blues. It can be the national music of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

65 The Zečaj performance is available on a DvD anthology of sevdalinke. See Antologia BiH sevdalinke vol. 1. DvD003.

Chapter tWeLVe

JOIn the CLUB Following the Leader: Manolis Kalomiris that a bridge between east and West – between asia and europe – might assume a concrete political form was considered a realistic possibility by many Greeks in the aftermath of World War I. the Balkan Wars had already resulted in territorial expansion for Greece – opposed incidentally by a strengthening Communist party – and a corresponding contraction for the Ottomans. During World War I, the promise of a further step, allowing Greece to turn some of its asia Minor settlements into territorial acquisitions, was apparently dangled by the entente powers before the then prime Minister, eleftherios Venizelos. and when the treaty of sèvres (1920) licensed the provisional occupation of smyrna by Greece (as well as eastern thrace and the islands of tenedos and Imvros), the ‘great idea’ of Greek irredentism seemed at last within reach. richard Clogg reminds us that Venizelos’s supporters spoke openly at the time of a ‘Greece of the two continents and five seas’.1 A greater Greece had been a long-standing dream, but it was only when Venizelos came to power in 1910 – in the wake of the Young Turk revolution (which generally sharpened the focus of Balkan nationalisms) and the ‘Goudi coup’ of the Military League – that it was placed on the political agenda. The Venizelos ascendancy initially energised the political nation through a twin programme of domestic reform and territorial expansionism. But in due course his agenda proved divisive (the Royalists, as well as the Communists, took a negative view of his expansionist plans), and it was increasingly prey to the manoeuvres of Great Power politics and the unforeseeable events of war. It ended in the ‘catastrophe’ of 1922, as the forces of Turkish nationalism destroyed Smyrna and routed the Greeks of Asia Minor. This was the political background to the rise of the ‘national school’ of Greek composers, so labelled by Kalomiris in his ‘manifesto’ of 1908. Kalomiris’s return to Athens from Kharkov [Kharkiv] in 1910 coincided with 1 Clogg 1992, 95.

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the rise to power of venizelos. he began teaching at the Conservatoire shortly after, and his ambitions for Greek music formed in many respects a cultural counterpart to venizelian goals.2 it is likely that the support of venizelos was crucial in promoting his career in athens, though it was equally a guarantee of later hostility from anti-venizelian circles. if we bear in mind, too, that Kalomiris was from Smyrna, we can see that the Greek nation for which he offered such powerful cultural propaganda in his polemical writings and activities from 1910 onwards was indeed a nation ‘of the two continents’. the mix of idealism and power-broking involved in his anti-ionian campaigns might stand as an object lesson in the politics of culture. it was a strategic alliance between Kalomiris and nazos that blocked the appointment of Spiros Samaras, the leading figure in Greek music at the time, to the Directorship of the Conservatory in succession to nazos. it hardly helped that Samaras was a royalist rather than a venizelist. Yet none of these allegiances would prove permanent. Samaras fell out of favour with the royals due to the perceived ideology of his only ‘Greek’ opera Rhea,3 and, as we noted in chapter 9, the harmony between Kalomiris and nazos also turned out to be short-lived. their true interests had never really coincided, and the gulf between them as musicians could have been measured in light years. when Kalomiris consolidated his position he lost no time in dissociating himself from nazos. there was another dimension of cultural politics involved in Kalomiris’s campaign. already prior to his engagement with venizelian ideals, he had committed to the (demoticist) anti-katharevousa language reform associated with a progressive intelligentsia.4 although they were not all in sympathy with his venizelian views, the demoticists adopted Kalomiris as a powerful representative in the musical world, and he in turn valued his association with them, especially with Kostis palamas (whose text for the olympic hymn, ironically enough, was set by Samaras).5 Demoticist ideals had a particular context within Greek history, but they also harmonised with wider programmes of cultural nationalism. within such programmes

2 Frangou-psychopedis 1990; belonis 2009. 3 belonis 2009. 4 this commitment was strengthened by his reading of Yiannis psycharis’s seminal autobiography, To taxidi mou [My Journey], published in 1888, while a student in vienna. note that the ‘demotic’ was a construction with some capacity to unify the different regions of Greece. 5 other younger figures included nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) and angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951).

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traditional music was typically viewed as both analogous to, and a potential ally of, the vernacular language, and in this sense Kalomiris’s vision – a Greek national school built on demotic ideals – conformed. two genres of music were usually taken to represent Greece in this construction, and it is typical of the anomalies of cultural nationalism that neither was, in any exclusive sense, Greek. First, there was the postbyzantine repertory of sacred music shared by several cultures in the orthodox world, but to which Greece staked a special claim. and second, there was balkan-anatolian traditional music, of which the many varieties of Greek demotic music might be regarded as regional species. ‘My childhood was haunted by our folk songs, by the melodies and rhythms of our people, by our legends and traditions, by byzantium, its mythical Kings and its haunted monasteries. along with them, by Greek poetry [. . . .]’, he remarked in old age, perhaps with a little rose tinting.6 there was a space separating both these ‘Greek’ genres from the styles and conventions of european art music. and it is for this reason that Kalomiris’s project was one of transition, albeit undertaken from the perspective of a western-trained composer. there was no insincerity, let alone hypocrisy, in this; it was the way of nationalist composers everywhere to reach out from their turrets of enlightenment to make contact with ahistorical, ‘natural’ communities (or alternatively atemporal, spiritual communities) that were supposedly at some remove from western rationality. but there was more to the transition in Kalomiris’s case. the double-descended identity associated with the Greeks has already been discussed, and is indeed a commonplace of historiography and criticism. against this background, the agenda of the demoticist poets was in part to reclaim something of the world view of the Romaioi, representing the ‘east’ of the byzantines as against the ‘west’ of enlightened hellenism. Yet, and again the ironies abound, this act of reclamation was itself the work of western-educated intellectuals, constructing a vernacular (demotike) in the manner of cultural nationalists everywhere. Kalomiris’s enterprise was analogous, and he fell easily into step with this demoticist understanding of national identity. like the poets, and in sharp contrast to Georgios lambelet, he wanted to release the Greeks from the burden of their distant hellenic tradition, a tradition whose contemporary relevance was above all the preoccupation of western europe, and at the same time to restore something of the ethos of the Romaioi to the modern nation. in

6 See Kalomiris 1988, 16–18 for this account of his early encounters with folksong.

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this way a musically sophisticated composer from a cosmopolitan background could embrace the east from a secure footing in the west: as Kalomiris expressed it himself, he could forge a national style by cultivating a distinctive ‘Greek-oriental colour with related harmonic formations’.7 nationalist composers do not have to be political activists. Chopin composed what is probably the first canonic repertory of european nationalism, yet he was hardly politically engaged; if there were guns, they were indeed ‘smothered in flowers’. all the same, from the mid nineteenth century onwards it was common for composers to enter the reforming fray and to lend a practical hand in nation-building through music. For some – Smetana, for example – such institutional work was defining of nationalist commitments. and in the early twentieth century, that same sense of social responsibility attached to the conversion of a figure such as Karol Szymanowski, who rejected his ‘splendid isolation’ (his phrase) to engage with the (often nasty) politics of national renewal. this was Kalomiris’s way, too. he claimed for music a special place within the social order, and argued for the need to harness its unifying, organisational, and above all redemptive, power through education. he attacked the casual attitude adopted towards the arts in Greece, and sought actively to rally the next generation of composers to the national cause. he was well placed to campaign on behalf of this vision, and did so tirelessly during the 1910s, in his teaching, his fund-raising, his polemical articles, his lectures, and his compositions. indeed his success was such that he was soon to be surrounded by like-minded, though stylistically very different, composers, all happy to be identified as part of a national school. his outlook was inevitably changed by the ‘catastrophe’, but he played if anything an even greater proselytising and educational role in the decades following it, dominating music and musical life to world war ii and beyond.8 prior to settling in athens, Kalomiris had been exposed to three different cultural climates. First there was his early life in Smyrna, athens and istanbul. his musical education was centred on the piano, but during these years he also became aware of demotic ideals in literature. and it was also while a student in asia Minor that he came to know Greek traditional music, which was to form one reference point for his developing 7 Kalomiris 1988, 94. 8 his role as an educator was of seminal importance, and that included writing a harmony textbook, one of whose chapters is devoted to the problems of harmonising folksong.

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musical style. Second there were his years as a student at the vienna Conservatoire (1901–06). these were crucial not only for acquiring basic professional skills, but for expanding his repertorial knowledge and deepening his musical understanding. it was in vienna that he first heard wagner and the ‘new Germans’, an encounter that had consequences for his later operas, and for his entire approach to music and the poetic. the third context was Kharkov, where Kalomiris accepted his first employment in 1906, and where he remained for a further four years. the Kharkov years introduced him to the philosophy and some of the music of the balakirev circle, his models for the creation of a modern national school in Greece (in particular the highly structured concert series in Kharkov, privileging the national and the local, was revelatory). not the least interesting aspect of this was the sleight-of-hand with which he could convert russian exoticism into something closer to a Greek homeland. it was also while in Kharkov that he began corresponding with psycharis and palamas, among other demoticists, and it was here that he began his polemical writings for Noumas. the famous concert in athens, with its accompanying and divisive manifesto, took place right in the middle of the Kharkov years. the programme included several of his early piano works. these have an assurance, a command of métier and a formal control that took Greek music to a new level.9 Some of the titles evoke Chopin (‘ballade’, ‘nocturne’, later ‘prelude’), and it is interesting that in the two extant programmes for concerts given by Kalomiris in Kharkov, Chopin took pride of place.10 he would have known Chopin from his early student days, for the music had been performed in well-off domestic circles in Greece for some time, and following the nazos reforms it migrated to the public platforms.11 but while in Kharkov Kalomiris may have picked up on the special significance Chopin held for the balakirev circle. interestingly, the

  9 this is not the place to discuss in detail matters of musical text, but it should be noted that several of these early pieces were subject to later revision. 10 in the first of these concerts he was a participant. in the second he was sole performer, and he gives an account in his Memoirs (Kalomiris 1988) of the agonies of nerves he endured. it was this concert that decided Kalomiris against any thoughts of a performing career. 11  romanou 1996. Chopin was second only to beethoven in popularity in athens during these years.

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work that is common to both Kharkov programmes is the Fantasy op. 49, which is often viewed in nationalist terms.12 as for his early ballades, Kalomiris, like many before him, would have read the genre title as connoting the vernacular and the nation. Yet the musical style is closer to liszt than to Chopin, belonging to european high romanticism, and only slightly inflected by native elements. that the first of them (1905) was inspired by a poem from victor hugo’s celebrated Les orientales might be taken as symbolic of the transition between east and west,13 and it is fitting that aside from obvious textural affinities with liszt, the ‘oriental’ moments here make explicit reference to liszt’s so-called ‘gypsy scale’. the second of the ballades was a response to a palamas poem, while the third (1906) – Mazeppa-like – draws on a popular folksong about the wild ride of Death. here the oriental material is enclosed within the sound and fury, and in a curiously fragmentary counterpoint. later, as in the more atmospheric and poetic Second rhapsody of 1921, Kalomiris succeeded – especially in the quiet middle section – in creating oriental constructions of a more integral character. in his early songs, Kalomiris could assert more clearly the link between the demoticist agenda and his own programme of musical nationalism. For some he wrote his own texts, but he also turned to demoticists such as alexandros pallis, Miltiadis Malakasis and of course palamas. palamas’s Iambs and Anapests, a collection of poems first published in athens in 1897 and probably encountered by Kalomiris in 1905, was the basis for a two-part cycle for voice and orchestra, the first S’agapo [i love you] and the second Magiovotana [Magic Herbs]. the chronology is confused here, with Magiovotana completed before S’Agapo and given its first performance in 1914 (individual songs were composed between 1905 and 1914). but in any case this is one of Kalomiris’s most persuasive compositions, responding to the mix of fairy-tale, oriental fable and classical myth with a score that achieves a delicacy and restraint that are not always hallmarks of his music. at times it occupies a musical world not unlike that of Pélleas et Melisande. there is a similar blend of russian and wagnerian elements, but the arioso is closer to aria than in the Debussy work, and the gendering

12 Goldberg 2004. even adorno remarked that ‘one would have to have one’s ears well plugged not to hear in Chopin’s F minor Fantasy a certain kind of tragically elevated triumphant music speaking of how poland has not perished and [. . .] that one day she will rise again’. (adorno 1976, 174). 13 Samson 2006.

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is more blatant (the masculine-heroic element is a constant, but the feminine-seductive element may be in turn destructive or redemptive). the cycle consists of a prelude (wagnerian at times) followed by eight songs, of which the second, ‘old Mother life’, was the earliest to be composed. wagner lurks in the wings, especially in the third song. but russian-oriental styles constitute a more prominent background both to the supernatural elements in the songs and to the depiction of the erotic, which comes to the fore in songs 5–7. these influences are not obtrusive, and the truly striking feature of the music is the sense of flow and continuity that somehow binds together such a diverse collection of images and narratives. even the final peroration, with its explicit affirmation of national pride, is held in check. after settling in athens, Kalomiris tackled his first music drama O protomastoras [the Masterbuilder], the earliest version of which was completed in 1915. the libretto draws on an early play by the eminent poet-politician nikos Kazantzakis, after the familiar Greek (akritic) folk tale about the bridge over the arta demanding a human sacrifice. Kalomiris worked the story into a powerful drama with explicit symbolic resonance. he himself supplied a leitmotivic index, and the technique is informally wagnerian, with an evolving arioso that can also incorporate periodic song. Further to the Leitmotiven, the composer employed a type of stylistic characterisation that had a long history in opera. thus, according to context, literal and stylised folksong and dance sit alongside oriental pastiche, seamless late-romantic recitative (supported by open-ended motive working in the orchestra), and full-scale arias. and throughout Kalomiris reveals the true dramatist’s instinct for pacing and continuity, for the bold stroke, for the timeless lyrical moment (‘the sun, the sun’), and for the impassioned climax (Smaragda’s confession of love and her subsequent love-death). it is no criticism of the work to note that stylistic categories remain conventional in semiotic terms (harvesters, gypsies, lovers and sages are musically differentiated in predictable ways), but it does raise a question about Kalomiris’s wider claims. it is only in certain parts of the work – notably when Mana [Mother], the voice of intuitive wisdom rather than rational knowledge, prescribes the necessary sacrifice – that we approach that more integral ‘Greek-oriental colour with related harmonic formations’ Kalomiris identified with a Greek national style. O protomastoras is an opera of considerable dramatic power, but it depends more heavily on existing russian and German operatic conventions than the composer’s rhetoric might lead us to expect. as to rhetoric, the initial dedication of the work, ‘to the Masterbuilder of a Greater Greece, eleftherios venizelos’,

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seems to leave no doubt about one aspect of the symbolism of the bridge, though in later reception Kalomiris distanced the work somewhat from the association with venizelos. he had good reason to do so. it has been suggested that the subsequent neglect of O Protomastoras in Greece was due to the link with venizelos and i megali idea.14 Certainly it never matched the success of his second opera, Dahtylidi tis manas [Mother’s Ring], which was completed two years later in 1917. the epic quality of O protomastoras is replaced here by lyrical restraint blended with fantasy, including a ‘fairy-tale’ second act in the form of a dream. here the dying singer, an orphic figure representing the aspiring artist, tries to reach an unattainable mountain peak in the company of the Mountain nereid (in effect erofili, his lover) who has stolen the ring, the object of a symbolic tug-of-love between mother and lover. Katy romanou has written about a stylistic genealogy that takes us from the discreet orientalism of this second act back through the incomplete opera Mavrianos to rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel.15 in truth, the juxtaposition of a diatonic or pan-diatonic ‘reality’, grounded in folk music, with a world of orientalised ‘fantasy’, often based on chromatic symmetries, is fundamentally russian. Yet the oriental elements take on a new meaning in the context of Dahtylidi tis manas, as a quality hovering somewhere between exoticism and indigeneity (the traditional 5/4 dance used for the nymphs is a case in point). along with the greater preponderance of traditional music, associated with ‘ordinary’ people such as Sotiris, with story-telling, and with Christmas festivities, as well as of byzantine music (the Christmas hymn I Parthenos Simeron), this ensures that the tone of Dahtylidi tis manas is closer to Kalomiris’s ideal of a ‘Greek-oriental colour’ than anything in O protomastoras. the real triumph of the opera lies in its art of transition. the different musical worlds – the three acts present in some ways separate stylistic tableaux – retain their semiotic distinctness, but they emerge in the end as compatible worlds, in effect part of a single larger world. the Leitmotiven help achieve this, but there is more to it than that. if Dahtylidi tis manas took a step away from wagner towards russian music and a more generic national style, the Levendia Symphony (1918– 20) returned to a decidedly heroic tone. in common with other symphonists around the edges of europe, Kalomiris clearly felt comfortable

14 See the note by haris politopoulos accompanying the lyra recording of the opera. 15 romanou 2005.

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with the lofty idealism and humanism of the beethoven archetype, easily adopting a tone that no longer seemed available to composers in central europe. this is a programme symphony, dedicated to palamas and celebrating Greek levendia [‘valour’ or ‘manliness’] in several manifestations. in the manner of the ‘new Germans’, Kalomiris was committed to the poetic as a shaping force in music. elsewhere i have discussed the tortuous reasoning in weimar polemics by which music, an instrument of liberation from language-based understanding, was deemed to achieve the status of a higher poetic (superseding language) only through association with a poetic idea.16 the goal was a new and higher unity, a fusion of sister arts, not just in music drama but in programme symphony and symphonic poem. this was the Kalomiris aesthetic. he had already composed several chamber works with a programmatic basis prior to the Levendia Symphony. indeed works without some acknowledged external source of inspiration are few and far between. in this first symphony the quality of levendia is portrayed through nature and character painting in the first movement, an evocation of the dead but immortal heroes in the second, a soldier’s feast in the third, and religious devotion in the last. there are folk-based episodes, for example in the development section of the first movement and in the scherzo, and there is a choral byzantine hymn to the virgin in the finale. but in essence this is a cyclic symphony in the lateromantic european manner. its affirmation will sound heroic to some, vulgar to others. with powerful symbolism, the symphony was given its first performance on the occasion of the liberation of Smyrna by the Greek army in 1920. two years later the venizelian dream was over, and it is hardly surprising that the national school, as conceived by Kalomiris, took a knock (there was a personal dimension to the tragedy for Kalomiris with the destruction caused to his home town Smyrna, followed a year later by the death of his son). the flow of compositions accordingly slowed in the 1920s. he occupied himself with his many public roles at this time, but compositionally he dealt mainly with revisions and occasional pieces. then, in the 1930s, major works began to appear again: orchestral songs to poetry by the nationalist poet Sikelianos, the Symphony of the Simple and Good people, the preludes for piano, tryptych for orchestra and Symphonic Concerto for piano and orchestra. and from the 1940s onwards he

16 Samson 2003, 192–7.

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composed a further three operas, a substantial corpus of vocal music, two symphonic poems, and a third Symphony (Palamiki). it is hard to generalise about this second phase of creativity, which takes us right up to 1961. but several points can be made. Some commentators detect a new inwardness in the post-‘catastrophe’ music.17 the heroic tone was moderated, and there was a muted response to selected modern idioms, especially those of French music. indeed for Kalomiris, as for several east european composers, early twentieth-century French music enabled a more integral approach to native traditions due to the meeting-points between French and Greek-oriental modalities. in later years he was less prescriptive about what qualified as ‘Greek music’, but fundamentally his colours were still nailed to the mast of his national school, and at a time when this aesthetic had lost favour elsewhere. it is tempting to compare him with vaughan williams in england, another composer who blazed a national, indeed a modern, trail in youth, but in the post-war era came to seem not just a conservative figure but a culturally restrictive one. if we now leap to the end of Kalomiris’s musical journey, it is not because the compositions of the 1930s and 1940s lack interest. on the contrary, some of his finest music appeared during these years, and key incremental changes took place in his musical language. indeed it was these changes that made possible his final opera, Constantine Palaeologus, which he himself regarded as his finest achievement and which was completed as late as 1961. in purely musical terms, he was probably right, but the undiluted nationalism of the work is hard to take these days. this opera, which turns again to nikos Kazantzakis and takes as its subject matter nothing less than the fall of Constantinople, represents the summation, or obituary, of the Greek national school. it is instructive to set Constantine Palaeologus alongside the two early operas. two things are immediately apparent, and they are related. First, the juxtaposition of styles characteristic of the early works has been replaced by a more seamless and integrated musical flow which goes a long way towards realising Kalomiris’s aim: ‘to combine western Music with byzantine chants and modes into a unified artistic whole’.18 and secondly, both the harmonic language and the orchestral texture are more complex than in the early operas. indeed it is because conventional triadic

17 belonis 2009. 18 in the preface to the piano version of the opera, quoted by Markos tsetsos in Svolos 2004, 142.

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harmony is used more sparingly that modal and polymodal structures are able to permeate the musical texture in a more integral way, resulting in a sophisticated, multi-layered soundscape. one result is that we lose some of the more accessible (stirring, colourful or seductive) moments associated with O protomastoras and Dahtylidi tis manas. but we gain in their place a new coherence, in which the several constitutive elements of the musical style are closely welded together. it is no exaggeration to claim that in this work the bridge to the east stands firm. it is perhaps the closest Kalomiris came to music of transition. how we read the transition is another question. Markos tsetsos reminds us that for the Greeks the double threat to the City from east and west promoted cultural isolation as a source of power.19 the relevance of this reading to the twentieth-century catastrophe would have seemed obvious to Kazantzakis and Kalomiris. it chimes too with our earlier observations on church chant – again an impulse to protect Greek identity from polluting influences from both directions – and even with our comments on the equivocal status of popular music. the Greek nation, in all these cultural manifestations, found its centre of orientation in a place of ‘in-between’. For Kalomiris, that centre absorbed a particular east and claimed it, as a spiritual if no longer as a political property. the final words of the opera – ‘in years to come, in times to come, they shall be ours anew!’ – had better be understood on these spiritual and allegorical levels. it is, we hope, the Greek spirit – embodied in the immortal Mothers, the archangel and the dead heroes guarding the holy Chalice, watched over by the protective virgin, our lady of Constantinople – that will survive, whatever the catastrophe. the contemporary allegory has additional layers, of course. the opera speaks of self-seeking politicians, of a church hierarchy caught between religious and political imperatives, of the populace as a collective victim, and even of a commentator-seer, in the form of a firewalker (the mystical power of the anastenarides). but the idealism is there too: in anna, an embodiment of self-sacrificing love whose allegorical link with the virgin is made explicit, and in Constantine himself, a Greek hero at once traditional and modern. Kazantzakis was influenced by nietzsche, and it is easy to see Constantine here as an archetype of nietzschean man, overcoming the seductions of love to emerge ‘strong enough for freedom’. he is perhaps the last of the nietzschean heroes to issue from the

19 ibid., 143.

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operatic traditions of eastern europe, his voice a distant echo of those of Szymanowski’s King Roger and enescu’s Oedipe. like the voice of Kalomiris himself, it is heroic, but no longer of its time. Drawing the Circle: The Greek National School in his 1908 ‘manifesto’ Kalomiris argued that an authentic ‘national school’ should be ‘based on the music of our unspoiled, authentic folksongs [. . .] embellished with all the technical means [. . .] of the musically advanced peoples’.20 two constitutive interactive elements are proposed: so-called folk music, which is supposedly natural and national, and the techniques of contemporary art music. note too the proposed relation between them: base and embellishment. words are one thing, notes another, and it is not always easy to map this prospectus onto the reality. Sometimes it seems that the principal entrance test for the national school, aside of course from professing verbal allegiance to its ideals, was to admit the right sort of foreign influences. positioning oneself correctly in relation to contemporary music seemed in practice more important that basing one’s music on ‘our unspoiled, authentic folksongs’. indeed conservative, minimally processed, pastiche folksongs were not considered appropriate. at the end of his life, in the preface to the score of Constantine Palaeologus, Kalomiris argued that ‘Greek music is much more than a simplistic imitation of Greek folk songs [. . .] much more than an imitation of bouzouki music’. it is familiar rhetoric for latter-day nationalists – compare Szymanowski, ‘our national music is more than the stiffened ghost of the polonaise or the mazurka’ – and no doubt Kalomiris had specific targets in mind, notably Georgios lambelet.21 according to Kalomiris, the imperative was to explore the transformative potential of traditional music, its capacity to reshape musical syntax in alliance with ‘the technical means of the musically advanced peoples’. this would be a reasonable description of some of his music, but only some of it. where other composers are concerned, we face yet greater anomalies. Consider two composers from different generations, Marios varvoglis (1885–1967) and Yannis Constantinidis (1903–1984). ioannis belonis reminds us that varvoglis began writing for Noumas around the same time

20 little 2001, 96–8. 21  there is comparative discussion of Kalomiris’s and lambelet’s views on folk music in little 2001.

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as Kalomiris, that he participated in the debate surrounding Kalomiris’s athens concert, and that in general he lent his voice to the demoticist cause and to the strengthening call for a national school in music.22 however, this is not obvious from his music. based mainly in paris in his formative years, he was by no means the only Greek composer to succumb to modern French music as an alternative to German symphonism; even Kalomiris dabbled with this music, widely regarded as prestigious. indeed in varvoglis’s case parisian influences extended beyond music to include the (then) neo-classical tendencies of the poet Jean Moréas. in any event, he remained in paris right up to 1920, the eve of the catastrophe, and some Greek commentators like to say that the music he composed there found a happy meeting-point between some of the more conservative French idioms and native Greek traditions. if this is so, it is at least clear which of the two ingredients is the more prominent. in practice varvoglis’s music is anchored to a moderately toned French neo-classical style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to which Greek dance rhythms and references to demotic music added something of the couleur locale to which paris in particular was highly receptive. even on his return to athens, where he became an influential teacher (though in later years somewhat on the edge of things due to his leftist political views), this remained varvoglis’s way, though he was patronised by Kalomiris and professed his support for the nationalist agenda. the lyrical neo-classicism of the Suite pastorale for string orchestra – closer to Fauré than to ravel – is characteristic. it is the landscape of watteau that is recalled in this pastorale, ordered and elegant and not at all suggestive of the harsher climes of the eastern Mediterranean. even when the intonation appears to point towards Greece (as in the theme of the second movement, with its augmented second in the head motive, or in the dance rhythm of the finale), the contexts and settings are so influenced by French music that these moments will tend to be heard as exoticisms. this is characteristic of varvoglis’s music more generally, and it was recognised by some Greek critics. reviewing the Suite pastorale, Minos Dounias remarked: ‘if we also take into account the harmonic labyrinths, we wonder again: what is left here that is Greek? only the composer’s good intentions. the means of expression: form, technique, harmony, all

22 belonis 2009.

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the spirit of this music, is the product of centuries of western civilisation’.23 the 7/8 kalamatianos dance in the finale of his piano Sonatina (1927) and the fragmentary reference to a folk-like melody enclosed within his Meditation for string ensemble provide further examples of Greek tokens in a French landscape. interestingly, it was in some of his Piano Pieces for Children, which span several decades of his creative life, that he ventured into more exploratory worlds of harmony and texture (compare bartók’s Microkosmos), seeking out genuinely novel settings for melodies that were either based on or inspired by Greek sources.24 but these little pieces are not entirely characteristic. even works that signal their Greek orientation more explicitly, such as his Greek Rhapsody for piano, seldom really escape established frames of stylistic reference, in this case derived essentially from liszt. returning to Kalomiris’s original manifesto calling for music based on folksongs, and embellished with advanced methods, we would need to invert the terms ‘based on’ and ‘embellished with’. none of this is to criticise varvoglis. what is at issue is the reality of a Greek ‘national style’, as Kalomiris conceived it. in Constantinidis, one of the last composers with some claim to membership of the national school, ‘base’ and ‘embellishment’ really do align with Kalomiris’s prescription. he based more-or-less his entire modest output of art music (as Kostas Yannidis he was also a composer of theatre music and popular song) on traditional music, and especially the traditional music of his asia Minor homeland. in his orchestral music (much of it written in the late 1940s), including the Dodecanese Suites,25 the three Greek Dances, and the asia Minor rhapsody, he presented original melodies relatively unchanged but in charming harmonic and orchestral settings, and including nicely crafted contrapuntal working and subtle modal interplay. he gave voice in this way to songs and dances from the black Sea, Cappadocia, Smyrna and the western coast generally. there was no chauvinism in this. Constantinidis wrote music that is as unpretentious as it is inclusive, incorporating turkish as well as Greek melodies, and at no 23 See Minos Dounias’s review of three chamber music concerts in Neoellinika Grammata (18.3.1939), reprinted in Dounias 1963, 34–35. 24 Compare the two series of ‘easy pieces’ by Kalomiris, 1906–12 and 1939 respectively. there are also contributions to this genre by Yannis Constantinidis (44 Children’s Pieces). it seems that Dounias was instrumental in promoting a native pedagogical music. 25 the first of these suites, composed in 1948, was dedicated to Samuel baud-bovy, who conducted its first performance in Geneva in 1949. For an english-language commentary on Constantinidis’s life and music, see little 2001, 168–243.

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point seeking to convert indigenous elements into anything resembling a national epos. So how does Constantinidis fare in relation to Kalomiris’s ideal? ironically, given that his music is imbued with native songs and dances, he does less well than varvoglis. like all nationalist composers, Kalomiris wanted most of all to be taken seriously in an international arena, and to that end indigenous materials had to be charged with ambition; they needed to participate in a discourse of the ‘musically advanced peoples’. on the other hand the modernisms should be compatible with the native materials, and in practice this meant one could proceed so far and no further. all this was very far removed from the easy listening offered by Constandinidis in works that are more subtly composed than they may seem. he too had studied in Germany, had responded to French influences, and had been genuinely close to an acknowledged Greek modernist, nikos Skalkottas. but his way was different. it seems that for Kalomiris the ‘technical means [. . .] of the musically advanced peoples’ could refer to anything ‘beyond’ the italian styles of the ionians but falling short of Schoenbergian atonality. the national school was more about rhetoric than style, and the composers associated with it made up a broad church, some leaning to French, others to German, and yet others to russian styles. Most could claim that indigenous traditions formed a reference point in their music (at least in vocal settings and explicit folksong arrangements), though it is possible to attach more importance to the shaping role of these traditions than the musical evidence can support. if we listen to a good cross-section of this music, we will be struck first by the high professional level of many of the compositions, and second by how amorphous is any quality of ‘Greekness’ we might attach to it. antiochos evanghelatos (1904–1981), despite his Cephalonian origins, was one of Kalomiris’s closest disciples. his music travels from the (at times) hindemithian neo-classicism of the Sinfonietta (1927) and Suite in D minor (1934), through the overture for a Drama (1937), not the occasional piece its title suggests, to the symphonic poem Coasts and Mountains of Atticus (1953), composed in a late-romantic idiom that allows delicate, impressionistic tone-painting to sit alongside big, full-blooded ‘cinematic’ climaxes. on another route it takes us to the symphonic ballad Death and the Maiden to verses by politis (1941) and the Four Cavafy Songs (1961). there are works with explicit Greek themes (Byzantine Melody; Variations and Fugue of a Greek Folksong), but evanghelatos’s music tells us that he belongs – right to the end; observe his dates – to the same German

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late-romantic tradition that had formed Kalomiris’s own starting-point as a composer. this raises an issue that will be appear in relation to other repertories in South east europe. Styles sit oddly with dates. For others, the post world war ii years represented a moment of change, the point at which they responded to the climate of the new in european music. one such was leonidas Zoras (1905–1987), a student of Kalomiris in athens before he went on to study in berlin in 1938 (specifically as preparation for a position as Director of the proposed State opera in athens). his early music – songs and piano pieces in the main – moved between French and German styles, with occasional reference to the idioms of traditional music. arguably his best work is to be found in songs and song cycles, of which the earliest of significance were the ten Sketches for voice and piano composed in the late 1920s, with a moderately progressive harmonic language, including whole-tone clusters and polymodality. other works composed prior to berlin included a set of Greek Dances for orchestra and the evocative orchestral piece Thrilos [legend] of 1936, given its first performance in berlin in 1939. before returning to athens in July 1940, Zoras was involved in an event of some significance. he it was who encouraged his teacher (and then father-in-law) Kalomiris to stage Dahtylidi tis manas in berlin in February 1940, rehearsing the work and conducting one of the four performances himself.26 this opera, with its folk-legendary ethos, was actually perfectly suited to the official requisites of post-1933 Germany, and it was apparently appreciated. but the whole event invites an excursus on the tricky question of political affiliation in the 1930s, when governments in South east europe veered sharply to the right in response to the Great Depression, even as Communism was on the rise.27 it is a question we will also address briefly in relation to Croatia and bulgaria. Zoras must have known something of the political realities inside Germany. he was more interested in art than politics, though some might ask if it was an option to be apolitical. as for Kalomiris, he moved with the tide on these matters. as Katy romanou has pointed out,28 he and other musicians, interested in the successes for themselves and for Greek music that came with performances in Germany, made little effort to find out

26 the production was supposed to run for six performances, but it was curtailed after four. 27 in Greece, some of the more disadvantaged refugee populations from asia Minor were especially susceptible to this rightward political swing. 28 romanou 2009a.

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what was really happening there. During the Metaxas years, cultural links with Germany were strong (Frankfurt opera performed wagner’s Ring in athens in november 1938), and the interest shown by the regime and by successive puppet governments in musical institutions was welcome. a key figure was the writer Kostis bastias, a close associate of Metaxas, and the power behind the formation of the State opera. bastias was much lauded by Kalomiris, and so too were ministers of the reich, not least Goebbels. it was also during the occupation that the State orchestra was founded, with Kalomiris conducting its first concert in February 1943, performing his Triptych for orchestra – a tribute to venizelos – on the very day that palamas’s funeral prompted massive anti-nazi demonstrations in athens. in the aftermath of the war, Kalomiris was not called to account. but the Kalomiris archive does possess an ‘apology’ prepared in advance by the composer, in which he not only spelt out that many Greek composers were in the same boat, but revealed all too clearly his failure to understand the real motives of the nazis in promoting his and other music from South east europe.29 Zoras meanwhile was taken into custody in 1945, but released shortly after. there was little appetite for witch-hunts against collaborators in Greece at a time when energies (partly under external pressure) were directed towards what was perceived to be a major Communist threat. in this climate, composers such as alekos Xenos, a Communist from the pre-war years and active in the wartime resistance, were the ones in the firing line. all this provides a context for the stylistic departures of the immediate post-war years. Zoras himself began to look in new directions following his Symphony of 1947, notably in three works of the early 1950s: the Concertino for violin and eleven woodwinds, which explores sound colours in interesting ways, and the song-cycles Instantaneous, six aphoristic and barely tonal settings of haiku texts by Seferis, and Prosfora [offering], a set of laments alternating Sprechgesang and byzantine-inspired legato melody against sparse, often organum-like accompaniments. all three works were performed to a mixed critical reception at the american concerts in athens in 1952, of which more later. and they paved the way to a decade of radical and interesting music by Zoras, including the song-cycles I psihi [the Spirit] (angular vocal lines against dissonant backcloths) and 14 Cavafy Songs (freely atonal and non-metred), the piano Sonata and the

29 ibid.

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choral composition Ta dhora [the Gifts], where traditional idioms find new energies in complex harmonies. nor was Zoras the only composer who responded to these winds of change. Georgios poniridis (1887–1982), whose early works include a byzantine Chant for choir and orchestra (1924), was one of several to have explored the transitions between post-byzantine sacred music and contemporary european idioms. but he too turned to a more radical, exploratory idiom in later works, including his three piano trios and his Concerto for Cello, Strings and Crotales.30 like Kalomiris and many others, he was an immigrant from asia Minor. and one might add here a further group who arrived from russia, including aristotelis Kundurov (1897–1969), who reached athens in 1930 (for a brief period he was the teacher of Xenakis). even in later works, such as the symphonic poem Orpheus and Eurydice (1962), Kundurov’s stylistic ancestry in russian music remains clear. the shadow of borodin falls over the opening gestures of this work, and the subsequent repetitions and formal intercutting strengthens such associations. the lisztian thematic transformations that unite the extended outer sections in slow tempo with the central episodes also link this music rather specifically to russian traditions of programmatic symphonic music. when he first arrived in Greece Kundurov’s first move was to compose a Suite-fantaisie sur les thèmes populaires grecs. this was an astute move, and other immigrant composers staked their claim to Greek identity in a similar way. there were good reasons for them to do so. Such composers were not easily integrated within the close-knit communities of Greek musicians, whose world had been badly shaken in the aftermath of the catastrophe. it was a context in which mainland-born Greeks were keen to hold on to positions of influence. on the other hand, some of those arriving from asia Minor or russia had already established international reputations abroad, and of these the most significant was petros petridis (1892–1977), an important figure in Greek art music, and one who worked hard to present himself to the west as an alternative to Kalomiris as the leading Greek composer of the day.31 like poniridis, petridis was interested in transitions between a byzantine inheritance and western traditions. born in Cappadoccia, where the byzantine world loomed large, and spending his formative years in

30 one might also mention here iakovos halliassas (b. 1920). 31  petridis’s lectures on ‘Greek Folklore and Greek Music’, given to King’s College, london in 1918–19, are discussed in little 2001, 100–5.

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Constantinople, he continued his musical studies in paris. he was a man of real intellectual breadth, working not only as a musician, but as a journalist for the foreign as well as the Greek press, as an administrator, and as a part-time academic teaching Greek philology at the Sorbonne. his first major orchestral composition was a lively (mainly 5/8) Klephtic Dance, composed in 1922. it was one of the very few works he did not destroy in 1926, and it stands as a stylistic reference point in his music, echoed in several later works, notably the first movement of his piano Concerto. as the purgation of 1926 indicates, petridis entered a new creative phase at that time, beginning with his First Symphony (1926–28). the broadly neoclassical, contrapuntally driven, and modally shaped idiom of this work is characteristic of much of his inter-war music, closer to roussel than to Stravinsky. From this point onwards petridis made a distinctive contribution to the national school, allowing his engagement with post-byzantine repertories to extend beyond the apotheotic references we can find in numerous Greek compositions (especially in finales) to the point where it could influence harmonic structure at deeper levels, partly based on a personal systematisation of ‘Greek’ modes. this is evident in the modalities (complete with ison) used in sacred works such as the Byzantine Sacrifice and oratorio Saint Paul, and in epic symphonic compositions. a good example is his Fourth (‘Dorian’) Symphony, composed during the 1940s. this work really does represent a kind of synthesis of traditions, and it is the more persuasive because it effects the transition in precise technical ways. in other words, the middle ground between two different worlds – byzantine and european – is explored by means of transformational procedures that are built into the substance of the musical argument. it is tempting to set petridis’s Fourth Symphony alongside Kalomiris’s earlier Levendia Symphony. again there is a political resonance – it is avowedly a musical response to the years of occupation and resistance – and again the tone is heroic; in a note on the work, petridis actually used the term levendia in relation to the first movement. Moreover both symphonies culminate in a byzantine hymn. but the comparison is revealing only of surfaces. in the ‘Dorian’ Symphony, as elsewhere, petridis avoided the big, gestural writing characteristic of Kalomiris. he preferred to build intensity curves by controlling the density of information in a work, notably through the rigorous contrapuntal working that seems to have represented his most natural expressive mode. his love of counterpoint (the fully worked fugue in the scherzo of the symphony), taken together with variation technique (the finale) and cathartic chorales (again the finale),

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suggests an affinity with reger (he studied in leipzig), and this is reinforced by works such as the two Chorales and variations on byzantine themes. Yet petridis stood apart from this world too. partly due to its byzantine inflection, his voice remained a distinctive one in the chorus of the national school. it is an obvious irony attaching to ‘schools’ of any kind that they are usually defined by one or two distinctive voices. the composers who determine the collective category, in short, also transcend it. the lasting importance of Kalomiris, and perhaps also of petridis, has in the end little to do with their allegiance to a national school whose foundations were anything but firm, and everything to do with their artistic individuality and quality. and in this respect one other composer can stand alongside them. the music of emilios riadis (1885–1935) may indeed be the strongest of all, though it has come down to us in such a confused state that much of it is only available in reconstructions. riadis stands apart for another reason. he was the one composer linked to the national school who hailed from what would become the northern Greek territories. he was born into the Greek community of ottoman Salonica, and from an early age was involved with the nationalist struggle there. Mark Mazower has noted that european fashions and ethnonational tensions developed simultaneously among the Salonican bourgeoisie in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.32 the multiple languages came to be freighted with ideology, and the city became a focus for both religious and ethnic struggle, before it became Greek Salonica in the wake of the balkan wars. the subsequent Muslim exodus and the population exchange a decade later completed that task (and the uprooting of the Jews from the city centre following the Great Fire of 1917 is another part of the story). the city, in a word, was hellenised. already in the late nineteenth century initiatives from the Greek community had contributed to the gradual development of a formal musical culture. ioannis belonis has summarised some of the institutions involved at the turn of the century, including cultural societies and related educational programmes.33 the most important was the papafeio orphanage, founded in 1903, but during the second decade several private conservatories were also founded. venizelos, whose provisional government was established in Salonica in 1916 in

32 Mazower 2005. 33 belonis 2009.

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opposition to ‘old Greece’ and the royals, was himself supportive of these developments, recognising the importance of raising the cultural level of the northern territories. and we might add that following the catastrophe the influx of refugees, traumatic as it was, brought a new potential taste public in the form of middle-class, educated Greeks from asia Minor. in 1915 riadis returned to Salonica, where he had originally studied with Dimitrios lalas – a one-time associate of wagner – after seven years’ study abroad, first in Munich (1908–10) and then in paris (1910–15).34 he became a professor of piano at the newly established State Conservatory, but that aside, relatively little is known of his life. his erudition was considerable – an interest in oriental cultures enabled him to give lectures on Chinese music, ancient egyptian music, Japanese poetry and the like – and his credentials as a published poet were high too. it seems that he rather promoted the aura of mystery that surrounded him, and it may well be that his singular personality, narcissistic but deeply insecure, not only shaped his music, but was partly responsible for the chaos of the manuscript legacy.35 it seems possible that for riadis an exotic vie intèrieure of mainly oriental provenance was primarily a means of distancing the immediacy of life. that inner world was given expression in both the imagery and the musical language of many of his songs, but it also permeated the chamber works, whose qualities are becoming increasingly clear to us thanks to the discoveries of leotsakos, together with the reconstructive surgery of Fivos anoyanakis, byron Fidetzis and nikos Christodoulou.36 the problem here is that there is often no single fair copy of a work, but rather a plethora of versions, whose chronology is not always clear.37 For riadis, a perfectionist and an intensely self-critical musician, composition did not come easily. we may begin with the songs, which were admired by Kalomiris himself, and which occupy a very special corner of Greek art music. even a glance

34 lalas is an intriguing figure, not least because much of his music was destroyed by a torpedo in 1917. there are references to his ‘words’ with wagner in Cosima wagner’s diaries, notably on the relationship between ancient and modern Greeks. 35 George leotsakos presents a finely balanced and instructive essay on the composer in leotsakos 2005b. 36 ibid. See also the notes by leotsakis and byron Fidetzis on the lyra CDs of riadis’s music, notably lyra CD 0718 and lyra CD 0116. 37 Much of this material has now been digitised and is available to view online at the ‘lilian voudouris Music library of Greece’ at the Megaron in athens. it includes manuscript material related to the three string quartets and the cello sonata.

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at the titles of some of the published songs indicates synergies between east and west: Chansonette orientale; Jasmins et minarets; Cinq chansons macédoniennes; Treize petites mélodies grecques; Nine Short Greek Songs, which include portraits of turkish, egyptian, albanian and patras women (four texts by pallis), as well as a song to Kambyssis’s erofili. Musically, too, riadis draws together – more successfully, i believe, than any other Greek composer – elements from demotic, oriental and byzantine traditions, forging them into a musical language that can signify diverse cultural landscapes while remaining essentially unified. riadis has been described as a Greek Musorgsky, but if we are to invoke a russian aesthetic at all, this can only be half the story.38 it is true that the harmonic opacities, and the ‘realistic’ musical mapping of speech rhythms and inflections, do echo Musorgsky, and in some songs there is a comparably dark tone of psychological realism, ‘making strange’ the conventional gesture. Yet another side of russian music, represented by rimsky-Korsakov, also casts a shadow, especially on those songs where the ‘real’ serves as a foil for a world of fantasy and imagination, a nonreality encapsulated in oriental themes and treatments. Debussy likewise inherited these two very different facets of the russian tradition, and there are good arguments for situating riadis in relation to a Debussyan aesthetic. when Debussy lost faith in his own ‘interior landscape’, necessary though it was to his creativity, he went on to treat it ironically. it is distinctly possible that riadis was tortured by a similar loss of faith in the exotic in the face of impinging realities, though perhaps without finding any resolution. this would go some way towards explaining why composition remained for him a deeply problematic activity. in his Nine Short Greek Songs, a folksong-derived idiom forms a reference point, but it never becomes the sole or dominant character. likewise oriental inflections are often present, but they are integrated within the musical flow, accommodated rather than set apart. a case in point is the last song, ‘Maid going to the fountain’ to a text by riadis, where a folksong idiom depicts the maiden and restrained oriental roulades are associated with the seduction. Contrasted modalities are employed, but in the end the two worlds are subordinated to the continuity provided first by ‘realistic’ speech rhythms in the vocal line and then by a stratified piano accompaniment, with stable pedal-note platforms, an intricate, diversified

38 in some pieces, notably his Five Dance Songs, riadis almost approaches the Stravinsky of works such as Pribaoutki.

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harmonic layer, and a fragmentary melodic layer echoing vocal motives. there are moments of periodicity in the song, but equally moments where the main shaping element is an expressive imperative linked to speech inflection and mood. other songs work with similar ingredients in variations on a realist theme. if the first song, ‘widow’, intensifies the dramatic realism, the four settings of pallis, all genre portraits of women, add a lighter element of pictorial realism. the first two of these, ‘turkish woman’ and ‘egyptian woman’, have oriental settings, but are no more explicitly oriental in musical idiom than ‘albanian woman’ and ‘Girl from patras’ (note the ‘aman aman’ of popular song in this sophisticated harmonic context). intertexts are intriguing. to compare riadis’s setting of ‘albanian woman’ with the one by napoleon lambelet is to glimpse in an instant the contrasted geo-musical worlds that lie behind these two composers. but even more interesting is a comparison between riadis’s delicately orientalised, parlando setting of Yannakis’s final song to erofili and the more sustained, conventionally expressive, but no less beautiful, version of the same text at the end of Kalomiris’s Dahtylidi tis manas. to listen to both is to hear the very best of Greek art music. riadis is slowly emerging from the mists. like the best of Kalomiris, but without the high-flown, overwrought qualities that can make some of Kalomiris rather unfashionable today, his chamber music gives authentic expression to the project of transition that enabled significant music in South east europe in a modernist age. the harmonic world of Ombres macédoniennes [Macedonian Shadows] for two pianos (1912) is truly unlike any other. this is apparent right from its opening bars, which announce that world but at the same time contain it in compressed form. but it is the slow movement that is the real kernel of this work. the harmonisation of its folk-like melody welds the Hicâz tetrachord firmly to european modernist harmony, transcending the exotic and generating its unique harmonic world on a territory of ‘in-between’, a territory further explored and amplified in the outer movements. as George leotsakos aptly remarks, ‘riadis explores [this] harmonic climate as if he wishes to transcend the inherent impossibility of a “tempered” instrument such as the piano to perform micro-intervals’.39 of the other works, we might single out the First String Quartet, likewise exploring folk motives and modalities, and in a context that is both

39 in the liner note to lyra CD 0116.

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expansive (the work lasts forty minutes) and compressed (the motivic material is taut and economical, with ‘accompaniments’ part of the motivic substance of the music). the influence of modern French music (ravel) is more apparent here, but it should not be over-stressed, for it is transformed by its contact with traditional Greek-oriental materials. even where the vocabulary is familiar, the syntax is new, so that we look afresh at the conventional triad and the pedigreed accompaniment figure. there is a unity of thematic substance that crosses the boundaries of individual movements, but this alone cannot account for the capacity of this music to engage us to the end. every detail is arresting, and those points where the idioms of traditional music emerge into the foreground – the closing sections of both the second movement and the finale – are invested with the power of an apotheosis. Another Way: The Failure of Greek Modernism it feels entirely appropriate to discuss riadis alongside the canonic figures of european modernism. along with the songs and at least two of the operas by Kalomiris, his best music stands on a par with the more highly-valued achievements of a small cluster of early twentieth-century composers usually associated with a nationalist aesthetic in east Central europe. Yet – and this strengthens the parallel – it stakes its claim on us today precisely because the nationalism was subsumed by aesthetic projects we might more easily describe as modernist. riadis’s achievement established points of contact with the realism of Janáček, for example, as also with the conquest of the exotic we associate with Szymanowski, and with the east-west synthesis characteristic of enescu and of bartók himself. nationalism was the trigger for a musical awakening all over eastern europe (including Greece) at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. but in the end it was not nationalism but its legacy that gave to the music of this region its very particular character. this is apparent in the attitude of all these composers, including riadis, to traditional music. For riadis, the demotic music of Greece and asia Minor was not an agent of romantic nostalgia, nor yet a musical symbol of national heritage gathering. rather it played a role not unlike that of multiple agrarian musics in bartók, effecting a transition between different cultural worlds, and forging on the territory of transition a new and integrated musical language. Moreover, whether or not he thought in these terms, riadis’s

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music achieved a synthesis that did not hide the fractured character of its components. in short, the modernist credentials of his music are not really in doubt. there is a more prosaic dimension to this. the national school was a chimera in musical terms. nevertheless, the Kalomiris ideal and the politics it engendered were powerfully controlling, and it was very difficult for a Greek composer to make any impact from outside the charmed circle. there were of course dissenting voices.40 indeed the polemic was strident. but the arguments were mainly about opposing models of Greekness, with lambelet’s elegant articles in Mousika chronika proposing a ‘purer’, un-Germanised Greek lyric idiom. with a few exceptions, what we do not get are the polemics about the new found in Yugoslav journals at the time. Kalomiris’s nationalism was essentially a nineteenth-century brand, remaining at some distance from the kind of Greekness identified by the ‘thirties generation of writers and artists, for example. but there was in any case no doubt about where the power lay. the classic case of the outsider was nikos Skalkottas, who studied in berlin with weill, Jarnach and Schoenberg, and attacked the Kalomiris agenda during his last years there in Mousiki zoi [Musical life]. Mainly this followed a concert in athens in 1930 at which his Concerto for wind orchestra (now lost) was performed to a hostile reception, and when he returned to Greece in 1933 he was either ignored or reviled. Kalomiris wrote disparagingly about Skalkottas in Ethnos, though later he would express posthumous appreciation.41 the highest praise accorded Skalkottas was for works such as the 36 Greek Dances. and it is true that he not only wrote about demotic music with enthusiasm, but also transcribed it for the folklorist Melpo Merlier, and appropriated it in several compositions. aside from the dances, conceived in berlin in 1931, several of his ballet scores and some of his piano pieces incorporate traditional songs and

40 See parpara 2007. 41  Music criticism in Greece is a subject arcane to most. the major journal was Phorminx, inaugurated in 1901, with psakhos as the main critic, and ending in 1912. later Nea phorminx was established, dealing mainly with byzantine issues. we might mention also Apollon, with its western orientation, and also pachtikos’s Mousiki (1912–15), which dealt with all kinds of music, including byzantine. in the inter-war period a major journal was Mousika chronika, with lambelet’s agenda to the fore. Mousiki zoi was also active at this time, with Kalomiris, Mitropoulos and varvoglis all writing. in addition to special music journals, music was discussed in the literary journal Noumas and in the daily newspaper Ethnos. Nea estia [new hearth] was inaugurated in 1927, with a principal focus on literature but including reviews of music.

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dances. but with a few exceptions his major instrumental works, whether tonal or atonal, avoid such references. For the ‘difficult’ modernist works there was no sympathetic ear in Greece. Skalkottas chose another way, and was forced into isolation, though it is possible to overstate this; he was certainly not the only Greek composer to encounter difficulties in securing performances. he had been preceded in berlin by the slightly older Dimitri Mitropoulos, whose own creative activities, eclipsed by his later reputation as a conductor, were of major significance. the bulk of Mitropoulos’s music was composed during the 1920s, while Skalkottas did his most productive work in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it is usual to consider them together. however, it is over-simple to represent them as a unified opposition to the aesthetics of the national School. Mitropoulos was involved in pro-nationalist polemics while in athens, and several of his early works might well be regarded as among the finest products of Greek nationalism in just the sense that Kalomiris understood it. it was when he arrived in berlin in 1921 that he found a new orientation, thanks mainly to his contact with busoni. it is often claimed that busoni’s unflattering remarks on the ‘Greek Sonata’, composed in 1920, proved so devastating to Mitropoulos that he was unable to compose until his return to athens in 1924. whatever the truth of that, it was the neo-baroque atonal idiom he developed at that time that invites an association with Skalkottas. these two composers, taken together, produced a corpus of modernist music that had little or no impact in Greece until after world war ii. the story is of course different today. partly in the wake of a more general post-war rehabilitation of serial music and a corresponding rejection of the national school, Skalkottas started to gain posthumous support among small groups of Greek critics (the very same critics who had damned him during his lifetime) and scholars (the musicologist John G. papaioannou was key) as well with expatriate Greeks and those with a particular interest in the Schoenberg legacy (there are some parallels with the reinvestigation of bartók in hungary and of enescu in romania, despite the different political contexts). the result was that as Kalomiris’s star faded, that of Skalkottas shone more brightly, and Greek musicologists weaved him into the national history. the tables had turned, and the balance was lost again, with the national school now denigrated for its ‘aesthetic deficiencies and anachronism’.42

42 Konstantinou 2004.

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as for Mitropoulos, his more modest output is just now undergoing re-evaluation. Some of his early piano compositions, especially the Scherzo ‘Fête Crétoise’ (1919) and the ‘Greek Sonata’, are really highly accomplished pieces in the idiom of turn-of-the-century pianism. however, a new stage in Mitropoulos’s creative life was reached with his Passacaglia – Intermezzo e Fuga of 1924. here there was a marked shift in harmonic language, a new departure, largely a result of his engagement with busoni’s music in berlin. From the austere, relentless tread of the Passacaglia (7/4 metre), on which are built dissonant strata of ever greater complexity, through the mercurial will-o’-the-wisp of the Intermezzo to the angular Fuga, whose three intertwining voices have all but lost touch with any stable tonal foundation, this work establishes textures of a remarkable density of information and articulates gestures of considerable rhetorical power. the dissonant counterpoint here stems from busoni, but there are affinities too with bartók bagatelles and even explicit intertexts with Schoenberg’s op.11 piano pieces. in 1927 Mikropoulos turned (in one work only) to a primitive form of twelve-note technique. he had returned to Greece in 1924, and his Ostinata in tre parti for violin and piano was composed in 1927, two years after Schoenberg’s first completely twelve-note composition, the Suite, op. 25. Skalkottas, in contrast, was just beginning to find his way as a composer at this time. in the early berlin years he had composed a few piano and chamber works in a loosely tonal style. the Solo violin Sonata of 1925 and the Sonatina for piano of 1927 represented culminating points of this early development. it was also in 1927 that he began his studies with Schoenberg after two years with philipp Jarnach, and his own early proto-serial composition, the 15 Little Variations for Piano, dates from the same year.43 1927 thus represents a point of convergence for the two composers, as the Ostinata and the Variations both explore very simple forms of proto-serial writing in a neo-baroque formal context. before composing the Ostinata Mitropoulos had already completed his Ten Inventions on Poems of Cavafy, and he went on to tackle his Concerto Grosso a year later in 1928.44 this was his only orchestral composition apart from the very early programmatic piece Tafi [burial] (1915). it renovates the baroque genre by using different instruments as the concertino 43 one other Greek composer, harilaos perpessas (1907–95), studied with Schoenberg at this time; his music is in an expanded tonal idiom somewhat akin to Skryabin. 44 For an excellent discussion of the Inventions, see haris Xanthoudakis’s introduction to Mitropoulos 2010.

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in each of the four movements, while the strings function as the ripieno throughout, and also by investing the gestures associated with the formal archetypes with fresh meaning. thus the rhythmic profile of the French overture is unmistakable in the opening largo movement, while the second movement uses a fugato technique in a predominantly 7/8 rhythm, and the third is an extended chorale animated by contrapuntal working. in the finale, the sound world changes, as piano and percussion enter for the first time. here Mitropoulos turns to traditional music, using a dance melody from Kythera as the basis of a fugue. this, however, is anything but conventional pastiche. the presentation of the theme in cluster formations may seem an alienating device, but it is in fact a logical conclusion of the intervallic argument of the work, where parallelism is applied to progressively diminishing intervals from movement to movement. the Concerto Grosso was performed in berlin in 1930, at a concert in which Mitropoulos also performed prokofiev’s third piano Concerto as a last-minute replacement for egon petri. his success as a conductor and pianist eclipsed his compositional achievement on that occasion, and while the Concerto Grosso was not quite the end of his activity as a composer, it was his last major composition before he embarked on his career as an eminent conductor. in contrast, Skalkottas’s 1930 concert, at which his Concerto for winds was introduced to athens, marked just the beginning of an arduous compositional road, on which the next major landmark was his First piano Concerto (1931). this was followed by several years of creative silence during which he endured a personal as well as a creative crisis. but when the deadlock was released in 1935, two years after his return to athens, Skalkottas produced an unending stream of music for the remainder of his short life, in difficult circumstances and in the knowledge that he would almost certainly never hear the more complex and technically difficult music. william trotter quotes Mitropoulos on this climate and its impact on Skalkottas: ‘they killed him, you know, Skalkottas, they killed him. and if i hadn’t left, they would have killed me too’.45 the commitment and determination shown by Skalkottas – the sense of creative necessity – may be reminiscent of Schoenberg, but Skalkottas was not on an exclusively serial road. throughout his mature years as a composer, he wrote tonal, atonal and serial music, and without any sense that he valued any one type more highly than the others. that said, it was

45 trotter 1995, 75.

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the modernist music that defined him in Greek eyes and ears, not least because his primary posthumous advocate, the musicologist John G. papaioannou, sought to project him exclusively as a modern european figure. Much of the modernist music is missing, but beginning with the third and fourth sonatinas for violin and piano of 1935 there is a substantial corpus of major chamber works (string quartets, piano trios, solo piano works), orchestral music (suites, concertos, and overtures), stage music and songs. in 1935–36 alone he produced the two sonatinas, the third String Quartet and String trio, the Concertino for two pianos, the Suite no. 1 for piano, and the piano trio. in addition he completed the 36 Greek Dances. one is reminded of the prolixity of Schoenberg’s first atonal year (1908–09). there are several analytical commentaries on Skalkottas’s dodecaphonic music.46 but it might be noted here that right from its inception, dodecaphony served any number of creative needs. even the viennese trinity employed the method to radically different ends, and later composers drew on these primary models and extended them in diverse ways. in the case of most middle-generation serialists we can detect a clear evolution of style and technique, and to a large extent this was true for Skalkottas too. however, the lifelong inspiration was Schoenberg, and specifically the Schoenberg of the late 1920s. this is not so much a matter of serial technique as of style and aesthetic. the nuts and bolts of Skalkottas’s serialism were in fact quite different from Schoenberg’s. he employed his rows in a distinctive manner, working with multiple, motivically related rows, and often reserving transformations (notably retrogrades; he rarely used transpositions or inversions) for formal functions where the effect is distinctly audible. but on a deeper level he remained committed to the Schoenbergian ideal of dodecaphony as a mode of neo-classicism, a means of renewing the classical past. in a way the world of early serial Schoenberg entered a kind of time capsule in a culturally isolated athens. we might take the First piano Suite as a starting point, since it was one of the works associated with his renewed creative activity in 1935– 36. inevitably it evokes Schoenberg’s op. 25. Consider the two preludes. Skalkottas’s way is to expose no fewer than eight separate twelve-note rows at the outset, a prolixity that replaces the more conventional transformations of a single row that we associate with Schoenberg. but beyond this essential difference, we may note that the processes of segmentation

46 See the relevant studies in Katy romanou’s bibliography (romanou 2009b). the major work in english is Mantzourani 2011.

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and the neo-baroque contrapuntal layering of segments are strikingly similar in both movements. it is interesting to pursue these analogies. Just like Schoenberg in the mid 1920s, Skalkottas in the mid 1930s moved between neo-baroque suites and chamber works that attempt to restate in serial terms the basic elements of the three- or four-movement classical sonata cycle. thus the third String Quartet, not unlike Schoenberg’s own third Quartet, presents a serial reworking of sonata form and rondo in its outer movements, and displays a panoply of broadly neo-classical gestures, textures and phraseologies. and much the same might be said of the piano trio, though the slow movement of this work foreshadows the expressive power we associate with some of Skalkottas’s final works. if we continue mapping Skalkottas works onto corresponding Schoenberg works, the violin Concertos and Fourth String Quartets would offer easy pickings; the Skalkottas quartet (1940) in particular seems to follow rather closely the Schoenbergian model, especially in the slow movement variations and in the finale, one of the most exciting movements he had written until that point. these two works marked a step change in the evolution of Skalkottas’s music, just as the corresponding works did for Schoenberg. there is an enhanced expressive lyricism in both the Schoenberg and the Skalkottas concertos, as there is a fiercer goaldirected momentum in their two quartets. both Skalkottas works achieve an architectural breadth and a supra-serial thematic (and contrapuntal) coherence that was not always so apparent in earlier works. and in this respect they look ahead to the major orchestral pieces of his final years, the Largo Sinfonica and The Return of Ulysses, whose final form as an extended, quasi-symphonic overture is perhaps his masterpiece. the angular, spiky neo-classicism of the early dodecaphonic works is here replaced by the more cumulative, sweeping progressions that we associate with symphonic breadth and mastery. it seems almost incredible that Skalkottas heard not a note of these or other major modernist works. right to the end, he embodied for Greek critics the ‘invasion of the barbarians’.47 we will be reminded of Cavafy. Greek music needed its barbarians.

47 this was the highly influential critic Sophia Spanoudi, writing anonymously in response to the 1930 concert in athens (belonis 2009).

Chapter thIrteen

MODERNA Garlands: Stevan Mokranjac there are several reasons to give stevan Stojanović Mokranjac pride of place in any narrative we might construct of Serbian music history. First there was his role in consolidating a distinctive tradition of Serbian church music, a tradition that already during his lifetime signified the spiritual nation. His first book of church melodies (Octoechos) was published in 1908, and subsequent notations were published posthumously.1 most were drawn from the oral tradition, and whatever view we take of mokranjac’s understanding of the modal structure of the chants and of the ornamental practice of rural traditions, we can be in no doubt of the symbolic significance of these notations for the nation. In addition, Mokranjac composed a corpus of original sacred music in a polyphonic style somewhat indebted to cecilian traditions (he was known as the ‘Serbian Palestrina’). Second there was his elevation of the traditional agrarian music of Serbian people wherever they might be found, partly through collecting activities (notably in Levač and Kosovo),2 and partly through the composition of the fifteen choral suites to which he gave the name rukoveti [garlands], comprising a total of eighty-two songs. Stana Djurić-Klajn reminds us of the associations of this title with agrarian communities (‘that which can be grasped by one hand at harvest’), but it also forges links with choral traditions beyond Serbia.3 and that leads to the third point, which underlies the other two. Mokranjac was committed to choral music, both compositionally and through his work as conductor of the trademark Belgrade Choral Society, with which he undertook numerous tours both within Serbia and beyond its frontiers. as noted earlier, in 1878 he gave a ‘historical’ concert to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society, with the title Istorija Srpske pesme [the history of Serbian Song].

1  See the chapters by ivana perković-radak, Vesna peno and nataša Dimić in popovićMlađenović and perković-radak 2006. 2 Konjović 1984, 44–47. 3 See, for example, Karnes 2005.

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In sustaining our historical narrative we might draw a line backwards from Mokranjac to Kornelije Stanković, a composer whose pioneering work in these same three fields has already been discussed. that Mokranjac marked an advance in artistic quality was partly due to the different evolutionary stages of a national musical culture in the making, but it was also because he was, quite simply, a more gifted composer. It is true that he worked within a limited generic and expressive range, seldom venturing beyond choral music, and restricting his folksong treatments to refined but hardly adventurous harmonisations. But his settings were invariably sensitive to the latent properties of the originals, and he developed an original approach to formal design based on the juxtaposition of textural and expressive contrasts. Although the rukoveti are really pot-pourris, the best of them – and commentators seem agreed that the tenth has special qualities – have an architectural logic and an expressive variety that transcend the usual limitations of this genre. there were other factors separating Mokranjac from his predecessor, stemming directly from the difference in generations. The career profile of Stanković was typical of the Serbian intelligentsia of the mid nineteenth century, in that he was a product of the cultural capitals of central Europe. Born in Buda, he studied in Vienna and lived among the pan-Slavic community there, though travelling extensively within the Serbian lands. Only in the later years of his short life did he settle in Belgrade. Mokranjac, on the other hand, was born in Negotin in central Serbia, and his early years were spent there, in nearby Zaječar, and in Belgrade. in his twenties he studied abroad, with brief stays in Munich and rome, and a two-year period in Leipzig, but otherwise he was rooted in Serbia. We might draw a different line, this time across political borders to connect up with another South Slav tradition. there are parallels between Mokranjac’s achievements and those of Dobri hristov (1875–1941) in Bulgaria. Like Mokranjac, hristov turned to the music of Orthodoxy, and was exercised by just how far one might speak of a distinctive Bulgarian chant, seizing on the so-named Bolgarski rospev discovered among russian manuscripts (see chapter 9), and establishing through his own harmonisations (notably his Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom) a prototype for a national church music. Like Mokranjac, moreover, he made creative use of traditional music. his two choral potpourris of the late 1890s (Liliyana moma hubava [Beautiful Liliyana] and Pusti momi jeravnenki [the Girls from Jeravna]) are analogous to the rukoveti, and they were followed by his Balkanski pesni [Balkan Songs] in 1913, and by numerous arrangements of songs from Macedonia, the rhodopes and central Bulgaria in the

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post-war years. they included the anthem of Bulgarian choirs rodna pesen nas navek ni svarzva [native Song forever binds us together]. Several of these songs employ the signature asymmetrical rhythms so often associated with Bulgarian-Macedonian traditional music; and, again like Mokranjac, hristov was a scholar of this music as well as a composer,4 believing that only music steeped in national traditions could achieve international stature. a more immediate political context was also invoked of course, and the date of the Balkanski pesni is significant, given the fate of Bulgaria after the Balkan Wars, just as the collections of the 1920s might be linked to its fate during World War i. Finally, hristov was as committed as Mokranjac to choral music as a medium for both church- and folk-based composition, and no less active in promoting the choral tradition on institutional levels; it was due to his initiative that the Union of Bulgarian Choirs was established in 1926. there was more to hristov than this brief summary suggests. But my purpose is to establish a parallel. that parallel can lead us to other reflections. When Serbs looked east they saw a people speaking a different language and with divergent political interests, but with the same script, the same Orthodox faith and orientation to russia, and a shared cultural history stemming from several centuries of Ottoman rule. When they looked west they saw a people with similar origins and language, but separated by script, faith, and a cultural history plugged in to the larger narratives of the Venetian or the habsburg empires. a counterfactual could be tempting here: in a word, a different Yugoslavia.5 Such an exercise helps us to see just how far cultural alignments were subordinate to political expediency in South east europe, and that in turn may suggest one reason why the real Yugoslavia failed to ‘take’ in the way that Germany did, or italy.6 Culturally, the Yugoslav idea was both amorphous and ambitious, given the mix of cultures, ethnicities and faiths that were to be embraced. Yet it was an idea to which many artists were sympathetic. in the end some form of South Slav unification (excluding Bulgaria)7 became a political 4 the major texts are hristov 1913 and 1928. 5 already in 1804 Jovan Jovanović, the Serbian bishop of novi Sad, advanced a petition for a so-called Serbo-Bulgarian state, embracing much of the Ottoman territory in the Balkans. 6 ironically, as Wachtel points out (Wachtel 1998), the proto-Yugoslavs saw italy as so disunited that there seemed a good chance for Yugoslavia. 7 hopes of including Bulgaria were already diminished when Serbia, encouraged by austro-hungary, declared war on Bulgaria in 1885; any remaining hope was shattered of

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necessity in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the events of World War I. If these territories were not to be gobbled up by greater powers, they had better get together. and, as we saw in chapter 9, that included slovenia, whose cultural traditions were yet further removed from those of serbia. It is little wonder that the Kingdom of the serbs, Croats and slovenes, later the first Yugoslavia, was rife with tensions from the start, with Belgrade and Zagreb – centralists and federalists, respectively – in overt competition. But who is to say that it would not have gelled finally, had its fate not been sealed by the events of World War II?8 Political federations of culturally disparate peoples can work. We have the evidence. Mokranjac’s rukoveti were composed during the Kingdom of Serbia, but the fall-out from these pieces – their reception, impact and immediate ‘effective history’, to use the language of Gadamer – belonged not to Serbia but to the first Yugoslavia. then, in the post-war years, the rukoveti took on additional layers of meaning as they entered the very different world of Tito’s Communist state. And finally, in more recent times, they were made available again to an independent Serbia. It would be hard to find a better case study in the poetics of reception history, as we track the shifting dialogues that are enacted between a fixed historical moment of inception and a later sequence of changing receptions. Biljana Milanović has written perceptively about this.9 We learn how inter-war essays by Serbian authors reformulated Mokranjac’s ideological position first in terms of the nationalism of the united Serbian Youth, then in accordance with a dual identity model (Serbia-Yugoslavia), and finally in relation to a Marxist-inspired shift of emphasis from the ‘nation’ to the ‘folk’. these latter two readings became in turn the paradigms for post-World War II monographs on Mokranjac, where it was expedient to stress both a unified Yugoslav nation and an ideology of folklore allied to an aesthetic of realism. then, in more recent writings (from 1990 onwards), there were attempts to re-define the national elements in his music yet again, including a proposal that the ‘national’ should be understood in purely musical terms. In this way the rukoveti have threaded their way through changing political, social and cultural formations, attaching course by the Second Balkan War. However, as late as 1912 the influential composer Miloje Milojević argued for a Yugoslavia that included Bulgaria. 8 Lampe 2000, 4–6. 9 in an as yet unpublished text, ‘past Musicological Discourses regarding national identification of Mokranjac’s Work’, read at the conference The Composer and his environment. on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Kornelije Stanković and 150th anniversary of Stevan St. Mokranjac, Belgrade 9–11 november, 2006.

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themselves to these formations in different ways, and adapting their own semblance as they did so. they have been heard ‘with different ears’. Modern reception histories often imply that contemporary readings have no particular privilege, and that the meaning of the work is something that unfolds and develops throughout its subsequent reception right down to the present. Milanović, however, prefers to close the hermeneutic circle, mapping these later receptions against some sense of a recovered past. in another text, she makes some telling observations about the selection of traditional melodies in the rukoveti, and about the itineraries and associated repertory of the composer’s tours with the Belgrade Choral Society.10 each of these describes a particular symbolic geography. Consider first the selection of traditional melodies. Milanović observes that the first of the rukoveti, Iz moje domovine [From my homeland] of 1884, makes use of melodies from the Kingdom of Serbia as it existed during the composer’s lifetime, while in the cycles that followed the music was drawn rather from diaspora Serbian populations in Kosovo and Macedonia, in independent Montenegro and in a Bosnia and herzegovina that was at the time annexed by the habsburgs. What this amounts to is that the rukoveti defined imaginary borders, at least some of which would in due course become real. even the dates of the respective rukoveti coincide neatly with strategic moves in Serbian politics in relation to these territories. But if the rukoveti signify Serbian nationalism in this way, the tours point directly to a future Yugoslavia. the repertory selected for these tours (including Mokranjac’s own Primorski napevi [Songs from the Littoral]) seems designed expressly to confirm a symbolic geography that opens out to embrace Bosnia and herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia-Dalmatia and Slovenia, uniting the country before it was created. taken together, the rukoveti and the tours represent two ideological positions that for Mokranjac, as for many Serbian artists at the time, were complementary rather than contradictory. We are presented with a kind of slippage between the political and cultural dimensions of Yugoslavia. Mokranjac was regarded during his lifetime as a leading Serbian proponent of the South Slav cultural movement. his collection and appropriation of folksong was part of that wider movement, for since at least the mid nineteenth century folksong was hardly less important than linguistic reform in promoting the Yugoslav idea. andrew Wachtel has demonstrated this, and has further documented

10 Milanović 2006.

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how cultural collaborations laid some of the foundations for political unification in the years leading up to World War I.11 in the visual arts, there was the lada Federation (which included Bulgaria) and the First Yugoslav Colony, while in literature there was the south slavic literary association, with seats in Belgrade and Sofia, and the Srpski književni glasnik [Serbian Literary Herald], which despite its title worked for South Slav collaboration. Moreover, as Jelena Milojković-Djurić points out, the Sarajevobased Bosanska vila [Bosnian Fairy] also played its part in promoting the Yugoslav idea.12 Wachtel also writes about the symbolic role of the Croatian sculptor ivan Meštrović for Yugoslavism, notably at the rome exposition of 1911. however, such ideas of a common culture were sufficiently vague and ‘catch all’ to serve more than one political programme. in the end, it was a Serbian centralist agenda, validated by the influential theories of Jovan Cvijić,13 that came to dominate the politics, and it was often Belgrade that played the leading role in promoting cultural reciprocity too, including music. a symbolic moment was the concert, a Yugoslav evening, held in 1904 at the Belgrade national theatre on the centenary of the uprising, with Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria all represented either by composers or performers, but with Serbia taking the lead. Mokranjac was not performed on that occasion, but his contemporary Josip Marinković had two works played, including a choral piece Slavija that signified the wider Yugoslav idea. the concert opened with the overture Ljiljan i omorika [the Lily and the pine], composed by Stanislav Binički (1872–1942) and conducted by petar Krstić (1877–1957). these two were the leading Serbian composers of the ‘generation of the 1870s’, and both were active in the modernisation of Belgrade’s musical life in the immediate pre-war years.14 in addition to institutional development – including the establishment of the second (‘Stanković’) Music School and a prominent role assigned to music in the national theatre – there were debates in the journals and at specially convened conferences about the future of opera, the correct attitude to folk music, the dialogue with europe, and the place of the new. Krstić in

11 Wachtel 1998. 12 Milojković-Djurić 1988, 51–66. the translation of ‘vila’ as ‘fairy’ scarcely does justice to the resonance of this word in history, folklore and mythology. 13 Cvijić 1918. 14 Binicki’s Marš na drinu [March to the Drina] was for a time widely popular; it is present in numerous arrangements in the catalogues of every sound archive.

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particular was active in these debates, which would become a marked feature of the musical culture of the first Yugoslavia. Yet there is a space separating the entrepreneurial activity and polemics of Binički and Krstić from their compositional styles and legacies. Stana Djurić-Klajn classified these composers as part of a ‘Belgrade School’, by analogy with the literary movement, partly because they appropriated the sevdah and rom styles of the city. this classification, which also separates them from the Vienna-based petar Stojanović (1877–1957) and the Vojvodina composer isidor Bajić (1878–1915), may seem a little crude today, especially as there can be purposeful ambiguities in their representation of Serbian and turkish themes (this is true especially of Bajić’s Knez Ivo od Semberije [prince ivo of Semberia], but also, to a lesser extent, of Binički’s na uranku [at Dawn] and Krstić’s Zulumćar). in truth, posterity has not been kind to any of the composers from the ‘generation of the 1870s’, though current musicological work might just do more than amplify the footnotes, and their symbolic importance to a Serbian vision of Christian Yugoslavia is not in question.15 nonetheless, the consensus is that it was left to a younger generation of composers, already active before the war, to translate Belgrade’s cultural energy into a durable musical legacy. one People, Three names: The First Yugoslavia From the start, the ‘one people’ thesis was more sympathetic to Serbs than to Croats and Slovenes (very crudely, the Yugoslav idea translated into federalism in Zagreb and Ljubljana, and into centralism in Belgrade). Zagreb and Ljubljana continued their own cultural activities unabated, maintaining distinctive profiles within the larger Yugoslav frame. there were indeed major differences of orientation underlying the attempts by artists and critics to create a synthetic Yugoslav culture following the birth of the post-war state. in his documentation of canon formation, collaboration and bridge building in literature, the visual arts and cultural politics generally, Wachtel is sensitive to these differences, and he is careful not to underestimate the strength of Croatian and Slovenian cultural identities.16 the one difficulty with his book is its neglect of music, where it often seems futile to try to pin down subject matter and style as Yugoslav, as opposed to Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian. 15 See, for example, the thesis on Stojanović (Cvetković 2006). 16 Wachtel 1998.

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Institutionally, there was a major impetus towards Yugoslav music. One example was the unification of choral societies from all three nations into a Yugoslav choral union in 1924, with the Mokranjac student Kosta Manojlović (1890–1949) as executive secretary.17 the first concert of Yugoslav choral music took place in 1926 and the first meeting of choral societies from all over Yugoslavia was in 1929. these gestures were politically driven. and in the same spirit the newly founded Belgrade Opera (1920) and Belgrade philharmonic (1923) fulfilled their obligations, with staffing and programming policies nodding towards Croatia and Slovenia (in the 1930s the Zagreb String Quartet visited Belgrade, and Croatian opera was performed more often than Serbian).18 Zagreb also did its bit. it had its own Opera, of course, and the Zagreb philharmonic was founded in 1920 before its Belgrade counterpart. Likewise, the Croatian Music institute survived, and its school of music became an independent academy of Music with university status in 1920. it also promoted a series of Intimne muzičke večeri [intimate Musical evenings] designed to promote Yugoslav music.19 there was a similar story in Ljubljana. We noted in chapter 9 the activities of the Glasbena Matica, founded as a Slovenian counterpart to the philharmonische Gesellschaft in 1872.20 its Conservatory was established in 1919 and became a State Conservatory in 1926. there was also the Slovene (later Ljubljana) philharmonic Orchestra, and a thriving Opera at the Slovene provincial theatre, where native opera was performed. Under the first Yugoslavia, not only did the Opera offer some of the most progressive programmes in Yugoslavia; it also made a real attempt to represent composers from Serbia and Croatia (Koštana by petar Konjović (1883–1970) was staged in Ljubljana, for instance; likewise adel i Mara by Josip hatze (1879–1959) and Morana by Jakov Gotovac (1895–1982)), as well as Slovenian operas by risto Savin (1859–1948) (Lepa vida and Gosposvetski sen) and Maciej Kogoj (1892–1956) (Črne maske [Black Masks]). all three cities had a developed musical culture, in other words. and all three engaged in conversations about music through the several journals that either survived from pre-war years or made their first appearances during the inter-war period. in pre-World War ii Serbia there was Srpski književni glasnik [Serbian Literary herald] (1901–14 and 1920–41), Muzički

17 See Milojković-Djurić 1984, 38–39. 18 Milanović 1998. 19 With a more continuous history of music-making than Belgrade, Zagreb was regarded by many as the musical centre of the new state (Dobronić 1926). 20 it was formally disbanded in 1947 and re-opened only in 2004.

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glasnik [Musical herald] (1922), Muzika (1928–29), and then in the 1930s Zvuk [Sound] (1932–36) and Slovenska muzika [Slavic Music] (1939–41). in Zagreb there was the long-standing Sv. Cecilija (inaugurated in 1877), Jugoslavenski muzičar [Yugoslav Music] (1923 and 1928–41, as Muzičar), Glazbeni vjesnik [Musical Courier] (1927–31), the Marxist Muzička revija [Music review] (1932), and Sklad [Concord] (1932–45).21 and in Ljubljana there were novi akordi [new Chords] (1901–1914) and nova muzika [new Music] (1928–29), as well as specialist magazines such as Cerkveni glasbenik [Church musician] (1878–1945).22 Leading composers took part in these polemics. as the music critic of Srpski književni glasnik, and also of the ‘daily’ Politika, Miloje Milojević (1884–1946) was prominent in Serbia, but Konjović also participated, and so did Manojlović, Vojislav Vučković (1910–42), and Stevan hristić (1885– 1958). in Croatia the key figures were antun Dobronić (1878–1955) and Božidar Širola (1889–1956), along with the critics rudolf Matz (1901–88), Lujo Šafranek-Kavić (1882–1940) and pavao Markovac (1903–41). in Slovenia, anton Lajovic (1878–1960), Slavko Osterc and Marij Kogoj entered the debate, as did the editor of novi akordi, Gojmir Krek (1875–1942). Cultural and political orientations among critics embraced conservative nationalism, cosmopolitan eclecticism, modernism, and in due course committed Marxism, the latter associated especially with the idealogues Vučković and Markovac. these two, Serbian and Croatian respectively, were unhappily linked by the manner of their deaths. Vučković, imprisoned in the mid 1930s as a Communist, was murdered by the fascist police in Belgrade in 1942 while in hiding; Markovac, a Jewish student of Guido adler, was killed by the Ustaše while trying to escape from a concentration camp a year earlier. it is through debates in the press that we can most easily take the temperature of musical life in the early days of the state, though the rise of radio played a part in promoting Yugoslavism among the wider population.23 the most immediately striking feature is the sense of urgency attending the polemic, no doubt in recognition that the post-war settlement represented a moment of political opportunity, and that music, like the rest of the cultural world, had some obligation to respond. Composers

21 For a full listing in Croatia, see Blažeković 2002; also Majer-Bobotko 1992. 22 a more comprehensive listing would include Laibacher Zeitung (1778–1914), Slovenski narod (1868–1914), Slovenec (1873–1914), Ljubljanski zvon (1881–1914) and dom in svet (1888–1914). See O’Laughlin 1978. 23 Ćirić 2004.

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and critics alike were concerned to find a way forward for Yugoslav music, and as a result ideological questions loomed large. there was much discussion of nationalism, and of the particular qualities of Slavonic music, with russia and Prague (rather than Germany and Italy) held up as the most suitable models for a Yugoslav music; the sense that music based on Slavonic folk music might offer an alternative to West European models was palpable. It seems clear that while the majority of composers and critics were comfortable with an ethnic identification as Slavonic in general and Yugoslav in particular, they were not anxious to subordinate their separate identities as Serbs, croats or Slovenes. Invariably local nationalisms raised their heads, and often in an explicitly competitive fashion. With perfect irony, cultural competition between the three nations extended even to an argument in the pages of Zvuk about who was doing most to promote Yugoslavia by programming music from all three nations (we are all Slavonic, but we are more Yugoslav than you!). According to one Slovene, it was ‘the weakest brother’ (i.e. the Slovene) who ‘knock[ed] hardest on the door of assimilation’.24 Zvuk is of particular importance in tracking the polemic of the interwar years, partly because, as Melita Milin has pointed out, it drew its authorship from all over the new state.25 as a result, the debates crossed borders, and we can gain some impression of the leading concerns of composers, performers and scholars from all three nations. One such concern was a widely perceived crisis of opera, continuing a debate that had already been active in the pre-war press. the symbolic value to the nation(s) of this genre was not in question, especially when it turned to historical or folkloric, or increasingly socialist-realist, themes. But there were real questions about how the genre should be developed so that it might pay its way and attract wider audiences. these questions gained a particular urgency in the new state, which was concerned to build or consolidate its cultural institutions at a time when the social function of music was increasingly on the critical agenda. the other major topics debated in Zvuk, and they are linked, were the musical nation(s) and ideas of the new. here the debates were revealing of dilemmas of identity facing a younger generation of composers. Some

24 Milin 2006. 25 ibid. Zvuk had a later incarnation as the quarterly periodical of the Yugoslav Union of Composers published in Belgrade until 1967, and then in Sarajevo.

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composers and critics opted for a conservative nationalism. this tendency was favoured in Croatia, where composers were inclined to respond to liberation by rejecting their central european inheritance (ivan Zajc) in favour of a neo-illyrian idiom rooted in folk music, with Franjo Kuhač as a source of inspiration (but note that Kuhač was as important for Serbs, with whom he was in dialogue, as for Croats). Others favoured a more cosmopolitan idiom, in the main conservative, but for a few composers distinctly modernist in character. this broadly describes Slovenian music, and some Croatian composers too. For those with Modernist leanings, the imperative was not to hang on to an old (folkloric) picture, but to draw a new picture; in other words to bring Yugoslav music up to date with a european avant-garde. and finally there were those who straddled both the nationalist and the modernist positions. this was especially true in Serbia, where some composers adopted a nationalist, folk-based aesthetic, others looked to european modernists, and yet others attempted to integrate the two. all these options were aired in the pages of Zvuk. thus, the Slovenian composer Slavko Osterc, in a review of operas by Konjović and Gotovac, distinguished between composers who turned to folk music in a natural, organic way, as an expression of true creativity (he counted Konjović, anton Lajovic and anton Dobronić among them), and those who merely used it ‘as a tool’ (and here he condemned Manojlović, Matija Bravničar (1897–1977) and hatze). and in a separate communication he linked this issue with modernity, criticising Croatian composers for allowing their involvement with folk music to stand in the way of the new; they lacked, as he saw it, ‘the will to export’. this elicited a long response from antun Dobronić, spread over two issues of the journal. Of all Yugoslav composers, Dobronić was surely the one most committed to a unitarist Yugoslav ideal. according to Dobronić it was necessary to ‘bring into harmony [. . .] two seemingly opposite elements: european musical skill and our musical primitivism: european intellectualism and our sensibility’.26 Whether he achieved this ideal in his own music is of course another question. But in light of this formulation, it is easy to see that he would have taken Osterc’s criticism badly. in response he launched an attack on the cosmopolitan tendency in some contemporary Yugoslav music, and proposed that only Croatians were creating an authentically Yugoslav musical expression. the Slovenians, he argued, ignored true Slavic sources and treated folk music in a manner too 26 Dobronić 1933.

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close to the austrians for comfort, while the serbs ignored the true legacy of Mokranjac (there was, incidentally, a separate debate published in part in Slovenska muzika, in which Milojević and Vučković took opposing positions on the Mokranjac legacy).27 among the most interesting remarks in all these exchanges was one by Dobronić himself right at the end of his communication, in which he claimed that there remained three separate musical ideologies in Yugoslavia. here, writing in the early 1930s, a leading proponent of the Yugoslav idea acknowledged that, in music at least, there were still three peoples, not one people with three names. the musical nations were still divided, Dobronić claimed, and he was specific about the nature of the divide. Only in Zagreb did he hear the authentic musical voice of Yugoslavia; Belgrade had lost its way by imitating the world beyond, while Ljubljana ‘wandered aimlessly’. there was further evidence of this divide in the daily press. Stanislav tuksar has trawled the newspapers for reviews of Josip hatze’s opera adel i Mara, which was given in rapid succession in Ljubljana, Belgrade and Zagreb between november 1832 and March 1933, with a further performance in Split in May.28 the sharpest opposition was between Ljubljana and Belgrade. the Slovenian critics, recognising the conservative idiom of the work, were nonetheless supportive, with one critic in particular anxious to identify the style as ‘ours’, meaning Yugoslav. interestingly, he included ‘those Mohammedans, [. . .] Yugoslav and very attractive’, referring here to hatze’s portrayal of the Bosnian Muslims by means of the usual signifiers (Jerko Bezić remarked elsewhere that adel’s song is ‘studded with augmented seconds’).29 among the Serbian critiques were accounts by Manojlović and Milojević, both dismissive of the opera on several grounds: its orchestration, its dramatic characterisation, and its conservative orientation (‘Mr hatze represents all that is accepted and traditional, bringing nothing new’). But most interesting of all was the reaction in Zagreb and Split, where the old-fashioned nature of the musical idiom was praised in some quarters and condemned in others (one critic objected to a patronising tendency to support native artists just because they are native). even Širola damned with faint praise: ‘harmonically, hatze offers nearly nothing new, but he tastefully arranges melodies filled with the sunshine of the true

27 these positions might be described as ‘romantic’ and ‘realist’ respectively. See Milojkovic-Djuric 1984, 54–60. 28 tuksar 1982. 29 Bezić 1982.

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vocal cantilena. . . .’. in summary, and this tells us more about the receptional communities than about the opera, the Slovenes were tolerant of adel i Mara, the Serbs dismissive of it, and the Croats worried by it. But they were all agreed about one thing; it was out of step with its time. Late arrivals: Croatian Modernisms the debate between Dobronić and Osterc throws into relief the competing claims of the nation and the new. Yet even Osterc acknowledged that in the right hands the two might be compatible. Close scrutiny of the debates reveals that, exactly as in Greece, the issue was not just about folk music but about defining a correct relationship to music beyond the frontiers. the controlling assumption in Yugoslavia was that their music had to ‘catch up’ with developments elsewhere in europe, with the strong implication that value should be attached to the modern, the advanced, the new. a modernist aesthetic, in other words, was the principal reference point for music in the inter-war years. notions of lateness and anachronism (a ‘denial of coevalness’) were accordingly prominent in the discourses of Yugoslav critics and composers. the credo of several younger composers was that in another place there was a progressive music spearheading musical culture into the future, and that they should be heading rapidly in that direction, if not getting themselves to the front line. Shortly i will argue that because of this attitude Yugoslav moderna was literally a music in transition – a transit to a ‘known new’ is the language i used in chapter 11 – but prior to that it may be worth reflecting a little on the inter-war debates from the perspective of today. in our present intellectual climate, modernism is often identified as a closed, contingent, historical moment. For this reason there may be options to rehabilitate repertory that was considered unfashionably conservative in a modernist age. in other words, we might accept more readily that the value of a musical work can be separated from its aesthetic and stylistic allegiances. if a composer is to interest us – so the argument might run – he/she must have a voice that is distinctive, a voice of his/her own. But it may be a conservative voice. eva Sedak, arguing for a more flexible understanding of periodisation and style in Croatian music of the first half of the twentieth century, has made two proposals that fall into line with this reading.30 One is that ‘signs

30 Sedak 2004.

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of the moderne’ were present in Croatian music of the inter-war period, but not as a period style, nor even in association with a particular composer; rather they took the form of particular manifestations scattered across different composers and different aesthetic positions. I will return to this later. Sedak’s second proposal is that the broadly conservative orientation of Croatian music allows for certain continuities between early twentiethcentury composers and our own age; it is the critical stance that changes, from one of modernist opposition to one of postmodern acceptance. This opens up the possibility that we might re-assess Croatian music of the modernist era, and not just Croatian. The composers classified as the ‘generation of the 1870s’ in Serbia, briefly discussed earlier, are plausible candidates. and in Slovenia there was a comparable generation, including Gojmir Krek, anton Lajovic, and emil adamič (1877–1936), as well as younger composers such as Lucijan Marija Škerjanc (1900–73), whose five symphonies (echoes of tchaikovsky and Franck) were composed in the ‘thirties and ‘forties, the Bruckner-influenced Blaž arnič (1901–70), and – though this needs qualification – the rather more individual Marjan Kozina (1907–66). the qualification is that, having studied in prague and Vienna, Kozina tempered his innate conservatism with tendencies towards what some scholars from the region like to call ‘moderate modernism’.31 the issue of anachronism, in short, is not confined to Croatia. But in Croatia, with one distinguished exception, there were few counterweights to the conservative voice. in looking back at these repertories today, we risk conflating the roles of historian and critic. in his study of Croatian music, Josip andreis discusses more than fifty composers whose main output dates from the inter-war period. From these, he singles out a small handful for more sustained treatment. there are questions to be asked about how and why certain composers rise to the surface in this way. they are really questions about the mechanisms of canon formation, for there are local as well as global canons, and they invoke politics (of the ethnic nation, the fascist ideology, and the Communist state), musical scholarship, and more prosaic matters such as the battles to be fought in getting music to the public platform. there are no absolutes in any of this, and even the winnowing effects of time are crude at best. Yet there is the greatest interest in looking back at little-known repertory from the

31 See the titles of Mikić 2008 and Medić 2008. as to Kozina, modernist tendencies were already apparent in early works such as Balada Petrice Kerempuha, for bass soloist and orchestra, with surprisingly dissonant harmonic formations, even in its final bars, and to a lesser extent in the orchestral Proti morju [to the Sea].

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perspective of several generations, bypassing ideologies and seeking, with George Steiner, ‘certified, plainly-lit excellence’.32 if we consider the careers of Blagoje Bersa and Josip hatze, we can extend our controlling figure of transition in another direction, proposing a bridge not between east and West but between the Mediterranean and Central europe. Both composers were from the littoral (Dubrovnik and Split respectively). But whereas Bersa looked to Central europe, studying in Vienna and remaining there until the end of the war, hatze turned to italy, studying with Mascagni in pesaro before returning to Split (compare ivo parać (1890–1954), whose adelova pjesma [adel’s Song] (1941) tells the same story as adel i Mara). their music reflects these different orientations. Bersa’s ‘realistic’ opera oganj [Fire] is often regarded as seminal in the story of Croatian opera, but more telling musically is a series of orchestral tone poems, of which one, Sunčana polja [Sunny Fields] (1919), a pastoral portrait of Dalmatia, achieved international success. hatze, in contrast, avoided instrumental music, and devoted his energies to song and opera. the reception of adel i Mara has been discussed, but one observation of the critics might be added here. Several compared this opera, completed in 1932, with its predecessor Povratak [the return], whose first performance was in 1911. their point was that hatze’s music had changed not a whit over a period of more than twenty years. Dora pejačević, in contrast, belonged unambiguously to a Central european orbit from the start. Born in Budapest into an aristocratic family from našice near Osijek, she studied in Dresden and Munich and lived most of her short life in Germany, though with constant visits to našice where she immersed herself in composition. her music belongs to the twilight of romanticism, and it represents a significant contribution to chamber and orchestral composition in Croatia, two media that had been only modestly served until then. it was only really in her later compositions, dating from around 1916, that pejačević’s professionalism began to show through. these include piano works such as the Zwei Klavierstücke, Op. 44 (1918) and piano Sonata, the nietzsche settings drei Gesänge, Op. 53 (1920), the Slavic Sonata for Violin and piano (1917), and two major orchestral compositions. Of these latter, the Symphony (1916–17) is widely regarded as her most important orchestral work, but the phantasie Concertante (1919) is perhaps more successful, less epic in conception, but more rounded and

32 Steiner 1989.

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accomplished. along with some of the miniatures, it represents the best of pejačević, and her best does have a distinctive quality. Yet it is hard not to hear echoes of russian and european music of the late romantic era in this music, and they can be so insistent that they drown out the composer’s voice. they remind us that pejačević’s musical activities belonged almost entirely to circles outside Croatia, and that her music was mainly performed in those circles; this indeed was the crux of a critique by petar Konjović.33 nonetheless, at the landmark concert given at the Croatian national theatre in 1916, generally regarded as symbolic of the renewal of Croatian music, pejačević’s piano Concerto of 1913 was performed. it was the penultimate piece in the programme. the final piece was Karneval, a folksong-based ‘symphonic portrait’ composed in the same year by antun Dobronić, a composer who was much more deeply concerned than pejačević that his music might speak for the nation. that Dobronić was a polemicist for Yugoslav music is obvious. taking his stand on a rejection of the Zajc era, he seemed a progressive figure at the time. Yet his brand of nationalism was grounded in nineteenthcentury models, as we can immediately see from the article he published in Musical Quarterly in 1926. there he claimed – in the tradition of nineteenthcentury Slavic messianism – that history had assigned ‘a special duty [. . .] to the Yugoslav nation among all the other nations on earth’.34 he became, in short, the spokesman for the neo-illyrianism that dominated musical composition and criticism in inter-war Croatia. this Kuhač-inspired ideology was indeed so prevalent that there was very little opportunity for composers to work outside its constraints. Dobronić dominated Croatian music, due to his assertive personality and his industry. his work list is remarkable, including operas (not always so labelled), ballets, masses, cantatas and other choral compositions (his Kraljević Marko [prince Marko] of 1927 was among the best known), eight symphonies, and a wealth of chamber works, piano pieces and songs. Yet in the reference to his own music in his survey of Yugoslav music, he listed folksong arrangements and vocal pieces first, and only later came to chamber and orchestral compositions. Folk music was at the heart of everything he did, and his most successful music avoids epic pretension in favour of colourful evocations of place. Karneval is one such piece, but equally popular were his Jelšonaki tonci [Jelsa Dances] (1938) for string orchestra.

33 Quoted in Kos 1994. For a fuller profile of the composer, see Kos 1998b. 34 Dobronić 1926.

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aside from a small handful of such pieces, few of Dobronić’s compositions have stayed in the repertory, despite some genuinely interesting ideas on ‘symphonic drama’ (Dobronić rejected the term ‘opera’), which he conceived as a kind of fusion of absolute and programme music. a key work was dubrovački diptihon [Dubrovnik Diptych] of 1917, for which he published a kind of apologia, explaining and justifying his aesthetic.35 the ‘folk music’ at the heart of his project was not exclusively Croatian. his cycle of Jugoslovenske narodne popjevke [Yugoslav Folksongs], for instance, consisted of melodies from all over the new state. it was common for composers either to transcend the older borders in this way or to home in on smaller regions, as in Hrvatske pučke popjevke iz Međimurja [Croatian popular Songs from Međimurje] by Vinko Žganec (1890–1976). this was true of larger genres too. Compare Jakov Gotovac’s popular comic opera ero s onoga svijeta [ero from another World] (1935), which draws on folk music from all over Yugoslavia, with dorica pleše [Dorica Dances] of 1934 by Krsto Odak (1888–1965), which again turns to folk music from Međimurje (a happy hunting ground for Croatian composers; see also Širola’s ‘Međimurje’ Quartet, and several works by Slavenski).36 Of the two, the Gotovac was the more popular and the more polished, but the Odak arguably tells us more about the conflicting demands made on Croatian composers at this time, and about resulting stylistic tensions. as Bojan Bujić put it, ‘modernity sits uncomfortably alongside a folk-inspired style’.37 Gotovac had no such anxieties, and the pastiche folklorism of ero s onoga svijeta captures to perfection the atmosphere of Milan Begović’s reworking of a well-known tale. Croatian commentators tell us that Gotovac ‘never [shirked] from harsh dissonances when required’, but this is disingenuous.38 ero is as close to operetta as to opera, with simple formal designs, singable folk-based melodies, lively folk dances (the inevitable kolo) and lucid diatonic harmonies. Gotovac was a consummate professional, and in many ways might stand as the paragon of Dobronić’s Yugoslav nationalism. Yet there is a paradox here. Dressing folk melodies in smart orchestral clothes, as in the Simfonijsko kolo [Symphonic Kolo] of 1926, his first major orchestral composition, may make for an exhilarating concert work, but it removes us even further from the village than

35 Dobronić 1922. 36 Majer-Bobetko 1998. Međimurje is a region in the northernmost part of modern Croatia. 37 Bujić 2000, 336. 38 andreis 1982, 231.

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modernist appropriations, where traditional materials can at least preserve something of their original ethos by virtue of critical difference. This also holds for Gotovac’s later symphonic poems orači [The Plowmen] and Guslar [the Fiddler]. Both are more ambitiously conceived than Simfonijsko kolo. But the Dinaric elements of the one and epic motives of the other are painted in the hues of a late-Romantic idiom that speaks of an idealised folk and an idealised past. The sheen of Gotovac’s orchestra deprives the folk material of energy, authenticity, and – from a modernist perspective, at least – contemporary relevance. Josip Slavenski (1896–1955) apart, Jakov Gotovac was the most successful of the Croatians working between the two wars. For the rest, it seems rather artificial to construct a hierarchy. the levelness is almost defining. Individual pieces were highly valued, and some were performed widely across Europe; to that extent there was indeed a croatian canon, but it was drawn from a wide range of composers and styles. In the theatre, Zajc’s nikola Šubić Zrinski was foundational, followed by Bersa’s oganj, Hatze’s adel i Mara, Širola’s Citara i bubanj [cithara and drum] (1930), and of course Gotovac’s ero s onoga svijeta. In addition there were oftenperformed ballets, including Fran Lhotka’s Đavo u selu [the devil in the Village] (1935) and Krešimir Baranović’s Licitarsko srce [The Gingerbread Heart] (1924). Among the orchestral works rendered to acclaim were Bersa’s Sunčana polja, Dobronić’s Karneval, Baranović’s Symphonic Scherzo (1921), the Sinfonietta (1938) by Boris Papandopulo,39 and Odak’s Simfonija jadrana [adriatic Symphony] (1940); the Bersa and Gotovac pieces became standard repertoire for a time. in many of these pieces there was a real attempt to convey a sense of place, as in the portraits of Dalmatia in the hatze, Širola and Gotovac operas, or of Croatian Zagorje in the Baranović ballet score; compare Odak’s Međimurje in dorica pleše. this regionalism was part and parcel of Yugoslavism, but even at the time there were those (we cited Osterc) who saw it as a restrictive influence on the national music. Of course, precisely this celebration of the Volk, and in an accessible, conservative language, was the passport to performances and publishing contracts in post-1933 Germany, whether or not one bought into the association of cultural nationalism and political fascism. For several Croatian composers, including Gotovac, Germany was still regarded as a window to the wider

39 papandopulo was a major figure, and his Passion of 1936, making use of Glagolitic traditions, is a work of some significance.

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world, and at the very least it would have been tempting to tailor the product to the market. indeed ero was in many ways the ideal of a naziapproved opera, and it is no surprise that it was widely performed in europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Contrast this with Gotovac’s compatriot Josip Slavenski, whose leftist orientation made him persona non grata in Germany, to see how musical life was becoming politically polarised at the time.40 naturally, this whole issue became even more sensitive during the war years, when a Ustaše regime governed much of Yugoslavia under nazi protection. i will return to this later, but we may note here Sanja Majer-Bobetko’s discussion of the disquieting role of the Glavni ustaški stan [Main Ustaša headquarters) in publishing an extensive two-volume account of Croatian music naša domovina [Our homeland], with contributions by andreis, Dugan and Širola, among others.41 it would be wrong to suggest that modernism passed Croatia by. Lip service was paid to the imperative of the new, with Debussy in particular riding high.42 One result was a tendency to overlay conventional styles with momentary and intermittent modernisms, and here antun Dobronić might be taken as symptomatic of a wider tendency. this is no doubt why Sedak sees dispersed ‘signs’ of moderne in Croatian music, and why Bujić speaks of modernity sitting uncomfortably with a folk-based style. Of course, gentler language can be used, as in andreis’s comments on dissonance in Dobronić and Gotovac.43 But it was really only in Slavenski that there was anything like a successful integration of traditional music and modernist techniques, and his project was an altogether larger one, carried on for the most part outside Croatia. elsewhere the waters were calmer. individual pieces might stand out as excellent—objects well made – but there were few attempts to re-make the conventions, to re-set the terms on which future evaluations would be made. i come back to an earlier point. the exceptional talent (however arrived at) was certainly there. But there is more to the conventional category ‘great music’ than exceptional talent. Slavenski apart, Croatian composers seemed to lack the kind of significant project that uniquely defines both its time and its place. there was little hint of the disruptive force of originality (not to be equated with mere innovation; i repeat that the original 40 Slavenski’s music was not published in Germany after 1933. 41  Majer-Bobetko 2004. 42 Weber 1995. 43 andreis 1982.

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voice may be both conservative and ‘of its time’) that would impose itself on the world and in doing so might assume an exemplary status. this need not be an adverse criticism, of course. It only becomes so if we take our stand on genius and modernity, valuing projects of greatness rather than projects of excellence. and in our own time projects of greatness have a distinctly twentieth-century feel to them. It may well be the ‘great composer’ who turns out to be the anachronism, for ‘genius is out of fashion today’.44 Parallel Tracks: Bulgarian advances Let us replay these themes, but with variations. earlier i established a parallel between Mokranjac and Dobri hristov. hristov was a key player in the quest for a national identity in Bulgarian music, but he was not alone. Following liberation, an imperative for Bulgarian musicians was to stake out a unique territory for a national church music and a national folk music. in both respects the demands of a newly established nationhood distorted the picture, and in familiar ways. But in fairness to hristov and compatriots such as Vasil Stoin (1880–1928),45 there were equally distorted claims emanating from without, and especially from the influential scholars Ludvík Kuba and Franjo Kuhač. Just as the Greek Church remained sceptical of claims to an independent Bulgarian chant, so Kuba and Kuhač argued that Bulgarian traditional music was really just a derivative of the music of the western Yugoslavs. the reality lies somewhere between these positions. political borders seldom carry real privilege in classifications of music, and Bulgaria is no exception. Where traditional music is concerned, there are commonalities with Serbian, as there are with russian, traditions; and in the case of epic song the affinities extend much further afield. But at the same time there are features of some Bulgarian music that link it more easily and naturally to Macedonia, northern Greece and anatolia, most obviously its rhythmic and metric asymmetries. these ‘non-Slavonic’ characteristics were among the very first to engage the attention of hristov and his successors, as they attempted to define what was truly Bulgarian about Bulgarian music, and sought to separate the national tradition off from other South Slav

44 that this remark was made in the late nineteenth century (Villiers de l’isle-adam 1985) emphasises that such thoughts are not unique to our own age. 45 For the story of this great collector, see todorov 2002.

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musics.46 and once it had been identified with the nation in this way, folk music could be appropriated by art music in all the usual ways. as in Serbia, a strong choral tradition served as a mediator between popular music and art music. all major composers contributed to this medium, with arrangements of, and original compositions based on, agrarian and urban songs. potpourris of folksongs were common, as were patriotic hymns, marching songs, and choral ballads. Solo songs with piano also tapped these reservoirs, with haidouk songs – many of them dealing with the 1876 uprising – highly characteristic. Composers in Bulgaria seemed able to switch rather easily between popular choral and elite orchestral repertories, and while this is no doubt a comment on anachronism and periphery, it made for interesting continuities, given the orientation of musical composition following World War ii. it might be argued that the strength of the choral tradition was a constraining influence on any impulse to change and innovation, but in any case the tradition was a genuinely original phenomenon. in the second half of the twentieth century choral music found ideal exponents in the women’s voices of the Koutev School at Kotel, founded in 1967, and the Lyubomir pipkov Choir under Vassil arnaoudov, to name just two such choirs. in its later development the distinctive sound of such choirs became somewhat fetishised outside Bulgaria. Most famous of all, in recent years, is ‘Le mystère des voix bulgares’, modelled by director Dora hristova on the Koutev tradition, and performing not just Bulgarian folksongs, but settings of minority Sephardic and Muslim repertories (notably in arrangements by nikolay Kaufman). the sound quality cultivated by choirs such as ‘Le mystère’ is unique, with soloists developing an edge in chest register that allows the harmonics to ring out. the fluctuating fortunes of the choirs will be discussed in a later chapter. the point for now is that the roots of the ‘Bulgarian voices’ were in the choral traditions of the first half of the century. reverting to that earlier period, the early twentieth century, we may note that there was a general professionalisation of musical life of all kinds in Bulgaria. thus we have the beginnings of an operatic tradition (the national theatre was opened in 1906), a proliferation of café orchestras, and eventually (in 1921) the foundation of a State academy of Music and (in 1928) an academy Symphony Orchestra. Much of the pattern here was similar to that in Yugoslavia, and that included the familiar tendency

46 hristov 1913 and 1928.

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for more talented composers either to study abroad or with Czech teachers at home. again as in Yugoslavia, native operas – notably by emanuil Manolov (1860–1902) and Georgi atanasov (1882–1931) – tried for size the available stylistic options, which usually meant choosing between pedigreed Italian styles and a more obviously folk-based idiom. the second opera of atanasov, Borislav, dating from 1911, is characteristic of the second of these options, with its Bulgarian-turkish symbols (haidouk songs versus orientalisms) and its appropriation of the popular Bulgarian 7-beat dance genre raichenitsa, one of the most characteristic cultural symbols of the nation. With the earliest orchestral compositions – overtures and rhapsodies by hristov, Manolov and panayot pipkov (1871–1942), culminating in atanasov’s First symphony of 1912 – a further step towards an independent Bulgarian repertory was duly taken. there was a gear change as a younger generation of Bulgarian composers came to maturity. again the parallels with Yugoslavia are inescapable, with the claims of the nation often thought to be at odds with the claims of the new. Forging a national identity was a priority, privileging folk music and church music as sources of inspiration, but the perceived need to catch up with Western europe was hardly less strong. again the key issues were debated in the journals and in independent writings: national music, international music, and (increasingly) ‘realist’ music, in the elusive socialist sense of that term. there was an embryonic specialist press, notably Musikalen vestnik [Musical Journal], edited by the composer Dimiter hadjigeorgiev (1873–1932), Musikalen pregled [Musical review], and the short-lived Gusla, but music was also covered by the daily press and by new socialist journals such as Zlatorog [Golden Way]. In addition to hadjigeorgiev, there were contributions from Georgi Baidanov (1853–1927), alexander Krustev (1879–1945), and Dobri hristov himself. at the centre of the debates were developing dilemmas of identity among composers, and in particular a preoccupation with their social and educational roles. this culminated in the foundation – by Ljubomir pipkov, among others – of the association of Bulgarian Composers Savremenna muzika [Contemporary Music], which published its own journal, in 1933. that journal – also called Savremenna muzika – quickly became the chief outlet for polemics about the future directions of Bulgarian music, but now involving younger composers such as petko stainov (1896–1977), pipkov (1904–74) and svetoslav Obretenov (1909–55).47 47 Much of this criticism is published in Balareva 1968.

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the debates were coloured by the politics of the inter-war years, as Bulgaria digested both the russian revolution and the Versailles settlement. By the 1930s there was a division of sympathies in the country, as russian-inspired socialist doctrines (including direct action)48 vied with an orientation to the new Germany on the part of the royalist political establishment. the positioning of composers within this forcefield is of some interest. at one extreme there was a figure such as Kosta todorov, who was born in Varna in 1886, studied in Würzburg, and on his return to Varna founded a symphony orchestra in 1912. in 1934 he brought the choir ‘rodina’ to Salzburg, and later founded the Bulgarisch-deutschen Gesellschaften in Varna and Sofia, promoting ‘evenings’ of Bulgarian and German music. he was written up with approval in Wiener Figaro in 1943, but has since disappeared from Bulgarian histories of music, including the most recent encyclopaedia.49 at the other extreme was Svetoslav Obretenov, who was commissioned by the Communist party (along with the poet nikolai hrelkov) to compile a volume of 20 trudovi pesni [20 Workers’ Songs] in 1934, only to have the volume confiscated by the police, and who also wrote numerous choral songs and cantatas to proletarian texts. Between these extremes there were many shades. pancho Vladigerov (1899–1978), probably the most successful composer of the younger generation, was based in Berlin between 1912 and 1932 (working as a musical assistant to Max reinhardt), and even after 1933 his music continued to be performed there with approval. But it would be quite wrong to draw political conclusions from this. Like Gotovac and Kalomiris, Vladigerov was interested in performance platforms more than politics. Likewise, on the other side of the divide, deep-rooted sympathies for russia (‘protector and saviour of the nation’) were common among composers, but did not always equate with support for socialism. and where there were clear socialist sympathies, as with Lyubomir pipkov, they usually fell short of embracing Obretenov’s radicalism. nor should a commitment to social meliorism through music be equated with republicanism; Dobri hristov himself was active in the promotion of a socially progressive choral movement, but he also composed a hymn to the tsar.50

48 i have in mind the Uprising of 1923, and also the destruction of churches by the Communists in 1925. 49 Wiener Figaro, Jan.–Feb. 1943, 16–17. 50 it hardly helps that the very few english-language studies come from Communist era. Venelin Krustev, author of the only translated history, was the son-in-law of Obretenov (Krustev 1978).

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With this younger generation, musical compositions appeared that for the first time in Bulgaria attained a high level of professionalism and have since become local classics. Symptomatic of this professionalism was the formation of the contemporary Music Society in 1933 by Vladigerov, Pipkov and other members of a so-called ‘national school’; indeed the statutes of the society spell out something of that mission. the national school had been inaugurated in the 1920s by two works. In 1922 Vladigerov composed his orchestral rhapsody Vardar, and four years later Petko Stainov completed his Trakiyski tantsi [thracian dances]. Already an established composer by the time he composed Vardar, Vladigerov now turned to Bulgarian themes, signalled by his use of a well-known hymn by dobri Hristov, and by successive episodes based on native dance melodies. the effect of this orientation was to direct the composer to Russian rather than to German styles. This extends beyond the transparent textures and colourful orchestration to modes of thematic transformation (the first theme), a central cossack-like dance section that intercuts between sharply characterised episodes, and a ‘Great Gate of Kiev’-like apotheosis of Hristov’s theme. While the result is exhilarating and slick, it lacks the originality of the Stainov work, which marked a significant step forward in its symphonic treatment of the kinds of material formerly (as in Hristov) presented as pot-pourris. there are echoes of nineteenth-century russian music in this work too, but the contexts are original and the composer’s voice distinctive. It was no doubt natural for Bulgarians to look to russia as a source of inspiration in this way, especially when they were concerned with the artistic appropriation of folk music, and it positions these two related works rather clearly in the tradition of nineteenth-century romantic nationalisms. neither Vladigerov nor Stainov really picked up on the innovatory potential of russian music in the way that modern French composers did, or for that matter Janáček and some Yugoslav composers. their preoccupation was with the creation – largely ex nihili – of a Bulgarian national style. the subsequent paths taken by Vladigerov and Stainov diverged. Vladigerov continued to work with Bulgarian materials, notably in his Bălgarska syuita [Bulgarian Suite] and Sedem simfonićni tantsa [Seven Symphonic Dances], but when he turned to the traditional instrumental genres, Bulgaria receded again. thus, his Sonatina Concertante, Op. 28, composed in the mid 1930s, is a neo-classical design, looking occasionally to ravel, but also to nineteenth-century pianism. his third piano Concerto meanwhile is so uncannily close to rachmaninoff that it rivals ‘the real thing’ at times.

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among the most persuasive of the works from this period was Improvizatsia i tokata [improvisation and toccata], composed in 1941 as part of a larger cycle. the blend of late romanticism and impressionistic textures in the ‘improvisation’ (more obvious in the piano than in the orchestral version), is reminiscent of some Croatian music from the inter-war period, and it poses some of the same questions. as with Dora pejačević, we recognise a poetic quality to Vladigerov’s best music, but we struggle to find the composer’s voice. What he brought to Bulgarian music above all was professionalism. Stainov, on the other hand, continued to build on the world of the Trakiyski tantsi, notably in a sequence of programmatic orchestral pieces. although conservative in idiom by the general standards of european music of the 1930s, these exhibit a clear musical personality. they include the Symphonic Suite Prikazka [Fairy-tale] (1930), whose five movements depict characters from folklore through a russian-inspired alternation of brittle fantasy, gnomic grotesquerie and romantic melody. a culminating stage in Stainov’s work was reached with his symphonic poem Thrace (1937), based on a nikola Fournadjiev poem. this is music of power and originality, again rooted in russian traditions, but with a Sibelian capacity to pace and modulate sections of contrasted tempi such that the entire work unfolds with an inexorable, goal-directed logic. a number of other composers have traditionally been grouped with this ‘national school’. We may single out Lyubomir pipkov, whose opera Yaninite devet bratya [Yana’s nine Brothers] (1937), to a libretto by Vesselinov, is widely thought to have lifted Bulgarian opera to a new level, and whose First Symphony (1940) is said to be a powerful, if traditionally conceived, work.51 also important was philip Koutev (1903–82), who at this stage of his life was active as a composer, and who in the 1930s contributed orchestral and vocal suites based on the folk music he would later make famous with his State Folksong and Dance Company. a more ambitious creative profile was that of Vessilin Stoyanov (1902–69), best known for his opera Salambo (1940) and his ‘Bai Ganyu’ (1941), based on the aleko Konstantinov character. Much of Stoyanov’s music sounds uncomfortably grandiose today, but ‘Bai Ganyu’ is genuinely colourful. a character sketch in the tradition of Till eulenspiegel, it is deftly scored and has some nice parodistic touches, such as the oriental ‘moments’ on clarinet during Bai Ganyu’s travels in the first movement, the solo violin in Viennese waltz

51 i have been unable to access this work.

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mode in the second, and the vulgarities of Bai Ganyu at the public baths in the third. the early music of Marin Goleminov (1908–2000), including his ballet nestinarka [the Fire-Dancer] (1940), his symphonic Variations on a theme of Dobri hristov (1942), and his third string Quartet, can also be associated with the national school. Of these early works, the ballet score, based on a Konstantin petkanov story about the fire-walking rituals associated with St. constantine and St. Elena (compare chapter 4 on the anastenaria in northern Greece), has been justly popular for its lively and strikingly original appropriations of folk dance elements, as well as for more delicate, poetic moments (notably in the epilogue). other composers could be cited, but in general the music of this generation might be characterised in terms of a late-romantic, folk-based nationalist idiom. only one composer seemed to look beyond this. dimitar nenov (1902–53) was one of the most troubled, and at the same time most adventurous, musical personalities of the first half of the century in Bulgaria. It would be inadequate to characterise his music as ‘lateromantic’; though in one sense it is that. ‘Hyper-romantic’ might be a better description, for nenov achieves at times a tone of sustained ecstasy that links him to composers such as Skryabin and Szymanowski, though the affinity is more of tone than technique. his was a truly original voice, even if not in strictu sensu a modernist one. Between the wars, he composed a cluster of major works, beginning with his Violin Sonata (1921), and continuing through his symphony (1922), first ‘Ballad’ for orchestra with organ (1924), and Four Sketches (1924–25), to the massive Concerto for piano and Large Orchestra (1932–36). this latter is a single-movement work lasting some forty minutes, structured around two motives that also determine much of its harmonic language. Much of the rhetoric of the music derives from late-romantic pianism, but the harmonic complexity and density of counterpoint make for a distinctive sound world, where the flow of ideas is unpredictable but coherent. Unlike the Vladigerov third Concerto, composed around the same time, this work makes its own statement, and its final apotheosis of the two motives is genuinely hard-won. here, as elsewhere in nenov, fashionable sallies into folk music are eschewed, and this was symptomatic of a non-conformity in life and art that resulted in political difficulties following the establishment of the Communist state in 1944, including his temporary dismissal from the academy of Music and (in the early 1950s) the destruction of his recordings. nenov’s was the closest to a truly iconoclastic musical voice in Bulgaria in the inter-war period. he was the only

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Bulgarian composer to register at anything other than surface levels something of the impact of european modernism that was so marked at the time in Yugoslavia. Transit to Prague it had long been the norm for young composers in South east europe to study abroad. not all looked on this as a passport to modern styles, of course. But for those with modernist leanings, the ‘known new’ to which they aspired was invariably located in the major cities of Central and Western europe, and the transit to modernism was naturally helped by a period of study in those cities. Germany was an obvious destination for Bulgarian and Yugoslav (as also Greek) composers. Of the student composers, Vladigerov lived in Berlin, Stainov and nenov travelled to Dresden (the latter mainly studying architecture), Milojević studied in Munich for a time, and Milenko paunović (1889–1924) and Stevan hristić both went to Leipzig (in the latter case after spending several years in Vienna). Yet Milojević aside, none of these – with the qualified exceptions of nenov and hristić – can really be described as modernist figures. paunović was especially noted for his two symphonies and for his Wagner-inspired operas, divina tragoedia (1912) and Čengić-aga (1923). as Biljana Milanović has noted, there are some affinities between the latter work and hristić’s opera Suton [Dusk], composed two years later in 1925.52 But Suton also registered both dramaturgical and musical influences from Debussy, and this reflected hristić’s greater eclecticism. When he finally settled in Belgrade after the war (following some time in Moscow, rome and paris), he became a key figure in musical life there, founding the Belgrade philharmonic, directing the Belgrade Opera in late 1920s and much of the 1930s, and teaching at the Musical academy, where he was rector for a short period in the 1940s. prior to Suton, hristić had composed an oratorio Vaskrsenje [resurrection] (1912), and the première of this work along with the composition of paunović’s divina tragoedia, completed just prior to the hristić première, represented a new stage in the development of Serbian music, a comingof-age, right on the cusp of World War i. Danijela Spirić-Beard, drawing partly on writings by tomašević and Milanović, has discussed the two

52 Milanović 2009.

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works together, gauging through their critical reception something of prewar attitudes to european modernism.53 Both works cut against the grain of existing traditions, with hristić challenging existing concepts of sacred music within an Orthodox tradition, and paunović breaking through the constraints of a long-established tradition of Singspiele with a full-scale German-influenced music drama. the response to Vaskrsenje was especially contentious. By the standards of european modernism in 1912, it was relatively mild-mannered, but in the context of pre-war Belgrade it represented something new, and there was censure from several critics, including Milojević in Srpski književni glasnik. Milojević argued that hristić needed to return to the more conservative nationalism of some of his earlier works, on the face of it an odd stance for this particular critic. and hristić responded with an unflattering anatomy of Serbian music (the Singspiele in particular), and with a defence of his own species of modernism. as Spirić-Beard remarks, the fortunes of Vaskrsenje, and also of divina tragoedia, tell us much about the tension that existed for composers in balancing the imperatives of new music with the inadequacies of performing forces and the conservatism of critics and public. hristić also composed several orchestral pieces,54 but in the end, he secured his place in Yugoslav music mainly through his popular ballet score ohridska legenda [the Legend of Ohrid]. he began work on this in the late 1920s and an early version was performed in the 1930s, but ohridska legenda is known to us today in a four-act version completed after the war in 1947. as Djurić-Klajn has suggested, it is hard to hear much direct evidence of his Germanic training (1904–08) in this picturesque evocation of a folk tale about the love and adventures of Marko and Biljana, with its dramatic representation of the Janissaries, its magic lake inhabited by water nymphs, and its romanian, Bulgarian and Greek slave girls at the Sultan’s palace. the sound world is essentially late romantic, but it is energised by folk rhythms from the wider Yugoslavia as well as by the ‘primitive’ rhythmic asymmetries that accompany the dance of the Janissaries. it is further exoticised by the orientalism of the Sultan’s palace, the ornamental melodies associated with the Greek slave girl and the muzica

53 Spirić-Beard 2012, Vol. i, 167–74. 54 the Fantaisie Symphonique for Violin and orchestra is characteristic in its folk-based lyricism.

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lăutărească of the romanian dance, and it is softened by the impressionist textures that depict the magic lake. at the same time there is a symphonic dimension to the music, especially apparent in the second of the four suites drawn from the ballet, and there is also an explicit link to an earlier Serbian national tradition in the reference to the two ‘Biljana’ themes drawn from Mokranjac’s tenth rukovet.55 the attractiveness and immediate appeal of hristić’s score have guaranteed its enduring popularity, but the work also has symbolic interest through its evocation of traditional music not just from Serbia, nor even Yugoslavia, but from the Balkans more generally, including romania, Bulgaria and Greece. the score may lack modernist pretension, but its clean lines and bright colours have been so beautifully realised that ohridska legenda stands today as one of the significant achievements of Yugoslav music. Vienna was likewise a popular destination for South Slavic composers, and had been right through the nineteenth century. Some of the older generation, such as Bersa and Stoyanov, studied there, but so too did younger figures of traditional orientation, such as the Slovenians Škerjanc, arnič and Kozina. Božidar Širola also studied in Vienna, though his work there was mainly musicological.56 But none of these composers really picked up on the more radical musical tendencies of the habsburg capital. Caught between the German and the Slavonic worlds, and marginalised from the nationalist ambitions of both, Vienna was a crucible of modernism, not only chronicling a much wider crisis in liberal bourgeois society, but also giving voice to highly specific forms of exclusion and dispossession. in retrospect the major composer was Schoenberg, in whom the crisis of modern culture took the form of an inward-looking crisis of expression, jealous of the integrity of art, protective of its ‘truthfulness’, and fearful of its debasement. But Schoenberg was a marginal figure at the time, and less influential as a composer and teacher than Franz Schreker, whose opera der Ferne Klang had made a major impact. One Yugoslav composer who studied with both men was the strange, and ultimately tragic, Marij Kogoj. a Slovenian, Kogoj completed his studies in Vienna in 1918 and arranged a public concert of his music there before he returned to Yugoslavia. in 55 Mosusova 2002. 56 Following the expulsion of students from Zagreb University after unrest in 1895, some moved to Vienna and others to prague, thus creating two separate groups. See nemec and Bobinac 1997.

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the 1920s he worked at the national theatre in Ljubljana, as a teacher at the Glasbena Matica and as conductor of the slavec Choral society. his early songs, piano pieces and chamber works would not have led anyone to expect the opera Črne maske [Black Masks] (1924–7), which took Ljubljana by storm in 1929, and which is the closest music in Yugoslavia came to the operatic climate of German expressionism. It was the subject matter as much as the musical language that attracted attention. Based on the russian play Chornye maski (1908) by Leonid andreyev, this work imported to Yugoslavia some of the exploratory psychological themes, overlaid by symbolism, that were associated with operatic subjects such as der Ferne Klang, erwartung, and Wozzeck. the protagonist of Kogoj’s drama, Duke Lorenzo, is an abstract figure removed from the everyday and the commonplace, and the drama, using the conceit of the masked ball, is a projection of conflicts within his psyche. this is no Faustian surrender to dark forces, with the possibility of a nietzschean overcoming through self-knowledge, but something altogether more disturbing, where truth and deceit can no longer be distinguished, and where Lorenzo has neither certainty about his identity nor control over his actions. in a truly schizoid moment, he murders his own double, and is the chief mourner at the funeral. it is too easy a game to read into this a premonitory sign, but Kogoj was declared clinically insane in 1932, just after composing a handful of harmonically exploratory miniatures (Bagatelles for piano; Polednji spevi [last songs]). as to the music of Črne maske, it is a long way off Schoenberg, but is strikingly modern in the context of Yugoslavia at this time, and makes a genuinely powerful impact. the closest point of contact is probably with Salomé and elektra: a heightened recitative-arioso, an intricate leitmotivic web, and a truly virtuosic orchestra. But the key point is that Kogoj is one of the very few Yugoslav composers for whom Wagnerian influence extended beyond a surface gloss on traditional operatic methods. there are ‘set numbers’ in Črne maske, but they have a diegetic role, as in the minstrel’s song in act 1 Scene 1, or the ‘requiem’ in act 2 Scene 4. harmonically – and again parallels with Salomé and elektra are to the point – there is a mix of complex dissonance (fourth chords, hints of bitonality, whole-tonality) and diatonic simplicities. With the fall of the habsburgs, Vienna lost some of its attraction. For several composers, paris seemed a livelier option. in contrast to Vienna, modernism in paris was eclectic, understated, and detached, and it ranged from the legacy of a Debussyan symbolist-impressionist aesthetic to the more experimental anti-romanticism of erik Satie. among those who

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worked there was the eclectic Milojević, responsive to the ‘new’ wherever he found it. his years in Munich had seen him captivated by richard Strauss (songs like nymph, Japan, and Hercegovačka uspavanka [herzegovina Lullaby]),57 but in the songs and piano pieces composed during the war years in paris he adopted the surface mannerisms, and the cool, detached tone that we tend to associate with an impressionist sound world. they included solo songs to French texts (Berceuse triste, L’heure exquise), as well as piano pieces such as the Quatre morceaux (Stara priča [the Old tale]; Melanholično veče [a Melancholy evening]; U suton je ljiljan snevno [the Lily was Dreaming in the twilight]; U vrtu [in the Garden]). impressionist influences re-surfaced, moreover, in the later interwar works, including the Kameje, impresije za klavir [Cameos, impressions for the piano] of 1937–42. in one extraordinary work, le balai du valet of 1923, Milojević produced the only Yugoslav composition to turn in the direction of Satie and the defiantly deconstructionist world of pieces like Parade. to a surrealist text by Marko ristić, Milojević produced a so-called ‘ballet-grotesque’, whose score comprises a parodistic collage of popular dance pieces (foxtrot and waltz), quotations from Wagner and Strauss, well-known Serbian songs, and even ‘concrete’ effects such as a pistol shot. this was a one-off, but it does say something about the contact between Milojević and his models, and perhaps even something about the contact between Yugoslav moderna and its models. Where traditions have shallow roots, contacts with the new are likely to produce unstable results. there may be wholesale rejection or unprocessed imitation, or (and this is the most common mode) there may be a fascination with external surfaces. this latter condition, where modern surfaces are grafted onto more conventional modes of thought, describes well some of the music composed by Milojević. the piano piece ‘U suton je ljiljan snevao’ is peppered with expressive directions that evoke Debussy, and its texture and compound triple metre strengthens the suggestion. this music looks on the page uncannily like Debussy. But it falls some way short of the more radical stratification of texture we find in Debussy; there is still a single harmonic layer that retains a background link with the harmonically directed idioms of late-romantic pianism. in a small handful of works, notably ‘Jedan san’

57 For an account of Milojević’s dialogues with western europe, see tomašević 1998. See also several chapters in Simić 1986.

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[a Dream] from the Visions Op. 65, the textural intricacy and opaque sonorities seem closer to skryabin than to either Debussy or ravel, especially in the cultivation of a particular kind of languorous melodic style, accompanied by gently pulsating dissonant harmonies. as a body of work, these songs and piano pieces do represent a significant achievement, probably the closest Yugoslav music comes to an impressionist corpus. Milojević’s journeys – literal and stylistic – were not yet over. In the postwar years he spent two years in Prague (1924–25), where he responded to an artistic climate that might be loosely characterised as ‘expressionist’. I will come to this in a moment. But first it is worth noting that as a ‘musical capital’ of the Habsburgs, Prague had long been a magnet for young composers from the South Slav lands. In 1904, twenty years before Milojević studied there, Petar Konjović, was among their ranks. That twenty-year difference, all-important in terms of what was on offer in Prague, can nonetheless be misleading, for Milojević and Konjović were almost exact contemporaries. Their philosophies, all the same, were very different. Where Milojević grouped himself with the ‘Europeans’ among the Serbian intelligentsia, Konjović saw himself from the start as a composer in the Mokranjac tradition. Along with Slavenski and the rather younger Marko Tajčević (1900–84), whose Seven Balkan dances for piano (1927) are still highly valued today, he set out to achieve the kind of alliance between traditional music and modernism that he identified in composers such as Musorgsky and Janáček.58 Moreover he aspired to the kind of psychological realism that is associated with those composers, achieved though intonational fidelity to everyday speech. it remains an intriguing and suggestive fact that these three Yugoslav composers, the three who came closest to a Bartókian model of modern musical nationalism, each followed career paths that were split between Belgrade and Zagreb. thus the two Serbs, Konjović and tajčević, were employed in Zagreb for much of the inter-war period, while the Croat, Slavenski, settled in Belgrade in the 1920s. it seems, too, that the larger project of all three composers might be understood, at least in part, as a modernist extension of a pan-Slavist ideology. this was true of Konjović especially. he himself made a distinction between eastern and western orientations among Slav composers, explicitly favouring the former (by

58 We need to keep the chronology in mind here. Janáček had only just achieved a belated recognition when Konjović arrived in prague.

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which he meant russian), and his commitment to Yugoslavia needs to be viewed in this light; this rather than a narrower Serbian nationalism.59 as a body of work, Konjović’s music has an authority that eludes the more exploratory, yet mercurial, output of Milojević. the turning point in his career was a concert of his music given in Zagreb in 1917, together with a Zagreb staging of his early opera Vilin veo [the Fairy’s Veil] (the title imposed by the censors for Ženidba Miloša obilića [the Wedding of Miloš Obilić]). these were key events, rivaling in their symbolic value the Zagreb concert of the previous year. But already prior to that, Konjović had proclaimed his lineage by dedicating his symphonic variations na selu [in the Village] (first version, 1915) to Mokranjac, and basing the variations themselves on a Macedonian theme from Mokranjac’s tenth rukovet. Like Mokranjac, he drew on songs from all over Yugoslavia in his collection Moja zemlja [My Country] (1905–25), with piano accompaniments in the ‘modern’ style, and he also turned to church chant for works such as his three psalms for String Orchestra (1917). and there were other major instrumental works, including an early Symphony (1907), a Violin Concerto ( Jadranski kapričo [adriatic Capriccio] (1936), and a Second String Quartet (1937) that again draws on a theme from Mokranjac’s rukoveti, transforming it imaginatively in the slow movement ‘quasi una legenda’ and in the increasingly frenetic finale. it was through opera that Konjović made his most significant contribution to Yugoslav music, and again his mentors were Musorgsky and Janáček. Following Vilin veo, there were four further operas, and of these Knez od Zete [the prince of Zeta] (1927), and Koštana (1931) were completed in the inter-war period. Koštana is his triumph, and it has been performed to great acclaim both within and beyond Yugoslavia. Konjović had already demonstrated his acumen in the composition of sevdalinka-like songs, and the central role of Koštana, a young gypsy girl, together with the setting in Vranje, allowed this aspect of his music full rein (the association with Carmen was not lost on contemporary critics). the opera was popular with the public, and in some quarters with the critics too. even the adversely critical trope – that the music was ‘too european’ and lacked a clear basis in Yugoslav folk music – implicitly recognised the capacity of this opera to take Yugoslav music to another level, where it might take its

59 as eva Sedak points out (Sedak 1989), Konjović was criticised in the Croatian press as either too nationalist or too european.

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place alongside other major works of european modernism. For some it remains the highest operatic expression of a Yugoslav national culture. the prague encountered by Milojević in 1924 was very different from the Prague that had shaped Konjović. In the post-war years, the newly independent city was culturally ‘open’, a crossroads of cultural pathways that imported ideas from the German cities, but was at the same time receptive to avant-garde influences from France. in many ways parisprague replaced paris-Vienna as the axis of musical modernism. this was true in all the arts, but in music it was associated in particular with the teaching of Karel Boleslav Jirák and the experimental techniques developed by alois hába. it was no doubt because of this diversity and openness that prague took on a special significance for Yugoslav composers in the inter-war years. not all were modernists. if we accept a rather crude division, we have on the conservative side Franz Lhotka (Czech by origin), Dobronić and Odak, and on the modernist side Slavenski, who arrived there in 1920, tajčević (also 1920), and Osterc (1925). and then of course there was Milojević himself. in some ways Milojević embodies in a single figure a threefold division among Yugoslav composers. at risk of caricature, one might describe it as a division between German-Viennese aestheticism, parisian decadence and prague progressivism. thus, it was entirely characteristic of Milojević that he slipped quickly and easily into another musical world on arrival in prague. Symptomatic was his cycle of choral compositions to Miroslav Krleža’s poems Pir iluzije [the Feast of illusion], where the advanced harmonies and raw energy are expressionist in character, and a very long way from the world of his French-influenced music. One might add here his solo song Sehr heisser Tag, and his tougher-grained, ambitious Violin Sonata Op. 36. exactly as with paris, moreover, the prague influence surfaced again in some of his later compositions. perhaps the most blatant of these is ritmičke grimase [rhythmic Grimaces] for piano of 1936, whose harmonic distortions, percussive piano writing and aggressive dissonance recall some other better-known manifestations of grotesquerie in twentieth-century pianism, including those by prokofiev and Bartók. it was as a source of new ideas, then, that prague took on its historic significance for Yugoslav music. Slavenski and Milojević both befriended hába in the 1920s, and in the pages of Zvuk hába himself acknowledged their support. But hába also influenced the young Slavko Osterc, who arrived at the Conservatory around the same time as himself. Osterc had begun on traditional ground as a self-taught composer in Slovenia, but already before setting off for prague he demonstrated that he had more

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exploratory inclinations, notably in songs such as Sonce v zavesah [the Sun on the Curtain].60 it was the prague environment that nurtured these and brought them to fruition. it provoked him to new adventures, and that even included a brief flirtation with quarter-tone composition in his three pieces for Quarter-tone piano of 1926. as andrej rijavec has pointed out, it was above all with his First String Quartet that Osterc found his way to a distinctive modern style, one in which tonality receded, a compensatory thematic-contrapuntal logic emerged, and baroque and classical formal archetypes ensured an underlying coherence.61 Osterc’s first major work on his return to Yugoslavia was a Concerto for Violin and Seven instruments, and this, together with other instrumental compositions such as the hindemithian Suite for Orchestra of 1929, the Wind Quintet of 1932, and the Concerto for piano and Wind of 1933, nailed his colours firmly to a modern, internationalist idiom, neo-classical in manner, and sharply contrasted with the expressionism of his talented compatriot, Marij Kogoj. the very fact that his most successful works were instrumental in this way (the Second String Quartet of 1934 and closeknit, single-movement Mouvement Symphonique of 1936 are among his most significant achievements) removed him from the orbit of more conventional Yugoslav nationalist circles, though he did also compose stage works and cantatas. When he returned to Ljubljana in 1927, Osterc immediately joined, and was soon a power behind, the Yugoslav branch of the international Society for Contemporary Music, with which Slavenski had been associated since its foundation in 1922. From the correspondence between the two composers (of which only Slavenski’s side has survived) we can see just how important it was for them that Yugoslavia should find a recognised place on the musical map of europe.62 and this was also the priority for a group of younger (mainly Serbian) composers, who became known as the ‘prague Group’ to signify not just that they all studied there, but that they adopted a very particular modernist position conspicuous for its rejection of folklore, and thus of any point of contact with national musical traditions. the forerunner was the Slovene Mihovil Logar (1902–98), whose Sonata quasi uno scherzo for piano (1929) inaugurated a new phase in Yugoslav music, but he was quickly followed by the Serbs predrag Milošević

60 rijavec 1969a. 61  rijavec 1969b. 62 Cvetko 1972.

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(1904–87), Dragutin Čolić (1907–90), Ljubica Marić (1909–2003), Milan ristić (1908–82), Stanojlo rajičić (1910–2000) and Vojislav Vučković. i will return to at least some of these composers in part 4, but it will be enough to remark here on the experimental profile of the music they wrote in prague in the early 1930s. Inter alia, the ‘prague Group’ explored hindemithian ‘constructivism’ (Logar’s Two Toccatas; Milošević’s Sonatina, third movement), Schoenbergian twelve-note composition (ristić’s First String Quartet, Marić’s Music for orchestra) and hába’s quarter-tone methods (Čolić’s Concertino for Quarter-tone piano, ristić’s Suite for four trombones, Vučković’s Quarter-tone trio). it will be clear from even a highly generalised description such as this that the ‘prague Group’ epitomised the transition to a known new. For the first time Yugoslav music was up to speed with modernist developments elsewhere in europe. however, this was not to be the last word on the inter-war period. it was one thing to produce music like this in prague. it was quite another to bring it back to Belgrade. When these composers returned to Yugoslavia with portfolios of modernist instrumental works, they were greeted with a chorus of hostility from audiences and performers alike.63 it became clear that they had not only created a division between old and new Serbian music; they had also driven a wedge into the centre of Yugoslav music, with Osterc and the younger Serbs on one side, Dobronić and the Croats on the other. perhaps the divisions were simply not sustainable, whether we speak of the temporal ‘break’ in the Serbian story, or the spatial separation in the Yugoslav story. in any case the obvious lack of comprehension must have been a motivating factor in the retreat from modernism that became apparent in the later 1930s. But the wider climate of ideas was also shifting during these years. as we noted in Bulgaria, there was a treacherous course to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Soviet Union and the German reich, and this time transition was no option. a new conformity began to appear in Yugoslavia, a ‘back to the roots’ movement that responded to Soviet aesthetics, though it was already in place before 1945 and thus before it could be officially prescribed by the Communist state.64 even Milojević found himself moving onto this territory, reinstating folk music at the centre of his compositions, as in his piano cycle Melodies 63 tomašević 2007. 64 a publication by Miroslav Krleža was of seminal importance here. his ‘predgovor mapi crteža Krste hegedušića “podravski motivi”’ of 1933 instigated a debate on ‘social art’ that quickly found its way into the pages of Zvuk (see Krleža 1973).

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and rhythms from the Balkans, Op. 69 of 1942, though harmonically these pieces are often exploratory (no. 16, for example), and also rhythmically (no. 3 alternates 10/8 and 11/8 sections). perhaps an even more interesting case was Vučković, a composer-critic who, like Milojević, began as a fervent advocate of everything new but in the end joined the clamour for ‘roots’, for social function, for realism. While in prague, Vučković had joined ‘Matija Gubec’, a revolutionary student movement, and on his return to Yugoslavia he became involved with the Communist struggle, with consequences that have already been described. his first rukovet of 1941, the very year in which Yugoslavia was attacked, occupied and broken up, was thus a symbolic gesture of return: to Mokranjac, to Serbia, and to Yugoslavia. if we take the longer view through into the Communist state, we might say that Croatia provided the continuity and Serbia the novelty, while Slovenia kept a foot in both camps. Such a characterisation is crude, but it is along the right lines, and it calls into question the Yugoslavism that continued to play in official cultural pronouncements in the reincarnation of the state. Of course, my characterisation leaves out of the picture altogether three of the republics that would form part of tito’s Yugoslavia. it was mainly under tito that Bosnia and herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro were modernised and began to build and consolidate a formal musical culture. and in this respect the differences between generations proved to be more significant than those questions of nationalism or socialism that were so much debated by composers and critics in the inter-war years. Meanwhile, one major composer transcended all these categories – generation, nationality and political orientation – in the way that major composers do.

Chapter FOUrteen

Serbo-Croat Who owns Slavenski? europe’s fluid borders and unstable politics can wreak havoc with composers’ nationalities. hugo Wolf was born into a German culture in what is now Slovenia, Karol Szymanowski into a polish culture in a nowindependent ukraine. In former Yugoslavia, where, as the Macedonian writer Goran Stefanovski put it, ‘you can’t be born and die in the same country’, these questions have become sensitive. Consider the difficulties facing the editors of the second edition of The new Grove. all those entries that had been happily lumped together as ‘Yugoslav’ in 1980 had to be carefully unpicked in 2001. It is not always easy to assign a cast-iron national identity to a composer in contexts that are politically volatile. Legalistic definitions may well be out of sync not just with composers’ subjective constructions of nationality, but with the consensus adopted by host communities. there was a whole generation of composers born in Serbia, or in the Croatian and Slovenian territories of the habsburg empire, who lived out their adult lives in Yugoslavia, and died as citizens of the federal state. how we label them today is moot. Most of them felt more Serbian, or Croatian, or Slovenian than Yugoslav, though for some of them the terms were more-or-less synonymous. as to the view from without, it was customary until the break-up of the state to label such composers Yugoslavs. but these days we think of them as Serbs, or Croats or Slovenes. Language is a powerful metaphor for these shifts. We no longer speak of ‘SerboCroat’, and the language is indeed separating out – Dubravka ugrešić describes it as ‘split, tortured’1 – with contrived differentiation between Serbian, Croatian and bosnian (and more recently Montenegrin) varieties. but for many years it was basically one, and its success was hailed as a triumph of Yugoslavism. Career paths further confuse the issue. as noted in chapter 13, petar Konjović and Marko tajčević were Serbs who lived for much of their lives in Zagreb. Likewise, Krešimir baranović (1894–1975) and Josip Štolcer 1 In a profile, ‘balkan Warrior’, in The Guardian 23.02.08, 11.

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Slavenski were Croats who made their later careers in belgrade. Slavenski brings the issue into sharpest focus precisely because he is widely regarded as the most significant composer working in the former Yugoslavia during his lifetime. he was someone worth claiming. Scholarship on his music has been more-or-less evenly divided between Zagreb and belgrade.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, there were contributions from the Croat eva Sedak and the Serb Mirjana Živković, with Sedak’s 1984 monograph, reflecting analytical approaches that were current at the time, still regarded as a landmark publication (it contains a thematic catalogue jointly authored by Sedak and Živković).3 then, more recently, Živković’s edited collection (2006), based on a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death, brought Slavenski scholarship into the modern age.4 unhappily, the wars of succession put paid to collaborative projects between belgrade and Zagreb. the jointly organised publication of Slavenski’s collected works was suspended in the early 1990s and has not been revived. Likewise, the belgrade conference in 2005 – the source of that Živković publication – was conspicuous for the absence of leading players from Croatia. It is unfortunate that such attitudes linger in the scholarly arena. and they are not the preserve of any one party. Croats may have refused invitations to the Slavenski conference in belgrade (were they blacklisting Serbian musicology, or blaming Slavenski for having settled in belgrade?), but at another recent conference one Serbian scholar was heard to chastise another for describing Slavenski as a ‘Croatian composer’. Slavenski himself would not have recognised any rationale for this competition. born in (habsburg) Croatia, fostered by Serbia, he was owned by neither. he was Serbo-Croat, Yugoslav, balkan. and he was Međimurjean. It is of some interest that he studied in budapest, moving there from Čakovec and Varaždin in 1913. budapest helped shape him as a composer, even if his music from these early years lacked maturity, though not enterprise (some of the music in his early suite Sa Balkana [From the balkans] is both harmonically bold and metrically complex). While in budapest he worked for both bartók and Kodály, studying composition with Kodály and transcribing field notes for both men. In other words, he had the best of models for a modernism forged from traditional agrarian repertories. In the later war years he engaged in his own collecting activities while serving in the military (mainly along the borders with romania), but 2 the State-funded Slavenski archive (Legat Josip Slavenskog), located in belgrade, has now apparently been closed. 3 Sedak 1984. 4 Živković 2006.

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this hands-on approach to traditional music was never really of central importance to him. In any case, by the end of the war he had decided on a career as a composer – if not on how to fund it – and had already a determinate aesthetic orientation. It was also in the immediate post-war years that he became politically active as a left-orientated ‘Young Međimurjean’ (Međimurje was not immediately included in the post-war Yugoslav Kingdom), and it was then – under the influence of the activist lawyer ernest Krajanski and his circle – that he started adding ‘Slavenski’ to his surname Štolcer, in an assertion of a Slavic identity that seemed under threat in Međimurje at the time (eventually ‘Slavenski’ replaced ‘Štolcer Slavenski’). then, in December 1920, he took the step that lifted his music to a new level of professionalism while at the same time ensuring that his compositional colours would be nailed firmly to the modernist mast. Like so many Yugoslav composers, he entered the prague Conservatoire, working with both novák and Suk, and associating with compatriots such as odak and Dobronić, with Czech composers such as emil František burian and alois hába, and with forward-thinking artists in other fields, such as the young Varaždin painter Ivo režek, with whom he shared an apartment for a time. Slavenski remained in prague for three productive years. It was there (in 1922) that he joined the newly founded International Society for Contemporary Music, of whose later Yugoslav section he would become an active member. and it was also during these years that he brought to fruition several major compositional projects ( Jugoslovenska svita [Yugoslavian Suite]; Iz Jugoslavije [From Yugoslavia]; First String Quartet), and saw his music publicly performed at concerts both in prague and in Zagreb. Yet, as eva Sedak has emphasised, several of his major creative achievements were already present in embryonic form before he left for prague. he had been working on a ‘large Latin mass’ that was probably an early form of the Misa za muški zbor a cappella [Mass for unaccompanied Male Voices], and also on a ‘symphonic opera’ Stvaranje [the Creation] that seems to have been a conceptual source for the ambitious enterprise collectively known as Misterij [Mystery], though of the several projected works only religiofonija [Symphony of religions] and Haos [Chaos] were completed.5

5 other constituent parts were the Prasimfonija [Symphony of ancient times], Kozmogonija [Symphony of the Cosmos], and Heliofonija [Symphony of the Sun]. Materials from these projected pieces found their way into other works by Slavenski.

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the major achievement of the prague years was the First String Quartet, which exists in several versions sharing similar musical materials. It was completed in 1923, and it was the work that more than any other brought him to international attention when performed at Donaueschingen a year after its composition. Its selection by a committee that included Schoenberg and Schreker augured well for Slavenski’s career as a composer (he was taken on by Schotts), but he had difficulty maintaining this visibility in later years, and was largely neglected after World War II, though still with some success (performances of the Violin Concerto and positive reviews for a performance of the Sinfonija orijenta) in 1950s belgrade. by the time of the Donaueschingen performance, Slavenski had already returned to Yugoslavia. he had been obliged to cut short his time in prague, and took a modest teaching post at the Zagreb academy in September 1923. then, less than a year later, he moved to belgrade, where, apart from an eightmonth period spent in paris in 1925–26, he remained until his death. the move to belgrade was not about nationality; any more than was Konjović’s move in the other direction. the brief period in Zagreb was an intensely creative one (the piano sonata; the Slavenska sonata [Slavic Sonata] for violin and piano), and during it he established or affirmed musical friendships that would prove to be lasting. the immediate cause of his departure was his removal from the academy due to major cutbacks at the end of 1923. In contrast, he had a firm offer from the belgrade Music School. but there are suggestions, too, that the atmosphere in Zagreb was not entirely conducive, especially given his Međimurjean roots. Milana Slavenski, who would marry the composer a few years later, commented not just on the conservative influences prevailing in musical circles in Zagreb, but on a certain snobbishness towards ‘provincial’ Međimurjeans (Slavenski was always keen to parade his credentials as a baker’s son who had turned his hand to the trade).6 belgrade, on the other hand, was an open city, a newly minted capital, and a ‘blank sheet’ on which new stories were being written in all the arts, with the Grupa umetnika [artists’ Group], established in 1919, playing a key role in expanding the cultural horizons of the city. Slavenski’s productivity remained undiminished during his first year in belgrade. he completed several major works, including his quintet Sa sela [From the Village], Sonata religiosa [religious Sonata] for violin and organ, piano Suite Iz Srbije [From Serbia] and symphonic Sketches Mladost [Youth],

6 M. Slavenski 2006.

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though during the following winter sojourn in paris he seems to have contented himself mainly with revisions. all the same, paris may have played a role in introducing him to more radical tendencies in art. and it was in paris that he developed an interest in the avant-garde movement known as Zenitism, around the time when Ljubomir Micić’s controversial journal Zenit was finally proscribed by the Yugoslav authorities. Milana Slavenski downplays the significance of Zenitism in her husband’s creative development.7 She does, however, discuss his encounter in paris with the ardent Zenitist artist branko V. poljanski, the pseudonym used by Micić’s brother. It seems that Slavenski took poljanski in and helped him financially, and that poljanski in turn introduced the composer to several artists associated with the parisian avant-garde, including pablo picasso. Milana was not entirely wrong to dissociate her husband from the Zenitists. It is true that he did not subscribe to their more subversive agendas, that he tired of the Micić brothers, and that his own brand of balkan vehemence was different from theirs. but this is to minimise what are very real connections. at the outset, Zenitism was influenced by european avant-garde movements, but ultimately it took its stand on an opposition between the balkans and Western europe, and on a view of the former as a potential source of the latter’s renewal. Its tone was militant – in the manner of avant-garde manifestos in the 1920s – and its agenda was ambitious: nothing less than to transform modern life by means of radical art. What was needed – and it is an intriguing reversal of the customary flow of ideas – was a purifying and energising ‘balkanisation’ of europe, through the power of the balkan ‘barbaro-genius’, a local variation on a nietzschean theme. It is hard not to see an element of this in at least one dimension of Slavenski’s music, including its references to the eastern orientation of the balkans. Certainly it is telling that the score of ‘Zagorski tamburaši’, the second movement of his suite Sa Balkana, was given in an issue of Zenit dated october 1925. I will return to ‘Zagorski tamburaši’ shortly. by the time Slavenski returned to belgrade from paris in July 1926 to take up a teaching appointment at an all boys’ Gimnazija, he already had an impressive portfolio of compositions. It is time to take a brief look at some of them. Consider first two pieces composed in prague, both signalling Yugoslavia. the suite Iz Jugoslavije exists in several versions, vocal and instrumental. It is based on traditional music, including songs from

7 Ibid.

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Šumadija and Croatian Zagorje, and the treatments are characteristically modern, with Slavenski eschewing diatonic functions in favour of stable harmonic platforms that create bimodal relations with the melody. this is also the technique of the final movement of the Jugoslovenska svita (piano version). but the other movements of the suite are free compositions, taking us from the harmonically ‘thickened’ melody of the opening tema con improvisazioni (polychordal writing), through the high-energy dissonance of the scherzo balcanico, to the polymetric improvisational flow and dissonant counterpoint of the third movement, adagio religioso. the alternation pjevanje-igranje [singing-dancing] here is an early instance of a structuring device in many of Slavenski’s later works based on traditional music. the movements of the first version of the First String Quartet are so labelled, and the two terms, suggestive of contrasted primal elements in traditional balkan music (the melancholy song; the wild dance), are frequently used as expressive indicators throughout his music. In its final form, this quartet stands as one of Slavenski’s most important early works. Its thematic substance is relatable to folk models. the opening melody, for instance, is based on a type of pentatonic Međimurjean song, and it would later become the basis of the sixth movement of Balkanofonija, personalised as ‘Moja pjesma’ [My Song]. Indeed it assumes the quality of a signature in Slavenski’s music as a whole. but the quartet takes this material into an area of contrapuntal abstraction, including fugal devices, and the dense, concentrated motive working of the work marks it off as one of the composer’s most rigorous, thought-through compositions.8 as its title suggests, the Slavenska Sonata also takes its inspiration from traditional music, but here it is transformed into a sound world that is more uncompromisingly modernist than anything in the First String Quartet. the style is a unique one. In trying to capture it, we may choose reference points in bartók, Janáček and Stravinsky, but only because as known quantities these can act as useful pointers. the Slavenska Sonata does not in the end sound like any of them. Its motive working and counterpoint, and the relation it establishes between an intensely expressive melos and an often aggressively dissonant harmonic accompaniment, have something in common with bartók. Yet its processive discontinuities, its circular ostinati and its expressive immediacy are closer to Janáček, and so too is the tendency for ‘accompaniments’ to transcend the usual connotations of this label. Stravinsky may seem a more unlikely comparator, but there

8 bujić 1978.

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is an element of tonal distortion in this music that is similar in technique, though not in sound, to the russian composer, with melody and harmony alike subject to ‘tonal interferences’. overall, though, the most striking feature is the sheer expressive range of this music within a relatively short, single-movement work. It encompasses tender moments of folk-based melody and violent explosions of dissonance, with little attempt to mediate between the two. and it is exactly this expressionslogik that allows us to characterise the sonata as a particularly fierce kind of expressionism. It is not out of place to relate it to Zenitist thinking. When Slavenski writes the words ‘sauvage extasie des balkaniques’ into the score of the Slavenska Sonata at one wildly dissonant moment, he surely invokes those cleansing balkan energies, with their capacity to counter western decadence, that would in due course be immortalised by Ljubomir Micić in his Barbarogenije decivilizator.9 this too is a trope that recurs periodically in the later music. In the Sonata religiosa for violin and organ, composed shortly after his arrival in belgrade, Slavenski moved yet further from traditional music. It still informs the expressive melos of the violin part, unfolding over circling, non-teleological ostinati in the organ, but it is juxtaposed with ‘sonoristic’ fields on organ alone, built up in separate strata and activated by rapid internal pulsations or divisions. here we can scarcely avoid adding another reference point in the music of the last century. Like Messiaen, Slavenski was alive to the potential of the organ to create a kind of religious ecstasy through the sheer power of sonority, allied to a refusal of developmental energies. the opening sections of the Sonata religiosa present an alternative to the pjevanje-igranje juxtaposition, where the ‘sauvage extasie’ of the Slavenska Sonata is replaced by an ‘extasie religieuse’. In both cases there is a dialogue between individual expression and depersonalised ritual forms, the surrender to the collective that is expressed in dance, but equally in religious ritual. In the Sonata religiosa the individual meditation of the violin melody is juxtaposed at the outset with the collective religious awe depicted by the organ, and the remainder of the piece can be understood as a mediation of these two positions. however, the sonic explorations of the Sonata religiosa took on an autonomous quality in some later works, representing one pole of Slavenski’s creativity, where folk-based motive working represents the other. the trajectory

9 For a discussion of Micić’s zenitist manifesto and his idea of the barbarogenius, see Šimičić 2003.

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of these early works then – from Iz Jugoslavije to the Sonata religiosa – describes a journey from one species of Yugoslav modernism to another: to put it over-glibly, from the modernism of Konjović to the modernism of osterc. From the Balkans . . . to describe Slavenski as Serbo-Croat is already to invoke transition. but his music is about transition in two other senses, both already introduced in our discussion of Yugoslav music between the wars. I will address the first of them here and the second in the next section. When Slavenski remarked that he sought inspiration ‘in the folk music of all those peoples that have not yet been spoiled by civilisation’, he aligned himself to a bartókian aesthetic, though he was not without his criticism of bartók.10 What he called ‘folk music’ in this quotation was no mere symbolic adjunct to nationalism, but an essential ingredient of modernism, in the terms of adorno’s classic formulation of bartók’s modernist credentials. unlike the rationalised folk and popular music of romantic nationalism, agrarian traditions were valued precisely because they had fallen largely outside the dominant Western processes of rationalisation, and could therefore be used critically to radical, progressive ends. Something of the symbolic value associated with folk music remained, of course, in particular its identification with a collective natural community, one that had not been ‘spoiled by civilisation’. but it was no longer a narrowly national community that was evoked. and that is why Slavenski’s project, no less than bartók’s, was less a nationalist than an authentically modernist one: to span the gulf between a putative ahistorical community, where the individual might be thought to speak for, or with, the community, and the contemporary world of Western modernity, where the individual is deemed to be alienated. of all composers working in Yugoslavia, Slavenski is the one who came closest to an essentially bartókian project. and in doing so, he articulated precisely the quality of transition that enabled significant music in the balkans. Far from inhibiting his modernist tendencies, as bojan bujić has argued, folkloric elements had a capacity actually to liberate those tendencies.11

10 In his article, ‘Muzički folklor kao političko oružje’ (Književne novine, 1 april 1955), Slavenski criticised bartók for Magyarising the folk music of neighbouring countries, including that of Međimurje. See Sedak 1984, i, 235. 11  bujić 1978.

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that Slavenski transcended narrow nationalisms is further suggested by the symbolic geographies traced by his titles. he was initially a committed Yugoslav, regarding the new state as a political expression of both Slavic and balkan (Zenitist) identities, at once part of europe and resistant to europe. as we have seen, his titles did for a time invoke Yugoslavia (in addition to Jugoslovenska svita and Iz Jugoslavije, there was the ‘Danse Yugoslave’ from the First String Quartet and the Jugoslavenska pesma i igra [Yugoslav Songs and Dances]), but this practice all but disappeared after he settled in belgrade in 1926. the later titles refer either to specific locales (rasina, Zagorje, and especially Međimurje), to nations within the wider balkans (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, albania, bulgaria, romania, Greece), or simply to ‘the balkans’. this was a significant shift. Slavenski identified not just with Yugoslavia but with particular regions such as Međimurje, and with the balkans. Indeed, by embracing the Muslim regions of the balkans – the most obvious markers of the ottoman legacy – he ran counter to the rhetoric traditionally associated with Yugoslav nation-building. this reorientation, shared by others (tajčević), was indicative of a future shift in the positioning of Muslims, a suggestion that they might be integrated, rather than ‘othered’, within Yugoslavia. Slavenski commonly used the term ‘balkan’, but in two distinct senses. It could be a Zenitist expressive indicator, as in ‘Scherzo balcanico’ from the Jugoslavenska svita, ‘allegro barbaro balkanico’ from Čapljanski tatari or ‘presto balcanico, furioso’ from Sa Sela [From the Village]. I have already discussed his links with Zenitism, but it is possible to argue that the ethos conveyed by these descriptors is at least as close to later writers such as régis Debray as to Ljubomir Micić.12 It is a distinctly masculine ethos, in which the primitive and the warlike are assigned a positive value, in direct opposition to an over-civilised West, which increasingly fights its wars by proxy (and sometimes in the balkans). to quote and then paraphrase Debray, the balkans are ‘closer to the laboratories of truth’, a site where hunger, insecurity, conquering faith and war can be studied daily and peace can be recognised for what it truly is: an interlude between states of hostility. this is close to one meaning the term carried for Slavenski. but ‘balkan’ was also understood as a unifying descriptor, and in more than a purely geographical sense. this is how it was used in the youthful Sa Balkana, in the Pesme i igre sa Balkana [Songs and Dances from the balkans] (1927), which formed the basis of the Balkanska Svita [balkan Suite] and the major orchestral composition Balkanofonija, and in the orchestral 12 Debray 2007.

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Četiri balkanske igre [Four balkan Dances]. Completed in 1938 on the eve of World War II, Četiri balkanske igre was the last major composition whose title points specifically to the balkans in this way. of all these works, Balkanofonija was, and is, the most popular. It was first performed in belgrade in 1928, then in berlin in 1929, and subsequently all over europe. along with the Second String Quartet [Lirski kvartet] of 1928, it represented the high point of what some have considered a second creative period in his work, and its panorama of balkan nations and regions neatly epitomises the inclusivity of his aesthetic. Compare the Simfonija orijenta (the name given to Religiofonija when that term was deemed politically unacceptable) of 1934, which speaks of inclusivity in a different way. From the start, the creativity with which Slavenski appropriated original and imagined traditional music and aligned it to modernist idioms lifted his music clear of the more conventional approaches of Dobronić and his circle. In the little choral piece Voda zvira [Water Springs out], composed as early as 1916, this originality was already apparent, not least through the succession of alternative harmonisations of a pentatonic melodic fragment reminiscent of traditional Međimurjean idioms. this ‘changing background’ technique, familiar in appropriations of traditional music from Glinka onwards, recurred frequently in his later music, as in ‘bulgarska igra’, the last movement of Balkanofonija. also typical of Slavenski was the re-cycling of the melody of Voda zvira in one version of the First String Quartet and in the Pesme i igre sa Balkana. Such re-cycling was especially common in folk-inspired pieces, and we find it again in the piano suite Sa Balkana, completed a year after Voda zvira in 1917. not only was this based mainly on existing materials for other instrumental combinations; in the same year the first piece became a song for voice and piano, while the last piece was arranged for chamber ensemble. Later (1930), the entire suite was arranged for chamber orchestra, and in the early war years for full orchestra.13 these are much more than arrangements. rather like Liszt, Slavenski allowed his ideas to spread out into multiple media, genres and forms, and new versions often have the effect of commenting on earlier versions. In other words, the same folk-inspired material generates a diversity of pieces that are at once independent and mutually dependent: a series of intertexts where significance can reside in the play of echoes, of memories and correspondences, of

13 this was also the time when Slavenski arranged his piano Sonata and Iz Jugoslavije for orchestra.

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recognitions and differences. this is even true where there are relatively few changes to musical substance, as in the second movement of Sa Balkana, ‘Zagorski tamburaši’. there is a world of difference between the piano and orchestral versions of this piece, to say nothing of the earliest form of all (1912), where the scoring is for two citterns. the piano version, with its percussive clusters ( feroce pesante) and relentless rhythms, reminds us again of that connection with bartók, here the bartók of allegro barbaro. Yet such comparisons need to be handled carefully. one by-product of modernist canon formation was the parallel formation of a scholarly canon for the analysis of modernist music: pitchclass set analysis following Schoenberg, octatonic theory following Stravinsky. For musicologists from South east europe, it has been hard to resist using such tools in the analysis of native repertories, but the effects are not always as intended. We may appear to dignify lesser-known composers by using analytical methods derived from the music of major canonic figures. but there is some danger that we inadvertently marginalise them further if the ‘fit’ between music and method is not adequate. In a word, they may be deemed to fall short of achievements that were never in their sights. eva Sedak’s study of Slavenski is not without difficulties in this regard. It is tempting all the same to explore Slavenski’s affinities with bartók in analytical terms. In the case of bartók, two approaches in particular, coming from very different theoretical traditions, have systematised the common ground between traditional music and modernist art music, one transforming traditional modalities into abstract inversional symmetries, and the other proposing an integration of (organic, eastern) ‘golden section’ and (inorganic, western) ‘acoustic’ systems.14 It does seem possible that comparable theoretical systems might be developed for Slavenski’s music, which is likewise concerned with modernist transformations of melodiclinear (often pentatonic) structures. but one thing is certain. they would not be identical systems.15 Despite their similar aims, the music of the two composers is really quite different. to use the language of adorno, we need to allow Slavenski something in advance.16 For one thing, folk or folk-inspired materials do not play a single, selfconsistent role in Slavenski’s music. this is already apparent in the music he composed before settling in belgrade in 1926. Sa Balkana is one of 14 antokoletz 1984; Lendvai 1983. 15 hugues Seress has made systematic efforts to conduct a comparative harmonic analysis of pentatonic melodies in the compositions of bartók and Slavenski (see Seress 2006). 16 adorno 1982.

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several works that remain fairly close to their folk models, though the four pieces – alternating songs and dances – are certainly much more than mere transcriptions; this group would also include the song-cycle Iz Yugoslavije. Slavenski made a close study of the scale and interval structures of traditional music, and his aim in such pieces was to allow harmonisations to emerge naturally from those structures, whether the melody was an authentic folk song or a folk-like melody of his own invention. bimodal accompaniments, often based on ostinato patterns, are characteristic, but the range of harmonic genera is actually extraordinarily wide, taking us all the way from archetypal bourdon fifths to dense clusters. In contrast, the First String Quartet exhibits a much more closely integrated thematicism, so that concrete folkloristic elements are much less immediate. Folk models do still inform the linear-melodic elements, but the models are now processed and transformed to the point where they can achieve a measure of abstraction similar to that found in the bartók quartets. then, somewhere between these two extremes, we have works such as the piano Sonata and the Slavenska sonata, where folk or folkinspired materials are often foregrounded in a ‘raw’ state, but where they are disrupted in various ways, partly through ‘tonal interferences’ and partly through abrupt juxtapositions with radical modernist devices, rupturing continuities but at the same time lighting up the simple melodies in new ways. the effect of this is to give the music a visceral, gestural quality, common to a good deal of Slavenski’s music. It is highly distinctive, and it separates him off from his most obvious models. For better or worse – mainly better – there is no other music quite like Slavenski’s. When he arrived in belgrade, following his parisian interlude, one of his first compositions was Pesme i igre sa Balkana, and the symbolic geography is reinforced by later works based on these pieces: the Balkanska svita and Balkanofonija. the three works are by no means identical in their musical materials. the two volumes of Pesme i igre sa Balkana contain quite a few pieces that do not appear in the later works, including songs or dances from Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia, the latter an arrangement of an early choral work. there are also regional pieces from rasina and Međimurje (the Međimurjean one is based on Voda zvira), additional Serbian pieces, a ‘Dervish dance’, and a ‘Slavonic dance’. Finally, the romanian dance is different from the one composed for Balkanofonija. In the five-movement Balkanska svita for String orchestra Slavenski renamed the opening ‘national dance’ a ‘Serbian dance’ and kept the albanian, Macedonian and bulgarian pieces. he also added ‘Moja pjesma’ [My Song] to the Suite, based on the Međimurjean-influenced slow movement of the

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First String Quartet. In Balkanofonija, which is in seven movements, he retained the ‘Serbian Dance’, ‘albanian Song’, ‘Greek Song’ and ‘bulgarian Dance’ from the original work, and included ‘Moja pjesma’ from the Balkanska svita. he also replaced the ‘romanian Dance’ with a different piece, and added another new movement called ‘turkish Dance’. taken together, then, these three works present us with a panorama of the balkans, and they carry a rather blatant political message: a sermon on nationalism. by uniting the region musically, Slavenski sought to emphasise what he saw as a special kind of power, closely linked to his visions of the primeval, the oriental, and even (as we shall see) the cosmic. It was a universal message, but at some remove from the hegemonic universalism embodied in the Western canon. Indeed, as someone whose politics were decidedly of the left, Slavenski resisted any imperialist suggestion that a Western bourgeois culture might speak on behalf of all. Idealistically no doubt, and here he echoed the Zenitists, Slavenski regarded the balkans, incorporating its Islamic ‘east’, as a privileged site of cultural renewal. the Balkanofonija pieces illustrate well my earlier point about intertexts. the three versions of the opening movement, ‘Serbian Dance’ are all different. In Pesme i igre we launch straight into the jaunty dance melody; in the Suite there is a two-bar dissonant prelude; and in Balkanofonija itself there is a more extended introduction based on an entirely different dissonance (a complete aeolian aggregate), marked feroce agitato. this is so far from the dance melody that it acts as an alienating device, establishing an opposition, a formal dislocation of a kind characteristic of Slavenski. the melody itself retains its folk-like character in Balkanofonija, but it is harmonised pan-diatonically rather than by an open-fifth bourdon, as in the earlier versions, and when it returns in the reprise it takes on a more ominous character through tonal interferences, reflecting the experience of a much darker middle section, and ultimately making sense of the opening dislocation. the middle section is characterised by a circular melody in Istrian mode projected against layered dissonant harmonic backcloths animated by oriental elements. the movement is more character piece than dance piece, a portrait of a melody as it interacts poetically and dramatically with its surroundings. Moreover the harmonies do not really drive the music. Characteristically they either provide ‘static’ backcloths or emerge from rotating patterns of ostinato-like linear fragments. these techniques are extended in the albanian and Greek movements. In the ‘albanian Song’ yet another dissonant opening harmony thins out to the octave ‘a’s that accompany the repeated modal melody in ways

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that recall borodin’s Steppes of Central asia. but again the simplicities are lost, as the parallel fourths of the second cycle give way to the complex sustained dissonances of the third. the ‘Greek Song’, meanwhile, allows its oriental mode to unfold in tight repeating circles that are bound yet closer by strict canonic treatments, making space for arabesque-like ornamental counterpoints towards the end. Most remarkable of all is the ‘turkish dance’, where wisps of melody and high-tessitura figures interweave in unpredictable ways, all overlaid on a recurring percussion ‘ground’. again there is no real hint of teleology here; and this is also true of the romanian dance song, which activates its modal field contrapuntally, but avoids any sense that harmony might shape the phrase. this is one of the keys to Slavenski’s treatment of traditional music. he preserves the principle of the ison, but replaces a single tone or bourdon with an harmonic field that may be animated by counterpoint and is subject to tonal interferences. the melody retains its integrity, but it takes on fresh meanings from unusual harmonic settings and from unexpected juxtapositions with those raw, seemingly unmotivated dissonant events that occasionally interrupt its flow and may even act as framing devices. Interestingly, the one piece in Balkanofonija that works on more traditional lines is ‘Moja pjesma’. as noted earlier, this is based on material from the First String Quartet, and the more conventional voice leading and warmer harmonies somehow intensify the nostalgia that is no doubt intended in this portrait of Slavenski’s Međimurjean homeland. as to the finale, this is the ‘bulgarian dance’ that rounded off the first book of Pesme i igre, as well as the Suite, though it is here transformed by a thicker harmonic layer, by changing orchestrations, and by a newly-composed figurative tracery. the augmentation of the theme in its final cycle is characteristically presented against a complex dissonant background. Balkanofonija is Slavenski’s tribute to the balkans, a region where, in his own words, ‘different national cultures of natives, émigrés and invaders intermingled, merged [and] created new and often extraordinarily beautiful and interesting forms’.17 two other major instrumental works from these years, the Violin Concerto (1927) and the Second ‘Lyric’ String Quartet (1928), are likewise based on either authentic or imagined folksong melodies. the Lyric Quartet in particular can stand with Balkanofonija as a major achievement of this creative period, and through its use of a kind of changing background technique in all three movements it has parallels with the orchestral work.

17 J. Slavenski 1946, 1.

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the first movement is a powerful instance of the marriage of traditional music and classical formal archetypes. the opening (Macedonian) folk melody is typically preceded by an alienating device – a tonally ‘foreign’ frame in octaves – before it is presented against changing backgrounds, while the second theme on viola is more developmental in character and is elaborated contrapuntally. the development section is a kind of fantasy, dominated by the contour and rhythmic profile of the Macedonian song, but subject to dramatic discontinuities of a kind that remind one of Janáček, not least through the illusion they create that time has been temporarily suspended. In the slow movement an authentic, deeply expressive folk melody is again repeated against changing backgrounds, first a single ison, then a bourdon fifth, then a quite different harmonisation that finds new qualities in the melody. as the movement builds to a peak of intensity, the melody is developed and fragmented, with the fragments treated contrapuntally, and then the reprise presents the melody for a final time in a quite new setting. but the real triumph of the work is its powerful monothematic finale, its theme endlessly projected against new backgrounds that pick out different qualities embedded in it. From the start the technique is contrapuntal, and dense polyphonic complexes are characteristically built into major climaxes. only in the closing section is there a moment of repose, allowing for the return of the second subject of the first movement in new expressive transformations. this music is distant from bartók, but it is hardly less successful in building a musical world on the transition between the traditional idioms of the east and the modernism of the West. . . . to the Cosmos In a handful of works composed by Slavenski during the 1930s the folkinspired modernisms of Balkanofonija gave way to more experimental techniques, of the kind we observed in the Sonata religiosa. We will approach these works by way of a composition with a foot in both camps, and one that stands as a counterpart to Balkanofonija. Slavenski began work on the choral Sinfonija orijenta in 1926, and completed it in 1934, though initially the piece carried the title Religiofonija (the title was changed after the war, at which point religious themes were proscribed). It was performed twice in the 1930s, in belgrade and bratislava, but was not accepted for publication by Schotts, mainly because of its ‘Jewish’ movement. the work was

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widely perceived to have a leftish orientation, reinforced by ideological readings of the final movement (this movement, a hymn to work, was added after the war, and could be read as an identification of Communism with a kind of religion). In any event the work languished before gaining another belgrade performance in 1954, the year before Slavenski’s death. the 1926 plan, in which the order of the last two movements is reversed, is more specific in description than the conception of 1933–34, referring to geographical regions as well as to faiths, and thus strengthening the sense of a universalist mission.18 the following outline is composite, in that it adheres to the later sequence but adds the geographical descriptions used in the earlier plan, as well as the technical subtitles from the final score. We arrive at this scheme: 1. Pagani [pagans] – afrika – musica rhytmica – musika prethistorije; 2. Jevreji [Jews] – Levant – musica coloristica; 3. Budisti [buddhists] – tibet, China, India – musica arhitectonica; 4. Hrišćani [Christians] – the byzantine world – musica melodica; 5. Muslimani [Muslims] – arabia – musica articulatia; 6. Muzika [Music] – europe – musica dinamica; 7. Pjesma životu i radu [Songs of Life and Work] – the balkan Slavs – musica vitalica. note that there is a broadly sequential chronicle of cultures and faiths here, that Slavenski identified Christianity with orthodoxy (though he himself converted to the orthodox faith only rather later), that he separated ‘europe’ from the ‘balkan Slavs’, and that he associated the former with high culture (arguably linked to religion through Kunstreligion), and the latter with labour and with Zenitist vitality. the musical identifications here are intended to function on a symbolic level. authenticity was never really part of the plan. all the same, the pastiche at the heart of the work makes for an odd mix of styles. Pesma radu, with its hints of a mass song idiom, hardly seems to belong at all. of the remainder, it is perhaps not surprising that the most traditional is Hrišćani, the first to be composed (1926), and the more so because it makes no real attempt to approach the orthodox musical traditions invoked by Slavenski’s

18 nothing could distort Slavenski’s intentions more completely than the extraction of the Muslimani movement for a bosnian recording representing the ‘Sarajevo renaissance’.

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subtitle. the imitative points and arc-like phrases of this piece belong to familiar traditions of choral polyphony, with sideways Cecilian glances. only the final epilogue looks beyond this world. Muzika is more exploratory in tone, but it likewise constructs its web of contrapuntal strands into powerfully expressive climaxes driven by insistent throbbing pulses on timpani. Like Hrišćani, this is goal-directed music. however, towards the end of the movement, the pulses and repetition structures begin to approach the condition of directionless ostinati of a kind more characteristic of the other movements of this extraordinary work. Indeed the remainder of the Sinfonija orijenta is almost a study in ostinato. In the first movement, Pagani, rhythmic ostinati (xylophone and timpani) are presented in canonically ordered overlapping layers, accompanied by exclamatory vocal cries (as yet without speech), but building into ever more complex rhythmic patterns and generating high levels of dissonance. It is a novel soundscape, but at the same time characteristic of a more widespread species of early twentieth-century ‘primitivist’ sonorism. Jevreji, on the other hand, cultivates timbrally differentiated and fragmented melodic ostinati in a manner that has something in common with Stravinsky technically but sounds really quite different. there are evocations here of traditional Jewish instruments (including the shofar), and the baritone soloist and chorus likewise recreate Jewish cantillation and choral prayer. In Budisti Slavenski builds gamelan-like pentatonic sound worlds over which the chant-like text repetitions (Ôm mani padme hûm’) are superimposed, simultaneously fast and slow. and in like manner, Muslimani culminates in a so-called ilâhi, in which the music is reduced almost entirely to ostinati (a study in religious ecstasy, it is in reality closer to the music accompanying the zikr than to an ilâhi). as noted earlier, the Sinfonija orijenta was one of a group of works or plans of works collectively labeled Misterij. one is reminded of the Mysterium envisaged by Skryabin, who developed a series of mystico-musical symbols in his later music: interval types, chord colours, bell sonorities. and also of Messiaen, for whom hindu and Greek rhythms, neumes, instrumentation, chord colours and birdsong all had similar signifying roles. Slavenski was not quite a mystic in the spirit of Skryabin and Messiaen, but he was deeply interested in religious experience, and attempted in several works to convey something of the spiritual ‘ecstasy’ beloved of the other two. he was also a scientist manqué, and in this respect he went much further than either Skryabin or Messiaen. It is true that both these composers translated their eastern-influenced visionary ideas into sound by way of rather sophisticated musical systems, but neither really came

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close to Slavenski’s enthusiasm for what would later be glibly labelled ‘the tao of physics’. Slavenski was interested in the (putative) underlying unity of the world and of the cosmos, and in order to symbolise that unity musically he toyed with neo-medieval correspondences between music and science: models of the cosmos that might embrace acoustics, astronomy and even atomic physics. he went so far as to coin the term astroakustika [astroacoustics] to describe these adventures, and although he entertained no illusions about their scientific importance, his aim seemed to be a re-ordering of the tonal system in accordance with ‘astroacoustic’ laws. What we know about this aspect of Slavenski comes from notes, some dating from as early as 1913, deciphered and summarised by Vlastimir peričić.19 Interestingly, they contain not just calculations about measurements within the solar system and about astrophysics in general, but also jottings of folk music and orthodox chant. It is clear that for Slavenski these musical archetypes of humanity’s ritual and religious experience, liberated from equal temperament, were all parts of the larger scheme. What emerges from this is not a scientific theory, but a game with numbers and intervals with a capacity to generate musical ideas of striking originality. planets are associated with musical intervals in several different ways. In some cases, for example, calculations are based on planetary distances as measured by astronomic units, so that the intervallic equivalents naturally involve microtonal relations. here Slavenski is an explorer, a musical ‘frontier man’, not unlike harry partch, with whom he shared a fascination with just intonation. he was less single-minded than partch (‘just intonation is the truth’), but he was no less convinced that equal temperament was an unnecessary and outmoded restriction on creativity, and he valued native Međimurjean music not least for its avoidance of such temperament. In 1937 Slavenski composed two pieces called Muzika u prirodnom tonskom sistemu [Music in the natural tonal System], involving in the first the 53-note-to-the-octave harmonium of r.h.M. bosanquet, and in the second four (electronic) trautoniums and percussion.20 the low C with

19 peričić 1984. 20 Slavenski gave a lecture in 1938 on the Prirodni muzički system [natural tonal system], and in his article ‘naše narodne melodije’ (Slavenski 1946), he discussed the artificial nature of equal temperament. there was a wider context for such debates at the time, and for the construction of instruments to meet the needs of Just Intonation, taking us as far afield as eivind Groven in norway (Lysdahl 2004).

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which this second piece begins is also an astroacoustical sign, based on an equation of the harmonic series with the planetary sequence (and also with the periodic table of atomic physics). It first appeared at the opening of the Sonata religiosa and then again at the beginning of the orchestral piece Haos, completed in 1932. Slavenski also generated symmetrical scales by manipulating these correspondences, including the octatonic scale, of which the ‘Istrian’ and ‘Jewish’ modes (as in the second movement of religiofonija) can be folkloric instantiations. as peričić has indicated, the play of correspondences was extended yet further, reaching into wavelengths, frequencies and the spectrum. but what is perhaps more important than the precise methods by which Slavenski arrived at his various pitch configurations, was the searching spirit that lay behind the whole enterprise. this aspect of his work embodied a kind of experimentalism that was rare in Yugoslavia at this time, and that allows us to consider his music within the framework of an avant-garde. We can separate out two distinct impulses underlying early twentiethcentury formulations of the musically ‘new’. one is a quest for new ideas, and the other a quest for new sounds. the former might be associated with Schoenberg; the latter with the Futurists, and with a group of experimental composers on the edges of the ‘great tradition’, of whom Varèse is the most significant. It is entirely realistic to relate Slavenski to the second of these tendencies, and it is characteristic that his quest for new sounds was associated with his quest for something elusively ancient, symbolised in part by the sounds of organ and bells associated with his native Međimurje. I referred earlier to the sonic explorations of the Sonata religiosa, and to the ‘musica coloristica’ of the Sinfonija orijenta. this aspect of his creativity was arguably pushed to its extreme in the orchestral piece Haos, material from which had formed part of the much earlier, and no longer extant, Prasimfonija, and also of the projected Heliofonija. Haos takes the form of a single structural crescendo, and conceptually one might again relate it to certain works of Skryabin, the Poem of ecstasy, for example, and even more the late piano work Vers la flamme. the crescendo is achieved partly through dynamics, but more importantly it is a function of sonority. From a single deep tone, static but pulsating, there slowly emerge circular ostinati, densely dissonant harmonies and fragmentary motives in a graphic depiction of the evolution of the world and the formation of matter. the ‘sculptured’ sound of this music is surprisingly close to Varèse, in that the primary compositional determinants are textures and timbres rather than themes and harmonies, though thematic definition – significantly relatable to the Međimurjean Moja

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pesme – is achieved as we approach the first of the work’s two big climaxes. a moment of dissolution leaves the organ alone before the final apotheosis. Listening to Haos, we quickly realise why Slavenski was drawn to the idea of electronic music, not just in the Muzika u prirodnom tonskom sistemu, but also in the projected Heliofonija, which was conceived for choir, orchestra and electronic instruments. there are similar sonic explorations in two works dating from the late 1930s, the Muzika za orkestar: harmonije i disharmonije (Muzika 36), and the Muzika za komorni orkestar (Muzika 38). Muzika 36 extends those evocations of the orient (referring here to the Far rather than the Middle east) found in Sinfonija orijenta. to a large extent, this was achieved by building on existing characteristics of Slavenski’s music: the multiple circling ostinatos, the stratification of textures to create ‘platforms of sound’ that proceed at different tempi, the imaginative use of percussion, and the broadly pentatonic melos. rather like Haos, the first movement proceeds by gradually filling out and then animating harmonic fields that remain largely stable, though in this movement Slavenski achieves a structural accelerando as well as a structural crescendo. again as in Haos, the formal process is a unitary one, in which the rhythmically dislocated and ever more tightly compressed repetitions of a small handful of motives enable a steady accumulation of energy. the second movement, splendidly marked allegro vandalico, is an orgy of brass and percussion, a ‘disharmony’ of superimposed stabbing figures in polyrhythmic layers, vying with rather than supporting the obsessively repeating principal motive. this is music that takes no prisoners. In this group of pieces dating from the 1930s Slavenski’s credentials as an unreconstructed Modernist are unassailable. here we may speak of transition in the second of the two senses I outlined earlier: the transition to a ‘known new’ associated with Western cultural capitals. Like a handful of pieces by osterc and Milojević, these works are conspicuous for their cultivation of avant-garde techniques. they enable us to model Slavenski’s output as a whole – or at least up to the outbreak of World War II – by way of a spectrum of styles. If we position Sa Balkana at one end of the spectrum, the journey will take us past key milestones such as Balkanofonija and Sinfonija orijenta until we reach Haos at the other end (the fact that these four works are also in chronological sequence has some significance, but is by no means defining). It is a journey from harmonised folksong to abstract expressionism, from the modernism of bartók to the modernism of Varèse, from the balkans to the Cosmos.

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Most of Slavenski’s music is located somewhere close to the middle of the spectrum, registering both these creative impulses. Muzika 38, performed at the Venice biennale, is characteristic. It establishes no fewer than five ostinati, presented separately and superimposed, but in a manner that actually links the music more to Janáček than to Stravinsky. Moreover it allows these polytonal platforms of sound to support developing melodies that achieve a kind of completeness in the horn melody in which each of the two movements culminates. this melody makes the link with Međimurje explicit, distilling surrounding complexities into a simple song. at the same time those very complexities recall Haos and Muzika u prirodnom tonskom sistemu by means of multi-layered harmonic fields built on the ‘astroacoustic’ low C platform. the elements of fragmentation and distortion here are not just expressionist devices but modes of deconstructive anti-nationalist critique. Yet the link with Međimurje reminds us that what collapses in Haos and also in Muzika 38 is not the link with traditional music. on the contrary, Slavenski is at pains to connect the experimentation of these, his most radical pieces, with forms of traditional music-making from which we have become alienated by the devices of art music, including of course equal temperament. this synthesis goes some way towards explaining the richness and diversity of Slavenski’s music, and its striking originality, but it also helps us to understand why this composer seems so emblematic of his time and place. his was a Modernism shaped by the balkans. It was a project of transition between east and West, between the traditional music of rural communities in the wider region and the sophisticated art music of cultural capitals to the north and west, between ‘the balkans’ and ‘europe’. In some works the transition is abrupt; indeed the explosive power and energy of such works seems often to be generated by the collision of worlds rather than a transition between them. In others, a universe of sound is constructed quite literally on the bridge or bridges between two worlds. but in all cases this is music ‘betwixt and between’. the story changed after 1938. From this point there was a retrenchment. During the war, when he was active in support of the Communists, Slavenski had little time for composition beyond tinkering with existing music, orchestrating and arranging. the major work to emerge from this was the Pesme moje majke [Songs of my Mother] for contralto and string quartet, a beautifully reflective poem on Međimurje, and thus a homecoming of sorts. parts of it date from as early as 1916, but it was finally completed in 1940. It summarises the composer’s lifelong preoccupation

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with this region, which thus becomes quite literally the end point of his symbolic geographies. It represented home and mother, a locality that could stand for the larger balkan themes of ethnic oppression and cultural periphery (a Slavic enclave at the borders of austro-hungary). at one and the same time, it could embody a highly personal sense of identity and a site of ancient Slavic culture. Following the composition of these songs, in the later stages of the war, Slavenski spent much of his time harmonising partisan songs and composing a major but blatantly propagandist work Simfonijski epos [Symphonic epos], depicting Yugoslavia through the beauties of its folk music, describing the attack from without, the resistance struggle, the mourning for fallen soldiers and finally the attempts at reconstruction under tito. the work was completed in 1947, and I will refer to it again briefly in a later chapter. For now we might note that in the post-war years the composer felt himself doubly alienated: too modern for the wider public, too conservative for the avant-garde. It was a dilemma for many of his generation, but that would not have made it easier to bear. his music fell into relative oblivion, and for the last five years of his life he composed nothing of substance. only after his death did his true importance begin to emerge, and that mainly within Yugoslavia. he was undoubtedly one of a very small handful of truly major composers from South east europe in the first half of the twentieth century, but even today most of these figures remain largely unknown in the wider musical world. only one of them achieved anything like canonic status.

Chapter FIFteen

pLaCInG GenIuS a Tempting Comparison: Locating George enescu In 1940 George enescu completed his Impressions d’enfance, op. 28, a suite for violin and piano. Fittingly it was dedicated to his old teacher eduard Caudella, Director of the Iaşi conservatoire in enescu’s homeland of Moldavia.1 One of the Impressions is ‘the little stream at the bottom of the garden’, and to achieve what he described as ‘una sonorità acquatica’ enescu enlisted a little help. there is an allusion here to szymanowski’s ‘the Fountain of arethusa’, also for violin and piano: not a quotation exactly, but an explicit reference to one of the most imaginative of those musical scènes d’eau we might loosely describe as impressionist. ‘arethusa’ was the first of szymanowski’s cycle of Mythes, which had been in enescu’s concert repertoire since back in 1927, and the allusion to it in Impressions d’enfance was a tribute to a work he admired. Yet it remains the only obvious point of contact between these two composers. all the same, i have reasons to consider them in tandem. in the years just before, during and after World War i the two composers followed similar paths, and the parallels can be revealing of wider issues. their youthful works have relatively little in common. But with the two second symphonies, szymanowski’s composed during 1909–11, enescu’s during 1912–14, following what the composer himself described as ‘an appalling effort’,2 there was a moment of convergence. it would be misleading to describe these as merely formative works; both are assured and powerful. But in each case they pre-date the arrival of a truly distinctive voice. if you hear these symphonies with an innocent ear you may be hard pressed to identify either composer. they are very different symphonies, but they look in the same direction, adopting the rhetoric, the gestures and the technical devices associated with an austro-german

1  caudella’s own Moldavian overture (1913) makes for an interestingly contrasted evocation of enescu’s homeland. 2 Malcolm 1990, 124.

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post-Wagnerian orchestral style. richard strauss rides high in both works, and especially in their first movements.3 Following this convergence the paths of the two composers ran in parallel for a bit. their third symphonies were both products of the war years, szymanowski’s composed during 1914–1916, enescu’s during 1916–18. and again the affinities are striking. For a start, the straussian tone of their predecessors has been decisively rejected; these symphonies belong to a rather different world. Both are characterised by an extravagant, lavish – even sumptuous – scoring; indeed the orchestral forces are similar, including a raft of pitched percussion (bells, tamtam, celesta, glockenspiel, et al.) together with piano, organ, harps and wordless chorus.4 and there are several parallel gestures along the way: the openings with their chromatically sinuous string melodies, the dissolution of full-blooded climaxes (strauss may have gone, but the shadow of Mahler remains) into delicate, evanescent sonorities influenced by modern French music, the mystical ambience associated with the wordless chorus, and that unmistakable whiff of the east. surface parallels abound, then, even if the underlying ethos of the two symphonies is rather different. to be more specific, the hedonism of szymanowski’s score, especially in the middle section, finds no echo in enescu; characteristically, the tone of quiet, radiant ecstasy in the third movement of his (enescu’s) symphony has to be hard won in its earlier movements. and that difference tells us much about what will follow. the immediate post-war years saw both composers immersed in the two great operas that lie right at the centre of their respective oeuvres, Król roger [King roger] and oedipe, reworkings of euripides and sophocles respectively. here they struggled with matters both metaphysical and stylistic. in Król roger szymanowski presented us with a nietzschean refashioning of The Bacchae, adapting the ending of Jarosław iwaszkiewicz’s libretto to portray a man who has first recognised and then overcome the Dionysian within, and can thus emerge ‘strong enough for freedom’. the message is clear enough, not least through the music: the intoxicating hedonism of the third symphony should not be rejected but accommodated, ‘overcome’. enescu too was dissatisfied with the first version of edmond Fleg’s libretto for oedipe. But here the changes concerned the

3 the neo-classical variations of szymanowski’s second movement also find an echo in some of enescu’s earlier music, though i suspect enescu would have disapproved the regerian fugue in which the szymanowski work culminates. 4 the outer sections of the szymanowski work use a text from Djalal al-Dīn rumi, but in the middle section the chorus is wordless.

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beginning rather than the end. in its final version, Fleg’s libretto reaches back to Oedipus’s earlier life, fleshing out events that are given only a cursory mention in sophocles. Only in acts 3 and 4 does it align itself to the theban plays. By depicting the entire life cycle of Oedipus enescu humanises the work; there is a shift from plot to ethos. this allows for the moral victory that can come with self-knowledge, let Destiny do its worst. it is another form of overcoming, again spelt out by the music, and especially by the final monologue, which invites comparison with King roger’s closing ‘hymn to the sun’. at the end of the operas the protagonists have reached a state of exalted solitude; they are no mere reanimations of ancient heroes. Knowing their shadow, as their light, they at last become whole.5 these two models of humanism had a bearing on the parallel folkloristic turn taken by both composers in the 1920s. For szymanowski the nationalist turn constituted what he himself called ‘a new period of my creative life’, during which he turned to the traditional music of the tatras as a source of inspiration. this represented the final stage of what might almost be described as an archetype of the evolution of national styles in east central europe (compare Bartók): three relatively discrete stages taking us from hostile imitation of a status quo (german late romanticism),6 through a quest for alternatives (modern French music), to the discovery of ‘one’s own jewels’, to use szymanowski’s language.7 We should note, though, that the jewels in question served a double function for szymanowski: a symbol of the nation, but – and probably more importantly – also an alternative exoticism. the brightly coloured music of the tatras was both homegrown and an exotic other; the jewels are ‘one’s own’, but they are ‘jewels’. For szymanowski, the exotic was a prerequisite of creativity,8 and the real achievement of his later music was to accommodate it, harnessing the new harmonic and textural acquisitions of the war years to formal and tonal frameworks of neo-classical lucidity. his folklorism, then, was a project perfectly in tune with the nietzschean message of Król

5 this is encoded in the intervallic structure of the leitmotiven of oedipe, notably the symbolic meanings attributed to tritone, minor third and major third. 6 this corresponds to the category ‘imitative but hostile’ in ernest gellner’s typology of nationalisms (gellner 1983). see p. 114 for further comment. 7 ‘My splendid isolation’, first published in Kurier Polski on 26 november 1922. the title is in english in the original. see Wightman 1999, 95–101. 8 his loss of faith in the exotic following the war years amounted to something of a creative crisis for szymanowski; ‘can you believe? i cannot compose now. . . .’.

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roger. it had less to do with nationalism than with a necessary conquest of the exotic. the case of enescu is less straightforward. in the first place his music cannot be so easily periodised in relation to german, French and indigenous (romanian) influences. rather it advanced through a shift in the balance of these elements, all of which were present more-or-less from the start. the folklorism of the 1920s, then, was not a new departure, but the consolidation and enhancement of certain earlier tendencies and the suppression of others. in some later works the idiom of traditional music was imaginatively recreated to establish a new ‘romanian’ sound world; in others it became a discreet presence in an impressionist landscape; in yet others it receded to the background, influencing processive aspects of the music rather more than melodic substance. and as this idio-style took shape in the 1920s, enescu decisively parted company with szymanowski. For the role played by traditional music in his later compositions had nothing to do with exoticism, and everything to do with the humanism represented by oedipe. in this respect enescu bought into some of the familiar symbolic values associated with traditional (folk) music, in particular the identification with a collective natural community. in his early romanian rhapsodies, it was a national community that was evoked. But for the later music, this reading would be much too constraining. exactly like slavenski, enescu engaged in a larger project of transition, though he achieved this in different ways. We may speak of modernism, but it would be entirely wrong to speak of an avant-garde. the point here is that enescu was engaged in a traditionally humanist enterprise. there is little trace in his music of anything we might recognise as modernist alienation. it is true that from the 1920s onwards he forged one of the most original and uncompromising musical languages (and ‘language’, unusually, is probably the mot juste) of any early twentiethcentury composer. it is also true that in doing so he drew upon rich reserves of romanian, and more generally Balkan, music, allowing this to reshape existing syntax in a radical way. however he did all this without creating any real sense of discontinuity with the past. i will return to this point later. For now, it will be enough to note that the mature enescu drew not just on the melodic and rhythmic substance of traditional music – the music of everyman – but also on its improvisatory manner, where an expressive imperative, expressive more often than not of lament, implicitly challenges the authority of those collective (i.e. socialising) forms that made the improvisation possible in the first place. the epic quality of his later music lies in its duplication of this tension. What is overcome here

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is not the seductive attraction of Dionysian life forces, but the impulse to individuation that is inherent in, and always threatens to destabilise, the world of collective forms. the parallel achievements of szymanowski and enescu might be understood in relation to a conventional narrative of east european musical renaissance. the narrative would run something like this. social modernisation and cultural renewal in the eastern half of europe during the nineteenth century were responses to ideas and practices from Western europe that stimulated and then fused with slowly developing nationalisms. Because of this response mode, there was initially an element of ‘forms without substance’ about this process.9 thus, the professionalisation of musical life associated with the shift from court to city took longer in eastern than in Western europe, just as the underlying ideologies of liberalism and nationalism were given rather different expression. in particular, liberalism10 was foregrounded in the West and nationalism in the east, a distinction that found musical expression in the manipulation of two ‘innocent’ musics. the music of Bach and the so-called ‘Viennese’ classics – music from a different era – served the interests of a dominant social class (a liberal bourgeoisie) in the cities of Western europe. in contrast, traditional music – music from a different social group – was pressed to the service of a dominant political ideology in eastern europe. hence the rise of nationalist music associated with this region, finding its ‘historical moment’ in the late nineteenth century, first in russia and the czech lands, then in hungary, poland and romania. When the conditions were right, the significant composers, including szymanowski and enescu, appeared on cue. this narrative is in need of some revision. larry Wolff reminds us that the division of europe into ‘West’ and ‘east’ was in large measure a retrospective one.11 indeed we have already seen that in parts of eastern europe the dynastic presence was integral to western culture, and played an enabling role long before it became a focus for ethnic and nationalist discontent. to push the point to an extreme, it would hardly be useful to link prague, a leading habsburg capital and culturally close to Vienna,

9 Boia 2001, 86. 10 i am thinking here especially of the contractual liberalism that followed the 1848 revolutions, dependent on political concepts of consensus and social contract. 11  Wolff 1996. Wolff dates the beginnings of a discourse of east-West divide to the writings of eighteenth-century philosophes, but the divide was formalised, and institutionalised, very much later.

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with skopje, which remained part of the Ottoman empire throughout the entire nineteenth century. alternative divisions of europe in the nineteenth century might proceed along dynastic or religious lines. thus, we might propose a cultural division between territories governed by the habsburgs, hoherzollerns and even romanovs on one hand, and Ottoman-ruled territories on the other. this division in no way corresponds neatly to ‘West’ and ‘east’, especially when we superimpose further divisions between catholic and Orthodox, or for that matter christian, Muslim and Jewish, communities. nor does the pedigreed narrative hold up at all well in its reading of cultural nationalism, which was every bit as integral to France and germany as to poland and hungary. poland and romania, then, were not on one side of a single divide as they entered the nineteenth century. poland was a deeply catholic country, politically shared out between austrian, prussian and russian dynasties. it was firmly rooted in western culture, though from 1830 that culture was subject to severe, politically motivated curtailment of a kind familiar enough, though more extreme than, in other european (including West european) territories. not unnaturally, polish cultural historians have made much of these constraints. romania, on the other hand, was Orthodox, still struggling to free itself from Ottoman domination and influenced profoundly by a history of Balkan (including greek) affiliations. We noted earlier that, for all the familiar rhetoric about an ‘island of latinity’, it was remote from western culture at the beginning of the century, and that the swerve towards the West, when it finally came around 1830, was remarkably abrupt. so how does all this bear on music historiography? For a start, it suggests that we still have to work at correcting some of the imbalances bequeathed by the politics of the cold War. an adequate account of polish music history would place it centrally within ‘the rise of european music’, even if documentation and demonstrable continuities have been victims of poland’s troubled political history.12 in just about all spheres – the cultures of church, court and city – this was a european story from the start. and it was no less a european story when polish composers turned to traditional music and appropriated it in the service of nationalism. like their german and central european colleagues, they did not encounter any massive syntactical space separating that music from the art music of the day. this was as true for szymanowski as it was for chopin. Despite

12 My reference is to strohm 1993.

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the novelties of the góral (tatra) idiom, this was a music that could easily be accommodated by the neo-classical idioms characteristic of the 1920s. like the Mazovian elements in chopin’s mazurkas, it added a specific colouring, an inflection, to contemporary european styles. the history of art music in the romanian principalities, on the other hand, began in earnest only in the 1830s. existing repertories – Ottomaninfluenced classical and popular music, Orthodox church music, muzica lăutărească, traditional agrarian music – were not supplanted by european art music in the nineteenth century, but carried on a parallel existence alongside it, and remained largely unrelated to it. as elsewhere there were projects of appropriation, not least in some of enescu’s own early music. But the space separating european art music from just about everything else was a considerable one, and certainly much greater than in Western and central europe. What that space signifies is the factor that most decisively undermines any attempt to embrace romania within a territorial grouping labelled ‘eastern europe’: in a word, its ambivalent relationship to the Balkans. a glance at the map is telling here. romania is in the Balkans or out, depending on whether we take the carpathians or the Danube as defining the peninsula’s northeastern border. a socio-cultural definition – one that equates the Balkans to those areas of south east europe in which there was a significant and sustained Ottoman presence – is no less ambivalent, in that romania was never overtly conquered by the turks, but rather came gradually under Ottoman control.13 adrian cioroianu has constructed a psycho-historical narrative around this ambivalence, characterising successive stages in romanian history as failed attempts to escape the Balkans, and allowing this to suggest elements of a collective mentalité.14 the idea of the Balkans, he argues, looms unusually large in negotiations of romanian identity, and this can entail either exaggeratedly positive or exaggeratedly negative readings of what we now call Balkanism. For cioroianu, romania, especially since independence, has constantly sought detachment from its geographical condition, while at the same time trying to claim the best things from the Balkans, which is a way of saying that romanians want to look West and east at the same time. all this has, i believe, some explanatory value when we turn to enescu’s achievement, which is romanian not just because it turns to indigenous

13 the one region that is in the Balkans on either definition is Dobrogea. 14 cioroianu 2002.

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sources, but also perhaps in cioroianu’s sense of simultaneously valuing and denying the Balkans. Of course enescu is more than just a romanian composer, or for that matter a Balkan one. But it is surely significant that his music is marked by its articulation of precisely that quality of transition that, as we have noted, distinguishes Balkanism from Orientalism. specifically, he delved deeply into the transition between a diversified indigenous culture, strongly marked by its Byzantine and Ottoman inheritance, and a european symphonic culture. however, we would do him an injustice if we tried to represent this project exclusively in terms of intersecting cultural spheres. at this point it will be worth recalling our discussion of transition in chapter 11, where it was argued that in order to give transitional states their due, we need to view them not just as sites of theoretical transformation which contain elements of two systems, but as invitations to locate a third system. this, it seems to me, has analytical implications in relation to enescu’s music that have been relatively little explored in the relevant literature. nor will it be possible to explore them here, in what are no more than introductory thoughts. all the same i will offer a few indicative remarks. Closing In: enescu’s Journey oedipe is a work apart. indebted to enescu’s earlier symphonies and foreshadowing his later chamber music, its sound world remains distinct from both. in rising to the challenge of its composition, enescu worked through issues of musical style that enabled him to set a direction for the future. it was above all in oedipe that he reined in the eclecticism characteristic of earlier works, by which i mean the music composed prior to 1909. passing over the very early compositions, including the four so-called ‘school symphonies’, we may note that his earliest success as a composer was the Poème roumain, completed in 1897 and performed to rapturous acclaim the following year; it earned him the patronage of the Queen of romania, including the use of a study at peleş castle at sinaia, where he later built a house. noel Malcolm has insisted on its indebtedness to an existing tradition of romanian music, including works by stephănescu and caudella, but as with the better-known romanian rhapsodies (1901) it is the combined influence of liszt and Dvořák that is more likely to strike today’s listener. early songs and chamber works reveal a rather different side to the young enescu, an affinity with austro-german late-romantic music, ranging

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from schubert to Brahms and beyond. this culminated in the Octet for strings of 1899, a work of considerable power, maturity and complexity, which would merit heavy-duty analysis in a more focused study of the composer. already by then his music was registering the impact of French music, and especially Fauré, who is a presence in the second Violin sonata (also 1899) and in the Sept chansons de Clément Marot, a cycle of consummate nuance and sensitivity. another strand is represented by the gallic neoclassicism of works such as the two piano suites (1897 and 1903) and the First Orchestral suite Op. 9 (1903), with its highly original unison prélude; and yet another in the pianistic idiom of works such as the Barcarolle of 1897 and the nocturne of 1907, where we view chopin through the prism of modern French music. after 1909 there was a period of creative silence until 1914, at least in the sense that major works did not appear; for the two years immediately prior to the outbreak of war he was working on the second symphony. then, during the years of the war itself, he was mainly preoccupied with the third symphony. We are now aligned with our earlier narrative, which culminated in the composition of his masterpiece oedipe in the post-war years. oedipe, i am suggesting, represented for enescu a moment of arrival, and also of departure. it is obvious that my summary of his earlier achievements does little justice to works of importance, but in the interests of the argument i wish to focus on the music from the 1920s onwards, the music of enescu’s full maturity. stylistically, the distinguishing feature of oedipe is not just that it pares down the big romantic gestures of the two symphonies to taut, economical gestures, but that it processes, rather than simply appropriating, those elements of other styles, whether german, French or romanian, that continued to feed enescu’s music. in his earlier compositions indigenous romanian elements were either strongly foregrounded (as in the rhapsodies or the dixtuor) or entirely absent. such elements had not yet assumed the importance they would carry in other works from the 1920s onwards. and in this respect, as in others, oedipe is the seminal work. enescu himself claimed to have written an opera ‘with eastern elements’, and musical features drawn from romanian liturgical music play a part in the score, notably scale types that correspond to the octoechos, with associated microtonal structures.15 likewise much of the vocal writing in

15 Şirli 1981. coincidentally, Byzantine elements also find their way into the choral music of szymanowski’s Król roger.

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the opera has affinities with romanian traditional music, most blatantly in music associated with the shepherds, but in more subtle ways invading the general melos of the work. this even extends to the incorporation of unorthodox vocal techniques derived from folk traditions. the important point is that these influences worked together with the discreet yet all-pervasive leitmotivic structure enescu imposed on the work to transform his approach to thematicism. it is through the density of its motivic information, where germinal cells and their constitutive intervals permeate every layer of the score and where more extended melodic statements are products of (rather than sources for) motivic working, that oedipe lifts enescu clear of the late-romantic inheritance that was unmistakable in his earlier music. this also has a bearing on the contrapuntal writing that had always been central to his music. the contrapuntal combination of independently established themes took on a new significance in oedipe; it was less about synthesising oppositions, as in earlier cyclic compositions, and more about revealing hidden affinities, a telling, and prophetic, change of orientation. and one final point: the constantly evolving melos that grows out of, yet at the same time cuts across or floats above, this densely compacted motivic structure has every appearance of a spontaneous, fantasia-like sequence. Yet characteristically, as Octavian cosma has pointed out, this apparent freedom is underpinned by carefully designed, though discreetly articulated, formal patterns, again prophetic of the later music.16 the end product of all this is a score of astonishing originality, in which conventional gestures and devices have been all but eliminated. in the musical language that began to take shape in other works from the 1920s onwards enescu intensified and refined the folkloristic element, but he did so in the light of the transformations already effected by oedipe. Most importantly, these works aspired towards a unity of musical substance. this was hardly a novel aspiration in music of the 1920s. indeed, a surface description of enescu’s practice would suggest links with many of his contemporaries. the musical idea is embodied in a germinal theme or motive, often present at the outset; that theme or motive acts in turn on the character of subsequent material, either through techniques of developing variation or in the form of connected antitheses, and this process continues throughout the work (i.e. across individual movements); constitutive intervals take on an independent structural role; and finally the motivic shapes permeate all layers of the texture, eliminating as far

16 cosma 1981.

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as possible elements of thematic redundancy. in other words, much of the music has something in common with the kind of ‘total thematicism’ found in works such as slavenski’s First string Quartet. But it is the realisation of this ideal that sets enescu apart. at the heart of it lies a dialectic between improvisation and composition, operating between open and closed forms; between elaborately ornamented and motivically focused melody; between heterophony and strict counterpoint; between rubato-parlando and giusto-silabico rhythm; between equal-voiced and melody-accompaniment textures. the resulting sound world is unique in twentieth-century music, and it establishes a stable reference point from which enescu could glance backwards to late-romantic styles, or alternatively across to modernist (neo-Baroque) idioms without for a moment losing his individuality. equally, from this vantage point he could glance towards the West or towards the east. i will profile here three distinguishable idioms constitutive of this new sound world. they are refinements of the three major influences at work on his earlier music, but they also carry significance as to spectral positioning. the first, glancing west, foregrounds motivic working, and is the culminating expression of enescu’s indebtedness to german symphonism. the influence of traditional (folk) music is not obvious on the melodic surface, but operates rather on procedural and processive levels. the second is a kind of impressionism, where elements of traditional music contribute to a musical evocation of nation and landscape; here the French influence is foregrounded. and the third, glancing east, is a more explicit recreation of traditional music, though viewed through modern lens; this, self-evidently, is the highest expression of the romanian element in enescu. the categories in this taxonomy are not mutually exclusive; nor do they entirely ‘cover’ the later period (there are several works, notably Vox Maris, that will not fit easily in any of the categories). But they hold good as a generalisation, and the journey between them neatly symbolises the transition from West to east. the first two idioms are already distinguishable in the outer movements of the first work to be completed following enescu’s initial period of work on oedipe, the First piano sonata, Op. 24 no. 1 (1924).17 the first

17 the second movement of this sonata, like similar movements in later works (notably the second movement of the second cello sonata, Op. 26 no. 2), steers a course somewhere between a neo-Baroque toccata and a futurist celebration of mechanism not unlike certain movements in prokofiev from around the same time (e.g. the second movement of his Fifth piano concerto).

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movement explores a middle ground between formal and thematic definition on one hand and freely evolving, incremental transformations of the same motivic substance on the other. a sonata-form archetype underlies the movement. But the sequence of events (and moods) is a fluid, improvisatory narrative in which individuated motivic elements appear to follow their own inclinations. it is rather as though an expressionistic fantasia and a strict sonata unfold simultaneously on different levels, so that the ear can move from one to the other. as to the fantasia, Ştefan niculescu reminds us that enescu liked to refer to the dream state as integral to his creativity and then to compare this with the creative process at work in traditional music.18 it is a suggestive analogy. On first hearing, the logic governing the unfolding of motives in this movement is hard to follow, let alone predict. subsidiary motives arise from existing ones and are combined with the originals in free counterpoint, creating a maze of interweaving lines, where new material is subtly insinuated just as the old is fragmentarily echoed, and where the differentiation between primary and secondary material (between theme, motive and figure) is far from clear-cut. the result is a texture often classified by romanian scholars as ‘heterophonic’. this kind of writing resists conventional modes of analysis, and not just in relation to formal and thematic processes. the harmonic language allows a myriad of constantly shifting tonal implications to arise from the bar-by-bar unfolding of the music in a non-diatonic and often dissonant idiom. sometimes this is an outcome of polymodal chromaticism derived from the interplay of motives, but more often it is unsystematic, resulting from momentary tonal connections between different components of the texture, as a kind of inner hierarchy is established amidst diverse intervallic contexts. then, to add to the mix, some of the more climactic moments allow vestigial traces of late-romantic harmony to surface momentarily. all of this, along with piano textures of uncanny originality and fluid rhythms that resist easy assimilation by conventional metric schemata, adds up to a movement that is tough and uncompromising, and at the same time powerfully expressive. and towards the end lies a moment of revelation, a gesture whose simplicity makes sense of surrounding peaks of rhythmic and harmonic complexity. a recognisably folk-like, stanzaic melody, romanian in character, emerges from the dark embryo, subtly prepared in advance. it is a moment of clarity and comprehensibility, and

18 niculescu 1981.

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following it the return of the germinal motive of the sonata has the character of an apotheosis. as in oedipe, this dialectic between improvisatory freedom and a unity of musical substance has some symbolic potency, and especially to the extent that it generalises aspects of traditional music. it finds an echo in several later compositions, including the piano Quintet, Op. 29 (1940) and second piano Quartet, Op. 30 (1944). But in two of the very last works to be completed (at least in their final form), the string Quartet no. 2, Op. 22 no. 2 (1951–2) and the chamber symphony, Op. 33 (1954), the motivicsymphonic topic in enescu’s late music takes a more severe, classical turn. it is in these works that enescu’s indebtedness to german symphonic thought is at its most explicit.19 the quartet retains the complex polyphonic-heterophonic textures of Op. 24 no. 1, but not its processive discontinuities and abrupt changes of Affekt. here a rigorous, closely unified motivic process in the first movement opens out in several directions in subsequent movements, some of them intensely subjective (the parlando manner of individual voices in the slow movement, at times redolent of Janáček), others celebrating collectivities (the folk-dance manner in parts of the finale). the emphasis is on continuities, both bar-to-bar and movement-tomovement, but this does not disguise the improvisatory quality so characteristic of enescu, such that the twists and turns of particular motives seem to pursue a life of their own, even if in the end they have to submit to the collective will. as to the single-movement chamber symphony, it is as though enescu distilled the world of the quartet, including its internal tensions, to produce a yet more concentrated thematic essence. this is an austere, initially unyielding composition, given neither to overt expressivity nor to folklorism. it is not without sensuous surfaces and moments of climactic intensity, but in both cases these are products of, and are subordinated to, the logic of the thematic process. rigour and economy rule in this work. it repays repeated hearings. i will pass briefly over the second distinguishable idiom in late enescu, associated especially with musical portraits of his homeland. this idiom, exemplified by the third movement of the piano sonata, might be characterised as a species of impressionism, evocative of place; indeed the composer later described this movement as a depiction in sound of the

19 Both these works, but especially the quartet, had a long and complicated compositional history.

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romanian plains. Many of the stylistic elements are familiar ingredients of impressionist tone painting from liszt onwards, with obvious affinities to Debussy and ravel: static platforms of sound comprising either pedal points or ostinato patterns; quietly dissonant chords in stratified textures; washes of tonal colour from which bell-like notes emerge; modal, at times oriental-sounding, fragments of melody; and wandering through all of this a constantly repeated folk-like motive derived from the second romanian rhapsody. there is a group of late works likewise inspired by thoughts of romania, evoking its landscape and some of the associations it held for enescu. the third Orchestral suite (Suite villageoise), Op. 27 (1938) and the Impressions d’enfance, Op. 28, with which i began this chapter, fall into this category, and both add onomatopaeic reference to the more generalised impressionism with which specific scenes are depicted in music: the children’s games and shepherd’s pipe in the suite, for example, or the caged bird, cuckoo clock and cricket in the violin piece. the third and fourth movements of the suite, depicting respectively the ‘Old childhood home’, and the ‘river in the Moonlight’, offer a kind of orchestral counterpart to the pianistic impressionism of the last movement of Op. 24 no. 2.20 enescu spent a great deal of time outside his native romania, and nothing evokes place more effectively than displacement. romania is a more musically specific presence in my third category, referring to a group of movements or works in which the composer set out to write in the character of romanian traditional music, avoiding quotation, but recreating through the most sophisticated control of rhythm, ornamentation and sonority something of the characteristic sound and ambience of this music. this is particularly true of the third Violin sonata, Op. 25 (1926), parts of the third piano sonata, Op. 24 no. 3 and second cello sonata, Op. 26 no. 2 (both 1935), and the ouverture de concert sur des thèmes dans le caractère populaire roumain (1948). the third Violin sonata ‘in the romanian popular manner’ presents this idiom at its most explicit. as in the first movement of the First piano sonata, there is a creative tension between the improvisatory manner and the sonata-based structure of the first movement, but here the musical material is more obviously related to popular idioms, to the hore boiereşti [boyars’ horas] of

20 the incomplete orchestral work Voix de la nature (of which only part of one movement is extant) also belongs somewhat within this category.

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upper Moldavia, and especially to the rhapsodic flourishes and exuberant virtuosity of professional lăutari from all over the region. to achieve this, enescu devised radically new approaches to idiomatic writing for both instruments. in the violin part he combined a calculated imprecision of pitch and rhythm (achieved through profuse ornamentation, microtonal inflection, portamento, glissando, and parlando-rubato rhythm) with a remarkable diversity of colours, including ‘flute-like’ bowing on the fingerboard and a range of different vibratos. the piano in turn adopts multiple roles, ranging from cimbalom-like accompaniments to a heavily ornamented heterophonic-bourdon technique, often strategically out-ofphase with the violin in what sounds almost like an aleatory texture. i noted earlier the affinities between the traditional music of Moldavia, especially the popular music of professional lăutari, and Middle eastern traditions. What are sometimes described as ‘variable modes’, for example, may be related to makam traces, and some of the melodic and gestural formulae associated with these are also found in the enescu sonata. likewise, the rhythmically free, improvisatory flow of parts of the music, incorporating endless repetitions and variations of tiny cellular motives that circle around key scale steps, recalls the improvised taksîm in turkish music, just as the fluctuating tone colours and vibrati of the violin part remind us of the type of wide vibrato singing familiar throughout the Middle east. this should not seem in any way surprising. there are commonalities of practice in a wide range of popular and traditional musics from the levant to the Balkans. We noted earlier how intersections between a makam system and diatonic space represented one way of thinking theoretically about such repertories (Bosnian sevdalinkas and greek rebetika, for example), and i suggest, tentatively, that it may also have some relevance to enescu’s music ‘in the romanian style’. romanian musicologists have written at length about the ‘folk’ models for enescu’s later music. in particular speranţa rădulescu has pinpointed affinities with traditional repertories in her discussion of the Violin sonata.21 But even when the models are exuberant folk dances, as in the finale of the Violin sonata, the finale ‘à la roumain’ of the second cello sonata and much of the Ouverture de concert, they are hybridised, generalised, and ultimately sublimated through their dialogue with modern european art music. this is especially true of enescu’s stylisations of the doina, by far the most characteristic of his folk models, and one that is immediately

21 rădulescu 1981.

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apparent in the melos of the Violin sonata. We met the doina briefly in an earlier chapter. it has something in common with the ukrainian duma, but is quite unlike any of the folk traditions of the southern slav nations, registering a rather different aspect of oriental influence than sevdalinka, for example. the structure and manner of the ‘doina proper’ were described by Bartók and Brăiloiu,22 and many of the elements of those descriptions – introductory formulae, ornamental improvisations around the augmented second between the third and fourth scale steps, rapidly repeated melodic turns circling around and highlighting particular notes of the mode or makam, internal cadence figures (alternating fourths), and closing formulae – are found in the enescu work.23 Moreover, these same elements, together with associated affects of sorrow and lament, are once again strongly suggestive of familiar devices from anatolian repertories. Much the same model operates in the slow movement of the third piano sonata, where an ornamental melody is joined by other voices in free rhythm to create a kaleidoscopic texture that slides easily from heterophony to free counterpoint, and from there to wisps of astringently harmonised melody. and it operates again in the first movement of the second cello sonata. here, as in the Violin sonata, the piano alternates between providing a cimbalom-like accompaniment, weaving motivic fragments around the unfolding arcs of cello melody, and itself taking over, and heavily ornamenting, the principal melodic line, or, more accurately, the multiply-layered melodic lines. taken together, all this music makes a statement that is quite unlike anything else in early twentieth-century music. it is concerned neither with appropriation nor confrontation but with transition. it succeeds, as no other music really does fully in my view, in making great art out of the transition between West and east, a transition that is symbolically represented by the journey through my three idioms, but in reality penetrates deeper and more uniformly into the substance of the later music. if we follow adorno in arguing that music analysis exists to show to us how significant composers can bring to full realisation what lies latent in musical material (and for adorno musical material is so heavily mediated that it can provide a remarkably authentic snapshot of its historical moment), then the analytical challenge posed by enescu is an important one, and yet to be adequately addressed.

22 Bartók 1923; Brăiloiu 1973. 23 For a fuller discussion of the doina, see alexandru 1980, 49–55.

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Wider again: In the Modernist Canon in the early years of the twentieth century, coincident with the triumph of political and cultural nationalisms, significant music emerged all around the edges of europe, music that attained and has sustained widespread international recognition. if we ask ourselves why enescu was the only truly audible Balkan voice in this chorus, we might try out a number of possible answers. perhaps his fame as a violinist was simply transferred to his compositions. But this will not take us far. Why, for instance, has the music of his compatriot Dinu lipatti failed to make headway? then again, networking and promotion mechanisms are poorly oiled in south east europe, so that there was, and is, a battle to get music through to more prestigious centres. at least enescu had the right kinds of connections, we might argue. Yet despite the worldwide respect in which he was held, enescu suffered more than most at the hands of publishers and agents, and continues to do so posthumously. his major significance is widely recognised, but he receives relatively few performances, and his contractual arrangements with salabert have proved little short of disastrous (had he signed with universal edition the story would have been very different). compare him with Kalomiris, genuinely gifted as a composer and infinitely more skilled in self-publicity, yet somehow unable to secure a place in the pantheon. perhaps we should really be addressing our own chauvinism. Does our ignorance of composers from the Balkans – of greeks such as Kalomiris and riadis, of distinguished figures such as Josip slavenski, and of Yugoslav Moderna in general – reduce in the end to questions of cultural politics? Michael herzfeld suggests that we need the Balkans to ennoble ourselves, arguing that the perceived fragmentation, diversity and general fractiousness of this region are recognisably ‘the other side of a familiar coin: the Western self-characterisation in terms of individual genius’.24 in recent years scholars have been anxious to submit precisely this kind of selfcharacterisation to critical scrutiny, not least in music. they have sought, in other words, to contextualise the idea of creative genius as a perceived historical category, and even to deconstruct it. tia Denora has examined the contingencies of genius in relation to Beethoven, for example, and Dana gooley has attempted something similar with liszt, usefully switching the

24 Bjelić and savić 2002, ix.

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emphasis from composition to performance.25 Both musicians, we learn, knew how to construct their image, how to survive in the patronal and mercantile cultures of their times, and how to turn the conditions of those cultures to their own best advantage. exceptional talent (acquired or innate) was there in both cases, of course, but it was nurtured by a particular ecology and enabled by particular agencies.26 this takes us a long way, and we may add to it the self-confirming nature of a canon, once established. But it is not the whole story. it is not at all obvious that we can explain the power of a particular corpus of european art – from the renaissance to the early twentieth century – in such terms. One might, for instance, supply counter examples that downgrade the kinds of contingencies discussed by Denora and gooley. there is the posthumously discovered genius, partly explicable in terms of the needs of particular taste publics, but only partly. conversely, there is the meteoric but ephemeral success, where no amount of promotion (by self or other) secures long-term visibility. My purpose in chapter 10 was to suggest that the really key contingencies were of a rather different order. and much of the discussion of art music in the last few chapters, including my account of enescu, has been shaped by the propositions advanced there. shortly i will review those propositions. But first it is necessary to address how enescu related to his more immediate context in romanian art music, if only briefly. he himself played a prominent role in the structures of musical life. inter-war narratives were not dissimilar to those we have tracked elsewhere, though the issue of bringing a newly ceded transylvania on board presented unique difficulties, given that its elite culture was primarily hungarian. in other respects, enescu was regarded as the key figure even at the time, and he was an obvious choice to chair the society of romanian composers, which was founded in 1920 and merged into the romanian section of the iscM in 1925. the secretary of the society was constantin Brăiloiu, who was active not just in folklore research but in early discussions (in the journal Muzica) about a national school of composers based on folklore (the link between ethnomusicology and composition was foundational in the early stages of the former discipline). the debates in the press, in other words, circled around the same themes that we noted in Yugoslavia: ideas of the new and ideas of the nation. 25 Denora 1995; gooley 2004. 26 psychological literature is wary of the a priorism suggested by term ‘talent’. however, the argument of this paper is not influenced by competing theories about the causes of differentials in human skills. that the differentials are there is self-evident.

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it seems important to emphasise this, because it does provide a more immediate local context for the change of direction in enescu’s music in the 1920s. to some extent, there was conformity here with other developments in romanian music. let us take a brief snapshot of the inter-war years in this regard. there were works from the older generation, such as the second symphony by the italian-romanian alfonso castaldi (1874–1942), a highly influential teacher. castaldi’s earlier symphonic poem Marsyas (1907) was justly popular for a time. the symphony, on the other hand, composed in 1925, is a late-romantic heroic work that suffers from insecurities about style that are characteristic of this generation. it has a grandiose programmatic basis and draws freely on the world of the post-Wagnerian orchestra, but it mixes this with elements drawn from modern French music. Of castaldi’s pupils, three leading figures were alfred alessandrescu (1892–1959), whose acteon of 1915 held promise but who stopped composing in the early 1920s, ion nonna Ottescu (1888–1940), whose assured romanticimpressionist style was leavened by folk-oriental and Byzantine elements, as in the second section of de la Matei cetire [reading Matei], and Filip lazăr (1894–1936), who settled in paris, and whose early death prevented his potential being realised fully. lazăr was a composer of genuine originality, with some fine songs and piano pieces, and with a rather more modernist-leaning musical language than the others. the rhythmic asymmetries and astringent dissonances of Le ring (1918) in particular introduced a breath of bracing modernist air, suggestive of the paris where much of his music was performed. in Bucharest too there was some contact with modernist idioms, including a Bartók concert, in which enescu and Bartók together performed the latter’s fiercely difficult second Violin sonata. native romanian voices were less adventurous. they include the modest output of ionel perlea (1900–70), whose Op. 10 string Quartet (1922–23) is broadly in german romantic vein, though its doina-like slow movement has some affinities with enescu, and whose Variations of 1934 is a more ambitious enterprise hovering somewhere between romanticism and modernism (for perspective we might note that schoenberg’s Op. 31 Variations were composed a few years earlier). also important were theodor rogalski (1901–54), who studied in paris and wrote in a ravel-influenced manner, and constantin nottara, whose poem for Violin and Orchestra of 1920 draws together influences from both France and romania. his Suita în stil românesc (1930) is representative of the more popular folk-based idiom that was becoming semi-standardised in romania at the time, and to which certain works of

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enescu may also be related; likewise works such as Şătrarii [the gypsies] of 1934 by Dinu lipatti (1917–50). in her account of ‘modernity and the avant-garde’ in romanian music between the wars, clemensa Firca discusses the impact of both Bartók and stravinsky on romanian composers such as rogalsi and lazăr, and she further discusses ‘moderate’ modernisms in music by Mihail Jora (1891–1971), paul constantinescu (1909–63), constantin silvestri (1913–69) and Zeno Vancea (1928–90), some of whom will emerge in later chapters.27 Firca outlines some of the trends that we associate with inter-war music in europe more generally at the time, and assesses how far romanian composers responded to them. and she argues, with pascal Bentoiu, for certain unifying tendencies in this music. her survey also gives us a good sense of the gradually widening catchment area for performances of modern romanian music, its increasing penetration of the world beyond. at the same time, Firca is much too astute a critic to make exaggerated claims for any of this music. her account does indeed reveal that enescu was not a lone voice in romanian contexts; indeed it allows us to see very real connections between his music and that of his compatriots. But at no point does Firca suggest that there is anything in earlier or coeval romanian music that might stand alongside the music of enescu. We could say much the same of almost any music composed in the Balkans during these years. in the end it is probably impossible to say why a figure such as enescu should have emerged where and when he did. But we can at least try. i suggested earlier that as an historical category, creative genius demanded not just individual aptitude (sometimes described as talent), but a convergence of this with the kind of significant project that was enabled by an institution of art. i further argued that the significant project had to be uniquely defining of both its time and its place. this latter formulation invites questions about the distribution of genius, invoking geographical as well as historical perspectives. Just why do our so-called ‘great composers’ appear where and when they do? Why do we find clusters and vacuums? there are no easy answers to these questions, and some of the obvious answers (to do with political stability, a consolidated bourgeois class, a well-developed institutional infrastructure, and so forth) founder on closer inspection. i went on to outline a number of options for the flourishing of creative genius. Depending on context, these might include an increasingly individuated patronal art, Kunstreligion, art as an embodiment of the nation, or art as a model of dissent. 27 Firca 2001.

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it is not unthinkable to theorise the distribution of genius by reading these several options (together with their constitutive projects) as the striated lines that mark out what Deleuze and guattari have called ‘sedimentary’ as distinct from ‘nomad’ space.28 ‘nomads’, they remind us, ‘have no history; they only have geography.’ i do not want to insist on this modelling. i mention it as just one of several possible frameworks within which ‘interferences’ between history and geography might be registered, but from a perspective that prioritises place rather than time, and with the striated lines effectively standing for historical events. We might learn something about the decline of instrumental music in italy from this approach, for example; or about the emergence of a symphonic ideal in germany; or about the long (apparent) silences in england and spain; or, to come directly to our subject, about the musical awakenings around the peripheries of europe at the end of the nineteenth century. those peripheral awakenings took two rather distinct, place-determined forms: a second growth of the symphony, and a modernism born of the equation of nationalism (or its legacy) and realism. in the former case music of affirmation, associated with a revitalisation of Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ style, was enabled on the peripheries of europe even as it was problematised at the centre. the peripheries in such instances, and i think especially of russia and the nordic lands, staked their claim to a place in the sun. in the latter case affirmation and critique were enmeshed. an affirmation of the nation, or wished-for nation, implicitly critical of the status quo, tended increasingly towards modernist critique and negation. the point here is that within small would-be nations, and i think especially of east central europe, significant composers made their mark by taking a step to the side of their immediate musical environment, initially colluding with so-called mainstreams, but in the end favouring a groundclearing critique, where traditional (peasant) music served as both critical tool and regenerative medium. What distinguished such composers was not that they were representative of their national music, but rather that they were unrepresentative of it. this, incidentally, also partly explains their singularity within their own national contexts, though politics played a part here, as did the familiar focus and fade mechanism of canon formation, the tendency for the significant to obscure the only marginally less significant. enescu belongs, and does not belong, within this latter category. he is aligned, and is not aligned, with figures such as Bartók and szymanowski. 28 see, notably, Deleuze & guattari 1987.

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What separates him from the others is the Balkan context. i would argue not just that an investment in transition was uniquely attuned to Balkan history and geography, but that it may indeed have been the only viable project for this region at this time; as we have seen, enescu was far from alone among Balkan composers, though he was certainly the most successful, in attempting a modernist project of transition between east and West. an analytical approach that is properly attuned to enescu’s project would have no difficulty in revealing the exceptional qualities of his later music, even its greatness, in something close to leonard B. Meyer’s use of that term.29 But the key part of this is the attunement, and it is the part that differentiates my own position from Meyer’s. Meyer appears to allow for little if any element of historical contingency in his attempt to define the attributes of greatness. i have some sympathy, all the same, with Meyer’s attempt to rescue the aesthetic from the many ideologies that lay claim to it. We should resist, i feel, the tempting tendency to explain away (rather than to explain) creative genius, to understand it exclusively as a category of reception. nothing is easier than the deconstruction of genius. contingencies need relatively little excavation. Yet the capacity of a small corpus of european music to enchant or re-enchant the world, to create a symbolically dense, clearly marked, privileged place, will not reduce quite so transparently to the conditions of its production, nor to the ideologies that have undoubtedly shaped its reception.30 that corpus is not, however, immutable. it is subject to revision, and the more so now that our historical narratives are increasingly freeing themselves from a utopian modernist bias.31 herein lies the importance of ‘placing’ genius. not only does it avoid the mystification and reification of genius associated with critics such as george steiner and harold Bloom; it leaves open the possibility that the very idea of genius may have outlived its usefulness in today’s world.32

29 leonard B. Meyer 1967a. 30 Mircea eliade refers to a break in space revealing a new centre for orientation, detaching a territory, making it qualitatively different, and thus allowing for regeneration. see eliade 1959, 20–26. 31 see albright 1999 for an alternative history of twentieth-century culture, one that includes just such a revision of the musical canon. however we view albright’s revisionism, it is rather clear that due to the winnowing effect of canon formation the status of twentieth-century composers is bound to be more contested than that of their nineteenthcentury counterparts. 32 steiner 1989; Bloom 1994.

part Four

eaStern europe

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the CurtaIn DeSCenDS Left, Right . . . a distinguishing feature of the fascist right in the 1930s was its mobilisation of the masses, and its capacity to sustain political engagement through mass culture.1 Communism adopted similar means, and this accounts for continuities in music-making across pre- and post-war administrations in much of South East Europe. The pre-modern territories of the Balkans were ideal breeding grounds for nationalist movements of the radical Right, complete with grassroots anti-semitism, as the history of the Romanian Iron guard demonstrates.2 But the pattern was not monolithic. in Croatia other factors came into play, including the catalytic role played by the Catholic Church in promoting Ustaša as a populist movement, a bulwark against the revolutionary Left. such polarisation was a feature of the wider region, and it continued into the war, with Communists prominent in the resistance movements, and especially in the partisan forces of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. The increasing economic dependence of the Balkan states on the Axis alliance ensured that Bulgaria and Romania were on side when the war broke, and that Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania would quickly be overrun, so that by the end of April 1941 hitler effectively controlled the peninsula. Of the ‘puppet states’, ion Antonescu’s regime in Romania and Ante Pavelić’s ‘independent’ Croatia, extending well beyond present borders, stood out for their singular brutality. in Romania, Jews and Roma were the victims of pogroms and deportation.3 in Croatia, there were summary executions or forced conversions of serbs, ghettoisation of Jews, prison camps, and a reign of everyday terror. The eventual outcome of the fighting in Yugoslavia was largely determined by the decision of the Allies to back the partisans

1  The idea of mass culture is larger than a symbiosis of popular culture and the mass media. it is in the end more to do with whether artworks adapt to these media or resist them in Modernist mode. This Adornian formulation is articulated and glossed in Paddison 1996. 2 Ornea 2000. 3 Deletant 2006.

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rather than the royalist Četniks. But for the Balkans as a whole, a no less crucial factor was Romania’s coup in August 1944, since this opened the door to the soviet Red Army. By the end of the war the entire peninsula apart from Greece was under Communist control. Wartime allegiances shaped formal culture to a marked degree, and there is some irony in the fact that the two rival canonised traditions of European art music should have found themselves politically aligned in the war. Accordingly, italy and Germany were well represented in the musical cultures of the Axis puppet states. Frankfurt Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring in Athens was one of numerous visits from German and italian companies to the Balkans on the eve of the war, and during it. At the national Theatre of Zagreb there were guest performances from the Royal Opera of Rome, the Berlin Philharmonic and a Choral society from Graz in the 1941–42 season alone.4 Conversely, German and Austrian opera houses during the Third Reich hosted several productions of Greek, Croatian and Romanian operas, even if ‘such events often took place outside the regular season as part of a special festival’.5 This is the wider context for those performances of Kalomiris, Zoras, Vladigerov and Gotovac in Germany, and one might add Romanian composers such as Paul Constantinescu.6 The notion of ‘collaboration’ is not usually appropriate, but in the case of some composers – Kalomiris in Greece, for instance, and Širola in Croatia – there were writings and speeches that explicitly supported not just the puppets but the puppeteers. German and italian support of, and subsidy for, native musical life, including the all-important radio, was often the key to this. Transparently, the motivation was control, but for some native musicians the benefits for their own careers and for local cultures outweighed any propaganda value to the Axis Powers. The line is hard to draw. in Bulgaria, most would have drawn it at Todorov’s Bulgarisch-Deutschen Gesellschaften. in Croatia, some would have singled out the German-Croatian ‘evenings’ that took place in Zagreb from 1943 onwards, though major figures such as Papandopulo and Baranović saw no difficulty about representation on these occasions. it should be noted

4 Ceribašić 1998a, 117. 5 Levi 1994, 191. 6 see, for example, Zeitschrift für Musik (1943, ii) for a review of Constantinescu’s Romanian Dances in Berlin in 1942.

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too that there were contacts between Bulgarian and Croatian composers in the inter-war period.7 The war forced issues in the field of art music, where the structures of formal culture were easily compromised or appropriated, and where middle grounds were hard to maintain. Arguably there has been an asymmetry of blame in the subsequent reporting of these matters. The tolerance accorded to musicians deemed to have engaged in necessary compromise in the soviet Union, for example, has rarely been extended to so-called ‘collaborators’ in fascist states. in both cases, it often came down to survival, and to the viability or not of alternative responses. it is easy to be wise after the event. Of course there were many victims, and their fate has influenced the retrospective gaze. Musicians (especially Jewish) suffered and died in the war, whether through direct fighting or through persecution; the respective ends of Vojislav Vučković and Pavao Markovac have already been described. A whole story might be told about music and music-making in prisons, concentration camps and ghettos in the Balkans as elsewhere. Only relatively recently has this subject has been tackled in a serious way by musicologists, notably by Guido Fackler and shirli Gilbert, and currently by Barbara Milewski.8 But accounts are mainly confined to a few camps, especially Theresienstadt, sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau. it has been noted that this research does sometimes lack nuance, supporting (or attacking) narratives of music-making as ‘spiritual resistance’, where first-hand memoirs strongly suggest that motivations were less clear-cut.9 But the Fackler volume in particular is remarkable for the enormity of the source pool consulted and the wealth of information provided. Most of the memoirs come from German camps, where there were many Balkan musicians (they include an account by Predrag Milošević of his time in nurenberg). What is so far lacking is an account of music in the camps and ghettos of south East Europe itself, apart from descriptions of Miloje Milojević’s activities in a camp in Belgrade, where he continued to compose and lecture. There are some harrowing observations about Jasenovac in the puppet state of Croatia. We read in Anton Eberst’s collection an account by Jakob Danon of his arrest by the Ustaše in July 1941 and detention in the camp

7 spasova and Georgieva 2011. 8 Fackler 2000; Gilbert 2007. Milewski’s work on this subject is in progress. 9 Milewski 2007.

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until 1945.10 Among the prisoners there were excellent musicians, and they brought their instruments with them. One prisoner, Dr. slavko Goldšmit, who worked as an accountant in the camp, had been employed in the Croatian national Theatre before the war, Danon tells us, and founded an orchestra made up principally of strings, but with accordions, guitars, trumpets and harmonicas. several of the musicians had professional backgrounds, including the conductor Erih samlaić, who had taught music in Osijek, but with only two exceptions, Roma were not allowed to play in the orchestra. The normal practice was to play classical and light music on sunday afternoons, but the orchestra also performed for the Ustaše when they had guests from Germany. There were few scores, so the musicians were obliged either to write down the music from memory or to compose it themselves. Danon gives one example of how it worked. he recalls that a certain Moritz Kohen, a prisoner from another camp at stara Gradiška, wrote a libretto based on Scheherazade, that somebody from that same camp wrote music for it in ‘an oriental idiom’, and that the score was then clandestinely transported to Jasenovac. The end of the orchestra was tragic. in 1944, convinced that ivo Volner, a Jewish member of the orchestra, had tried to escape, the Ustaše killed all the Jews playing in the orchestra, including Goldšmit, and forbade all further musical activities. There are further stories of a choir established by partisan sympathisers in the prison in Vukovar and of an orchestra at the camp in Porto Re in istria, but the whole subject is in quest of comprehensive review. Beyond the camps, the effect of wartime politics was to prolong and intensify the nationalist orientation that had characterised art music in much of the Balkans during the interwar years, and specifically to enhance the folkloristic ethos. Programming policies reflected this, but so too did original wartime compositions. There was movement into a middle ground somewhere between art music and folk music, and it came from both directions. Even as composers aimed at accessibility through the appropriation of familiar material from folk-popular culture, creating not just patriotic songs but effectively propagandist war songs, so there was a move to add new layers of sophistication to folk traditions, in effect to classicise them. This latter tendency was especially evident in the official cultural policies and discourses associated with the puppet governments,

10 Eberst 1985.

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and it provides us with one of several intriguing pre-echoes of Communist cultures. in a nutshell, the Fascist dictatorships accentuated a pedigreed rhetoric of cultural purity that increasingly translated into abuse of ethnic minorities. The Metaxas regime in Greece was characteristic though certainly not the most extreme, and here the rhetoric was allied to a blatant neohellenism (a ‘Third hellenic Civilisation’) within which there was massification of specified elements of Greek culture and expulsion of other elements. similar forces were at work in Pavelić’s Croatia. naila Ceribašić has noted that the rhetoric, embodied in the ‘beauty and strength’ of traditional Croatian melodies, was often at odds with the obligation to present Croatian music as cultivated and sophisticated: on a par with the best of European culture.11 By citing reviews of folk performances by Croatian musicians and dancers in Vienna in 1942, she exposes the officially sanctioned imperative to polish and professionalise folk performances, again foreshadowing the folk ensembles of post-war Cominform states. What lay behind it was the myth of a uniform ethos – whether of the Right or of the Left – embodied in the nation. When we turn to popular music during the war years, we note a distinction between politically disinterested and politically engaged music. The former was associated with the cafés, cabarets and artists’ clubs of the urban centres, its clientele consisting of either the political establishment or the occupying forces. The bulk of the repertory was international popular music of the day, including north American, and much of it was a direct response to the seedier by-products of war, which included the growth of black market profiteering, and the exploitative culture this promoted. The picture was a diverse one, marked by border crossing both socially and ethnically. Roma, like Jews, were notoriously targeted by the Fascists, but this did not prevent some of them from retaining their traditional musical roles in the cafés, weddings and saints’ days. such popular music was also presented to a wider public by way of rapidly developing mass media, though as nationalised radio assumed an explicit propaganda function it was increasingly censorious of the products of the café chantant. naturally, it did not take political authorities long to realise that radio’s entry into the home unleashed unprecedented powers of persuasion. Popular music was either censored directly or invested with new political meanings through specific programming

11 Ceribašić 1998a.

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policies. Yannis Constantinidis was director of the third programme in Greece at the time, and he has left accounts of the political directives from above.12 But propaganda can cut two ways, which brings us to the politically engaged music and music-making associated with the partisans of the Left. Much of this activity was associated directly with the provinces, where the fighting actually took place, and the diversity of the repertory was a defining feature. The patriotic songs and war songs cultivated by the Yugoslav Partisans, for instance, drew eclectically on many folk and popular traditions, in direct contrast to the ethos of uniformity promoted by the Ustaše. One factor here is that the Partisans came from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Texts may have been purpose-built, but musical styles could range from the oldest layers of dinaric singing through modern singing na bas and epic songs, to the characteristic kolo dance songs found over much of the slavonic Balkans.13 Another factor is that the Partisans were revolutionaries, and as such their cultural policies had not yet been reified into the prescriptive agendas that would later accompany the rise to power of Communist elites. And a third factor is that they accessed a radical tradition unavailable to the Right, the revolutionary songs associated with the soviet Union. in practice these were not so different musically from the war songs of the radical Right (there were even shared melodies). Leading composers engaged in the liberation struggle, or sympathetic to it, attempted to raise the level of partisan music, and made their own newly composed contributions to it. in the later stages of the war, slavenski wrote songs such as Heroj Tito and Stalin-Tito-enver-dimitrov, along with narodne partizanske pjesme and Makedonska partizanska. More directly involved in the resistance were composers such as Panche Peshev (1915– 44), Oskar Danon (1913–2009) and the young composer and musicologist nikola hercigonja (1911–2000). hercigonja had joined the Partisans in 1942 and he left accounts of their musical activities (choral singing and theatrical productions), as well as composing a body of original songs and making numerous arrangements.14 A committed Marxist, he drew very directly on soviet models, especially in mass songs such as Crveni makovi [Red Poppies] and Vihori [hurricanes]. We will return to him shortly.

12 Leotsakos 2005c. 13 There are interesting reflections on this in Žanić 2007. 14 hercigonja 1972.

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in Bulgaria, too, proletarian musical traditions flourished, as befitted the Balkan state closest historically and culturally to Russia. Already in the early twentieth century workers’ songs were cultivated, culminating in numerous songs by svetoslav Obretenov from the interwar period. Obretenov also composed mass songs and cantatas on the soviet model, and contributed to the wave of anti-fascist songs that were composed in great numbers between the wars and during World War ii. As in Croatia, the music harnessed by the resistance movement drew on a wide range of popular sources, and by no means exclusively Bulgarian (there are published collections by Elena stoin and others),15 which is hardly surprising given the class-based ideology espoused by the partisans, and their hostility to the political allegiances of the Bulgarian monarchist polity. Often it was a question of taking existing soviet songs and customising the texts by, for example, associating present-day struggles with familiar historical tales of national rebellion, heroism and vengeance. Dencho Znepolski, a guerrilla fighter during the war before he was held in the notorious Bellene camp in the early 1950s, has written about his experiences with the partisans, as well as his experiences at the hands of the Communist regime.16 his account of the music of the partisans, cited by Krustev, is illustrated by songs such as Mladata partizanka [The Young Partisan Girl] and Găsta e măgla padnala [Thick Fog has Come Down], but also by more conventionally conceived partisan marches, in a stirring common time.17 As for Obrenetov, the fate of his collection of workers’ songs was mentioned in chapter 13, but he also contributed songs for the anti-fascist theatrical productions that were popular in student and intellectual circles. Of all Balkan states, it was probably Bulgaria that witnessed the most seamless transition between the revolutionary music of the inter-war years and the mass songs of the socialist Republic. it is precisely in this matter of continuity that we may recognise a contrast with Greece. Among the Communist guerrillas in Greece it was again common to use soviet songs, albeit with Greek-language texts, but there were also many original revolutionary songs composed by Greek composers, prominent among them nikiforos Rotas (1929–2004) and Alekos xenos. xenos has written of his wartime experiences among the Greek partisans, and there are remarkable photographs of him conducting choirs on

15 Krustev 1978, 135. 16 Znepolski 1997. 17 Krustev 1978, 136.

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improvised stages ‘in the field’.18 There are further first-hand accounts of music-making by the partisans in the volume Ta antartika tragoudhia [The songs of the Guerrillas], which contains song texts, a few songs with music, and several articles and memoirs.19 some of the most telling evidence comes from surviving photographs, revealing of the diverse regional and social backgrounds of the guerrillas, the range of instruments available to them, and their resourcefulness in designing ad hoc performance sites. From all of this we begin to see that, as elsewhere in the Balkans, the resistance movements in Greece were surprisingly well organised. Up there in the mountains were wind bands, choirs and even rudimentary forms of musical theatre, all designed to boost the morale of the fighters but also to sell their message to the indigenous population. A recently published collection of partisan songs, all harmonised, is evidence of the diversity of some of the repertory. There are Russian and soviet marches and songs, klephtic songs, italian songs, American Civil War songs, and even a putative irish song, together with original compositions that include songs by xenos and Theodorakis, and even one by iannis xenakis!20 All of course were furnished with Greek resistance texts. The musical practices revealed by such compilations were in every way consistent with liberation struggles across the rest of south East Europe. Volumes of folk, military and revolutionary songs were produced in increasing numbers in the early war years, with obvious propaganda value. Citing various war memoirs, naila Ceribašić conveys something of the morale-boosting and enemy-deflating value of these songs in relation to all three of the forces who were at loggerheads in the mountains of Yugoslavia: Ustaše, Četniks, and Partisans.21 This was music at the front line, and here the propaganda war, like the real war, was both vicious and immediate. in a volume edited by Andrija Tomašek, we have a detailed account of nikola hercigonja’s activities as a member of the agitprop of the Croatian Communist Party Central Committee, including his early publication of the collection Pjesme borbe [Fighting songs], and his work at Bihać with 18  see Maheras 1999. i am grateful to Kostas Kardamis, who introduced me to this source in the hellenic Music Laboratory of the ionian University of Corfu. 19 Ta antartika tragoudhia. Athens: Tetradio magazine, 1975. 20 Dimitroadou 2002. interestingly xenos and xenakis crossed swords in the early 1950s in an issue of Epitheorisi tehnis [The Bulletin of Art] about the existence or not of a national Greek music. At the time xenakis was a member of EPOn (Eniea panellinia enosi neoleas [ Unified Panhellenic Youth Union]). 21  Ceribašić 1998a.

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the partisan theatre group Kazalište narodnog oslobodjenja [Theatre of national Liberation].22 The first performance of this group took place in December 1942 at Bosanski Petrovac, at which point hercigonja met Tito for the first time, and from then onwards there were numerous performances for partisans and for local people in the territories they occupied at the time. in hercigonja’s own writings the detail is rich, and sometimes quirky. We read about the difficulties encountered in learning songs from different traditions (notably in a chapter on Romanian fighters), and we discover that styles could be rapidly transformed following political directives from above.23 Most of all, we learn from hercigonja the capacity of music to reinforce ideological programmes directly and efficiently. This was a message already well known to the political elites of the soviet Union, and it was about to be assimilated by those ruling the client states of the soviet ‘empire’ in Eastern Europe. But in the post-war years popular music in Greece took a very different turn, a mark of Greece’s exclusion from the family of Cominform states. it was the resulting break in continuity that provided the context for ‘popular art songs’ promoted by hadjidakis and Theodorakis. These not only took on the role vacated by Kalomiris’s national school; they also substituted for a possible socialist popular music, which in the rest of Eastern Europe played a key role not only in its own right but as a catalytic element in art music. Much later, in the 1980s, just after Pasok came to power, xenos, still a die-hard communist, lamented this state of affairs. he reflected on what was and what might have been. xenos’s reflections were articulated in the polemical article ‘Katigoro to rebetiko’ [i accuse rebetiko].24 he attacked the fetishism of rebetika by political leaders (he meant Papandreou), and he lamented the hypocrisy of those ‘song writers’ who now complain of the commercial culture they helped to create (he meant Theodorakis). in contrast he evoked resistance songs written by ‘the people’ and ‘the peoples’ composers’ (he meant himself). some indication of how this healthier popular music might have fertilised the art music of a Greek communist state was provided by his First symphony ‘The Resistance’, completed in 1945 (compare slavenski’s Simfonijski epos). With an accompanying programme describing the lives of the resistance fighters in the mountains, each of its three movements is

22 Tomašek 1982. 23 hercigonja 1962. 24 xenos 1984. For a study of leftist positions on rebetika, see Zaimakis 2010.

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based on an emblematic resistance song, including a Cretan song and the resistance anthem of the Left, which comes into conflict with pernicious distortions of the British national anthem. Although composed in 1945, the work received its first performance only in 1979, in the aftermath of the Junta. That it was awarded a prize by the Romanians in 1952 says everything. in Extremis: The Singular Case of albania Post-war reconstruction – physical and cultural – was a Europe-wide project, transcending ideology. For many of Europe’s cities it meant clearing rubble, rebuilding city centres, and repairing transport networks. nonetheless, within a short time ideologically competing structures began to prise the two Europes apart politically and culturally. By the end of the war the entire Balkans apart from Greece was under Communist control, and by spring of 1948 soviet treaties had been signed with Romania and Bulgaria, as well as with Albania. The exception was Yugoslavia, which parted company with stalin in that same year, and was expelled from the Cominform, but with her political structures already instituted on a soviet model. in all cases the formal organisation of government was based on state-Party joint committees that controlled political, social and economic affairs in a highly centralised way. And although the separate Cominform states began to depart from the soviet model as regional interests were increasingly asserted, their economies were still run along soviet collectivist lines. it was at this point that south East Europe transmuted to part of Eastern Europe, a symbolic geography dictated by the iron Curtain. Cultural life was not the highest priority, but its propaganda value was recognised early, and by 1948 the organisation of musical life was on the political agenda. Again the model was a highly centralised one. There were distinct pluses. An undoubted achievement was the development of an impressive infrastructure for the teaching, promotion and dissemination of high culture, including professional music-making. But as creative artists soon discovered, there was a heavy price to pay in terms of cultural freedoms, which were curtailed across all the client states, in accordance with the socialist realist doctrine that was a key component of MarxismLeninism. The decrees on music by the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow in January 1948 (following earlier decrees on literature, theatre and cinema) set the terms of reference, and composers in Eastern Europe soon found themselves having to take careful note of the proclamations of Andrei Zhdanov.

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The pluses and minuses can be inspected in starkly polarised form in Albania. Vlorë, on the Albanian Adriatic, is where modern Albania really began. independence is its Leitmotif. if you visit it today you will see an independence Monument in the best heroic style, located in independence square, and not a stone throw away from the Museum of independence. The town had long enjoyed an interesting history, not least because of its once substantial Jewish population. But more pertinently, it became a major centre for the independence struggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with educational activities and patriotic societies, including the ‘Laberia’ Club under ismail Kemal, helping to stoke the fires of rebellion. And it was here in Vlorë that independence was declared on 28 november 1912, to be recognised in May of the following year by the Treaty of London. The Albanians quickly discovered that it was one thing to declare independence, quite another to secure it, and especially in the shadow of more powerful neighbours such as italy, Greece and (after World War i) Yugoslavia, all of whom had vested interests in the country’s borders and political colours. in December 1914, Vlorë was taken by the italians, and after the war – in the 1920s – it became a centre for anti-italian and anti-Zog resistance, culminating in the so-called ‘War of Vlorë’, and a brief moment of democracy for Albania under Bishop Fan stilian noli in 1924. Later, on the eve of the second World War, the italian occupation ordered by Mussolini began with a landing in Vlorë, and throughout the war the city remained an important base for anti-fascist resistance, first against the italians, and then the Germans. Albanians were specialists in resistance; the word sums up their history. Prior to World War ii, Western art music had been all but non-existent in this tiny nation, probably the least developed region in the Balkans, economically, socially and educationally (illiteracy ran at 85% in 1945). There had been some musical activities (wind bands and choirs) associated especially with the important trading city shkodër, with its cathedral and Jesuit College, in the Catholic north. The self-taught composer Palokë Kurti (1860–1920) was active there, especially as director of the band that was eventually named after him; likewise, the Franciscan Martin Gjoka (1890–1940) played a pioneering role, composing stage and orchestral works that had little hope of adequate performance, and instructing a generation of younger Albanian composers. There were also Westernorientated musical practices in the south of the country, and especially in the pre-war italianate town of Korçë, home of mandolin orchestras and (in the 1920s) of another high-profile band directed by Thoma nasi (1892–1964), who subsequently emigrated to America.

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however, it was really only after liberation in October 1944, when the Communist-led Anti-Fascist national Liberation Council was transmuted into the Provisional Government of Albania under Enver hoxha, that Albanian music was put on an organised footing, along lines familiar in the other soviet client states. Again there were obvious musical continuities between wartime partisan activities and the post-war regime. Thus, in the immediate wake of liberation the Ensemble of the People’s Army was founded, along with a state Chorus, and exactly as in Yugoslavia their repertory was made up largely of partisan songs and socialist mass songs. several of these songs were subsequently published, and of the original compositions most are by composers who have since disappeared without trace. An exception to this was the contribution of the shkodër-born composer Prenkë Jakova (1917–69). One might indeed spotlight successive stages of Albanian post-war music history by way of Jakova’s fortunes and output. his song ‘në një dorë kazmën, në tjetrën pushkën’ [A pick in one hand, a rifle in the other] was characteristic partisan fare. it was popular at the end of the war, and very much in harmony with the socialist direction Albania was to take in post-war years. Jakova’s post-war career was symptomatic of the brave new socialist world of music-making that developed during these years. he became an influential figure in Albanian musical life when he was appointed music director at the house of Culture in shkodër shortly after the Liberation, and while there he organised and directed a choir and orchestra that enabled him to promote Albanian music, including the works of his younger compatriots. in the country at large, music was hardly the first priority in these early years of socialism. But music education was taken seriously, and again it was organised in accordance with policy shaped in Moscow. The ‘Jordan Misja’ Music school was established in Tirana, and at the same time the brightest young performers and composers were encouraged to study in friendly countries overseas, especially Czechoslovakia and the soviet Union. state-subsidised publishing and recording were initiated, a Union of Writers and Artists with a separate music section was established, and several key performing institutions were put in place, including the national Philharmonic society (1949), which later (in 1953) absorbed the Opera and Ballet Theatre. Then, after 1955, when the first groups of students returned from overseas, now professionally trained, there was an acceleration of activity, a burst of renewed energy that continued up to the first major turning point in post-war Albanian history, Enver hoxha’s breach with the soviet Union in 1961.

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This was the context for the composition (1956–58) of Jakova’s opera Mrika, to a libretto by Llazar siliqi, an extension and elaboration of his earlier musical tableau dritë mbi Shqipëri [Light over Albania] of 1952.25 it was the first full-scale Albanian opera, and it was performed in shkodër and Tirana in 1958, at a time when Albania was still a soviet client state. The subject matter is on message, depicting the building of socialism in Albania in the context of post-war reconstruction and external hostility, though the story of Mrika herself, one of feminist self-determination, transcends this context. Like the libretto, the dramaturgy is indebted to soviet models, in that the fate of individuals, portrayed by soloists and ensembles, is positioned against an all-important background of ‘the people’, portrayed by the chorus. Predictably, the musical idiom is conservative harmonically, while its melos is heavily influenced by folk models. Mrika may have been one of the more professionally realised works to emerge from Albania during this period, but it also demonstrated that the implementation of a socialist realist aesthetic was already much stricter in Albania than elsewhere in the Eastern bloc. This had been true almost from the start, following a brief period of liberal governance under the first Minister of Education sejfulla Malëshova. in the wake of Zhdanov’s proclamations, the obligatory conference of the Writers’ Union, including its music section, was held in 1949, and from that point artists and intellectuals were subject to surveillance and ‘guidance’. All modern music – and modern here included Debussy – as well as all jazz and popular music were condemned; the recommended subjects for opera and ballet were the partisan struggle and the building of socialism; and the idiom of contemporary composition was severely constrained. The official party line on compositional style, neatly articulated in the brief section on music in an English-language guide to the country published in 1978, was rigorously enforced, and for scholars such as Ramadan sokoli, as well as composers, there were many problems.26 it was a dangerous time, during which the alternative to conformity was persecution, internment or worse.

25 A recent study of Jakova (in Albanian) by the italian-based Albanian scholar spiro Kalemi looks at his achievements as the founder of Albanian opera (Kalemi 2006). Prior to this book, Kalemi had already written extensively about Albanian music, notably on musicians from shkodër. 26 an outline of the People’s Socialist republic of albania. Tirana: 8 nëntori Publishing house, 1978.

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Exactly a decade after the performances of Mrika, Jakova composed a second opera Gjergj Kastrioti-Skënderbeu, the first major stage work to draw on the life and deeds of the most famous of all Albanian heroes, and the central figure in all mythologies of Albanian national romanticism.27 By that time (1968), Albania had broken with Moscow, left the Cominform, ostensibly in defence of stalinist orthodoxy, and begun its liaison with China. not only were the familiar soviet models now eschewed; soviet music was deemed just as unacceptable as the decadent products of the West, and was officially proscribed. Following the breach in 1961, a further reorganisation of cultural life was considered necessary to formalise the new status quo, with controversial meetings of the Union of Writers and Artists in July of that year to debate future directions. This meant further institution building, including the Music Conservatory in Tirana, inaugurated just after the breach in 1962, and the Palace of Culture, which housed the Opera and Ballet Theatre from 1964. The effect of all this on Albanian composers was ambivalent. The virtual exclusion of music from the wider world carried some benefits, at least in securing performances. And although the Party exerted control over music, inaugurating a series of song festivals of Albanian music all over the country, the withdrawal of soviet models paradoxically enabled some more liberal trends artistically. This was reflected in the more ambitious conception of Jakova’s Skënderbeu, and in the greater diversity of its musical and narrative forms, when compared with Mrika. Musically, this is indeed a surprisingly sophisticated work. ideologically, though, there could be little room for ambiguity. To invoke a past hero in this way and at this time, and to divorce him from the Christian world, was to serve the personality cult of a present-day dictator. Personality cults were a familiar feature of post-war Communist dictatorships, but nowhere were they cultivated with such fanaticism as in Albania. Albania truly was a land in extremis. Jakova died a year after completing Skënderbeu, in 1969. As a result, he missed the most oppressive period of all in Albanian intellectual life, the decade following 1975. Relations with China had deteriorated in the early 1970s, and by the middle of the decade they had been cut completely. This of course was contrary to the general direction of music elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where dialogues with the West were developing. A tangible

27 But note the film Skënderbeu of 1957, an Albanian-soviet co-production directed by sergej Jutkević.

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result of the isolationist policy was that all Albanian musicians studying abroad were obliged to return. Another was that not just Western and soviet music but all religious music – Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim alike – was officially proscribed, with implications for choral societies, and even for organists, that need no spelling out. This came in the wake of Albania’s ‘coming out’ as the world’s first officially designated atheist state, a policy enshrined by a museum of atheism established a few years later (1972), in shkodër of all places. These repressive policies culminated in the Fourth Plenary session of the Central Committee in 1974, at which Enver hoxha presented the now notorious report that effectively cut Albania off totally from the remainder of the contemporary world. Little was known of Albania during these years. From the late 1950s the country had been something of a closed book to all but a handful of western visitors. As to music, these included expeditions by the Romanian ethnomusicologist Emilia Comişel in the early 1950s. Then, as noted in chapter 7, there were collections made by the stockmanns in 1957 and by Albert Lancaster Lloyd (himself far from neutral politically) in 1965. There were also several trips by the leading contemporary (activist) composer Gerhard stäbler.28 But between 1975 and 1991 such visits were few and far between.29 One exception was George Leotsakos. in 1981, right in the middle of this reign of terror for artists and intellectuals, Leotsakos, then employed as a music editor for Larousse, was invited to Albania. he was astonished by what he found there during that initial fifteen-day visit, and his first-hand account of it reminds us that even the most negative aspects of the political system in Albania were incapable of quelling the creative spirit of composers.30 it reminds us too that the more positive achievements of the system were remarkable. Leotsakos was met by the composer Feim ibrahimi (1935–97), who despite having to toe the party line officially, demonstrated an unexpected familiarity with the music of iannis xenakis and showed Leotsakos a ‘Cello 28 in an earlier period (1903), the German ethnographer Paul Traeger (1867–1933) visited northern Albania, and made a number of important recordings, predominantly among Catholic Albanians. These, along with the recordings made by Edith Durham around the same time, are the earliest known recordings of Albanian traditional music. 29 Occasional windows on Albanian music were opened by enterprising musicians such as the British composer Dave smith, who travelled there in 1983 on the one (carefully controlled) package holiday then available, and briefly recorded his impressions of urban popular music, traditional music and a selection of compositions by leading Albanian composers (smith 1983). Later, in the 1990s, Joan Emerson (self)-published a short book listing the major institutions of music-making and the leading composers (Emerson 1994). 30 Leotsakos: personal communication.

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sonata he had composed a few years earlier in a progressive (atonal) idiom; it was performed for the first time only after the fall of Communism. Later he encountered and came to know well other composers, such as Tish Daija (1926–2003) and Tonin harapi (1928–1992), both of whom managed to compose in a manner that met official requirements, while harapi at least privately demonstrated a remarkable breadth of musical knowledge, composing ‘difficult’ works for the top drawer rather than the concert platform. But the real surprise for Leotsakos was the musical infrastructure he encountered in Albania. For a city then comprising 250,000 inhabitants, Tirana had an Opera and Ballet Theatre, several orchestras (including the symphony Orchestra of Albanian Radio and Television), a national Ensemble of Folk Music and Dance, a Music Conservatory, and several specialist music schools. Even more striking was the extent and range of musical activities taking place outside the capital in what had been an undeveloped country in the pre-war years. Every major town had its house of culture, its orchestra, and its choral society, and native operas were staged throughout the provinces. Moreover, as everywhere in the Communist world of Eastern Europe, a heavily subsidised culture meant tickets affordable by all. By the time Leotsakos arrived in Albania there had already been more than thirty years of Communist government, and musicians had watched political allegiances and associated cultural policies change with the seasons. he has not said so, at least to me, but as a music critic arriving from the one country in south East Europe where Communism had failed to take, or rather had been forcibly squashed, he could hardly have avoided engaging in some comparative analysis. The results would have been decidedly mixed, emphasising the ever-widening gap between Greece and the Communist Balkans during these years. Putting it bluntly, the Albanian authorities supported high culture; the Greek authorities did not. Modern Greek art music was given some official backing (see chapter 20), but in the main it was ignored; and it is still ignored today. On the other hand, Greek composers could write what they liked. There are debates to be had about the extent to which the new music carried ideological messages, and about the supporting role of foreign powers in the promotion of a post-war modernist culture in Greece; it is obvious that censorship and propaganda were not invented in the soviet Union. But none of this measures up to the restrictions imposed on Albanian composers by what was without question the most hard-line and dogmaridden regime of all the European Communist states. nowhere else was the divorce between the private and public voices of composers – both

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verbal and musical – quite so complete, and even with the death of Enver hoxha in 1985 the grip of the Party did not slacken. it was not until 1991, following the collapse of one of the last Communist regimes to survive in the Balkans, that the doors to the wider world were pushed ajar. administered Music: Performing Communism if we look more closely at the pluses and minuses of musical culture in Communist south East Europe we will see that they represented two sides of a single coin. The real issue is that the codes associated with musical categories were magically switched as those categories were either appropriated by, or rejected by, state socialism. This code switching was an extension of Cold War politics, much of which played out in European cultural arenas. Thus, two categories that were considered antithetical within the bourgeois culture of the first half of the twentieth century – modernist music and commercial popular music – formed a kind of alliance under Communism. Both were deemed to be part of the culturalpolitical armory of the United states, and were condemned by the soviet Union and its allies as anti-humanistic and decadent. There was comparable code switching associated with classical music and traditional music. A creation of bourgeois Europe, classical music was an elite culture, but when appropriated by socialist realism it lost these associations and became the property of the people, expressive of universal human values. it also became a site of competition, an assertion of cultural prestige on the world stage. As to traditional music, this was eagerly appropriated by socialist realism, but its pedigreed associations with bourgeois nationalism became problematical. Links with the nation were not eliminated, but in a sense they should have been, and this created a kind of unresolved tension within the aesthetic. One line was that national states should simply wither away in the new order, and that traditional music should be valued as an authentic expression of the people (the proletariat, not the nation). But stalin’s classic formulation tied nation building to the class struggle, and in practice the nation not only prevailed but gained enhanced status.31 What seemed more crucial was that traditional music

31 As Marina Frolova-Walker indicates, the formula ‘national in form, socialist in content’ was a temporary ideal only. ‘Only the outward forms, the technical means of expression, might reflect the nationality of each republic [of the soviet Union], and even this was meant as a temporary concession, until all the national tributaries could merge into

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should lose another of its bourgeois associations, this time with the primitive. To a modernist, the primitive could be a highly valued category; to a socialist realist, it was a mark of inferiority and regression. it was this investment in classical music and traditional music that determined the direction of musical life under Communist regimes. And conversely, it was the opposition of these regimes to modernism and popular culture that resulted in severe curtailments of creative freedom. since they were wrapped in a single package, it may seem naïve to label these developments as pluses and minuses. But as part of the ‘effective history’ of the Communist years, that is what they were. The contrast was at its most extreme in Albania, where an impressive infrastructure was conjured up seemingly ex nihilo, but where creative artists were reduced to unwilling agents of propaganda. in the other Cominform states of south East Europe, where there already existed an infrastructural history and well-established creative directions, issues were less clear-cut. There was not quite the same tabula rasa, on which a new socialist story might be written, and although prescriptive dogma was imposed, history and tradition had a way of creeping back in to modify the story. Much also depended on relationships with Moscow and with the West, and here there was little uniformity. There has not been the same degree of specialised scholarship on the musical life of the Communist states of south East Europe as on Poland, hungary and Czechoslovakia, but one certainty is that the more we learn about these cultures, and about Cold War cultures in general, the more we are inclined to deconstruct the stereotypes.32 The avant-gardes of Western Europe, far from cutting loose from a political establishment, were themselves institutionally grounded and subject to political influence. And, conversely, East European censorship left much more room for artistic expression and disinterested judgment than the conventional narratives allow. ideological questions will be addressed presently. But first i need to sketch in some of the shared background to the structures of musical life. Opera, its elitist origins conveniently forgotten, was widely supported across the whole of the Eastern bloc in the spirit of the soviet opera

a single mighty river of international soviet culture, socialist in both form and content’ (Frolova-Walker 1998, 334). 32 For two studies of music in the Cominform states, see Thomas 2005 and Beckles Willson 2007.

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project.33 it had prestige, signalling a sophisticated culture, and when translated into a people’s art it also had propaganda value. Accordingly, in the early years of the new people’s republics, opera houses were either newly promoted (with the ‘national opera’ and ‘national ballet’ given independent status rather than part of the infrastructure of the national Theatre) or newly established all over the bloc. The models for the organisation of these institutions were the opera houses of the soviet Union, and it was common for soviet staff to be employed in advisory and instructional roles. This was notably the case in sofia, where the national Theatre, restored after extensive war damage, hosted several decades of Russian-influenced opera and ballet. Russian classics and approved soviet works dominated the repertory, replacing pre-war italian fare, and staging and direction were also heavily indebted to Russian realist traditions. But singers, musicians and conductors were Bulgarian in the main, and gradually a Bulgarian repertory was established. There was a similar reorientation at the state national Operetta, which took over from the earlier Operetta Theatre in 1948, and again switched the standard repertory from Viennese to Russian and Bulgarian works. And in due course opera houses were established in the major provincial cities of Bulgaria: stara Zagora in 1946, Varna in 1947, Roussé in 1949, and Plovdiv in 1953. not for nothing had Georgi Dimitrov, the first post-war Communist leader, promised ‘to make best use of our limited possibilities and to give, to give, so that both theatre and opera can develop. All this will help to raise the cultural level of our people, of our youth. it will be a mighty factor in the construction of a new socialist society in our country’.34 There was a similar story in Romania. surprisingly, much institutional work had already been achieved there during the war years, with funds given by the Ministry of Public instruction to establish a Philharmonic in Bucharest (1942) and a Romanian Opera of Moldavia (1944). in post-war years, the network of institutions was strengthened and consolidated, but it had the additional task of imposing some cultural uniformity on provinces with very different histories and traditions. A key objective was to strengthen the alignment of Transylvania to Romania, though a delicate balance had to be maintained here and some concessions were made to 33 Marina Frolova-Walker exposes the contradiction at the heart of this project, as between a realist subject matter and monumentality and an elevated musical language (Frolova-Walker 2006). 34 Quoted in Krustev 1978.

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hungarian populations, particularly concerning the (re-)naming of the hungarian Opera in Cluj-napoca in 1948. Likewise in Yugoslavia, except that here there was yet another task: to raise the general cultural level of the less developed republics. since Montenegro remained culturally affiliated to serbia, this meant in practice investing in Macedonia and in Bosnia and herzegovina, where art music in the western tradition had very shallow roots. such unifying and levelling missions were not simply the province of opera and ballet. symphony orchestras were also promoted, following a similar pattern in all the client states. Existing orchestras were restructured to become state Philharmonics, while orchestras were either consolidated or established at the Radio and Television. Again there were decentralising tendencies, with historical provinces given their due in Romania (both Cluj-napoca and iaşi had Philharmonics) and with relatively even-handed cultural investment in the separate republics of Yugoslavia. Everywhere there was an attempt to develop and promote national repertory, but Russian and soviet music was also well represented, and in Bulgaria there was even a suggestion of a unified Russo-Bulgarian culture. in Romania there was a shift of focus when Ceauşescu came to power, though the liberalisation promised by his early years proved to be a mirage. As for Yugoslavia, since Tito had broken with stalin as early as 1948, one might have expected a greater orientation towards western music from a rather earlier stage. in practice, however, the cultural thaw was steady and gradual. Choirs were a mainstay of musical life in all these states, with a repertory that relied heavily on folksong arrangements, on mass songs – not all of them propagandistic – and on socialist cantatas composed to a blueprint provided by the soviet Union. it was the choral medium that most successfully bridged the gap between classical music and traditional music, and often the choirs were formally linked to dance troupes with a mission to promote the culture of ‘the people’. This was part of a sustained attempt to democratise musical life along socialist realist lines, while at the same time raising standards to a thoroughly professional level. in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in particular, there was continuity here with pre-war practice. But what was new in the Communist era was the proliferation of soviet-influenced mass festivals and competitions – regional, national and international – all over the Eastern bloc, show-casing the choirs and dance troupes, and offering platforms to national traditions of classical and folk music alike. it is unnecessary to list these. More important is to stress the ethos of progress they embodied, so that even amateur musicians were encouraged

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to develop the highest professional standards (the dom kulture [house of culture] was a key institution in promoting amateur music and dance in provincial settings). And it was this same ethos that informed the investment in music education, at all levels from conservatory down to specialist music school. The resulting symbiosis between a rigorous, centrally decreed and state-patronised music education and nation-wide institutions for professional music-making has to be recognised as a strength of the political culture. And finally, it goes without saying that each of these states was alive to the importance of dissemination, and to the even greater importance of controlling that dissemination. Governmentsubsidised publishing houses, recording companies and radio were at the service of music, provided it conformed to official requisites. how, then, did composers fit in to this organised and carefully monitored musical life? The pattern was not everywhere the same, but one constant was the establishment of either an official Composers’ Union under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, or a specialist music branch of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union. it was common for these unions to organise ‘meetings with discussion’ at which a central concern was to define a local position in relation to ideological decrees emanating from Moscow.35 But it was also through union channels that the censorship of composers and compositions took place (‘adjudication panels’, ‘self-criticism sessions’ and ‘purge sessions’), and conversely, that the familiar state prizes for composition were awarded, in part with a view to consolidating the status of particular genres as exemplars of the political and social order. in both cases the general practice was to publicise the outcomes either in music periodicals or in the specialised music journals that were the responsibility of musicology institutes housed by government-sponsored Academies of science. it was also the job of the unions to commission new works – notably mass songs and socialist cantatas – from composers, and they had funds disbursed by the Ministry of Culture for that purpose. Then, depending on the political proximity to Moscow, and on the presidency and executive committee of the union, a careful eye would be kept on membership lists, with émigré composers characteristically excluded, and with the activities of the membership closely monitored. in liaison with security networks and the agitprop of the Central Committee, the unions had a major say about who would attend this or that festival, for example, and in particular

35 As Michael David-Fox points out, there were many different words for ‘meeting with discussion’ in the political language of the early soviet years (David-Fox 1999, 8).

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who would be allowed to make visits overseas. Co-operation brought very real material benefits. senior figures in the unions – leading composers or musicologists, who effectively created the official art and the official artistic discourse – could wield a powerful influence on the course of musical life in the satellite states, often based on little more than personal likes or dislikes. Careers could be made or broken. The politics of a divided Europe thus imposed a measure of cultural uniformity on Balkan territories that had very different histories and traditions. The soviet empire replaced earlier empires, and it did its best to shape the societies and cultures of client states in its image. Likewise, Communism replaced earlier confessional traditions as an official belief system – it was always more than a political philosophy – creating a unified status quo (increasingly, a self-serving elite) and in due course a unified, and considerably larger, community of dissent. naturally these societies were at different stages of development in 1944–5, some just emerging from near-feudal conditions, others comprehensively networked into a central European cosmopolitan culture. so the new structures were designed to be, and to a degree really were, both socially and culturally levelling, even if real power resided always in the Party, and at the centre. Levelling was in any case relative. in Yugoslavia the socio-economic and cultural roles assigned to Macedonia were hardly commensurate with those played out in slovenia. But given its pre-liberation backwardness, Macedonia still felt the benefits, and it is no coincidence that Yugonostalgia today is commonest in the less developed republics. naturally, the conformity imposed from Moscow was also strengthened discursively, through official political and cultural historiography and criticism, and through Government-controlled media, all to a Marxist-Leninist agenda. The results were hardly imaginative. Politically, there were revisionist readings of the second World War (only the ruling classes were responsible for the pro-fascist alignments), and re-workings of conventional national and even racial narratives to accommodate the concept of class struggle. Culturally, the most surprising feature of all was the relatively seamless transition from inter-war nationalist discourses to post-war socialist discourses.36 Thus, music history and criticism from the Cold War years not only blanked out the darker side of the immediate past; they worked to re-nationalise the more distant past. The nation, in other words, was

36 see Žanić 2007, 76 on this.

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aligned to class in Cold War discourses, just as it had been aligned to modernity in the inter-war years. Composers on Message nationalist rhetoric persisted, then, but there was a major shift of emphasis under Communism. separatism and competition were in theory replaced by a brotherhood of nations, ideologically grounded by the socialist ideal, by the international struggle against capitalism. it would be a mistake to regard this new discourse as invariably the product of enforced propaganda missions. in many cases it stemmed from conviction. A belief in the promise held out by a new Communist order had been widely shared by the interwar intelligentsia, and it remained robust at least until the soviet proclamations of 1948, and in several quarters beyond that. in the case of Yugoslavia, the breach with stalin ensured that composers were not really subject to such severe constraints as their colleagues elsewhere in the bloc.37 But for the other states, getting ‘on message’ was an imperative. The hard-line policy established by Zhdanov in 1948, and continued by Tikhon Khrennikov, reaffirmed the dogmatic collectivism of 1932, and it was an unmistakable signal to the bloc generally that conformism was to be the order of the day. in each of the client states, a conference took place in 1948–49 to determine the direction of the national musical culture, though by that time the message was already clear from earlier pronouncements on literature and cinema. The certainty and determinacy that ensued proved destructive, as certainty and determinacy invariably do. samuel and Thompson remind us that both positive and negative myths were established across the bloc.38 There was the myth of socialist man, a progressive figure there to be celebrated by artists, and there was the myth of his political enemies, there to be demonised, for as Tzvetan Todorov has remarked ‘the totalitarian state cannot live without enemies’.39 Those enemies included artists and intellectuals who refused to accept, or whose work was deemed to mystify, the new reality. no-one was left in any doubt about the official line on demons. There was typically a ‘hunt for opposition’, followed by the coordinated ‘denunciations’ that had become formulaic within the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s.

37 ironically, the first Cominform centre was in Belgrade. 38 samuel and Thompson 1990, 5. 39 Todorov 1999, 7.

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such denunciations were exported to the satellite states after 1948, and they were indicative of an increasingly repressive political culture from that point onwards. some patterns were common to all. in 1948 the interior Ministries issued circulars to bookshops and libraries, censoring western culture in general, and singling out and removing what were regarded as subversive books. At the same time the activities of journalists, writers, artists and musicians were all brought under the aegis of agitprop sections of the Party Central Committees. in Bulgaria in particular the repression was severe, associated especially with camps such as Bellene. Reform of education was high on the list, with schools taken over by the states, foreign schools closed, universities purged of perceived dissidents, and school and university curricula revised. The national histories were re-written along Marxist-Leninist lines, and that included airbrushing out problematical war records. in Romania, for example, the first step was to link nineteenth-century revolutionary nationalism to Communism, then to unify acts of war-time resistance by groups from very different social and political backgrounds into a single movement of Communist protest and dissent, and finally to present the all-important coup of August 1944 as Communist-inspired and Communist-led. All of this added up to an environment of indoctrination, denunciation and nepotism, of which artists and intellectuals were understandably wary; questions were moot about just who might or might not be trusted. Michael David-Fox’s description of soviet political culture in the 1930s might well be transposed to the satellite states from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s: ‘At times it could seem like the political culture of the party-state had come to resemble a big and deadly masquerade’.40 if we compare the discourses of the inter-war period with those of socialist realism, we will note continuities but also clear differences. The latter were distinguished by what ivan Šiber has called a ‘systematised world of meanings’ that operates some way beyond manifest content.41 Key words and phrases acquired a formulaic character, established through endless repetitions: text after text, party conference after party conference. They triggered meanings that could only be understood within the prevailing political culture, and that were distinct from – even opposite to – manifest meanings. One way to conceptualise this discourse is to view it as a series of dialogues or attempted fusions between a core matrix, derived

40 David-Fox 1999, 13. 41  Žanić 2007, 18.

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from soviet-style socialist realism, and a cluster of separate, nationally orientated, matrices based on myth, folklore and history. Typically, the official discourse would preserve links with older layers of culture, and would use these to unite the faithful against their enemies within and without. ‘Enemies’ is the mot juste here, for the discourse was heavily militarised, promoting the cult of heroism that was so central to Communist propaganda, but allowing that cult to function simultaneously within nationalist and socialist frames of reference. in this way national and class struggles, haidouks and partisans, could be drawn into the same universe of meaning. The aim was a transformation of society, but it was acknowledged that this was more likely to succeed if continuities could be established that penetrated deep into the national culture, and with music playing its part. We may ask just who was persuaded. And whether we examine the responses of the Communist elites themselves, of the populace at large, or of the intelligentsia, the answer will not be straightforward. The least helpful way to think about it is in polarised terms. in a political culture that encouraged circumvention, half-truth and duplicity, responses to the official line were shaded and individuated. Even the line itself was a variable. it was subject to modification by local contexts, and – the hackneyed metaphor is inescapable – it was liable to freezes and thaws. if we place the spotlight on artists and intellectuals, it becomes fairly clear that the general direction across the bloc as a whole was towards growing discontent and an increasing willingness to give voice to that discontent. What was at stake, after all, even for those artists who were sympathetic to Communist ideals, was the sense of personal authenticity that has to be negotiated within any professional practice. Macintyre’s concept of a practice, briefly referenced in chapter 1, is germane.42 Under these Communist regimes the demands of the official institutions placed an intolerable pressure on the practices they housed. As a result, it became ever more difficult for artists to serve the practice, whose ethos they had learned to respect, while at the same time submitting to the institution, whose prescriptions they had little choice but to follow. it was an extreme form of a familiar enough tension between practices and institutions, but it became ever clearer that the schizophrenia it generated could not be sustained indefinitely. At the root of the problem was the simplistic version of ‘realism’ that became official policy in the years following Zhdanov’s post-war

42 Macintyre 1981.

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proclamations. This was a crude form of mimesis. The artwork should reflect, rather than model, social reality. instead of presenting the perfection of art as an ideal to which the social order might aspire (somewhat in the manner of a nineteenth-century aesthetics of autonomy), Zdanhov presented it as the mirror of a perfection already achieved by the new socialist order, even if the ideal society it was to create remained workin-progress. it was the job of the artist to celebrate that order, and at the same time to help protect it from those who would seek to undermine it. There could be no dissonance, and no pessimism, since these would presuppose a flaw in the social order itself, something incompatible with the victory of Communism. nor could there be any self-indulgent retreat into a self-contained and elitist aestheticism. Art was for the people. The resulting censure was more difficult for writers than for composers, but composers were in the firing line too. Their prescribed subject matter – the socialist struggle, the building of Communism, the idealised lives and work ethic of the common people – should be depicted in mass songs and cantatas. That the celebratory tone demanded of these genres amounted to a warped version of a nineteenth-century Kunstreligion is to the point, given the substitution of secular symbols for sacred. But this subject matter extended to other genres too, including opera and film music, and even programmatic instrumental music. Absolute music was more problematical. it was not proscribed, but it was treated with suspicion. its tendency, after all, was towards ‘formalism’, in the sense of minimal referentiality, and the last thing the state wanted was a play of sounds devoid of meaning. On the other hand, an existing symphonic canon was approved, with Beethoven’s heroic style given pride of place. it was the Beethovenian narrative of struggle and overcoming – a narrative that could accommodate dark, pessimistic (one might almost say modernist) tones in the early stages of a work – that became the historical model for new symphonic composition, alongside Russian and soviet traditions. A rider to this was that musical materials should ideally have a basis in the ‘rich heritage’ of folk-song and folk-dance; and in practice a judicious reference to traditional music could often mitigate modernist tendencies elsewhere. The scare quotes are used advisedly, given that the rich heritage was decidedly reinvented, stripped of irrational dimensions and brought into line with social modernity. The much-vaunted paradox of socialist realism emerges clearly from all of this. social modernity was allied to artistic conservatism, social progress with aesthetic regression. it was this curb on the exploratory and the new (provinces of self-expression) that had composers champing at the bit. Under Communism the balance

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between the autonomy character of music (music is for me) and its commodity character (music is for all) became seriously skewed. Composers found their own pathways across this treacherous terrain. some supported the ideals of state socialism, and had no difficulties with ideological correctness; personal friendships with key ideologues in the Ministries of Culture or Education naturally helped. some preferred to keep their head down, avoiding controversy as far as possible. some were already living abroad and decided not to return, while others went into exile; typically, their music would then be banned. some tested the limits of correctness in public art, both through verbal discourse and compositionally. And some offered what Maruška svašek has described as ‘private acts of resistance’.43 svašek’s formulation is useful, for there was indeed an explicit separation between public and private spheres of music during this period. The former was the preserve of the epic genres (opera, symphony), of mass songs and of folksong-based compositions, all subject to adjudication and censure on ideological grounds. The latter was the province of chamber music and of various kinds of ad hoc groupings, and here it was sometimes possible (though it could still be dangerous) to work outside the world of official art. There was unofficial music, in other words, and it could venture into forbidden modernist territory. The more experimental compositions might remain in the drawer or receive only private performances, but modernist music also reached the concert platform in some modest venues, even in the early days of state socialism. One narrative might indeed be characterised as the progressive penetration of the public sphere by the private. Depending on the location, there was movement on several fronts from the mid 1950s onwards: increasing experimentation in composition, greater contact with western modernism, a more openly critical discourse, and a more tolerant line in official circles. none of these proceeded in a straight line. But they were recognisable tendencies, and they were strengthened by the liberal policies taking effect elsewhere in the bloc after 1956. For those younger composers who aspired to a moderate modernism under state socialism, there were real questions to ask about possible ways forward. And here we may note a significant difference between south East Europe and East Central Europe. in Poland, Czechoslovakia and hungary there were major canonic figures from the early twentieth

43 svašek 2001.

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century, conveniently dead for the most part, who were unambiguously part of the national history but at the same time recognised by a wider modernist culture. in the post-war era these composers could form reference points for negotiations between the claims of ideology and the imperative of the new. The official line was still to present nineteenthcentury masters such as Moniuszko, smetana and Liszt-Erkel as the echt models, but internationally recognised modernist figures could not be ignored, and there was often an argument for appropriation and habilitation rather than rejection. Thus in Poland szymanowski’s later style formed a reference point for a folk-based idiom of neo-classical lucidity, though the point was not unduly laboured in official discourse.44 in Czechoslovakia, the argument for Janáček was stronger. he was promoted as a precursor of socialist realism following the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1948, and in some respects it was an easy case to make. As to Bartók and hungary, this raised yet more ambivalent questions. it is no exaggeration to claim that critical discourses in hungary were shaped and re-shaped through the prism of Bartók reception, so that at varying points different features could be held up either as warnings (the music of the ‘twenties’) or as models (the folksong arrangements; the later music); Danielle Fosler-Lussier has recorded these shifting phases of Bartók reception.45 For composers, as opposed to ideologues, the importance of such key modernist figures lay in their potential as models of mediation. They offered possible options for steering a path between soviet ideology and a modernist language. There were no real parallels in the Balkans. The closest was Enescu, but since he remained abroad after the war, he was persona non grata with the Romanian authorities, and, along with Constantin Brǎiloiu, he was denied membership of the newly vamped Composers’ Union. As a model for younger composers he was compromised, at least initially, and his music was barely performed during the first post-war decade. We might compare him in this regard with Martinů in Czechoslovakia, who likewise blotted his copybook by remaining overseas, despite the best leftwing credentials and a resistance record in the war; he was habilitated only with the thaw of the 1960s. And we might contrast him with Kodály, who remained in hungary and followed a broadly pro-soviet line. signifi44 An interesting aspect of this is the blend of Marxist discourse and German idealist thought that informed the writings of key Polish ideologues such as Zofia Lissa, by no means explained away by a narrative of common origins. 45 Fosler-Lussier 2007.

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cantly, it was only after Enescu’s death in 1955 that his status changed, and a major re-examination of his music began in Romania. For Romanian composers who were coming to maturity in the ‘sixties, he was a crucial model. There was no composer in either Bulgaria or Albania who qualified as an international figure in quite the way that Enescu did. Yugoslavia had a more promising contender, of course, but the situation there was not strictly comparable, given the break with the soviet Union in 1948. And in any case slavenski all but disappeared from view in the post-war years. All in all, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the options taken by composers in this region was to turn to the early modernists further north in East Central Europe as models for a fusion of nationalism and moderate modernism (for Romanians, Bartók had in any case a unique significance). There were already inter-war precedents for this, but the new political structures – welcome or not – strengthened the possibility of a more generalised East-European musical culture, and not exclusively slavonic. There were other options however. One was to aspire towards the seductive modernist achievements of a still only partially known, but increasingly materialising, western post-war culture. Even in absentia, western modernisms – the idea of them, as much as the actuality – were a powerful force in the Communist states, and a major attraction for creative artists in particular, though to engage openly with them in the early post-war years could be to court denunciation or worse. But of course the most obvious option for all for these composers was to look directly to the soviet Union itself. nor did this necessarily mean slavishly following Party lines and remaining faithful to the tyrannical requirements of socialist realism. soviet composers were not just about mass songs and cantatas. They had more experience than most in finding ways to walk the tightropes, and they had much to teach others. There was in any case a long history of affiliations between the Balkan states and Russia prior to the establishment of a post-Yalta Eastern Europe.

Chapter SeVenteen

DIVerGInG pathS Traffic with Moscow two empires carved up the balkan peninsula for much of its post-medieval history. but from the eighteenth century onwards, a third also had designs on it. In russia there were dreams of the patriarchate, of a byzantine succession, and of access to the Mediterranean. Various modes of cultural imperialism linked to orthodoxy – the stories of the border Serbs and later of bulgaria – were in support of these ambitions. but so too was military force, resulting in a century of russo-turkish wars (from the 1770s to the 1870s) during which other interested parties, especially britain and the habsburgs, watched, waited, and on occasion intervened. the principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) were directly in the line of fire. they were overrun by russia in the 1770s, became russian protectorates in the 1830s, and then took advantage of the 1877–8 hostilities to declare an independent romania. But serbia and Bulgaria were also agents of russian ambition at various stages of the narrative, and in those same hostilities Bulgaria became the main theatre of war. Following the Berlin treaty of 1878 there was both disillusionment with, and dependency on, russia on the part of each of these states. romania lost Bessarabia (modern Moldova) to russia in 1878, was rescued by russia following a failed attempt to take transylvania during World War I, re-took Bessarabia at the end of the war, was forced by hitler to cede it to the soviets in 1940, and submitted to the conquering red army at the end of World War II. Bulgaria resented the russian acquiescence in 1878, but submitted to a strong russian presence in, and influence on, the new nation state, and again yielded to the red army. Like the Bulgarians, the serbs, despite their deep-rooted cultural affinity to russia, were disappointed by the outcome of 1878, and even more by russia’s acceptance of the habsburg annexation of Bosnia and herzegovina in 1908. however, one important later difference was that serbia-Yugoslavia, unlike romania and Bulgaria, greeted the red army with an already formed Communist administration under tito, albeit one that had seized power only thanks to stalin’s patronage.

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the acquisition by the Soviet Union of four client states in South east europe, in one sense the realisation of a long-standing russian ambition, imposed some degree of homogeneity on the socio-political and cultural profiles of these states, with terms of reference established in Moscow. Where music was concerned, the hard-line Stalinist position established by Zhdanov in Moscow was followed faithfully by Khrennikov, but under Krushchev there was a political and cultural ‘thaw’ roughly between 1955 and late 1958. Show trials, aggressive ideological campaigns and arrests were all replaced during those years by new cultural initiatives, and these gained sufficient momentum to survive the official end of the thaw, so that in the 1960s previously proscribed works by Shostakovich and prokofiev were reinstated, and figures such as Myaskovsky and Khachaturian were taken off the suspect list. a younger generation of Soviet composers also emerged at this time, and several of them managed to forge a musical career at some distance from the officials of the Composers’ Union. During the Brezhnev years, networking was all-important in the Soviet Union, with overlapping and interactive circles of composers centred on the Moldavian-born teacher philipp Moyseyevich herşcovici, on Shostakovich and Shebalin, and on the short-lived electronic studio (closed in the mid-1970s). as to compositional options, two were broadly successful for those walking the tightrope. One was to develop the kind of ironic play of genres and gestures honed to perfection by Shostakovich, and the other was to cultivate the polystylistic composition that was to become emblematic of Soviet modernisms. it was not the end of censorship, of course, and Denisov, gubaydulina and Schnittke all had their share of problems. Only under gorbachev did the curtain begin to rise. this sequence does not apply to the client states in any uniform way. political relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites took different forms, and those differences provide a necessary framework for understanding cultural policies in South east europe. Yugoslavia, dissident almost from the start, was expelled for bad behaviour, and found itself in dialogue with the capitalist West as well as the socialist east. that is a story for the next chapter. albania, as we saw, retreated into its Stalinist hermitage in the ‘sixties, with the severest consequences for all intellectual and cultural life. For the two remaining Cominform states there was relatively little deviation from a hard-line Stalinist position during the first post-war decade. politically, Bulgaria remained a faithful acolyte of the Soviet Union, so much so that on two separate occasions todor Zhivkov was willing to cede its separate political identity in favour of incorporation

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within the Union. a sense of indebtedness to russia was hard-wired into Bulgarian history, but the shift from the San Stefano to the Berlin treaties in 1878 was a major blow, and russia’s compliance over the final settlement qualified the prevailing russophilia. the loss of territory that accompanied the treaty of Berlin was the first of a series of disappointments in modern Bulgarian history. the conclusion of the Balkan Wars likewise proved disadvantageous, and so too did the versailles treaty, following Bulgaria’s belated decision to support the Central powers in World War i. at times it must have seemed that Bulgaria had an unerring capacity to back the losing side. World War ii was no exception, and it was against this background that the Communist coup of the ‘ninth of September’ 1944 and the subsequent Sovietisation of the country were accomplished. More than anywhere else in the eastern bloc, Bulgaria proved biddable, and in the early years at least this attitude served the nation well, economically and also politically.1 even in the early 1990s, despite a moribund economy, a policy of ruthless antiminority discrimination and a growing body of dissidents among the intelligentsia, the wider population maintained a widespread nervousness about any brave new democratic world. So Bulgaria represented in some ways a default position, a kind of ideal client state from the Soviet perspective (Donna Buchanan remarks that her Bulgarian friends would turn to the Soviet press to see in advance what would soon be coming their way politically).2 the administration of musical life in the country, and the formulation of the aesthetic values it was supposed to embody, all derived explicitly from Soviet models. and so too did music education. Curricular development at the State Conservatory and the state music schools (there were separate schools for folk music and art music), and likewise the scholarly agendas for musicology at the institutes established at the University and the academy of Sciences, were all borrowed from Moscow. as for the organisation of community music-making, this took place within clearly defined areas of a hierarchical bureaucratic structure that linked provincial local authorities and party committees to the State Council and the politburo, twin heads of State and party. Within this structure it was the Committee for Culture that was responsible for music, establishing the terms of reference for policy and education. 1 Bulgaria served as a laundry for suspect Soviet deals during these years, and reaped the rewards financially. 2 Buchanan 2006, 11.

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the Composers’ Union, established after several forerunners in 1947, liaised with the Committee for Culture on questions of repertoire, agendas for scholarship and criticism, festivals and competitions, personnel for performing and administrative roles, publishing and recording policies, and above all censorship. this operated at all levels, from art music through the professional folk ensembles to the popular music deemed suitable for radio broadcast. typically Union reports would follow – in both senses of follow – the Bulgarian party Congresses, which in turn would follow the Soviet party Congresses. in truth the bureaucracy was even more complex than this summary suggests.3 there were separate committees responsible for the organisation of tours, for example, not least the muchsought-after invited tours overseas (cultural shop windows for the State), and that included fixing payment rates; and there were also committees tasked with overseeing amateur musical life. Moscow was kept informed. aside from the obvious communication chains, there were concealed channels leading to the Soviets by way of Bulgarian State Security. there were State Security informers in the Union, and this enabled the authorities to keep the closest watch on members. indeed the individual files kept on composers and scholars were so detailed that they amounted at times to day-by-day chronicles. the usual denunciations took place. rossitza guentcheva draws attention to the critical response to the first Bulgarian socialist operetta, deliana by parashkev Khadzhiev, in 1952. the accusation was that the librettist broke the rules by depicting decadence and intrigue in the world of the Bulgarian village,4 in defiance of the prescription set out by georgi Dimitrov himself in a letter of February 1947, with all the usual strictures about an alliance between a folk-based idiom and the Classics of the Western tradition.5 Just how closely Dimitrov’s directive was followed, and how it was inflected by later shifts of policy in Moscow, can be gleaned from venelin Krustev’s articulation of the party line of the 1970s. Krustev’s survey of music, musicology and criticism during the post-war period is a revealing document. it speaks of the need to correct residual bourgeois tendencies in 1948, but also of the need to correct the imbalances created by an over-rigid and over-narrow interpretation of the 1948 Decree of the Soviet Central Committee. it celebrates the glorious achievements of mass song composition in the post-war decade, but at the same time 3 ibid., 180ff. 4 guentcheva 2004. 5 Krustev 1978, 186.

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deplores the excesses of a political personality cult following the death of Dimitrov. and in coded language it speaks of the relaxations that were effected by the third and fourth ‘reviews’ (effectively festivals) of Bulgarian music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and of the perceived necessity to balance traditional folk-based materials and more advanced techniques. What this account demonstrates is just how closely the official line followed the shifting ideological positions adopted in the Soviet Union itself. had he been writing a decade later, Krustev would no doubt have at least paid lip service to the benefits of perestroika. Composers were another matter. Of the older generation, several were well disposed to state socialism, and those who were not seemed able to adapt to the new regime. there were, however, exceptions. For Dimitar nenov, who had little sympathy with Dimitrov’s prescription and maintained a fiercely idealistic conception of the responsibility of the composer towards the nation, it was all much too difficult, and he paid a heavy price in terms of public esteem and personal wellbeing. among the middle generation there were several for whom the familiar conflicts between political prescription and (modernist) self-expression led them into difficulties with the regime. Of the several composers one might cite, those with the highest profile were Konstantin iliev and Lazar nikolov. Dissidents were by no means unknown in Bulgarian music, then, but their voices were muted, and their influence modest. even the loosening of Marxist-Leninist strictures from the 1960s onwards was not really motivated by agitation from within. it was an officially sanctioned thaw, responsive to developments in Moscow, and it was given institutional grounding through the so-called Weeks of Bulgarian Music. Much of this pattern was replicated in romania. here, too, there was strict allegiance to Soviet dictates in the immediate post-war years, though the dialogues with russia varied from institution to institution, as between the Opera, the Conservatory and the Composers’ Union. the Union was the most powerful force ideologically, and it was quickly taken over by a generation of composers with the best Soviet credentials, several with Soviet training. By a deft sleight-of-hand, there was a change of name in 1949 from the old Society of romanian Composers, founded in 1920, to the Union of romanian Composers, requiring fresh registration and thus enabling major figures working abroad (above all enescu and Brǎiliou) to be excluded without the embarrassment of more public expulsions. Of the younger generation who came to power at this time, it was Matei Socor, himself a fairly mediocre composer, who was made president in 1949, and who organised the inevitable post-Zdhanov conference in that same year.

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accordingly, socialist realist aesthetics regulated the decisions made by the Union, and if anything they were applied more strictly under ioan Dumitrescu, Socor’s successor as president from 1954. We are fortunate that there exists a published, year-by-year, account by Octavian Cosma of the proceedings of the Union and of the pre-war Composers’ Society, based on stenographic transcripts of most of the discussions.6 We learn that romanian composers were not slow to produce their mass songs and cantatas – to say nothing of their hymns to the party, to Stalin or to gheorghe-Dej – in the post-war years. and we encounter the same bias in the official journal of the Union (Muzica), established in 1950, and in the books (initially translations of russian studies) and scores produced by the newly founded publishing house, edituri Muzicale. Commissioning, censoring and prize-giving activities were in the first instance heavily politicised, we discover, but as time went on this became rather less of a problem. as elsewhere in the bloc, sub-committees were established by the Union for assessing opera, choral music, instrumental music and musicology. But they were large enough to minimise personal prejudice, and the Ministry of Culture was usually willing to accept the recommendations of the Union without too much interference. none of this changed the fact that internal repression remained severe. the State Security archives have been available to researchers for several years now, and they tell a fascinating story, though to this day it is a matter of some sensitivity as to just how much can and should be widely publicised (there have been inappropriate witch hunts by journalists, and unreasonable condemnations of those composers who wrote mass songs and cantatas).7 as in Bulgaria, some composers were themselves members of the political committees of the party, and some were undoubtedly used as informers. and, again as in Bulgaria, the Securitate maintained a close watch on composers. a figure such as paul Constantinescu (1909–63), who committed the double sin of having Jewish origins and composing religious music, was the subject of detailed reports. Several leading figures, including Mihail Jora and Mihail andricu (1894– 1974), paid a price for gestures of dissidence or for what was perceived at the time to be an unhealthy proximity to the West. in the case of Jora, a confirmed monarchist, this followed an official instruction to gather

6 Cosma 1995. 7 in this climate of recrimination, even the fact that a composer or musicologist had studied in the Soviet Union could serve as the basis for condemnation.

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musicians together in the Conservatoire to celebrate the deposition of King Michael. instead of celebrating, Jora announced several minutes’ silence. as a result he lost all privileges, including his paid employment, and was kept under what was effectively house arrest for several years. For andricu the fault lay in his close association with the French ambassador, which gained him access to Western luxuries, but also – and more crucially – to Western scores and recordings, which he shared with younger romanian composers. he sustained this privilege for several years, but in the end he was singled out for much the same treatment as Jora. Like Bulgaria, romania responded in some measure to the Krushchev thaws. it is symptomatic that both Jora and enescu were admitted as members of the newly reformed Union in 1954. and it is no less symptomatic that when enescu died in 1955 romanian composers and musicologists ‘discovered’ his music afresh and turned to it as a source of creative renewal. During the first post-war decade, only the early rhapsodies and the romanian poem had been given an airing in romania. But after his death there were pioneering scholarly studies, and a new creative interest on the part of romanian composers. Yet in the wider political arena, the thaw of the mid 1950s proved to be of short duration, especially in the aftermath of events in neighbouring hungary in 1956. the true onset of more liberal cultural policies came only with Ceauşescu’s rise to power in 1965. it is well known that the Ceauşescu years were not what they initially seemed. nonetheless, doors to Western europe were opened. indeed they had never been fully closed (andricu in particular had introduced younger composers to western modernisms through informal study sessions at his home). During the earlier stages of Ceauşescu’s regime younger composers had renewed opportunities not just to visit the ‘Warsaw autumn’, which was by then a truly international celebration of new music, but even to attend the Darmstadt seminar, the power house of post-war modernisms. Following Ceauşescu’s break with Moscow, romanian State Security, unlike Bulgarian, became a purely internal affair. and other evidence of unilateralism was very quickly manifested in musical life. Soviet music had been widely performed during the first post-war decade, and that meant predominantly mass songs and cantatas: what Marina Frolova-Walker has aptly described as the ‘art of boredom’.8 But following the mass exodus of russian musicians and administrators, romania turned its back on most of

8 Frolova-Walker 2004.

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this repertory. russian and Soviet music was still performed, but increasingly artistic quality was the principal criterion for inclusion in concert life, so that the tendency was to perform russian classics rather than propaganda pieces. initially, the break with Moscow seemed to signal greater freedom. But in the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was again a freeze, as Ceauşescu effected his own version of a cultural revolution. in the later stages of the regime the sense of a maverick fiefdom, ruled irrationally and veering rapidly out of control, was palpable. how far this affected music is another question. these were years when music was obliged to serve massive public spectacles, notably through the institution of the choral competition Cântarea româniei [Singing for romania]; years too when composers were obliged to take on a public role in all the usual anniversaries, and when all contacts with Westerners were very carefully monitored.9 Yet for all that, new music of a radical cast was cultivated in romania. it did not have the public exposure of the comparable ‘school’ in poland, but its political resonance was similar. new music became, in a word, a powerful assertion of artistic independence, and of political resistance. The acolyte: Bulgarian Bridges i referred earlier to ‘the ninth of September’, the date of the Communist coup in Sofia in 1944. the phrase ‘the ninth of September’ is familiar in Bulgaria; it is a phrase with resonance. in the early post-war years, several composers wrote works with deveti septemvri as or in their title. there was a cantata by philip Koutev, a key figure in the formal culture of the post-war years, as president of the Composers’ Union (from 1954) and as Director of the influential State Folksong and Dance ensemble. there was a mass song by Lyubomir pipkov, also a player in the Union and especially instrumental in the transition from Savremenna muzika to the post-war Composers’ Union. there was even an orchestral overture by vladigerov, who took on leading pedagogical roles in Sofia when he returned from Berlin, and was also prominent in the Union. the first two of these pieces were staple fare of socialist realism. they need not detain us. But equally there is little merit in high-minded

9 My own experience researching enescu’s music in Bucharest in 1983 provided ample evidence of this.

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dismissals of those who produced them. as elsewhere in the bloc, no opprobrium need attach to those who wrote mass songs and socialist cantatas, though questions might be asked about those who wrote them and later claimed not to have done. the third piece is different. vladigerov’s overture is one of a cluster of ‘heroic’ overtures composed at the time, but there is no great stylistic disjunction between this work and the composer’s other music. the heroic mould of the overture inflected but did not fundamentally alter vladigerov’s relatively conservative brand of late-romantic symphonism, and it is a matter of judgment as to whether we call this music committed, compliant or heavily ironic. Soviet music furnishes us with many comparable examples. vladigerov’s other major works in the post-war era, including his later piano concertos, present a marked continuity with his earlier music. that political constraints played a role is demonstrated by the bridge connecting his popular ballet score Legenda za ezeroto [the Legend of the Lake], composed in 1946 before the socialist realist position was fully implemented in Bulgaria, and some of his music of the 1960s, when those constraints were already loosening. this is a familiar pattern among composers of the older generation. even with pipkov, whose socialist commitment was real enough, there are stylistic affinities between major works from the late ‘sixties, such as the opera antigone 43 and the Fourth Symphony, and pre-1944 works such as the First Symphony; in the piano piece Proletni priumitsi [Spring Fantasies] of 1971–2 such affinities extend even to the re-use of earlier materials. relative to these compositions – early and late – the works of the ‘fifties, such as the oratoria za nasheto vreme [Oratorio for our time] (1959), come over as transparently tailored to socialist realist ideals. We can see the same bridging effect in the music of Marin goleminov. Bulgarian musicologists point to a new creative period in his music of the 1960s, and it is true that the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra of 1963 does represent something of a new departure. But if we compare this work with music by polish composers from the same period, it is hardly at the forefront of the avant-garde. Like his later Fourth Symphony (Shoppophonia) and Fourth String Quartet (‘Microquartet’) of 1967, the concerto is muscular music of power and conviction, but it is easier to view it as a continuation of pre-1944 directions (nestinarka, Symphonic variations, third String Quartet) than to argue for belated modernisms. it was really the next generation of composers, notably the vladigerov pupil Konstantin iliev (1924–88), the nenov pupil Lazar nikolov (1922–2005) and their contemporary georgi tutev (1924–94), who took Bulgarian

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music in new directions.10 Both iliev and nikolov made some necessary concessions to official culture. iliev in particular composed choral pieces in a more traditional idiom. But in their instrumental music they experimented with much more radical techniques (in iliev’s case partly stemming from his studies in prague in the immediate post-war years), and they were clear about their rejection of both the late-romantic idioms associated with vladigerov and the heroic, folk-based idiom demanded by a socialist realist aesthetic. although both composers, iliev in particular, secured high-profile positions in the musical world, this did not insulate them from State opposition, and from endless difficulties with censorship. ‘their works represent pandemonium, a senseless accumulation of dissonance, a sort of musical equilibristics’, was the view of Blazho Stoianov in Bălgarska muzika in 1956.11 iliev’s First Symphony of 1947 and nikolov’s piano Concerto were both condemned as formalist; and in iliev’s case it hardly helped that he worked tirelessly to introduce modernist repertories to Bulgaria in his role as a conductor. perversely, it was only in the late ‘sixties, when there was some relaxation of political constraints, that iliev began to investigate folk music, but he did so not in the spirit of socialist-realist folklorism, but in new, creative ways. he had, after all, first established his modernist credentials in a series of tough-grained compositions dating from the more ideologically difficult decade of the 1950s. the Concerto Grosso, composed in 1949, inaugurated this creative period. it cultivated a dissonant counterpoint and a rhythmic complexity that would certainly have proved difficult to sell to the commissars of culture at the time. Much later, beginning with his Fragmenti [Fragments] (1968) and continuing through to works such as Bukoliki [Bucolics] (1977), Glasovete na ravninata [the voices of the plain] (1971) and the Sixth Symphony (1983– 4), iliev turned to the carefully controlled aleatory textures that we associate with some polish music from the ‘sixties. it was in these works that he began to explore ancient layers of Bulgarian folk music; compare górecki and Kilar. polish sonorism was undoubtedly a tempting model for Bulgarian composers. it loomed large in the later music of Lazar nikolov too, and even more so in that of georgi tutev, whose visit to the Warsaw autumn Festival in 1965 was immediately registered in the music he wrote from

10 a more detailed survey would seek to do justice to more traditional figures such as alexander raichev and Simeon pironkov. 11 guentcheva 2004, 213.

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the late ‘sixties onwards. tutev’s modest but meticulously crafted output ranged from the early, and still relatively traditional, Metamorphoses for 13 String Instruments (1966) to the radically experimental Calvinomusica (inspired by the Cuban-born italian writer italo Calvino). Calvinomusica was one of his last compositions, and it is a measure of the difficulties facing avant-garde composers in general that, along with several of his major works, it was proscribed in his native Bulgaria, and was premièred instead at an overseas festival. this is no doubt one of the reasons that several composers bypassed the State-monitored larger ensembles and reserved their most experimental music for smaller forces, and especially for the piano. Several exploratory works for piano were produced in Bulgaria, including sixteen sonatas (dating from 1962 to 2003) by Dimiter Christoff (b.1933) and a threevolume Izkustvoto na seriyata [the art of Series] (1966–70) by ivan Spassov (1934–96).12 inspired by The art of Fugue, each of these volumes consists of twelve short sections, to be performed in indeterminate order, and with the materials all based on transformations and transpositions of a single twelve-note series. if we follow the chronology of their composition (which differs from the final sequence) we will note a progressive freedom in rhythmic control, a ‘loosening of the time connections between sounds’, in Lutosławski’s phrase, that no doubt evidenced Spassov’s links with poland. We might also include here piano works such as Sonograms (1980) by georgi Mintev (b.1939), and works by alexander Kandov (his Las mariposas nocturnas of 1993 is appreciated). Of the younger generation, key figures have been Mihail goleminov (b.1956) and georgi arnaoudov (b.1957). rituel I of 1988 by arnaoudov and Klavierstück I of 1992 by goleminov are representative. the seven piano sonatas of nikolov, embracing four decades of postwar creativity, lie at the heart of this corpus. even in the early 1950s nikolov was writing uncompromising music, including the second of the sonatas (1951), whose constant shifts and turns speak more of angularity than whimsy. the dissonance level here is high, and there is little hint of anything approaching a unifying tonal structure. this, in short, is far from accessible music. nor does it yield much on repeated listening, for there is something oddly unsatisfying about its mix of old and new. if we leap forward thirty years to the Sixth Sonata (1982), the difficulty melts away. here the modernist idiom (developed in works of the ‘sixties, such

12 andreeva and Smilkov 2009.

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as his Symphonies for Thirteen String Instruments and divertimento Concertante) is unencumbered, and the blend of serially organised textures, fragmentary motives and free sonoristic writing emerges as an attractive product of the free play of imagination. the picture changes again if we skip forward another decade. nikolov’s seventh and final sonata (1991) is from the same world as its predecessor, but it is more homogeneous and assimilable, occupying a space somewhere between the first two Boulez sonatas and the piano music of Zygmunt Krauze (more beguiling than the former, we might say, but with greater weight and substance than the latter). there is something very moving about the resoluteness of this latter-day modernist ploughing his furrow in a politically alien world, a world whose passing he lived to see. paradoxes abound. in the end, his particular brand of tough, exacting music would come to seem something of an anachronism in the eastern europe of the 1990s. the impact of polish sonorism was yet more marked on the generation born in the 1930s. vasil Kazandjiev (b.1934) visited the Warsaw festival in the mid ‘sixties, and a score such as his Complexi sonori (1965) instantly registered the influence. Like his teacher iliev, and at around the same time, he began to explore synergies between controlled aleatory notations and elements drawn from Bulgarian traditional music, and in particular tonal structures and gestures associated with the most ancient layers of that music. this is apparent even in the abstract medium of the string quartet, but it is more obvious in works such as Zhivite ikoni [Living icons], Kartini ot Bălgaria [pictures from Bulgaria] and Apokalipsis, all from the 1970s. the capacity of polish-influenced aleatory devices to open up new potentialities in traditional music was to prove all-important for Bulgarian music, and we can see it again in some of the music composed by Spassov contemporary with and following Izkustvoto na seriyata. Spassov studied in Warsaw with Kazimierz Sikorski and Stanisław Wisłocki during the early 1960s, and their influence is apparent in works such as Epizodi za chetiri grupi tembri [episodes for Four timbral groups] and Dvizheniya [Movements] for 12 string instruments (1967). it was during the 1970s that, like iliev and Kazandjiev, he turned to traditional music in a new spirit, notably in works such as Canti lamentosi (1979). and later still, in tune with a revival of religious music (again compare górecki), he wrote a series of slow-moving, elegaic works, including Bălgarski pasion [Bulgarian passion] (1990), Pietà for 12 cellos (1991) and the Mass of 1993. For this generation of Bulgarian composers, political constraints were less oppressive. But they still operated. On his return to Bulgaria from poland, Spassov was dismissed from his conducting post in plovdiv for

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modernist tendencies, for example. Composers born in the late 1940s, on the other hand, were still students when the cultural thaw of the 1960s was instigated. as a result, they had much freer access to western avantgardes. Career patterns are revealing here. emil tabakov (b.1947) studied in Sofia, and remained in Bulgaria as a conductor, albeit travelling widely with the Sofia philharmonic, until late in his career (he was conductor of the Belgrade philharmonic Orchestra in the ‘nineties and at the time of writing is a conductor in ankara as well as conductor of the Sofia radio Orchestra). his music maintains links with the generation of the ‘thirties, and is notably ‘Balkan’ in its big sounds and rhythmic energies. Compare the modernist complexities of Stefan Dragostinov (b.1948), who studied not just in Sofia and Leningrad but also in Cologne, or the minimalist idioms of plamen Dzhurov (b.1949), who completed his studies in vienna. The Zealot: albanian austerities the political and institutional backgrounds to the development of postwar albanian music have been shaded in. it remains to offer a brief survey of repertory.13 inevitably much of the output consisted of mass songs and cantatas. all leading composers wrote in these genres. a senior figure such as Çesk Zadeja (1927–97), closer than some to the political authorities, could produce cantatas such as atdheu [Our Fatherland] – a title that appears rather often in albanian music of this period – as well as mass songs such as o ju male [hey, you mountains], while at the same time writing in more ambitious genres. Many of these works have little artistic interest. But in the hands of a composer such as tonin harapi the formulae could be transcended. harapi’s extended cantata Kënga e malëve [Song of the Mountains] is a case in point, and he went on to write several other major vocal and orchestral works along similar lines, culminating in his Poema e dritës [poem of Light] of 1971. the propaganda function could not be avoided altogether of course. in harapi’s three-movement cantata Vullnetaret [the volunteers] of 1965, a celebration of the youth

13 a full account of albanian music will have to wait for george Leotsakos’s book, currently well advanced, though it will be published in greek. Sokol Shupo is also preparing materials for a history of albanian music, though this may be long in the making. Spiro Kalemi recently published a volume on late twentieth-century music in albania (Kalemi 2010).

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volunteers who worked on projects such as the construction of albania’s rail network, it could hardly have been more explicit. in the more challenging genres, achievements were considerable, even if composers were constrained by the political straightjacket, especially in big, public works. prenkë Jakova’s Mrika pointed the way for the subsequent development of albanian opera, just as Kristo Kono (1907–91), who was to Korçë what Jakova was to Shkodër, looked to later operetta with his agimi [Dawn] of 1954, set on a collective farm and widely performed throughout albania during the hoxha years. it is worth noting in passing that – no doubt because of their earlier histories – both Shkodër and Korçë remained key centres for albanian music, despite the growing importance of tirana. Many leading composers came from, or were closely associated with, these two towns. they included tish Daija, who came from Shkodër, and who can be added to our list of ‘firsts’, in that he composed the first albanian ballet, Halili dhe Hajrija [halil and hajrija] in 1963. as to instrumental music, we may turn again to Zadeja for yet another ‘first’. his Symphony, composed in Moscow in 1956 and based on albanian folk music and on episodes from the national history, was not just the first albanian symphony. it set the tone for later orchestral music more generally. it was a conservative, late-romantic tone for the most part, owing a good deal to the music of nineteenth-century russian nationalists. nor could it have been other than conservative. From the mid 1960s there were indications of a more elaborate musical life and also a slight broadening out to western repertories, but this remained relative, and what counted as modern was hardly so when compared to other countries of the bloc, let alone of Western europe. this does not mean that albania lacked music of quality. in fact, the striking thing is just how strong much of the music is, and how it can hold its own in an international forum, now that critical criteria are less style-conscious than once they were. Çesk Zadeja, together with tish Daija and tonin harapi, studied in the Soviet Union, establishing a pattern that would be followed by many until the break with russia in 1961. all three were born in the late 1920s, and they could be considered the earliest professional composers – in the sense that they were professionally trained – working in albania. two other names from the same generation might be added. nikolla Zoraqi (1929–91) came late to composition (he was helped by Zadeja and Daija), but he went on to produce some major instrumental works with a distinctive musical voice. he too trained in Moscow, though as an instrumentalist rather than a composer. But on his return to albania he acquired a reputation as a composer of distinction, and his Uvertura e festivalit

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[Festival Overture] of 1969 is still popular in albania. he also composed three violin concertos. Finally, Simon gjoni (1928–91), another Shkodërborn composer, studied conducting at the prague Conservatory, and although known principally as a conductor, composed a symphony and a substantial body of orchestral and instrumental works, including symphonic poems, orchestral rhapsodies and the like. For several of these composers, opera was an enduring interest. Characteristically the libretti would either represent everyday life in socialist albania or delve into the heroics of albanian history. From the older generation, Kristo Kono’s popular Lulja e Kujtimit [usually known as ‘Flower of remembrance’] of 1961 to a libretto based on Foqion postoli’s novel about the class struggle, and tish Daija’s Pranvera [Spring], first performed in 1960, are representative. then, during the period of cultural isolation, tonin harapi wrote two major operas, Zgijimi (1976) and Mira e Mujsit [Mira, Daughter of Mujsi] (1983–4), the former (based on a novel by naum prifti) dealing with the effects of war on village life. One other composer of this generation who made a major contribution to opera was pjetër gaci (b.1931), also Shkodër-born and an eminent violinist as well as a composer, notably through his Përtej mjegullës [Beyond the Mist] of 1971, which deals directly with the ‘Kanun of Lek’ and the blood feuds of the northern mountains, and his Toka jonë [Our Land] of 1981. even more popular than opera, however, was ballet, no doubt because it afforded ample opportunities for stylisations of traditional dancing. Daija’s Halili dhe Hajrija was closely followed by Zadeja’s delina in 1964, and both composers returned to the genre in the 1970s, with Zadeja’s Shqiponja sypatrembur [albanian eagle] and Daija’s Bijtë e peshkatarit [the Fisherman’s Sons]. the list of ballets is a long one, and it included popular repertory pieces such as Cuca e maleve [the girl of the Mountains], written by nikolla Zoraqi in 1968 to the theme of Loni papa’s popular play of the same year (the play was later made into a film). it also included Plaga e dhjetë e Gjergj elez alisë [the tenth Wound of gjergj elez alise] by Feim ibrahimi, a major figure born in the mid 1930s, and one whom we encountered in the last chapter (on this title, see the reference to alija Đerđelez at the beginning of chapter 9). aside from his prolific output of instrumental music, ibrahimi made a distinctive contribution to music for films, another genre that was popular in albania and one heavily freighted with political agendas. a glance at the outputs of these albanian composers reveals a surprising number of pieces called rhapsody. tish Daija’s rhapsody for Flute and Orchestra of 1981 is characteristic. So too are tonin harapi’s two

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rhapsodies for piano and Orchestra, the two orchestral rhapsodies by Feim ibrahimi, and a cluster of similar pieces by ramadan Sokoli, Simon gjoni, and others. these pieces tended to be formulaic, arriving at a folk-based idiom somewhat indebted to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works so labelled, while at the same time nodding towards the epic traditions of the north, where the term rapsodi is also used. the formula was acceptable to the Union of artists and Writers, and was soon adopted by younger composers. here we might cite the folk-based Concert rhapsody Toka ime, kënga ime [My Land, My Song] of 1979 for violin, Cello and Orchestra by thoma gaqi (b.1948), best known for his symphonic poem Borova (another title that recurs, referring to the site of a World War ii massacre); or the rhapsody for violin and Orchestra (1977) by aleksandër peçi (b.1951), one of the most popular figures in albanian music (his Liturgical dialogue uses the voice of albania’s most famous daughter, Mother teresa); or the rhapsody for piano and Orchestra by Sokol Shupo (b.1954), a key figure in the organisation of albanian musical life today. Comparable works for orchestra, chamber ensemble or piano, usually based on albanian traditional music and with titles such as Fantasy, Ballade, variations, or simply poem, were written by most composers prior to 1991. the output of pëllumb vorpsi (b.1957) is characteristic, including variations for piano (Ballade) on an albanian Folksong (1978), Symphonic poem (1983) and Fantasy for Symphony Orchestra and Choir on the albanian Folk Dance ‘napoloni’ (1988). in some of these folk-based pieces by composers of all generations – as also in the many concertos composed during these years – there are occasional glances towards Bartók and Stravinsky, but this remained a largely surface matter. at root the idiom was unambiguously traditional. naturally all this changed after the fall of Communism. nowhere in the rest of the eastern bloc was the chaos as great as albania in 1990–91. along with many others, musicians fled the country in droves in a context of riots, profiteering and anarchy. From 1991 there was an abrupt transformation in albanian music from infrastructure without freedom to freedom without infrastructure. Once more albania presented as a land in extremis. The Maverick: romanian renewals Some of the most interesting music to emerge from South east europe during these years sprang from political contexts that were neither in hock to the Soviet Union, nor aggressively defiant of it, but rather steered a course

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through the middle ground, maintaining some sort of dialogue with both east and West. this broadly describes the position in both romania and Yugoslavia, and although internal repression could be severe in the former country, it was more of an issue for writers than for musicians. as in Bulgaria, there was an older generation of composers in romania – several of them discussed briefly in Chapter 15 – who continued to work in the post-war years. Of these, a number (including enescu himself of course) either remained, or emigrated, overseas. But others, such as Mihail Jora, Mihail andricu, Marţian negrea (1893–1973), Sabin Drăgoi (1894–1968), Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985), theodor rogalski (1901–54) and paul Constantinescu, were based in romania, and they adapted as best they could to the new political realities. aside from the direct conflicts that arose with the authorities and the obligation to produce mass songs and cantatas, the major difficulty was the lack of contact with musical developments elsewhere in europe. in considering the possibilities open to composers we might begin with some key works from the immediate post-war years, prior to the imposition of clear directives from the Composers’ Union under Matei Socor. First, there was the diptych of oratorios for easter and Christmas by paul Constantinescu (1946 and 1947, respectively). the symbolic potency of easter and Christmas oratorios in the aftermath of the war would have been lost on none. With the help of his religious mentor, the priest ioan petrescu,14 Constantinescu made a study of sacred music in romania, and cultivated in a number of works – instrumental as well as vocal – a consciously archaic modal idiom based on those traditions. in this respect he made a contribution both to the repertory of harmonised Orthodox music and to that of Byzantine-influenced contemporary music. the second of these paired oratorios Naşterea domnului [the nativity] was given its first performance in the Bucharest atheneum in 1947. it has since become a popular work, with exposure beyond romania, but at the time its potential to point to the future was bound to be limited. the contrived simplicity and archaism of its musical idiom was in tune with the demands of socialist realism, but the religious orientation ensured that this could never be a way forward for romanian composers. Significantly, the work was not presented again until 1967. 14 petrescu subsequently complained that Constantinescu failed to acknowledge the large part he played in introducing the composer to the Byzantine sources not just in these two oratorios but in several works from the late 1940s and 1950s. When the oratorios were performed, the priest wanted to be named as an author.

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in contrast, Mihail andricu’s Second Sinfonietta, composed in 1946, seemed to strike an acceptable note in terms of future directions. With its folk-based modalities in a diatonic context, clean contrapuntal lines, bright primary colours and sprightly neo-classical rhythms, this work was a model for later instrumental works composed during the early 1950s. a cluster of works celebrating romania either through explicit references to folk music or through pastoral evocations of an impressionist kind appeared at this time. among many others, we could cite theodor rogalski’s three romanian Dances (1950), of which the second is an evocation of the gaida, the Symphonic Dances (1951) by tibor Brediceanu (1901–78) and Marţian negrea’s Prin muntii apuseni [hiking in the transylvanian Mountains] (1952), in which a folkloristic tableau such as Un izbuc [a hot Spring] sits alongside a pastoral-impressionist tableau such as Gheţarul de la scărişoara [ice rock in the Scărişoara Cave]. We can place such works on a continuum linking pre-war tendencies in romanian music with instrumental works from the mid-late ‘fifties such as the Concerto for Strings by Constantinescu (1955)15 and the Sinfonietta by ioan Dumitrescu (1957). they occupy a middle-of-the-road position in a decade dominated by mass songs and cantatas. Significantly, at the end of the ‘fifties and in the early ‘sixties, there were conspicuous changes in the music of several of these older composers, including Constantinescu and even Jora.16 there is a considerable stylistic space separating such works from the modernist offerings of the younger generation. these composers, most of them born in the late 1920s or early 1930s, first entered the public arena in the late 1950s, and therefore benefited from the cultural thaw associated with the 1960s. it is tempting to propose a parallel with polish music after 1956, where again there was a strong sense that the new generation turned to avant-garde techniques at least in part as a political statement. the situation in romania was not so straightforward, however. Whereas in poland modernism became a well-resourced official culture in defiance of Moscow, the official line in romania maintained the familiar socialistrealist rhetoric while at the same time insisting on its independence of Moscow. Modernists in romania, in other words, still had to fight their corner, but at least the climate was one that enabled their voice to be heard in counterpoint to the official voice.

15 this was a reworking of a String Quartet composed in 1947. 16 a case in point would be Jora’s ballet score, Inoarcerea din adîncuri [return from the Depths] of 1959.

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For the group of composers gathered around the andricu and Jora student Ştefan niculescu (1927–2008) it was possible to establish something of a power base within the Union, for example, and in later years they were able to play an important role as teachers of the next generation. they formed, in short, a real community, and again in ways that remind us of Warsaw, where the modernist composer was a familiar part of the furnishings of musical life in the 1960s and 1970s, known to audiences and performers alike (niculescu was the prime mover in the public listening sessions for contemporary music promoted in Bucharest in the 1970s, for example). radical modernism in music may not have been an official art in romania, but for a time it did become a sort of orthodoxy. Many of these composers took the later music of enescu as a startingpoint, bearing in mind that romania has emphasised particular qualities of enescu’s mature music, most of them relatable to indigenous repertories. they include the use of isons, microtonal writing, parlando-rubato rhythms, various kinds of mi-voix speech-song, and above all what romanian scholars and composers describe as heterophony. the densely motivic textures found in enescu might be interpreted in several ways. But for niculescu and his colleagues heterophony was the privileged reading, and it became subject to re-workings that allowed for modernist complexities while at the same time maintaining a link with archetypes of traditional music. During the 1960s niculescu studied for a time with Kagel in the Studio Siemens in Munich, and he was a regular at Darmstadt. his Hétéromorphie (1967) is characteristic of the kind of densely interwoven textures that resulted from a unique synthesis of enescu reception and post-war techniques. Later, in the 1970s, he wrote several works with the title Ison, where again there is a considerable complexity of texture of a kind that might be labelled either heterophonic or micro-polyphonic. and in general his achievement – right through to late works such as the fourth and fifth symphonies (deisis and Litanies respectively), composed in the 1990s – was one that allowed qualities understood as indigenous to generate modernist sound worlds. there may be superficial resemblances to Ligeti in works like Hétéromorphie, and to Messiaen in parts of the Fourth Symphony. But, as with some Bulgarian composers, niculescu’s alliance of post-war modernisms and folk-chant archetypes resulted in a very particular idiom: a unique product of its time and place. among the other composers associated with this modernist group were anatol vieru (1926–98), tiberiu Olah (1927–2002), adrian raţiu (1928–2005), Miriam Marbé (1931–97), Dan Constantinescu (1931–93), aurel Stroe (1932–2008) and Cornel Ţăranu (b.1934). naturally they each

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have, or had, their separate compositional concerns, and their individual creative personalities. But they also had a collective agenda, inseparable from the political context. the sense of working at a dangerous frontier is very strong in their enterprise. the spirit of exploration, the pushing at boundaries, and at the same time the intolerance of more conservative orientations: all these gave political edge to their achievements. Like niculescu, they invested in the enescu legacy, and also like him they were intrigued by the possibility of generating systems that synthesised indigenous materials and modern techniques. the systems were of several kinds. vieru developed compositional methods that drew aspects of mathematical set theory (the theory of multitudes) and game theory (as in Xenakis) into a relationship with traditional modes. at times this extended to specific citations, as in the defamiliarised folksong and jazz references in Jocuri [games] for piano and orchestra (1963) or the evocations of Bach’s C-major prelude in the Musical Museum for harpsichord and orchestra (1968), where fragments of the prelude speak into a series of stochastic textures. these are two of a series of concertos, all of which ‘play with history’, but discreetly, and informed by a rigorous number working that controls the proportions of the music as well as its pitch systems. in the last of these works, the Sinfonia Concertante for ‘cello and orchestra (1987), it is again a folk melody that counterpoints the lyrical lines of the powerful central movement. and as in vieru’s music generally, elements of traditional formal archetypes inform the work as a whole, scaffolding its strange but compelling sonorities. there are parallels here with tiberiu Olah, one of the most distinctive voices in modern romanian music. he too started from enescian heterophony, quoting directly from enescu in later scores such as armonii IV (1981), but more generally developing a technique of stratification involving overlapping streams of sound. this can be traced back to the first work of his Brâncusi cycle, the orchestral Coloana infinită [the infinite Column] of 1962, and it is somehow preserved even in the monodic context of the second work of the cycle, Pasărea măiastră [the Miraculous Bird], composed in 1963 (as a virtuoso work for solo clarinet, and with a birdsong referent, it can scarcely avoid recalling Messiaen’s ‘abîme des oiseaux’). the technique crystallised in the third ‘Brâncusi’ piece, Spaţiu şi ritm [Space and rhythm] of 1964, where three groups of percussion instruments proceed in separate layers and at separate speeds. and it became more sophisticated in later cycles of so-called ‘translations’ and ‘harmonies’. also in tune with niculescu and vieru is Olah’s exploration of archetypes of pitch structure derived from ancient music, though in

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his case they are based on the pentatonic scale. this is clear in the pitch organisation of later works such as the Second Symphony of 1987, which invests in familiar triadic harmonies in novel ways. there are many correspondences to be found across the work of this group of composers. Several of the compositional preoccupations of Olah are also found in adrian raţiu, for instance. he too used enescu as a starting point, and he went on to develop a modal system of that in its turn links to the concerns of anatol vieru. On the other hand raţiu took modality in different, and rather less accessible, directions, exploring a principle of complementarity that owed a good deal to serial thought. this method was rather consistently developed, beginning with less public compositions such as his Cycle of piano Works (1957), then transferring to a more public arena in the 1960s (Concerto for Oboe, bassoon and strings [1963], Concertino per la Musica nova [1967]), and eventually reaching a culminating point in the chamber cycles of the 1980s and 1990s (Transfigurări [tranfigurations] i and ii, and a series of Convergenţe [Convergences]). Some of this music is almost Feldman-like in its reduction of the musical argument to a state of near stasis and non-assertiveness. it can be austere, and often arcane, but it is somehow always arresting. it is impossible to do justice to the work of this generation with such characterisations. Much could be said of aurel Stroe, who visited Darmstadt in the ‘sixties, worked in the US for a bit and also in Berlin, and finally settled in Mannheim, teaching both there and in Bucharest. political agendas are rather clear in works like his ambitious Oresteia trilogy (1973–1988), with its focus on ideas of freedom and resistance against tyranny. But Stroe also developed a computer-assisted compositional system, based on principles of morphogenesis derived from developmental biology. it is at work in a series of radical works from the 1960s onwards, and it culminates in the orchestral composition for saxophone and orchestra, Prairie, Prières of 1993, which journeys from aleatory sonorism towards determinism, its progressively shorter movements culminating in a 27second finale in which the pitch material has been stripped down to a single scream on the solo instrument. the contribution of Myriam Marbé is also an individual one, albeit with a shared interest in associating aleatory techniques with folk archaisms (her Serenata of 1974, a composed-out jubilation in which the symphony orchestra appears to stylise traditional vocal ululation techniques, is indicative). and similarly, we could discuss Dan Constantinescu, whose music moved from a modal-serial synthesis that found its culminating expression in the piano Concerto of 1963, a work of real dramatic and

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coloristic flair, to a phase dominated by dialogues between aleatory devices and serially structured determinism (the variations, Op. 27 of 1966; the Concerto for two pianos of 1972). and finally there is the transylvanian composer Cornel Ţaranu, who likewise explored serial-modal syntheses, and aleatory-determinist dialogues. Collectively, this group changed the face of romanian music, not least through their teaching. that they made less of an impact internationally than their polish counterparts is as much to do with political and economic contingencies as with artistic quality. indeed one might well argue that these composers successfully evaded some of the pitfalls of the polish avant-garde, achieving a more judicious balance between the seductions of sonorism and the austerities of structuralism. Moreover their shared interest in using contemporary methods to uncover and ‘make available’ to modern sensibilities ancient layers of music-making suggests a yet deeper unity of purpose, and one that links these romanian modernists to several composers in Bulgaria. Within the context of state socialism, this amounted to a powerfully expressive enterprise, and with clear political resonance. their dominance of the contemporary music scene was all but total, but it carried with it the danger that more conservative composers might at times be undervalued. it is interesting, then, to turn to another distinguishable strand of romanian music that flowed from the later music of enescu. For several composers of the same generation the enescu model suggested a more traditional musical syntax, though the boundary here is not clear-cut. We will pass over theodor grigoriu (b.1926) and the more conservative Wilhelm georg Berger (1929–93), both of whom were significant figures, and come directly to a composer whose achievements may well prove to be the most lasting of all. pascal Bentoiu (b.1927) registered the liberalisation of cultural climate in his music of the 1960s, but he did so cautiously and strategically. if we were to pursue the parallel with poland, we might say that his transition to new worlds of sounds was more akin to Lutosławski’s than to Serocki’s or Bacewicz’s. that transition was effected through a trio of works: the First violin Concerto (1958), the Second piano Concerto (1960) and the violin Sonata Op. 14 (1962), with the two-movement sonata in particular marking a significant advance harmonically, and also displaying an expressive individuality that plays ironically with traditional contrapuntal forms and textures. his second (one-act) opera, Jertifirea Iphigeniei [the Sacrifice of iphigenia], a radiophonic meditation on iphigenia, was completed in 1968, and its hieratic character, with stylised gestures, pared-down textures for organ, programmatic use of electronic

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sound sources and vocal recitation, already looks ahead to the work that many consider his masterpiece, the third opera Hamlet (1969), first given in Bucharest in 1975. Stylisation is the watchword of Bentoiu’s Hamlet. his approach to the Shakespeare was to focus on its conceptual aspects rather than its dramatic action, with the latter mainly portrayed through pantomimic and balletic means. there are ten scenes that pinpoint what Bentoiu (his own librettist) identifies as the crucial moments of the tragedy, and a series of interludes that either pick up and develop ideas from the preceding scene, as in the spectral first interlude, or presage the coming scene, as in the second, passacaglia-based interlude. it is an ingenious solution, allowing the spotlight to rest clearly on the speculative dimension of the play, manifest in the mind and thoughts of the central character as they are lit up by his very different responses to the other characters. thus, scene three holds on to the passacaglia of the second scene for the dialogue between hamlet and gertrude, before ceding to the actors’ pantomime. the pantomime then proceeds in parallel with an ever more intense musical argument that increasingly transfers to the orchestra, entwining hamlet’s theme and the revenge motive to build a magnificent climax. all the ingredients of Bentoiu’s musical language are brought to the service of this concept, with audible leitmotivic devices (partly based on instrumentation and rhythm, but including 12-note themes that take on radically different meanings in the case of hamlet’s uncle and Ophelia), and with a magnetic tape based on hamlet’s voice to represent the ghost. a degree of musical stylisation also enters in, allowing us to view the dialogues as to some extent stylistically discrete: the otherworldly magnetic tape of the ghost, the exquisite transparent scoring associated with Ophelia (scene 5), the solid triadic writing for Laertes (scene 6), the monodic idiom for ‘to be or not to be’ (scene 8), the parodic qualities of Osrick (scene 9), and so on. Hamlet is one of the triumphs of modern romanian lyric art, and it stands as a monument to the so-called ‘moderate modernism’ that represents a discernible direction in Communist South east europe. it was not of course the end of Bentoiu’s story. all but one of his eight symphonies (so far) post-date hamlet, and there is a wealth of chamber music. it is fitting that he became the first post-Ceauşescu president of the Composers’ Union. By then, a younger generation of romanian modernists had come to the fore: nicolae Brînduş (b.1935), Mihai Moldovan (1937–81), Corneliu Dan georgescu (b.1938), Octavian nemescu (b.1940), Fred popovici (b.1948), adrian pop (b.1951), Maia Ciobanu (b.1952) and Dan Dediu

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(b.1967). But the sense of group identity associated with the niculescu circle was lost, even if many of the techniques developed by that circle – in particular the anatomising of folklore through heterophonic and aleatory devices – have been carried forward. it is surely significant that certain key words appear almost ubiquitously in the liner notes of Composers’ Union recordings of works by the younger generation of composers. One, referring to the quest for origins, is ‘archetype’, sometimes linked with ‘archaic’, a trend associated with nemescu and georgescu in particular. another, associating these repertories with folk models, is ‘modal’, sometimes linked to ‘pentatonic’, and also to ‘heterophony’. in addition, there is a range of terms that invoke mathematics (fractals theory, complexity theory), indicating that developing systems remains a preoccupation of younger romanian composers. in some ways the continuing vitality of modernist impulses through into the 1980s was remarkable, given that political constraints were if anything even more severe at that time, and contacts with the West more limited. in any event the collapse of Ceauşescu changed everything, and since 1989 no-one has been much interested in dictating style or ideology to younger composers (the Society of Composers – the old Union – has lost much of its power and influence). the trouble is that no-one seems interested in them at all. Or so one might conclude from a glance at the music shops and concert programmes in today’s Bucharest. CDs of contemporary music have been produced in voluminous numbers by the Society of Composers, but are available only for promotional purposes and cannot be sold, while editura Muzicala, which with the help of government subsidies had published and helped disseminate the music of romanian composers, is no longer in a position to support contemporary music. Locating modernism – indeed art music generally – within postCommunist South east europe is not an exercise destined to raise the spirits. it will be attempted in a later chapter.

Chapter eIGhteen

another trY Politics versus Culture: The Second Yugoslavia that the second Yugoslavia survived its expulsion from the Cominform is a matter of wonder. tito’s stance faced opposition not just from Stalin, but also from within. he stamped it out ruthlessly, and this may have taken the steam out of Stalin’s anti-tito propaganda campaigns and dashed any hopes that the Yugoslav experiment might be brought to a swift close.1 in the post-stalin era, Yugoslavia pursued a separate path, committing to a ‘self-governing’ model of socialism that attempted to reinvest in Leninist principles.2 But prior to that, and of necessity, Tito had engaged in extensive dialogues with the capitalist powers, and especially with the Us, for whom this crack in the Communist edifice presented obvious strategic advantages.3 in due course Communist Yugoslavia found its historical roles first as a mediator between the two blocs, and later as a player in the international non-aligned movement. Nationality was the bugbear. The official line of the administration was to recognise individual national cultures within a supranational state, a position at variance with the yugoslavism of the inter-war state, and in theory at least one that facilitated the building of bridges to neighbouring states.4 But the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of Communist yugoslavia was inherently unstable. there was from the start a conflict of interests between the anti-statist socialism favoured in the poorer republics and the statism associated with Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia; ironically, in the later stages of the state, to declare as a ‘yugoslav’ came to signify the last refuge of either the dissident or the disadvantaged. this conflict of interests was reflected in the leadership. as Dejan Jović has argued, the victory of 1  across the rest of the Soviet bloc, there was a vitriolic and well orchestrated anti-tito campaign, including cartoon depictions of him as a poodle led by the US. 2 Benson 2001, 101–3. 3 Campbell 1967. 4 Katherine Verdery remarks, admittedly of another part of the region, that ‘precisely because the Soviet regime had destroyed all other bases for political organization while constitutionally enshrining the national basis, national sentiment emerged to overwhelm federal politics’. See Verdery 1996, 86.

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edvard Kardelj’s decentralising agenda over titoism served in the end only to strengthen the statist tendencies of the three stronger republics.5 it was at this political level that the future of yugoslavia was decided. But the same tension existed in the arena of cultural politics and education. andrew Baruch Wachtel shows that despite centralised programmes of education, the teaching of history, literature and language in the separate republics followed distinctive patterns, and allowed for the expression of individual national qualities.6 on one hand there were unifying supranational tendencies, embodied in the process Wachtel describes as ‘recanonising the classics’, while on the other hand (and increasingly) there were powerful centripetal forces, witnessed by the different reading lists of the school programmes and the separatist tendencies of language teaching. it is interesting to look at music and musical life in light of these delicately poised political and cultural forces. as to the structures of professional music and community music-making, Communist yugoslavia traced a pattern of institutionalisation similar to that found elsewhere in the bloc. indeed precisely because of its federal structure, it was closer to the Soviet Union in this respect than the other client states. the aim was to disseminate high culture across all the republics, and ideally across all parts of the republics, and to this end a centralised policy was subject to local implementation and allowed for a high degree of local autonomy. each republic had its composers’ association (even, belatedly, Montenegro), and although linked in a confederation, they were encouraged to develop their own ‘national’ cultures. Croatia, for example, developed its active musical life well beyond the capital. osijek was targeted, and developed an innovatory policy at the opera house in particular. and there was cultural investment in the principal towns of the littoral. Both Split and rijeka saw a renaissance of musical life in the post-war years. there was a similar story in Serbia. opera was cultivated at the national theatre in novi Sad, at Subotica, and for a time at niš. in the poorer republics the base line for these democratising exercises was low. Macedonia in particular had been underdeveloped culturally even during the first yugoslavia, and it was only really in the post-‘liberation’ years that an adequate infrastructure was put in place for music and music-making. the job was tackled with the conscientiousness typical

5 Jović 2004. 6 Wachtel 1998.

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of state socialism. a list of institutions established in the post-war years tells much of the history, but by no means all; it excludes, for example, the kinds of educational factory concerts that were promoted by workers’ associations all over the state. in the first post-war decade alone, the Macedonian State philharmonic orchestra, and the radio Skopje Choir and Symphony orchestra were founded; likewise the first Music School in Skopje, the Macedonian national theatre, the association of Creative and performing artists of Macedonia, the elementary Ballet School, the folk music and dance ensemble ‘tanec’, and the institute of Folklore ‘Marko Cepenkov’. the first Macedonian ballet was given in 1952, and the first opera in 1954. Later, in the 1960s, the radio and television Dance orchestra was established, along with the ohrid Summer Festival, the Balkan Folk Festival, Jeunesses Musicales Macedonia (a local branch of the much wider movement), the academy (or Faculty) of Music, and the Contemporary Music ensemble ‘St. Sophia’. it would be a mistake to idealise this ab initio culture-building (standards of performance remained basic), but as in albania attempts at grafting elite culture onto the Macedonian corps were part of a more ambitious surgery designed to modernise a society and an economy that had only just emerged from feudalism. Much of the cultural activity was instigated locally, but it could only be implemented with support from central government, and as part of a deliberate policy of cultural levelling. and the same was true of the other poorer republics. in 1945 a Music high School was opened in Sarajevo, followed by high schools in Mostar, Banja Luka and Bihać, while the following year a permanent opera was established in Sarajevo. in 1948 the Symphony orchestra of Bosnia and herzegovina was created (later the philharmonic), and in 1962 the Symphony orchestra of radio-television Sarajevo was established, along with a chorus and children’s chorus. Separate associations of performers and Composers were also founded in the post-war years, the latter including musicologists. Montenegro was less well served, but the elementary Music School in Cetinje became a Music high School in 1958 with sites in Kotor and titograd, and radio titograd also sponsored several vocal and instrumental ensembles, including (from 1959) a Symphony orchestra. the Composers’ association was founded in 1969, and dani muzike [Music Days] were established on the coast in Sveti Stefan and Budva. all this was supra-national work. For people living and working in the poorer republics, and that included musicians, there seemed little reason to set the nation (we are Macedonian) against the state (we are yugoslav), given that both the material and the cultural benefits brought by the

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federation were tangible. however, the matter was viewed rather differently in the three dominant republics of the second yugoslavia. Far from looking towards Belgrade as a model for cultural reconstruction, Zagreb and Ljubljana looked to their own active pasts; elite western culture had thrived in both cities, after all, at a time when Belgrade still hosted the pashas. the positive side of this was that there were infrastructures already in place in these cities, albeit in need of re-activation after World War ii,7 and also that there existed traditions of national music on which to build, or against which to react. But the down side was that cultural life could often be insular. in general Zagreb and Ljubljana lacked the ‘wide-open’ quality that had characterised Belgrade at its best during the inter-war period. as to restructuring, the opera and ballet of the national theatre in Zagreb resumed their normal activities after the war, while the Symphonic orchestra of Zagreb radio (established in 1948) became the Zagreb philharmonic orchestra. in addition, numerous chamber ensembles were founded, of which the best known were the Zagreb Soloists and the Zagreb Quartet. orchestras were likewise established in rijeka and in Dubrovnik. in Ljubljana, the Slovene philharmonic orchestra was re-established in 1947, complete with its own choir. the radio orchestra of Ljubljana was founded around the same time, closely followed by the Maribor philharmonic and the Chamber Choir of radio Ljubljana. the opera houses in Ljubljana and Maribor also picked up the threads of their earlier activities in the post-war years. Various specialist groups were created at this time, and in 1962 a festival of contemporary chamber music was established at radenci, and has been held there ever since. the Music academy in Ljubljana also resumed after the war, and in 1962 a musicology department, validated by the University, was founded at the academy. Similar institutions were cultivated in Belgrade. it is unnecessary to list them, but special mention should be made of the academy of Music, which was a magnet for leading teachers and promising student composers from all over yugoslavia. Belgrade also hosted the Union of yugoslav Composers, which functioned as the umbrella organisation for the associations of composers established in each of the six republics. that the three main cities presented a similar face to the world under Communism was inevitable, given the homogeneities imposed by the system. But we should not imagine that they ‘felt’ the same; nor even that

7 name-changing was endemic among the institutions in both Zagreb and Belgrade.

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they had similar goals. When we speak with musicians who were educated in Communist yugoslavia, it becomes clear that, even more than in the teaching of literature and language, training in musicology or composition meant the study of separate national traditions. the outside world may have labelled Vinko globokar yugoslav, but the composer himself was in no doubt that he was Slovenian. Symptomatic of this was the publication of a landmark history of yugoslav music in 1962.8 after a very short introduction, the book divides into three entirely separate parts, enabling the doyens of musicology in the three dominant republics (Dragotin Cvetko, Josip andreis and Stana Djurić-Klajn) to tell their national stories. not only was the opportunity to advertise a newly synthetic culture in the later stages of this story passed over; the three poorer republics were covered in a few exiguous paragraphs of the introduction, roughly a page for each in a book of over 700 pages. interestingly, in a slightly earlier ‘official’ history, again edited by andreis (together with the istrian composer Slavko Zlatić), lip service was paid to integration. Following separate treatments of the earlier music histories of the six republics, the editors argued that ‘in the passages devoted to the development of yugoslav musical life after the liberation in 1945, such grouping proved unnecessary, and sometimes even impracticable, because some regions have already assumed general yugoslav characteristics to such a great extent’.9 Such remarks, like the book as a whole, were targeted at the outside world, and it is probably true that the outside world bought into a unified yugoslavia rather more than the yugoslavs themselves. yet the major dictionary entries in germany and england made little effort to argue for a synthetic supranational culture in the twentieth century. of the 14 pages of text afforded to the art music of yugoslavia in Volume 7 of MGG (1958), 4 were devoted to Slovenia, 5 to Croatia, 3–4 to Serbia, 2 to Bosnia and herzegovina, and 1 to Macedonia (21 pages were given over to traditional music, again treated nation by nation). astonishingly, the 1954 Grove had no entry at all for yugoslavia; and when the editors remedied this in the 1980 edition (The new Grove), just over 2 of the 22 pages – fewer than for Sweden – dealt with art music, again broken down into nationalities. From today’s perspective, we can look back at Communist yugoslavia as a political experiment that went badly wrong, after more than four

8 andreis, Cvetko and Djurić-Klajn 1962. 9 andreis and Zlatić 1959.

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decades of survival. however, it is too simplistic to attribute this failure to its ethnic, religious and cultural diversity, as though this of itself guaranteed the breakdown of the state. history shows us that federal solutions can work politically in contexts where such diversity is acknowledged and accepted. there are conspicuous case studies of political unification where over time cultural diversities have come to affirm rather than to threaten the state, though even in long established unions we cannot assume that culturally distinctive regions will always lack the will to nationhood. Whatever the caveats, there were perfectly good grounds to assume, as most outsiders did, that this country had a future. in its early days the second yugoslavia, unlike the first, actually institutionalised its separate national identities. Statehood was about balancing diverse cultures, not about imposing a single uniform culture. thus musicians by and large viewed themselves by separate nationality, first and foremost. they might have held different views about how best to express that identity: should the nation draw on its traditional music in the spirit of romantic nationalism, or should it aspire to cosmopolitan modernisms? But their sense of identity was not in doubt. and much the same was true of traditional music. attempts to professionalise this music in the spirit of socialist realism were of course made, but they valued and promoted regional variants as distinct and distinctive. there was little interest in homogenising these variants (there are interesting comparisons to be made here with changing phases of regional music policy in the Soviet Union). it was political intervention in the later days of the state that did for yugoslavia in the end, including intervention from the major powers: that, together with economic collapse. Statist players (younger leaders, whose power bases were in their separate republics) asserted themselves in a climate of increasing austerity, and they had no difficulty in harnessing the distinctive cultural identities of their constituencies to their cause. Minorities were victims of these statist policies, but the agendas were not really about minorities, whose principal role seems to have been to sharpen the definition of majority identities. the competition was rather between ‘equals’, with ethnic and cultural affinities but with a strong sense of their uniqueness, and even their superiority, as individual nations. already before the death of tito, in the context of a greatly weakened party, such policies were doing their cultural work. Depressingly, many of the intelligentsia seemed all too ready to comply. and following tito’s death, in an upsurge of separate nationalisms, new statist establishments pounced on music and found it an easy prey. as we noted in chapter 3, even church music was not immune. it is hardly fair to blame the music.

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chapter eighteen The dark decade: Mainly Serbia

Composers in yugoslavia entered their most testing period in the late 1940s. We noted that already in the 1930s there had been a retreat from modernism among those younger (and some older) composers who had studied in prague. We also noted that for several composers from the Balkans there was a stylistic elision between partisan songs and socialist mass songs devoted to war heroes, the popular army, the building of socialism, and so forth. oskar Danon was typical of a number of composers who were active in the partisans and went on to play key roles in the post-war establishment, and his Uz maršala Tito [With Marshall tito] was one of many propaganda pieces; one might mention Mihovil Logar’s Himna Beogradu [hymn to Belgrade]) and Mihailo Vukdragović’s Pesma izgradnje [the Song of rebuilding]. Composers were encouraged to write such pieces, and to develop the rather crude form of national style (in orchestral suites and programme pieces) for which models were available in the Soviet Union. as a result, the modernism found in some inter-war yugoslav music disappeared in the post-war years, even as contacts with contemporary developments in Western europe were severed. in the very first issue of Muzyka, published in 1948, Stana Djurić-Klajn warned composers against allowing western trends to alienate them from their natural constituency. the concert life of the new state initially reflected this orientation, with a high profile assigned to accessible russian and Soviet music. and although the break with Moscow in 1948 changed much of this, the ensuing cultural thaw was a gradual process, slower in music than in the other arts. already in 1949 there were signs of change in the literary world, as the journal Mladost pointed young writers in new directions. then, just prior to the Sixth Congress of november 1952, Miroslav Krleža addressed the Congress of Writers in Ljubljana in a plea for the rejection of socialist-realist strictures. the political authorities responded, albeit cautiously, to such expressions of discontent, and a more experimental attitude was permitted, though religious themes were still unacceptable. in music, on the other hand, a more conservative aesthetic prevailed, and it was only in the late 1950s that there was a general embrace of more liberal attitudes. again religion was the last frontier, with Serbian orthodox music removed from the concert halls until the early 1980s.10 part of this

10 ira prodanov has researched this topic, looking in particular at the ‘hidden’ references to religion in music of the time. See prodanov-Krajišnik 2007.

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stemmed from the lack of contact with Western europe. in contrast to the inter-war years, when many yugoslav composers worked in prague and in other central european cities, relatively few managed to travel abroad in the immediate post-war years. For an older generation of composers, born at the end of the nineteenth century, not very much changed. in Serbia, both Konjović and hristić were active after the war, but their nationally orientated styles could be adapted rather easily to the new aesthetic. the critique of Konjović’s opera “prince of Zeta” (1927), staged in Belgrade in 1946, was an exceptional case of ideological pressure. Little new was added by this generation in the post-war years. neither of Konjović’s two later operas (Seljaci [the peasants] of 1951 and Otadžbina [the Fatherland] of 1960) achieved the success of Koštana, and even the younger Marko tajčević is remembered today through pre-war piano works such as the 7 Balkan Dances. Likewise in Croatia, Jakov gotovac continued to compose in an accessible national style, but lives on today through Ero and the interwar orchestral music. this was also true of Dobronić. Krsto odak, on the other hand, did find a rather different orientation in response to the new politics, notably in a group of symphonic and programmatic orchestral works. there are some parallels here with an older generation of Slovenians, including Blaž arnič and Marjan Kozina. Lucijan Marjan Škerjanc, a highly influential figure in Slovenian music, was a exception, in that some of his music from the late 1950s nods slightly in a modernist direction; he even included the term ‘dodecaphonic’ in the titles to some works. For a younger generation official cultural policy raised more difficult questions. the retreat from modernism in Serbian music cannot be attributed exclusively to political pressures. But whatever the cause, it is striking that all these composers marched more-or-less in step. Mihovil Logar, a modernist in the 1930s, composed not only the statutory cantatas in the post-war years (Pjesma o biografiji druga Tito [Biographical Song for Comrade tito] in 1945 and Žeteoci [the reapers] in 1946), but also traditionally conceived works such as the opera Pokondirena tikva [the Stuckup Woman] in 1954. and the same was true of predrag Milošević, who produced conservative theatre pieces in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Dragutin Čolić, who (re)turned to folkloric idioms and symphonic poems in national style (Uskrsna zvona [eastern Chimes] in 1946 and Nikoletina Bursać in 1951), all a far cry from his experiments with quarter-tone composition in the 1930s. Milan ristić followed a similar path, moving to folk arrangements and melodramas in the post-war years, and to a programmatic symphonism in the Second Symphony of 1952. and Stanojlo rajičić

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likewise found his way to an extended tonality of fairly traditional cast in the group of concertos he composed in the late 1940s. By the end of the 1950s this picture had changed. Several of these composers had by then adopted a neo-classical idiom with no trace of national (folkloristic) elements or of the programmatic subject matter encouraged by socialist realism. Logar’s violin and clarinet concertos were characteristic; and so were the Symphonic Variations and Concerto for Chamber orchestra by ristić, lightly spiced with dodecaphonic elements. For rajičić, the direction was towards a form of neo-expressionism (his Fifth Symphony), and one might associate rudolf Bruči (1917–2002) and Vasilije Mokranjac (1923–84) – at least in some works – with this trend too. although the shift from the early to the late 1950s was not an abrupt one, it was a shift nonetheless. partly there was a relaxation of political constraints. there had already been some movement here as early as 1950, but in 1957 a more decisive step was taken, with the programme for the 10th meeting of the League of Communists of yugoslavia speaking of the need to free ‘educational, scientific, artistic and cultural life from administrative interference by government organs’.11 taken as a whole it seems that the 1950s was a decade in which composers increasingly tested the limits of official cultural policy. three landmark dates in this process have been proposed. Vesna Mikić refers to 1951; Melita Milin pinpoints 1954; they both agree on 1956.12 For Mikić, 1951 is significant as the date of both rajičić’s orchestral songcycle na Liparu and ristić’s Second Symphony. She locates these works within a broad cultural frame of reference – embracing the Montenegrin painter petar Lubarda and the writer Dobrica Ćosić – and argues that they represent early intimations of so-called ‘moderate modernism’, where this is measured against socialist-realist norms. Milin singles out the concert of 17 March 1954, when compositions by enriko Josif (1924–2003) and Dušan radić (1929–2010), were performed. What was striking here was the pointed rejection of officially sanctioned options in favour of a cool, poised, antiromantic style indebted to Stravinsky and parisian neo-classicism. this was undoubtedly a turning point. the turmoil created by radić’s Spisak [the List], settings of ‘sketches’ by Vasko popa, gives some indication of just how new this music seemed in the Belgrade of the mid 1950s, even

11  Quoted in Zupančič 1976, 104. 12 Mikić 2008; Milin 2009.

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if it comes over today as belonging to a much earlier Stravinskian world (Pribaoutki). Both composers remained on this path through the 1950s; witness the neo-baroque idioms of Josif’s Sinfonietta and Sonata antico and the clean lines and sprung rhythms of radić’s Clarinet Concertino and Divertimento for strings, vibraphone and percussion. only in the deliberate archaisms of radić’s Ćele-kula [tower of Skulls] of 1957, again setting Vasko popa, who himself had no truck with official policy and who cultivated something of the same fusion of archaism and modernism in his verse, was there a hint of something rather different.13 in this work Stravinsky is evoked by way of others (Carl orff, for example), but there are also elements – especially in the ‘lament’ – of an earlier russian realism (Musorgsky). it seems likely that the tone of Ćele-kula was attributable, at least in part, to the last of our three landmarks, highlighted by both Mikić and Milin. this was the performance in 1956 of Ljubica Marić’s cantata Pesme prostora [Songs of Space], arguably the central event of Serbian music from the 1950s. Marić belonged to the prague generation, and in one sense she followed the same general direction as Logar, ristić, rajičić and the others. But she cannot quite be pigeon-holed in this way. She too had her experimental phase in prague, indebted to both Schoenberg and hába; of the works composed then, only the Wind Quintet of 1931 and the Music for Orchestra of 1932 have survived.14 She also had her folkloristic moment after the war (in Tri narodne [three Folk Songs] for Choir and Brankovo kolo [Branka’s Kolo] for piano, though coeval works such as the three preludes for piano of 1947 are more adventurous). But Pesme prostora represented a new departure, and not just for Marić. it is significant that Stana DjurićKlajn discussed the work alongside other cantatas of the 1950s, almost as though it might be understood to be conformant with socialist-realist norms.15 in reality, it is precisely because Marić turned to this approved genre that the gesture of subversion, evident in the subject matter of the texts no less than the musical language, comes over so strongly. Pesme prostora inaugurated a move within Serbian music that foreshadowed developments elsewhere in South east europe. We noted already that one of the defining features of Bulgarian and romanian music from the late 1950s onwards was an attempt to draw together ancient layers

13 alexander 1985. 14 Marić destroyed a substantial amount of her own music. 15 Djurić-Klajn 1971.

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of musical culture and modernist techniques. the saccharine folklorism promoted by socialist realism was rejected, but equally there was a perceived need to establish contact with what were thought to be deeper cultural and spiritual roots. it seems that for several composers from this region, the avant-garde of Western europe was no less anonymous than the official culture of eastern europe. the marriage of archaism and modernism (including novel applications of aleatory devices) offered them an identity, and not just a narrowly national one. Pesme prostora signals something of this aesthetic by turning to the inscriptions on some of the famous medieval tombstones of Bosnia, traditionally associated with Bogumilism. the opening of the work confirms the new direction musically, its densely layered, dissonant harmonies in predominantly woodwind scoring close to the stiffly hieratic quality we associate with certain works of Stravinsky. the choral chanting and treading ostinati of later movements are also part of the Stravinsky legacy, and again they have the effect of reducing any sense of immediacy; they are monumentalising or ‘alienating’ techniques, in the precise Brechtian sense of the latter term. there are no extravagant modernisms here; they would not have been an easy option in the 1950s. But these archaisms offered a path to the future, and for Marić it was a path that allowed very particular spiritual (rather than narrowly national) identities to be affirmed through evocations of a medieval Serbian world. Such identities are apparent again in her passacaglia for orchestra of 1957, based on a traditional melody from the Morava river valley, ‘ancient and profound as if sung by the earth itself ’, in the composer’s own evocative description. But subsequently they came to be associated in her music with the Serbian octoechos, and with the post-Byzantine sacred world of South east europe more generally. the first fruit was octoecha 1 (1958), whose improvisation, ricercar and Coda are based on the initial melody of mode 1. then came the Byzantine Concerto for piano and orchestra (1959), with its three movements based on modes 2, 3 and 4 respectively. next in line was the chamber cantata Threshold of dreams (1961), followed by the ostinato super Thema octoecha (1963) for chamber orchestra, both based on mode 5. the final work, a Symphony based on the remaining three modes, failed to get beyond the sketch stage. all four completed works share a quality of renunciation that gets us close to the wellsprings of Marić’s inspiration as a composer. the appeal of the octoechos was less to do with religion than with collectivity, with the quest for deep communal structures that might be re-activated for our times. again it is easy to

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cite Stravinsky, but in the octoechos cycle any direct Stravinsky influence has receded almost to vanishing point. the octoechos works were composed at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. We might construct two narratives around them. one would depict them as a stage in the journey of Serbian and yugoslav music from political confinement and imposed insularity towards freedom of expression and integration within european music. they were a gateway to a brave new world. the other narrative would see them as valuable and privileged precisely because they fought shy of a ‘progressive’ Western avant-garde, bearing in mind that this was hardly less ideological than a ‘regressive’ socialist realism. the larger political point here will be picked up later. But for now we might note that in this narrative Marić was important in the way that enescu was important. She captured the historical moment for Balkan music. indeed this may well have been the last time that such a thing would be possible for art music in the Balkans. avoiding the false consciousness of both the past and the folk that we associate with music policy in state socialism, and at the same time avoiding the officially sponsored historical denials and elitism of the new music, she found a voice somewhere ‘in between’, catching the resonance of collective voices from the distant past, but sifting and straining them into an active present. it was her voice, uniquely so, but as we noted in the last chapter it chimed with the voices of others in the Balkans at just this particular moment. it was of its time, and of its place. In from the Cold: Mainly Croatia, a Little Slovenia, and Back to Serbia the first of the two narratives outlined above, a narrative of emancipation, would single out 1961, the year of Marić’s Threshold of dreams, as an important landmark. it was in May of that year that yugoslavia institutionalised modernism in music through the establishment of the Zagreb Biennale. it is certainly intriguing that this seminal event, as also the important opatija Festival, should have occurred in Croatia.16 naturally there are dangers of stereotyping if we profile the music of yugoslavia’s nations reductively. But one can at least say that in the inter-war years the dominant musical culture in Zagreb, as represented by antun Dobronić, had been one of conservative nationalism. Croatian composers at that

16 opatija was also to become the site for a major international festival of popular song.

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time – with the exception of Slavenski, who worked mainly in Belgrade – conspicuously avoided the iconoclasm associated with the Serbian ‘prague’ school, and for this reason socialist-realist imperatives created much less of a disjunction in Croatian music history than in Serbian. For the post-war years, such characterisations by nation are more treacherous, but they do still have some explanatory value. on one hand we could justly claim that during the 1950s Croatian composers played their part in the slow, steady cultural thaw that was apparent all over yugoslavia. on the other hand, it could be argued that they opened out to the West in a more all-embracing and less self-conscious manner than their Serbian colleagues. Where the best of Serbian music since the war tended to look inwards and to wrestle with issues of cultural identity, Croatian music seemed to merge seamlessly and easily into the mainstreams of european modernism, with Darmstadt as the principal model. initially, the Croatian Society of composers had followed the familiar Communist line.17 Meetings in 1948 reported ‘ideological disorientation’ on the part of some members, and a year later there were complaints about the lack of enthusiasm for mass songs. But signs of change were apparent in the 1950s, especially towards the end of the decade, and even among the older generation. in the case of the formidably gifted and prolific (and politically interesting) Boris papandopulo (1906–91), this meant little more than a mild disruption to a fundamentally conservative idiom (some of the bravura piano studies of 1956, for example),18 but for Milo Cipra (1906–85), the shift was more decisive, with Sunčev put [the Sun’s path] of 1959 inaugurating a phase of atonal-serial experimentation. When we come to composers whose early music belonged to the postwar years, the embrace of the West was yet more eager, and in many cases the change of direction at the end of the 1950s was abrupt enough to suggest parallels with polish composers around the same time. a case in point would be Branimir Sakač (1918–79), whose works from the 1950s are traditionally conceived, but who switched to avant-garde techniques, including musique concrète pieces, at the end of the decade, and who went on to experiment with avant-garde music theatre in the 1960s. Likewise natko Devčić (1914–97) swerved from a series of works based on themes and styles from istria in the 1950s to an atonal-serial idiom in the 1960s.

17 on the implications for Croatian music history of the shift between totalitarian governments of the right and left, see tomažić 2004. 18 Sedak 2004.

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Moreover, the same turning point (late fifties – early sixties) can be identified in the very different outputs of two leading composers from the younger generation: Stanko horvat (1930–2006), whose polish-influenced modernisms are still rooted in traditional idioms, and ruben radica (b.1931), whose engagement with new techniques has been total. it was symptomatic of the new eclecticism that a number of younger composers, including both horvat and radica, learnt their craft in major european centres. Some went on to make their career outside Croatia, though in most cases they retained active musical contacts with Zagreb. ivo Malec (b.1925) is a case in point. he went to paris initially for further study in 1955, but settled there in 1959, and soon became a member of Schaeffer’s Group de recherche musicale. he himself has argued that only in paris (i.e. from 1960 onwards) did he achieve his full maturity as a composer, and especially in pieces such as Sigma for orchestra of 1963. But already in the 1950s he laid foundations for what would become an international reputation in avant-garde circles for his contributions to musique concrète and electronic music, for his experiments in modern virtuosity (in the spirit of Luciano Berio), and for his work in music theatre. not the least interesting aspect of his work is the reciprocity it has promoted between live and electronic forces. at its simplest, we might say that, as in some works by Ligeti, he has composed ‘electronic music’ for live instruments. even more visible was Milko Kelemen (b.1924). he too studied in paris in the mid 1950s, and he went on to work in Siena and Freiburg, to attend the Darmstadt seminar on several occasions, and (in 1961) to take up a scholarship in the United States. Later, in 1969, he chose to settle permanently in West germany. But before that he taught at the Music academy in Zagreb, and he established his reputation there with a number of major works composed in the late 1950s, in which he decisively pulled away from the folk-based idioms of the immediate post-war years; they include his Koncertante improvizacije [Concertante improvisations] for strings of 1956, his challenging and innovatory Skolion for orchestra of 1960, and his award-winning Transfiguracije [transfigurations] for piano and orchestra, also of 1960. in 1959 Kelemen was closely involved in the initial discussions of the Society of Composers about a festival of contemporary music, and he soon emerged as the major power behind the Zagreb Biennale. Muzički Biennale Zagreb (MBZ) was established in 1961 with Kelemen as its first president, and it quickly secured an international reputation. Kelemen himself has written about how he was able to turn the Cold War to advantage in

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securing funding for the festival by playing the Soviet Union off against the United States.19 Whatever the formula, the Biennale soon attracted leading figures in contemporary music (the presence of Stravinsky at the second festival in 1963 was symptomatic), and at the same time it acted as the major platform for composers of a progressive orientation from all over yugoslavia. indeed part of its mission was to set yugoslav modernisms in an international context, very much in the manner of the ‘Warsaw autumn’ festival. as in Warsaw, moreover, the festival could be at once a source of national pride and a symbol of cosmopolitanism, though it was less successful in promoting native composers than its polish counterpart. the exception was Kelemen himself, for whom it was a conduit to wider recognition, and eventually to a career in germany. From 1961 onwards he came to epitomise what was truly characteristic about modern Croatian music: its increasing alignment with an international avant-garde and its rejection of the Balkans. there is a precarious balance here. For many in Croatia the new pluralism amounted to the recovery of a cosmopolitan aesthetic traditionally associated with their nation. on this reading the nationalism promoted by Kuhač, and brought to fruition by Dobronić and his circle, was a digression, or even an aberration. Since 1961, so the argument ran, there has been a reintegration with Central and Western europe. there has been no ‘Croatian music’: just music in Croatia, and music by Croatian composers living elsewhere. Croatia, after all, like germany and italy, needed no reminders of the darker side of nationalism. thus, in the early 1990s the quest for independence was also a bid to join the family of european nations. this is a comforting story for many, but in truth the Croatian political and military record of the 1990s was ‘Balkan’ enough, by any standards. that, together with several manifestations of mass culture, served as a reminder that the ghosts of the past are not so easily laid. Kelemen himself was at the forefront of internationalist agendas, and his reputation as an exponent of the new music has been well deserved. in his collection of writings, Labirinti [Labyrinths], published in 1994 though dating from various stages of his career, he writes intelligently about the limits of complexity, as also about the limits of freedom.20 a committed

19 Kelemen 1971. See also parts of Kelemen 2002. 20 Kelemen 1994.

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Jungian, he writes too about the growing importance of archetypes for his music, and – connected with this – about the relation between (simple) deep structures and (complex) surface detail. What emerges from these texts, and from the music, is that while Kelemen’s colours have undoubtedly been pinned to the modernist mast, he has been anxious to avoid radicalism and to embrace immediacy. at its best (works such as Changeant for cello and orchestra of 1968, Passionata for flute and 3 choirs of 1971, and apocalyptica of 1979), his music has been challenging in its complexity, but also immensely vivid, dramatic and exciting. and in the 1980s these latter qualities were given a new context, as the composer responded in his own way to more general ‘postmodern’ tendencies. this greater accessibility was turned to expressive account when the events of the 1990s forced him, as it forced others, to look again towards the homeland. in this context, archetypes acquired a new significance. if Kelemen has a counterpart among the younger generation of composers, those born after 1940, it would be his one-time student Silvio Foretić (b.1940). he too has been an entrepreneurial figure, especially through his engagement with the ensemble for Contemporary Music (azSg), which he co-founded. Like Kelemen, he settled in germany (Cologne) in the late 1960s, and the creative path he followed there has been yet more exploratory and more radical than that of his teacher. in particular he has been influential in multi-media composition, developing a kind of ‘instrumental theatre’ in which he himself has often been the principal performer. Characteristic would be works such as “Für Klavier?” of 1970–71, der achte Tag oder auf der Suche nach der Weissen Zeit of 1973, and ‘Semi-monoopera’ of 1979. there is often an element of (radical) political engagement in these works, facilitated by polystylistic devices that generate clear references. this was accentuated in the 1990s, when Foretić found himself unable to avoid a creative response to the political realities of the Balkans. his ordinarium Missae for choir and instruments, begun in 1967 but finalised only in 1995, introduces recorded sounds of war to the text of ‘Dona nobis pacem’, a disturbing gesture in the political context of the time, and one that somehow seems to underline an ambivalence at the heart of Croatian culture. a roll call of other distinguished Croatian composers active between 1960 and 1990 would include Dubravko Detoni (b.1937), igor Kuljerić (1938–2006), Davorin Kempf (b.1947), and Frano parać (b.1948). But roll calls are hardly to the point here. as elsewhere in european music, there were debates in Croatia about contemporary modernisms. there were

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reactions to Darmstadt and to Warsaw. there were ‘circles’ of composers ordered according to ideology, aesthetic, musical style, teaching genealogy, and even geography. none of this was unique to Croatia. But as the century drew towards its close, there were questions asked not just about the viability of modernist music but about the contemporary relevance and future of classical music more generally. along with those questions came other questions, about the nation and about the region. it is certainly intriguing that postmodern accessibilities seemed to be linked with a return to regional specificities. For some this remained on the level of topical satire. Several of the composers listed above began to address local issues, political and cultural, not only in polemical writings but in the subject matter of their music. one case in point would be igor Kuljerić. in his 1980s opera on orwell’s animal Farm, Kuljerić assigns the role of napoleon to the Sabor, the Croatian parliament. it is an unsubtle political gesture, but it is the timing that is of interest. For others, the waning of modernism – a general european phenomenon – resulted in a more comprehensive investment in a sense of place and in the cultural identities that might be forged from this, even as the storm clouds gathered. there are parallels in Slovenia. of all the republics, Slovenia was the one most obviously orientated towards western culture, and for obvious historical reasons. Several composers born in the 1920s, including primož ramovš (1921–99) and Uroš Krek (1922–2008), made the familiar transition from traditional (neo-classical) to modern idioms during the 1950s, and ramovš in particular went on to play a key role as father figure of the avant-garde of the 1960s. as in Croatia, several leading Slovenian composers worked abroad, notably Janez Matičič (b.1926), who settled in paris, and most famously Vinko globokar (b.1934), who spent his early years in France but moved to yugoslavia in the 1947, and eventually settled in Cologne. in the 1960s and 1970s globokar had a comparable status to Kelemen in avant-garde circles, and his acumen as a trombonist certainly helped. having studied in both France and germany, and taught for some years in north america, he is a citizen of the world, and although politically engaged – his anti-establishment credentials are as apparent under capitalism as they were under Communism – he belongs to an international modernist culture. in particular he expanded aleatory devices to incorporate active performer improvisation, instrumental characterisation, extended techniques for woodwinds and semi-improvised musical theatre. in some works globokar turned towards yugoslavia, notably in his etudes pour folklora of 1968, and more potently in his Kolo (1988) for mixed choir,

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trombone and electronics, but these are exceptions.21 although he maintains his links with Ljubljana, he belongs within the avant-garde circles of Western europe and in relation to Slovenian culture he represents above all a prevailing cosmopolitanism. it is symptomatic of this cosmopolitan orientation that in an essay ostensibly devoted to modernism and tradition in twentieth-century Slovenian music Leon Stefanija seems to use Slovenia mainly as an opportunity to address in microcosm issues that relate to the Western musical heritage in general.22 there is admittedly a set of historical ‘frames’ through which he locates three key stages in Slovenian music: the early twentieth century, the inter-war period, and the post-1945 period. But interestingly – and there is nothing in Stefanija’s article that really spells this out – Slovenia looses specificity progressively as we move through these three frames, at least until the later stages of the last of them. the context for the first frame is unique to Slovenia, but that for the second is largely shared with the rest of the first yugoslavia, while the third seems to open out yet more widely to an international culture. Within this third frame – the post-1945 period – Stefanija identifies a further three distinct phases, a common enough reading, as he recognises. the first (traditional idioms in the 1950s) is shared with the rest of the eastern bloc, but arguably also with other cultures beyond the modernist circles of France, germany and italy, while the second and third (modernism from 1960 onwards and postmodernism from the late 1970s) is shared with an elite culture belonging to the western tradition more generally. the whole sequence might be viewed, then, as a graphic representation of Slovenian music seeping imperceptibly into the wider world around it. that at least would be a convincing interpretation were it not that in the later stages of the third phase there is, as in Croatia, some evidence of a homewards turn. as to the first phase, the 1950s, Stefanija downplays the importance of socialist realism as a determinant of musical style, arguing that ‘an effective repressive apparatus was lacking’, and that where individual musicians were targeted it was less to do with their music than with their social position and political attitudes. this is fair comment, though it may not quite do justice to the ‘silent’ pressures of the political climate, even if 21 globokar’s wider understanding of the social and political value of improvisation as a constituent of composition emerges from his own writings and interviews. See Stojanovićnovičić 2004. 22 Stefanija 2006.

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verbal denunciation was as bad as it got. But in any case, if Slovenia is to be singled out from a more general east-european pattern here, it will be as one of the more liberal corners of yugoslavia, itself one of the more liberal corners in the bloc. When we get to the second phase of Stefanija’s third frame, however, Slovenia recedes further from the picture. the establishment of the Pro musica viva group in Ljubljana was seminal in the 1960s as the mouthpiece of Slovenian modernism, an essentially internationalist movement. these early modernist stages might be represented by the serial excursions of the prolific composer alojz Srebotnak (1931–2010), beginning with pieces such as Invenzione variata for piano of 1961 and Monologi of 1962. alternatively one might cite the polish-influenced aleatory methods adopted by ivo petrič (b.1931) in the late 1960s, notably in pieces written for his influential ‘Slavko osterc’ ensemble. or the collage works (including tape) composed by Darijan Božič (b.1933). or the early works of Lojze Lebič (b.1934), the youngest of the Pro musica viva group, and one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Slovenian music. From the 1980s onwards, however, there was a general retreat from these modernist positions on the part of several composers. those of the younger generation – such as Uroš rojko (b.1954), who teaches in Freiburg – were born into a postmodern culture. But many of their older colleagues looked in this direction too. the shift that took place in poland in the late 1970s may have been an influence here, especially on composers like ivo petrič, whose music from the 1990s is marked by its return to a more traditional idiom, and along with that by a nod to national themes. Characteristic of this would be Gallus Metamorphoses (1992), The Song of Life (1995), on texts by Slovenian poets, Four Seasons after Grohar’s Paintings (1995), and Grohar’s Impressions (1998). in the case of Lojze Lebič, the shift took the form of that same quest for archetypes that resonates more widely in music of South east europe. it is not appropriate to look for authenticity in any of this. the archaisms are essentially ‘poetic’ evocations of past cultures and civilisations, and their simplicity is deceptive. after an intense and critical confrontation with contemporary trends in composition, Lebič formed his own mode of expression ranging between the impetuosity of sound and the restraint of meditation as well as between cosmopolitan modernism and his own sensitivity to the heritage of traditional cultures and civilisations. if Lebič’s concerns as a composer seem reminiscent of Ljubica Marić back at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, this is perhaps no coincidence. Shortly i will reflect on some of the implications, and the ironies, of such connections, but first i will trace Marić’s own subsequent development

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briefly, locating it within a larger Serbian context. Following the cycle of octoechos pieces there was a fall in creativity until the 1980s. Following this, she turned her attention to chamber music, with works such as Monodia octoecha for ‘Cello solo (1982), Invocation for double bass and piano (1983), and asymptote for strings (1986). as these titles suggest, there is a striking continuity in Marić’s concerns as a composer from the late 1950s onwards, and this persisted right through to her last major composition, the piano trio Torso of 1996. there is little hint that she troubled herself at any stage with the trends and fashions of the new music, whether we label these modernist or postmodernist. her primary inspiration in many ways remained her teacher Josip Slavenski, who likewise sought to uncover hidden layers of music that were often particular to the Balkan region, but in all cases transcended narrow nationalisms. Like Slavenski, Marić believed that such archetypes had universal resonance. if we shade in the Serbian background to her work, on the other hand, we can identify broad patterns in the journey from the ‘sixties through to the ‘eighties. in the ‘sixties traditional idioms were increasingly infiltrated by modernisms. this was true of the other members of the ‘prague group’, whose inclination was often to reconcile their pre- and post-war idioms, and also of a younger generation of composers born before 1930. Some of these have already been mentioned (Bruči, Mokranjac, radić and Josif), but we might add to them aleksander obradović (1927–2001), Dejan Despić (b.1930) and petra ozgijan (1932–79). the ‘seventies marked something of a new departure, as a younger generation, more radically orientated from the start, came to the fore; they included Srđan hofman (b.1944), Vuk Kulenović (b.1946), Vlastimir trajković (b.1947), and Zoran erić (b.1950). here techniques of post-Webern serialism, polish-influenced sonorism and american minimalism all made appearances, and so too did studio-based techniques, a direct outcome of the establishment of the electronic Studio at radio Belgrade in 1972. For at least one student working in Belgrade at the time, the 1980s represented a ‘golden age’.23 this was the period when composers such as Kulenović, trajković and erić came into their own, inspired in part by the proselytising efforts of aleksander pavlović, conductor of the Belgrade Strings, and by the wider creativity that was a marked feature of Belgrade in those years, in theatre and visual arts as much as music, and in popular music as much as art music. anyone who lived there at the

23 Kuzelich 2001.

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time testifies to this energy. and it was then – in Serbia, as in Croatia and Slovenia – that there was a turn towards postmodern pluralism. a key stage in that particular journey was trajković’s arion, le nuove musiche per chitarra ed archi of 1979, followed by Kulenikov’s raskovnik (1981), and erić’s widely performed Cartoon of 1984. Few were untouched by this new post-modern orientation; we might equally cite Milan Mihajlović (b.1945) or ivana Stefanović (b.1948) as representative. and much the same general direction was followed by a yet younger group of composers emerging at the end of the ‘eighties, right on the cusp of major political change in yugoslavia. With characteristic chutzpah, they labelled themselves ‘the Magnificent Seven’, and we will return to them in a later chapter. But we should move back a step first. needless-to-say, a summary of this sort can never be more than indicative. Marić was not the only composer for whom easy pigeon-holing will not work at all. Vladan radovanović (b.1932) committed himself to a remarkably radical position right from the start. already in the early 1950s he composed his Seven Chorales, a work that has something in common with early minimalist composition. But it soon became clear that radovanović was an avant-garde figure of a more all-embracing kind. in a manner that is rare in South east europe, he went on to explore multi-media pieces of Stockhausen-like metaphysical ambition, even incorporating at times ‘notations’ of his dreams. he works in the visual arts as well as in music, and he has articulated novel and interesting theoretical views on the nature of artistic synthesis. So it is fitting that several of his compositions take the form of ‘projects’ or ‘happenings’, including film and computer-based installations. radovanović was the spiritus movens behind the electronic studio in Belgrade, and this has played into several of his ‘cosmic’ pieces. if there is a genealogy here, it might well return us to Slavenski. titles such as Kosmička muzika [Cosmic Music], Muzika sfera [Music of the Spheres] and Sazvežđa [Constellations] are suggestive. it is tempting – though perhaps a little glib – to see aspects of radovanović’s enterprise as extending Slavenski’s aesthetic in a rather different direction to the one taken by Marić. Where Marić continued to explore archetypes of Balkan music very much in the spirit of Slavenski, digging deeper and deeper into local soil, radovanović pursued the other notable dimension to Slavenski’s work, pointing his telescope skywards. My earlier subtitles ‘From the Balkans . . . to the Cosmos’ are very much to the point. the end of the ‘eighties was a time of sharpening political differences between the yugoslav republics. ethnonationalist agendas rode high, and they culminated in war. For this reason it is intriguing to find areas of

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convergence in the field of elite culture. We can detect movement in two directions here. First, there was a growing tendency for Serbian composers to conform to some of the more generic trends in european music. in some quarters, we might say that they were chasing european modernisms and postmodernisms with a vengeance. this had the effect of aligning Serbian music to cosmopolitan approaches that were already well established in Croatia and Slovenia. Serbia, too, was coming in from the cold. yet – and this is the paradox – there was also a marked tendency for composers in Croatia and Slovenia to turn their thoughts to that same quest for archetypes (of the nation and of the region) that was already well established in Serbia. there was a wider context for this in european postmodernism from the 1980s onwards. But there was also a region-specific dimension to it. it is obvious that cultural forms may be appropriated by politics, but they can also make their own statement, independent of political manoeuvres and political agency. the real irony in all of this is that the cultural project of yugoslavism, demonstrably a failed exercise in the political contexts of both the first and the second yugoslavias, begins to look something of a possibility in the context of the successor states. Catching Up: other republics in the less powerful republics of yugoslavia it was very much harder to establish and maintain separate cultural identities, and perhaps especially so in the field of art music.24 the three cases were not the same. For Macedonia the struggle of the partisans under tito was tantamount to, and is invariably described as, a War of national Liberation, and in the post-war years there was a determined effort to affirm a unique and distinctive nationality in all walks of life. the challenge was to carve out a cultural space that could be cleanly separated off from the spaces already occupied by influential neighbours. in Bosnia and herzegovina, the problem was related but different, in that a sense of cultural distinctiveness was undermined by ethno-religious difference. the demographic distribution of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks within this republic made it all but impossible to profile its culture in terms of any single majority culture, even where forms and materials were shared. as for Montenegro, the historical links with Serbia were so strong here that for the majority of Montenegrins 24 For an english-language survey that tries to do justice to all the republics, at least as things stood in 1980, see Lipovčan 1980.

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the issue of a singular culture (as opposed to a singularly heroic version of a Serb culture) did not really arise. in due course, that would change. in all three cases it was in the post-war years that there were significant creative achievements in art music. the pioneers of Macedonian music were all-purpose musicians. they were composers, ethnomusicologists, theorists, conductors and teachers. the key figures were Živko Firfov (1906–84), an ethnologist and collector of importance, trajko prokopiev (1909–79), the high-profile director of the State folk ensemble ‘tanec’, and todor Skalovski (1909–79), conductor at the opera and a force behind both the Composers’ association and the State Symphony orchestra. all three are major figures in the local context. along with Stefan gajdov (1905–92) and petre Bogdanov-Kocko (1913–88), they made up the ‘Macedonian Five’, who laid the foundations for a national school of composition. Skalovski’s Macedonian oro, an apotheosis of the emblematic folk dance teškoto oro scored for chorus and orchestra, retains its popularity among audiences today. So do several of his choral works, including a piece ‘in praise of Cyril and Methodius’. Likewise, prokopiev’s ballet Labin i dojrana (1958), recounting a familiar Macedonian legend in a folk-based idiom, carries symbolic significance as a document of national culture, just as his later opera razdelba [Separation], first performed in 1971, is hailed as a worthy musical match to the immensely popular anton panov play (Migrant Workers) on which it is based. Compositionally, the major step forward came with the generation born in the 1920s. i will profile three composers from the 1920s briefly, and then turn to those born in subsequent decades. the celebratory nationalism associated with the establishment of a new order may not have translated into works of great originality, but it did coincide with a newly acquired professionalism. younger composers learnt their craft at other leading yugoslav centres, and in a few cases in russia or Western europe. thus Kiril Makedonski (1925–84) studied in Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana, Vlastimir nikolovski (1925–2001) in Belgrade and St. petersburg, and Dragoslav ortakov (b.1928) in Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo. Makedonski is best known in the history books for his 1954 opera Goce (based on the Macedonian revolutionary goce Delčev), the first opera by a native Macedonian composer. But his later historical opera Tzar Samoil, first performed in 1968, is also regarded as a work of importance, and he composed five symphonies between 1956 and 1978. nikolovski also drew on folk music, establishing clear points of contact with Stravinsky through the choral chanting of the second of his three symphonies, and the anti-romantic tone of chamber works such as Sonoro (1965). ortakov

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is best known as a musicologist, but as a composer he explored the world of eastern chant in modernist contexts, notably in a series of pieces called ephtamerone. he was also a pioneer of electronic music. What is not immediately detectable in any of this repertory is a distinctive Macedonian voice. Macedonian composers tended to follow a generalised, and in the early post-war years a politically conformant, yugoslav tendency to build a ‘national’ repertory on the basis of folk sources. the results are not readily distinguishable from other music composed within the state. to some extent this direction was continued by the generation of composers born in the 1930s, including Mihailo nikolovski (1934–95) and tomislav Zografski (1934–2000). yet Zografski did extend the nationalist orientation some way beyond neo-classical folkloristic pastiche, and in some works he went on to explore archetypes of traditional music in interesting ways. the oratorios Pohvala Kirilu i Metodiu [eulogy to Cyril and Methodius] and Cantus Coronatus, both of 1969, are representative, and the ‘notes’ for voice and piano even more so. the most significant figure born in the 1930s, however, was toma prošev (1931–96). he studied in Zagreb and Ljubljana and then in paris with nadia Boulanger, and his musical idiom ranged from the heroic brassy tone of the Fourth Symphony to modernist-leaning chamber works such as Musandra III for wind quintet, a study in instrumental characterisation that also makes use of aleatory devices. there is a substantial corpus of works, including operas (Pajažina [Spider’s Web] of 1958 is highly regarded), an impressive symphonic output, and – in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties – concertos for two violins, for piano and for ‘cello. of the generation born in the 1940s, Stojan Stojkov (b.1941) is an entrepreneurial figure (he was president of the Composers’ association at various points), and his output is much respected. the stylistic journey is a familiar one: from the neo-classical idiom of works such as Rondo dramatico of 1965 to the more forward-looking world of Universal Mother for soloist, narrator, electronics and strings of 1985. he is best known for his Madrigals of 1976, six vocal-instrumental arrangements of well-known themes, somewhat ‘alienated’ by the recourse to baroque techniques. But before that he had already established a reputation with his Twelve Prayers of Penelope for voice and ensemble (1963) and his Bartókian Sonata for two pianos (1965). the most original composer from this decade was risto avramovski (b.1943), who explored modernist pathways in works such as the tone poem Bibliofonija (1970), with spatialised sound and block structures, and also in works such as Psihofonija I of 1972. there is some influence from modern polish music in the sonorism of the two Ezero [lake]

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pieces for voice and piano, as in the cycle Crveni cvetovi [red Flowers], and Two Hands for singer, reciter and piano. and this in turn suggests parallels with the most significant figure born in the 1950s, tomi Manchev (b.1950), especially in works such as Paganophony (1989). in some ways, this is yugoslav to the core, drawing together the pursuit of modernisms and the quest for ancient roots. Bosnia and herzegovina also came into its own with the establishment of the second yugoslavia. the case was not quite as in Macedonia. Unlike Skopje, Sarajevo was drawn more centrally into the cultural life of the new state, somewhat at the expense of the other major Bosnian towns. the opera, the symphony orchestras and the Music academy all ensured that leading figures from the three dominant republics were a presence in the city, as conductors and also as teachers. But even among the older generation there were key players from Bosnia too.25 the most eminent were Vlado Milošević (1900–91) and Cvjetko rihtman (1902–89), and both were distinguished musicologists and folklorists as well as composers. Milošević is the more highly valued as a composer, though the idiom is somewhat anachronistic, a kind of rustic neo-classicism indebted to folk music from Bosanska Krajina (the eight rukoveti, composed variously between 1940 and 1967 and in the spirit of Mokranjac), and in some works to Serbian orthodox repertories. Flirtations with impressionist devices seldom penetrate much below the surface, though in some solo songs from the ‘sixties and ‘seventies they are more foregrounded (Pastel; Sonet nepoznatoj ženi). there are in addition string quartets (including Kameni spavač for reciter and quartet of 1968), a violin concerto (1951), Dramatična simfonija (1967) and the symphonic poem Hilendar (1972).26 Modernisms began to permeate Bosnian music with slightly younger figures, of whom one of the first was avdo Smailović (1917–84), though even here the basic musical idiom retained some contact with folklore. Metamorfoze for piano (1980) is characteristic, including controlled aleatory devices and a tone that might be termed expressionist in its formal discontinuities and explosions of dissonant harmony. a similar journey from traditional idioms to moderate modernisms can be found in the music, especially the chamber music and song cycles, of nada Ludwigpečar (1929–2008), and likewise Vojin Komadina (1933–97), who has lived

25 For a recent, immensely detailed, history of music in Bosnia and herzegovina, see Čavlović 2011. 26 Čavlović 2001.

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in several parts of former yugoslavia but was based in Bosnia and herzegovina during the 1960s and 1970s, and whose early folk-influenced neo-classical works yielded to more modern techniques in later years. a work such as refrain IV – Silent round dance from Glamoč for piano (1975) has a foot in both these camps, not entirely securely. a more radical figure, experimenting with electro-acoustic and computer music, is Josip Magdić (b.1937), currently based in Zagreb. Some of Magdić’s concerns as a composer, evident as early as his Sound Spectrums of 1968, harmonise with developments we have noted elsewhere, including the tendency to draw elements of church chant and folk traditions into a modern sound synthesis. after the Bosnian war the number of Bosnian composers working actively in the republic (as far as one can separate them out from other yugoslav composers working there), dropped significantly. Creative enterprises looked increasingly inward at this time, despite the valiant efforts of the Music academy to promote and maintain an active and truly contemporary musical life. the title of one of the CDs produced by the Muzikološko Društvo FBih [Musicological Society of Bosnia and herzegovina] is no doubt significant: ‘Works by B-h Composers Living abroad’. nor was art music immune from the political agendas that appropriated sacred repertories and popular music traditions in the post-war years. Self-analysis can be the most brutal of all, and the comments of amila ramović on the state of play in Bosnia and herzegovina today are hardly encouraging.27 to some extent the same problems attend two other territories of former yugoslavia that have either gained or asserted their independence. in both Montenegro and Kosovo there are obvious attempts today to establish national cultures and to validate these historically, despite the associations of the former, and the minority population of the latter, with a dominant Serbian culture. to list as ‘Montenegrin composers’ the teachers and choirmasters Jovan ivanišević (1880–1940) and Jovan Milošević (1895–1959), both of whom studied in prague, is perhaps anachronistic; and likewise several composers associated with Boka Kotorska. attempts to chart a music history of Montenegro have been made by several writers, notably Miloje Milošević and Manja radulović-Vulić, and it is common for such authors to refer to iloja Lakešić (1908–73) as the first Montenegrin symphonist (his

27 ramović 2005.

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symphony of 1952),28 and to list as Montenegrin the cantatas and oratorios of Borislav tamindžić, as also his Impresije sa izložbe [impessions from an exhibition] of 1975, and his rhapsody for piano and orchestra of 1978. the break-up of yugoslavia removed whatever infrastructure was in place for art music. a brief visit to Marko rogosić’s ‘office’, that constitutes the Composers’ Union, says everything. as to Kosovo, it need hardly be said that the starting-point was late and that progress has been slow. there were amateur choirs and orchestras, and in 1948 the first music school was founded in prizren, followed by an elementary music school in Kosovska Mitrovica in 1954. in the 1960s there was comparable institutional development in priština, including a Music school and a music department in the principal teachers’ college. then, in 1969, the association of Composers of Kosovo was established, and it gained its independence from the yugoslav association in 1972. the Symphony orchestra of radio-television priština followed in 1974, and the following year a music department was established at the academy of arts. as in Macedonia and in Bosnia and herzegovina, the earliest composers were all-round musicians such as Lorenc antoni (1909–91), more active as a folklorist than composer, and redžo Mulić (1923–82), and the latter has indeed produced extended symphonic works. But it was the generation born in the 1930s that may be reckoned the first professionally trained composers, including esat rizvanolli (b.1936), who composes in a neoclassical idiom, and Fahri Beqiri (b.1937), who combines folk-based and modern techniques. the next generation – Zeqirja Balata (b.1943), rafet rudi (b.1949) and Bashkim Shehu (b.1952), who is now in Croatia where he organises the istrian ‘pula Summer’ Festival – explored more complex, and in some cases (notably in works by Zeqirja Balata) genuinely avantgarde, territory. But the future of art music in Kosovo, like the future of Kosovo itself, remains an imponderable.

28 radović 1998.

Chapter nIneteen

bIrthrIGht oF the peopLe orchestras: Classicising Traditional Music Long after the advent of nineteenth-century nationalisms, the music of rural communities in South east europe retained its innocence of nationhood. even after traditional music had been appropriated by nationalist causes, it retained its local meanings in situ until those meanings were changed by social modernisation (the decline of ritual), and by the parallel drift of rural populations to the towns. the timing of all this varied, but by the mid twentieth century a determinate stage had been reached across most of the balkans, and from that point onwards there was a loss of innocence. It was compounded by the imposition of an intellectual model of idealised rural folk music along Soviet lines, a model that – paradoxically, given its socialist orientation – reinforced the nineteenth-century association of that culture with the nation, and further divorced it from ritual. this amounted to the construction of a professional or semi-professional genre of ‘folk music’ on the ground of a traditional musical culture that was simultaneously made the subject of extensive collection and intensive study. While this model encouraged multiple regional musics, accommodating these within the framework of the nation, it was conspicuously intolerant of the musics of ethnic minorities, which were deemed cultural pollutants. Likewise, and for similar reasons, it was often dismissive of the hybrid musics of the towns. an industry of folk music collection, performance and scholarship was established. Folklore archives were instituted or re-instituted for the deposit and classification of existing collections and newly acquired products of field research, and to this end scholarly programmes were launched. the tasks were twofold: to map out regional musics on a systematic basis, and to arrive at theoretical principles for the description and classification of those musics. such scholarship was not just motivated by the directives of state socialism. It continued pre-war scholarly themes, with important research undertaken both at music academies and at research institutes. Major teaching curricula were a valuable by-product, in the music academies and also, for at least some parts of the region, in music lyceums.

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But there were of course political imperatives, and political agendas. they were not entirely self-consistent. there was a general assumption that the music of peasant communities was privileged and had greater value than urban repertories. But at the same time there was a move to re-contextualise this ‘natural’ music, to render it applicable to the modern urban world, and to create new institutions to support it. a commitment to traditional music – the birthright of the people – was axiomatic. But even as ethnomusicologists sought to preserve this music, others worked to render it suitable for consumption by a wider public. hence the appearance of folk ensembles on the Soviet model (the Moiseyev ensemble), dedicated to the presentation of national music in all its regional variants. these ensembles were established in the early post-war years, and they ranged from professional state and radio orchestras down to innumerable semi-professional groups and the amateur ensembles that were widely promoted in emulation of these. the folk ensemble represented a meeting point between traditional music in its natural setting and the ethos of the classical orchestra. on one hand it was a mode of conservation, keeping alive endangered traditions. But on the other hand it was a construction, a synthesis of characteristic elements of the local style in question, presented with an eye to professional performance standards, and often orchestrated for an array of folk instruments that would never have been found together in a single village. again, the picture was not black and white. Within the ensembles there were studied attempts to reproduce ‘authentic’ performance styles in a spirit of revival, and here the greatest professional skill was necessary to recover the performance styles of the least professionalised (most ‘primitive’) practices. in this sense, the folk ensemble was a simulacrum, rather as Baudrillard understood it. it simulated a reality that was not (or was no longer) there.1 the modernist appropriation of traditional music – its conversion into folk music – was also found in greece in the Metaxas years and beyond. and, as ljerka V. rasmussen demonstrates, it had also been present in the first Yugoslavia, and in embryonic form all over the Balkans in the nineteenth century.2 in other words, socialist realism does not provide a complete explanation for the folklorism associated with the post-war years. More general processes of modernisation and urbanisation were at

1  Baudrillard 1988. 2 rasmussen 2002, 11–12.

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work. and the context might be widened yet further in the post-war years, establishing something of a divide between eastern and Western europe, and perhaps a later convergence. here the association of folklore with the fascist regimes of the 1930s was all-important.3 the propaganda value of folk music as a putative music of the masses had not been lost on the Nazis, and there are predictable similarities between the folklorist projects of late 1930s germany (in education, publishing and concert life) and those of the post-war Communist states in eastern europe. Conversely, it was precisely those associations with fascism that played to the general tendency of Western europe to reject traditional music after 1945, until in due course it was re-invented in the 1960s and 1970s.4 all that said, it is not hard to see why folk music became all-important within the Communist programme, harnessing processes of urbanisation and modernisation to a larger enterprise of investment in – but at the same time re-fashioning of – the ‘folk’. folk music was thus institutionalised, and the primary model was provided by the Soviet Union. the all-Union Conferences held in Moscow in 1959 and 1960 formalised the development of secondary ensembles in schools and factories, the institution of regional and national competitions and festivals of song and dance, the engagement of classically trained musicians as arrangers and composers, and the instigation of programmes of research at the academies. at one extreme, there was careful scholarship into, and performance of, regional traditions of folklore across the Union, and at the other extreme there were song texts crudely transformed for blatant propaganda purposes. Most important of all, this new folk culture redefined the ‘folk’, embracing the modern proletariat as well as the rural peasantry. the whole enterprise, riddled with contradictions, was very quickly adopted by the satellite states. We might register some of the paradoxes by reflecting on practices in romania. an obvious starting-point is the state-sponsored institute of folklore (later the institute of ethnology), which was founded in 1949, with harry Brauner as the driving force.5 the institute took over the arhiva de folklore of the Society of romanian Composers (originally established by Brăiloiu) and the rival arhiva

3 for a case study of this during the Metaxas regime in greece, see loutzaki 2008. 4 See randall 2005. 5 See Marian-Bǎlaşa 2000. a year after becoming Director of the institute in 1949, Brauner was imprisoned, having been implicated in a show trial. he remained in custody for fifteen years.

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fonogramicǎ (associated especially with george Breazul),6 and it became in effect the guardian of traditional music in romania, maintaining contact with thousands of amateur singers and performers by way of regional offices and houses of culture, and taking great care to preserve the many local characteristics associated with the national musical heritage. thus, in a spirit of regional ‘authenticity’ (cultivated in much the same way in Bulgaria) singers and ensembles were encouraged to perform only repertory from their particular region, bearing in mind that regional differences were indeed immense. only in Bucharest was there a license to cross boundaries. this same institute, along with the Ministry of education, also played its part in the professionalisation of traditional music and dance. folklore festivals and competitions were supported, promoting traditional music and raising performance standards to a professional level, but inevitably homogenising musical styles in the process. from 1976 onwards much of this activity was gathered under the umbrella of the Cântarea României [Singing for romania]. and in support of it talented amateur singers (village lǎutari) would be singled out and educated at state-sponsored music lyceums, where they would learn music notation and theory, and at least two traditional instruments. By the 1980s there were around forty such music lyceums and in excess of fifty folklore festivals, big and small, across the country. through the festivals in particular, the picturesque ‘stage peasant’, imbued with an image of contentment that was markedly at odds with the reality of peasant life, became a familiar figure in romania, for although authenticity might be cultivated on some levels (costumes, dance steps, musical idioms), it was conspicuously eschewed on other, more fundamental, levels. it was in this context, and especially at the larger festivals promoted nationwide within the Cântarea României, that the folk orchestras and dance troupes came into their own, presenting a model of an idealised, ‘progressive’ community. and by definition the musical arrangement was central to the ensemble. the arrangement was designed to enrich, polish and complexify – to ‘improve’ – the original material, but of its nature it also stylised that material. rather oddly, it could simultaneously modernise and classicise it. there were of course arrangements and arrangements. they could be sophisticated and artistic, the products of highly skilled, classically trained musicians, or they could be monuments to kitsch. the

6 for a discussion of the politics of these two archives in the inter-war years, see Mengeel 2007.

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latter were especially apparent in later tourist-orientated, propagandist stage shows of the 1970s and 1980s, whether exhibited on foreign tours or presented at home. official visitors to Bucharest in the 1980s could escape the kitsch only with the greatest difficulty. None of this was unique to romania. ensembles, and the arrangements they promoted, were found all over the bloc. like american Swing bands of the 1930s, they demoted ‘raw’ improvisation and encouraged intervention, and in due course composition. Monophonic melodies were given chordal accompaniments, counter melodies were added, and the whole was then scored for larger forces. Vocal parts were likewise ‘orchestrated’, building larger forms on a principle of textural contrast, with solos, ensembles and choruses juxtaposed. and traditional folk dances were elaborately choreographed, transforming the village square into stage spectacle. the leaders of the more eminent ensembles wielded considerable influence. Characteristically they were classically trained composers and serious folklorists, such as Živko firfov, the power behind the Macedonian State ensemble (tanec), founded in 1948, and philip Koutev, who established its counterpart in Bulgaria in 1951; it would later become internationally famous as the ‘Koutev ensemble’. each of the republics apart from Bosnia and herzegovina had an equivalent, state-supported, ensemble (in Serbia it was ‘Kolo’, in Montenegro ‘oro’, and in Croatia ‘lado’), but actually the folk orchestras proliferated. the radio Sofia ensemble was no less famous than the Koutev, and within a short time, as timothy rice put it, ‘every major town [in Bulgaria] had its own professional folk ensemble’.7 again we can draw non-Communist greece into the picture, with the activities of the Dora Stratou greek Dances theatre. folk ensembles could be sited in the villages or in the cities. ana hofman’s ethnographic study of Niško polje in Serbia is enlightening on the villages. in presenting historical backgrounds she looks at the explicitly educative Village gatherings established by the Serbian republic of Yugoslavia in 1973, and specifically at the gender implications of the ‘new socialist’ policy.8 Village gatherings might be located somewhere between traditional music-making and professional ensembles. they were public representations of traditional music and dance, and as such they make useful case studies in the mediation of such binaries as ‘official-unofficial’ and ‘public-private’. hofman’s ethnography allows many subject positions

7 rice 2004, 64. 8 hofman 2010.

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to be articulated, but they all support her central thesis about the empowerment of performance, and about how it has negotiated between old and new female roles. her book tells a fascinating story. like Buchanan’s Performing democracy, it allows personal histories to break down pedigreed accounts of socialist cultural norms.9 Moreover, in telling women’s stories hofman is also telling men’s stories. here the relationship between the performative and the everyday comes into sharpest focus, especially as we move into the post-Communist era. there is a challenge to the old roles, but not a definitive transformation. as to the cities, the folk ensembles had a capacity mysteriously to unite peasant culture and the urban workplace. as Beno Zupančič reminds us, some of the factories in parts of Yugoslavia were not just visited by professional folklore troupes; they had their own KUD (Kulturno umjetničko društvo [Cultural-artistic Society]) complete with folk ensembles.10 and the same was true of albania, where ensembles were established at houses of Culture all over the country, and amateur groups instituted at several of the larger factories. Some of the best of these amateur ensembles achieved international fame, and the propaganda value was exploited to the full. the most prestigious platform was the National folklore festival that took place in gjirokastër from 1968 onwards. it was a five-yearly event, but it generated an industry of folklorism by way of preparatory local festivals and competitions. Moreover, like comparable festivals elsewhere (the equivalent in Bulgaria is at Koprivstitsa), gjirokastër not only promoted albanian traditional music, but identified what might and might not be regarded as such. religious songs were out, and so was the oriental-influenced ahengu shkodran. even the lyrics of well-known traditional songs were subject to ‘purification’, all in the service of the new man, the peasant-worker beloved of socialist realism. the usual prizes were awarded, and the entire event was recorded and transmitted by the State Broadcasting Corporation. earlier i noted some parallels – of function, not of style – between folk orchestras and american Swing bands. those parallels might be extended. Just as the Big Bands of the 1930s fostered solo virtuosity (as opposed to group improvisation), so the new folk ensembles in eastern europe promoted the professional folk soloist, whose artistry and virtuosity might be projected against a uniform orchestral backcloth. Star soloists could

9 Buchanan 2006. 10 Zupančič discusses in particular the Alat factory of trebinje in a heavily ideological reading. See Zupančič 1976, 86–91.

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be of either gender, though interestingly, and despite official communist doctrine on the subject, other roles were often gendered in traditional ways, with accompanying instrumental ensembles male, choruses female and dance troupes of mixed gender. recordings of high-profile solo artists accompanied by folk orchestra soon became a staple of recording companies such as Balkanton in Bulgaria and Jugoton in Yugoslavia, and these artists were further promoted by the music channels on national radios. it would be hard to overestimate the importance of radio as an active shaping force in this whole development. it was the obvious means of dissemination for the new folk culture, and for that reason it was especially subject to political control and remained conservative in orientation. But more than that, it was thanks to the ambience and professional ethos of radio that solo performers acquired, and were expected to acquire, polish and sophistication. the wheels of this development were already in motion in the pre-war years. it was thanks to radio, for example, that one of the first ‘stars’ of folk music in eastern europe first came to national, and then to international, attention. for this story we need to return to romania. in february 1937 Maria tănase (1913–63), then a waitress and family-taught amateur musician, became an overnight sensation when she made her radio debut with a programme of romanian folk songs. Soon she had the attention of leading composers, including theodore rogalski and enescu himself, and in due course she was given a weekly spot on radio. her fame quickly spread, leading to recording engagements and extensive tours, and culminating in her appearance at the romanian pavilion of the World fair in New York in 1939. together with enescu and others, tǎnase spent the war years performing at camps and hospitals, but in the immediate post-war years she was taken up by the regime, given employment at the newly established folksong department of the Music academy, and engaged to sing with local ensembles all over the country. With her own ensemble Taraful Gorjului (the gorj folk ensemble), she also made numerous tours overseas. at the time of her early death in 1963, tǎnase was a household name in romania, almost a national icon, and her body lay in state for several days in Bucharest. She remains to this day a potent symbol of the ethos of professionalism and commercialism that began to invade traditional music with the advent of Communism. it was likewise a radio competition that launched the career of tǎnase’s younger compatriot ioana radu. But by then celebrity folk artists had begun to emerge all over South east europe. the subsequent direction was twofold. there was a classical orientation, where leading singers would

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perform with the more prestigious ensembles, continuing the tradition of arrangements established by Koutev and others during the 1950s. and there was a more popular orientation that began to take shape in Yugoslavia in the 1960s. this was associated with singers such as the Serb predrag gojković Cune, with a prestigious line-up of Sevdah singers performing on radio-television Sarajevo (Safet isović, Zaim imamović and many others), and with rom singers such as esme redžepova and Šaban Bajramović. the local recording industry helped promote such artists, anticipating in some ways Yugoslavia’s increasing absorption of elements previously ‘othered’. and records also helped create a large audience for the new folk stars among the expatriate communities of Yugoslav ‘guest workers’ abroad, especially as repertories swerved in the direction of popular music. that swerve in turn indicated a growing disenchantment with the ethos of the classical arrangement and of folklorism generally. the ensembles lost ground to smaller, earthier combinations, derived in the main from urban traditions. the most characteristic product was the ‘newly composed folk music’ that dominated the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia. i will consider that development shortly. But first i will return to the folk orchestras, which resisted change and maintained their traditions alongside these more popular idioms in the later stages of the Communist era. that they were increasingly at the mercy of political vicissitudes emerges more clearly from the researches of visiting scholars than from native accounts. By the 1980s ethnomusicologists from abroad had become a fixture in South east europe, and their agendas were often at variance with those of local researchers. there were two main differences. first, the visitors interested themselves in ethnic and religious minorities, including roma, who were either marginalised by, or assimilated within, the official narratives of music history. to be fair, not all native scholars conformed to the official position; witness Speranța rădulescu, who worked on rom musics from a very early stage. But it was above all visitors from germany (rudolf Brandl) and North america (Carol Silverman) who made these musics their central focus, the former working in greece, the latter mainly in Macedonia. it has only been relatively recently that minoritarian studies have blossomed in the native ethnomusicologies of South east europe.11 the second major difference was in ethnographic approach. North american scholars in particular brought a less positivistic and more self-

11 See, for example, Ceribašić and haskell 2006.

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reflective perspective to their fieldwork, attempting to draw the observer into the hermeneutic circle. for some reason, Bulgaria proved an especially happy hunting ground. timothy rice blazed a trail, and Donna Buchanan followed.12 her magisterial study, Performing democracies, has direct relevance to our narrative, based as it is on years of fieldwork with the musicians of the Koutev and radio ensembles. the ethnography (and the history) is multi-voiced in this book. the voices of informants emerge through countless quotations and paraphrases woven into the texture of the book, their memories, observations and impressions creating intriguing counterpoints with Buchanan’s voice. We hear from the appropriated and the appropriators, and in many cases the effect is to mediate such over-simple binaries. this is the value of the study, and of the approach. it cuts through reductive descriptive categories to record the lived experience of musicians in a period of profound political and social change. in other words, we glimpse something of the backstage world of an institution that has been assigned a monolithic meaning, and in doing so we glimpse too those complicated and intimate places in which real people work out their lives. newly Composed Folk Music in September 2003 i joined several thousand others on a trek to the olympic Stadium in Sarajevo to hear a concert given by the popular Bosnian singer halid Bešlić. Bešlić had emerged in the 1980s as a cult figure of socalled novokomponovana narodna muzika [newly composed folk music], when that genre was in its heyday. at the time of the Sarajevo concert he was a household name, well known as a narodnjak not just in Bosnia and herzegovina, but in Belgrade too, and in Macedonia. My companions on that occasion described several of the songs as sevdalinkas, though this title had come to be used so permissively by then that it seemed almost meaningless. others were rom songs popular across the Balkans. all were well known by an audience that cut across generational divides, though it was predominantly young. the body language of the fans, a swaying motion with semi-raised arms, was conspicuous. it is as familiar in South east europe today as in the Middle east, and it points to the ‘oriental surge’ that was a feature of this genre. even for one unfamiliar with the

12 rice 1994 and 2004; Buchanan 2006.

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music, it was clear that a particular space had been carved out by drawing together elements of narodna [folk] music, zabavna [popular] music, and orientalna [oriental] music. as to the language of the songs, Bešlić and others insisted on staying with local vernaculars, even in the recording studios. in tracking the early history of newly composed folk music, ljerka V. rasmussen refers to a ‘major conceptual shift’ occurring in the 1960s, as ‘the “arranger” gave way to the “auteur” ’.13 one practical but important point here is that with this shift the music fell under copyright laws, but rasmussen had in mind changes of much wider cultural significance. She tells the story of Sarajevo-based songwriter Damjan Babić, not just because he was a leading player, but because his career throws light on the institutions that determined the success or failure of newly composed folk music: the radio, the festival and the record companies. Negotiating with these institutions was far from easy. We learn that Babić left the record company Diskoton when it refused to sign up goran Bregović’s Bijelo dugme, and that the conservatism of radio-television Sarajevo forced him to establish an independent studio in the city. We witness the treacherous path he steered between the demands of radio editors for a more classical approach to folk music (one that retained some contact with its ‘original’ spirit) and the no less strident demands of a popular music industry increasingly tied to the commercial marketplace. the balance of interests was between what rasmussen calls ‘the significance of zabavna music in providing the environment for this music’s early development, and an organised attempt at the creation of “Yugoslav song” within the early festival context’.14 rasmussen’s account of these events exposes the workings of the culture industry in Communist Yugoslavia, bearing in mind that, as she had already pointed out in an earlier essay on Južni vetar [Southern Wind],15 the particular model of ‘self governing’ socialism cultivated there allowed a robust, semi-privatised popular (but not unified) music market to emerge at a much earlier stage than elsewhere in eastern europe. We learn from her study something of the difficulties faced by musicians as they negotiated much the same tricky path as Damjan Babić, a path that led, broadly speaking, from folkloric to popular music environments.

13 rasmussen 2002. 14 ibid. 15 rasmussen 1996.

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there were market-led pressures to move beyond the static prescriptions for folk music created in the post-war years, and to that extent neo-folk began to represent an alternative to official folklorism even as it built upon its foundations. We may ask why neo-folk developed in the first place, why it occurred just when and where it did, and what deeper needs it met. these questions have been addressed by several authors dealing with pop-folk, including Sanja raljević who looks specifically at the development of the genre in Bosnia and herzegovina.16 raljević attempts a broad social, and even psychological, profiling of the publics who made up its audience. like several others, she locates the major social cause not just in urbanisation but in ‘(r)urbanisation’, by which she means the ‘ruralising’ of urban culture by those who have moved to the towns but find themselves unable to adapt; these were the so-called primitivci [primitives], supplemented by returning gastarbajteri, who made up much of the audience for neo-folk.17 raljević then sets this model alongside the more familiar escapist narratives associated with urban poverty, poor education and mass culture, including the emergence of ‘star’ singers, and of kitsch lyrics. the oriental elements associated with neo-folk might also be understood in these terms, their oneiric or seductive qualities again translating into modes of escapist fantasy, even if the fantasy has a distinctly local provenance, and is for that very reason subject to political censure. as Miša Đurković demonstrates by looking at three very different periods of music history in Serbia, oriental elements have always invited the same criticism, and even the same critical language, in this part of europe.18 in other words, the censure was not just a product of the Communist years. again it would be pertinent to refer to similar developments in greece, and it would be possible also to cite the oriental character of čoček, whether romani or non-romani.19 the oriental model associated with Južni vetar and soon found all over the Balkans became a source of controversy in the 1980s, a controversy discussed in some detail by rasmussen and related by her to similar debates yet further east in turkey and israel. What always seemed to be at stake in such debates was how far such elements might be

16 in her thesis, and in raljević 2003. 17 the distinction is elaborated in gordy 1999; see especially 106, and (for the social breakdown this can cause) 197. Similar arguments have been advanced for the rise of turkish arabesk, whose heyday was in the 1980s. See Stokes 1992, 8–10. 18 Đurković 2004. 19 Silverman 2008.

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understood to be a legitimate part of the native heritage, as distinct from foreign imports grafted onto, and threatening the integrity of, that heritage. We are back to one of the grand narratives outlined in chapter 6. Just what actually constituted oriental elements musically is another question, and not a straightforward one. in tracing the development of newly composed folk music from its origins in westernised and classicised folk arrangements to the folk-oriental idiom of the late 1980s, rasmussen distinguishes several regional elements, including Bosnian sevdalinka, Serbian dvojka and Macedonian rhythms, and relates them to particular ‘streams’ within the developing genre, centred above all on Sarajevo and Belgrade. Singers such as hanka paldum and Miroslav ilić are then considered in relation to these streams. She further discusses the impact of popular music in the 1980s, epitomised in neo-folk by singers such as the legendary lepa Brena, the singer most often credited (or debited) with instigating what would become known as ‘turbo-folk’, and she goes on to discuss the self-consciously ‘oriental’ stream associated with Južni vetar.20 rather as with greek paradhosiaka, complex issues of identity seem to have been working themselves out through these oriental elements; for obvious reasons the picture is very different in Serbia and Bosnia and herzegovina, for example. it is tempting to understand such elements as a way of controlling an alien ottoman inheritance (commanding it, we might say); or even as a way of inscribing that inheritance into Balkan identities. But their constitution (extending into commercially encoded and essentially western stylisations of arab, iranian and even indian traditions) suggests that at least in some cases more conventionally orientalist glamorising, othering or self-exoticising modes may also have been at work.21 in any case, the fact that evaluations of this Slavonic-oriental repertory – typically denigrating it in relation to western pop and rock – have tended to draw on the familiar critical terms outlined by Đurković is perhaps less surprising than the obvious enthusiasm for it at the grassroots. the ‘New Wave’ that swept over popular culture in Yugoslavia in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not exempt neo-folk. as applied to neo-folk, it signalled an attempt to bring this genre into the modern world, not least by blending it with global popular music genres. there was no doubt an attempt here to adjust the scales and to transfer to newly composed 20 See Kurkela 2007 for Bulgarian contexts; also lipsitz 1997, though here the focus is not on the Balkans. 21 there is an interesting discussion of this in relation to Balkan cinema in iordanova 2001.

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folk music, typically perceived as culturally ‘regressive’, and still stereotypically associated with rural, (r)urban or émigré traditions, something of the prestige associated with a more internationalist rock and popular music scene. in the case of neo-folk there was a tension not just between an official culture (folklorism) and a mass culture (neo-folk), but between a ‘superior’ mass culture designed for urbanites (rock) and an ‘inferior’ mass culture designed for (r)urbanites (neo-folk). this tension further accentuated a dichotomy that had been a feature of neo-folk from the start. on one hand it indicated the local through its reference to traditional music, which connoted certain social imaginaries through culturally recognised signs, and also (though this is more problematic) to indigenous oriental elements. on the other hand it pointed to a global popular music scene, and allowed the music to be absorbed by the marketing apparatus associated with that scene. there is a difficult balance to strike here, as from the former perspective the genre could appear a caricature of certain idealised origins, while from the latter perspective it could seem parasitic and eclectic, feeding uncritically off shifting trends in contemporary popular music worldwide. all that said, the product was always a singular one. even when it engaged explicitly with a succession of ‘western’ genres, from disco through dance to hiphop, there was always a local spin placed on the performance conventions associated with those genres. Neo-folk, after all, was first and foremost a form of commercial popular music. the most famous of the bands was goran Bregović’s Bijelo dugme [White Button], established in 1974 in Sarajevo, and soon immensely popular all over Yugoslavia. indeed to pigeon-hole Bijelo dugme as ‘neofolk’ is hardly adequate. the band redefined itself on several occasions, but its broad strategy was to refer to indigenous musics within the overall framework of a rock idiom. that it was situated in Sarajevo was significant. the Bosnian capital was a site of remarkable creative energy in popular music, right up to the Yugoslav wars. it has become conventional to speak of a ‘Sarajevo pop-rock school’, and Bijelo dugme was a leading part of this. When it disbanded at the end of the decade, it was in the context of a political extremism that forced responses in all directions in popular culture in Bosnia and herzegovina. Bregović was increasingly associated with emir Kusturica from this point onwards, and the subsequent direction of both men – sometimes understood as a kind of politicised Balkan essentialism, involving rom appropriations and pastiche in both music and film, and associated with Kusturica’s move to Serbia – has not been well received in some quarters in Bosnia and herzegovina (in the case of

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Kusturica that puts it mildly). But in its heyday Bijelo dugme responded to the changing fashions of a global popular culture. and in that respect the band belonged within a much wider set of local-global dialogues that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s. if modernised neo-folk music formed one pole in Yugoslav popular culture at this time, the other pole was a thriving rock scene, linked to the West, and implicitly or explicitly critical of state socialism, though the politics of Yugoslav rock could look in several directions.22 it oversimplifies the picture to suggest that the former was associated with SerbiaBosnia-Macedonia, and the latter with Croatia-Slovenia. Croatia had its own ‘internal’ east, for example, and neo-folk thrived in the café culture of the cities even when blacklisted by official media channels. Conversely, Yugo-rock was cultivated in Belgrade and Sarajevo as much as in Zagreb and ljubljana. there was indeed a pre-history to this attempt to create a vibrant urban popular culture in the late 1970s. already in the late 1960s, initially in the teeth of opposition from tito, a countercultural rock scene had developed (Grupa 220 in Croatia, YU Grupa in Serbia, and the cover band Kodeksi in Sarajevo). YU Grupa in particular cultivated a ‘Balkan rock’ sound, whose folk-orientation served to emphasise that the space between this world and neo-folk was as much about rhetoric as style. this is not to say that the space did not exist. What constituted it was the overall framework of the idiom, distinguishing rock with elements of folk from neo-folk with elements of rock.23 the initial impulse for ‘New Wave’ punk-rock came from Zagreb in 1977, associated with the café-pubs Zvecka, Blato and Kavkaz (and later the club Kulušić), and heavily promoted by the influential socialist youth paper Polet [enthusiasm]. among the key bands were Paljavo kazalište [Dirty theatre], Pankrti [Bastards] (from Slovenia), and Patrola, but most influential of all were the two incarnations of azra, with its front man Branimir (‘Johnny’) Štulić (the break-up of the first azra gave rise to another influential band Film, led by Jura Stublić). following the death of tito there was a second wave, this time including bands from Belgrade, such as Šarlo akrobata [Charlie Chaplin], Idoli [idols] and Električni orgazam [electric orgasm], associated with the Student Cultural Centre and brought to wider notice by the ‘three Days of Young Slav Culture’ held in Belgrade

22 for an account of the rise and fall of Yugo-rock, see the chapter ‘rock Music’ in ramet 1996. 23 ibid.

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in 1980. the Serbian bands were later joined by Bora Đorđević’s riblja čorba [fish Chowder], whose inflammatory lyrics led them into a long series of conflicts with the censors on both ethical and political grounds. then, in the early 1980s, there was increasing dialogue between Zagreb and Belgrade, now involving more recent bands such as Darko rundek’s art-rock group Haustor [Stairway] from Zagreb. the major festival held in Subotica (begun way back in the 1960s) was instrumental in bringing leading Croatian and Serbian bands together. 1981 has been regarded by some of the key protagonists as the high point of this ‘New Wave’, with leading bands such as Paljavo kazalište and Azra migrating from the clubs to the bigger halls, selling more and more records, and smartening up their image at the same time. in examining this rock culture, it can be challenging to spell out the succession of genres and sub-genres. generic distinctions are often hard to draw in purely musical (as distinct from more general music-dance-behavioral) terms with such repertories; a performer in Paljavo kazalište remarked that the band became ‘punk’ more-or-less by accident, as they tried unsuccessfully to imitate The Rolling Stones. in any event, the active punk movement associated with the ‘New Wave’ soon spread all over Yugoslavia. and again it may be worth singling out Sarajevo, since the punk bands there were something of an inspiration to the influential ‘new primitive’ movement that emerged in the 1980s, contributing a distinctive brand of satirical neo-Zenitism to the mosaic of popular culture. the best known of the bands here was Zabranjeno pušenje [Smoking forbidden], with a later incarnation to which Kusturica would become attached for a time. Zabranjeno pušenje cultivated a deliberately insular ‘Balkanism’ that played on familiar stereotypes, spiced by parodic, almost pythonesque, elements. ‘We didn’t hear the roar coming from afar’, claimed one performer, referring to political rumblings in Kosovo and poland in the early ‘eighties. even those ‘New Wave’ bands that thought of themselves as countercultural but apolitical in impulse (in interviews with igor Mirković, some spoke of their inclination to create a ‘private universe’ of rock),24 were unable to insulate themselves from impinging political realities. leading players have discussed the effects of new financial stringencies (the power cuts, the petrol shortages, the rising foreign debt) that affected Zagreb

24 Mirković’s comment comes from his rockumentary film Sretno Dijete, which will be discussed in chapter 23.

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and Belgrade from 1982 onwards, together with the increasing ‘roar’ from Kosovo. ‘Zona sumraka’ [the twilight Zone] by Film, with its obvious double meanings, seemed to mark this change of tone. and it inaugurated something of a new period, during which some bands became more establishment-orientated while others became increasingly disillusioned, sensing that the dream had been shattered. already in the ‘eighties the exodus began, notably when the most socially aware of all the New Wave artists, Johnny Štulić, left Zagreb in 1990. others following in due course, and today the ‘New Wave’ heroes are scattered far and wide. the face of popular music was beginning to change in other ways. While bands such as Bijelo dugme and riblja čorba continued to attract huge audiences through the 1980s, alternative movements from the West were beginning to glimmer in the local discos. first there was a growing awareness of rap and hip-hop subcultures. these had the potential to foster feelings of social and political disadvantage, but they could equally carry the sense of a faddish interest in the most recent western trends. it is widely recognised that global rap could take on many different meanings according to context, and it seems likely that its meanings in Yugoslavia in the 1980s had less to do with its origins in black urban ghettos than with media-mediated images of a stereotyped ‘gangsta paradise’. it was mainly in the late 1980s that homemade varieties made their appearance. first there were musicians such as the Montenegrin rambo amadeus, whose early albums combined rap and pop-folk, but whose parodic play on styles became increasingly anti-establishment and politically activist with the outbreak of war. Secondly, and in sharp contrast, there was a self-consciously sophisticated countercultural avant-garde, often incorporating elements of classical music, and best represented by the elite and controversial Slovenian group Laibach, whose subversive political satire has proved to be notoriously open to misreading as fascistic.25 if neo-folk represented the most inward-looking tendencies of Yugoslav popular culture, increasingly appropriated by hard-line ethnonationalist politics, then Laibach was among the most outward-looking bands. this was a blatantly cosmopolitan Balkan critique that came from within but as though from without. We might take these positions to represent nationalist-conservative and cosmopolitan-modernist idioms respectively. it is tempting to draw paral-

25 Sabrina ramet’s reading of this group misses some of the play of meanings (ramet 1996, 102–4).

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lels with the debates that took place in art music half a century earlier in the first Yugoslavia, addressed of course to a rather different taste public. and as with those earlier debates, the categories might be refined. along the spectrum separating nationalist-conservative and cosmopolitan-modernist we might place nationalist-modernist and cosmopolitan-conservative. all four positions were represented by composers in the ‘thirties and bands in the ‘eighties, though it goes without saying that the categories are not watertight. and the parallel might be extended. the debates of the inter-war period – we noted the exchanges between Dobronić and osterc in Zvuk – were brutally overtaken by events (the outbreak of war), at which point there was a sharp polarisation of cultures. and when a polity finally intervened, it was the nationalist orientation that held sway. What effectively happened under state socialism was that alternatives were removed; they were squeezed out. Compare the late 1980s in popular music, where there was a similar polarisation of pop-folk and pop-rock, and where again it was all blown apart by the outbreak of war. When war finally came, it threw everything into the melting pot, styles and taste publics alike. even traditional folk instruments, such as the gusle and the tamburica, came to assume symbolic values in this political context (as noted in an earlier chapter), and especially when allied to popular music genres. here ‘folk’ and ‘pop’ fused in a blatantly ideological manner. Many of the established groups disbanded at this time. Bijelo dugme had the highest profile, but the case of riblja čorba was perhaps more representative. first they decided to disband; then they revoked the decision. finally, in the 1990s, they were victims of the increasingly polarised attitudes that inevitably accompanied the wars, as Bora Đorđević’s support for arkan and for the Serbian action in Bosnia and herzegovina (though he was no fan of Milošević) and his collaboration with the nationalist turbo-folk singer Baja Mali Knindža lost him a fan base in key quarters. it was characteristic of the separating power bases associated with these twilight years of the second Yugoslavia. and in this polarised context it was of course the nationalist orientation that rode high under official political prescription, a process documented by eric D. gordy precisely in the terms of a ‘destruction of alternatives’, and not just musical alternatives.26 gordy tells us how the rock culture enabled by the liberal version of Communism found in Yugoslavia was pushed to the margins under Milošević, though he may exaggerate the extent to which the dictator was

26 gordy 1999. See also hudson 2007.

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directly in control of such events. Belgrade rock increasingly narrowed the cultural space available to it by explicitly critiquing the association of neo-folk with the regime, and thus allowing itself to become ghettoised. it cultivated more explicitly, in short, the critical voice that was implicit in this genre under state socialism. the whole process, associated with the independent radio station B-92, was also described (more anecdotally and with a good deal less balance) in Matthew Collin’s book This is Serbia Calling.27 put over-simply, gordy and Collin show that the disintegration of the market for a subversive rock culture was directly correlated to the rise of a legitimising and affirmative turbo-folk music, a music that was endlessly promoted by state-controlled media such as tV pink and tV palma. in this way, the Milošević regime operated a propaganda machine that entered into private and leisure space, blocking out alternatives. it would become a case study in the uses and abuses of power, in whose service media technologies were all-important. While he does not articulate it in quite these terms, gordy reveals to us that the engagement between popular music and politics could take multiple forms. for one, music could function as an ‘unknowing’ index of, or product of, social and political change. the development of newly composed folk music out of a particular kind of social disadvantage, whether among the primitivci or the gastarbajteri, was of that order. for another, music could be subject to political appropriation. here we would note the hijacking of traditional music by the Communist regime and of neo-folk and later turbo-folk by ethnonationalist agendas, not just by the Milošević regime, but in a very different way by some Muslim groups in Bosnia and herzegovina.28 Music could also act as an active agent of political subversion in the last days of Communism, in some cases exerting a powerful sub- or counter-cultural charge. Some rom repertories acquired these connotations as early as the 1970s, but in the late 1980s rock bands such as riblja čorba likewise qualified. and conversely, music – in some cases the very same bands (Riblja čorba is a case in point) – could function as propaganda for a militant, celebratory ethnonationalism, as with some of the explicit pro-war messages articulated by Serbian and Croatian artists alike in the early 1990s.

27 Collin 2001. 28 hogg 2004.

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Simulacra: Wedding Music and More the combination of a semi-privatised recording industry and a relatively liberal version of state socialism enabled a popular music industry to develop in Yugoslavia earlier than elsewhere in Communist South east europe. Western-influenced rock and pop music may have embodied counter-cultural values (it was of its nature contra the status quo in a Communist state), but it was at least performed in the major Yugoslav capitals. Matters were rather different in romania and Bulgaria, to say nothing of albania. these countries were subject to more stringent political constraints, and the familiar socialist-realist position on western and western-influenced popular culture was accordingly rigorously enforced. it was thus much more difficult for Western rock to establish itself as a model of dissent. there was, however, a yet greater enemy. the authorities in romania and Bulgaria reserved most of their fire power for genres and performance styles that connoted ‘the east’, and that meant not just turkish and rom, but also greek and Serbian, popular music. Mono-ethnicity was a key component of political philosophy in these states. there was an expectation that all expressions of culture should be ‘purely’ Bulgarian or ‘purely’ romanian, an expectation that was formalised by Ceauşescu’s so-called ‘July theses’ of 1971, and a decade later by massive campaigns of re-nationalisation in Bulgaria. Both states were concerned about the political aspirations of their ethnic minority populations, especially turks and roma, and both engaged in draconian methods of suppression, from expulsion to forced assimilation. in Bulgaria that included the Bulgarising of turkish or romani names. Music was not immune from these campaigns. it was obvious to the political authorities that little could be done to curtail rom music-making, given the ubiquity of the practice. But the leading musicians and their bands were subject to close political control. they were expected to perform only what was officially acknowledged to be native folk music, and to avoid the ‘oriental idioms’ that had developed out of earlier traditions of ottoman-influenced urban popular music. those traditions included čalgiya and muzica lăutărească, as well as the orientalised songs known as manele in romania, a kind of romanian equivalent to sevdalinkas in Bosnia and Serbia or amanedes in greece. the official view of these oriental idioms was that they were culturally regressive, and they were accordingly banned from official public platforms, including media channels. But there were limits to the control that could be exerted over live

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performances, especially privately commissioned performances for occasions such as weddings. By the 1970s ‘ethnic’ repertories and performance styles were very much alive and well at unofficial performance sites where roma musicians were employed. and precisely because of the political constraints, this music began to acquire a subversive political edge. Wedding music, in which rom musicians played a leading role, emerged as important in Bulgaria at this time, acquiring the status of a high-kudos mass-cultural genre. Based on reformulations of a čalgiya idiom, it became the model of an alternative culture, a voice of dissent not just for ethnic minorities but also for a larger youth movement. articulated mainly in live performance and through privately circulated cassettes, this voice was necessarily moderated when the svatbarski orkestri [wedding orchestras] assumed the more public roles that inevitably accompanied their growing fame. on such occasions they were obliged to perform what was deemed to be an unpolluted Bulgarian repertory. a classic case in point concerned the major ‘star’ of wedding music, and in many ways its pioneer, ivo papazov. in his comments on papazov, timothy rice demonstrates that he had to tread a fine line between subversion and acquiescence.29 it is clear that the real issue for the authorities was how they might manage to ‘contain’ a figure like papazov, and the repertory and performance style associated with him. Certainly by the late 1980s he had achieved an iconic status in Bulgarian music, and he retains that status even today, as a glance through the record stores of Sofia quickly indicates. Yet questions arise about the changing significance of his music, and of svatbarska muzika in general. as wedding music was absorbed by a developing popular culture industry in Bulgaria, it began to lose something of its critical edge. indeed in the closing years of the Communist era it became increasingly difficult (at least for a non-expert like myself ) to separate out wedding music from other forms of popular music with a basis in folk and ‘oriental’ music. generic borders were blurred, with influences registered not only from western pop and rock, but from neighbouring Balkan cultures, including the Yugoslav neo-folk that could be heard on Serbian radio stations and through a black market in ‘pirate’ cassettes. it was from this alloy that pop-folk, later to be known as chalga, was forged in Bulgaria. the label chalga signals a distant derivation from čalgiya, but the musical idiom was really more like a Bulgarian-Macedonian variant of turbo-folk. the point to make here is that although chalga was really only properly established in the 1990s,

29 rice 2004, 70–2.

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musical tastes were already receptive to the idiom, given the extensive contact with rom musics, and with the new ethno-pop styles coming from Serbia, greece and turkey. and it goes without saying that the association of these repertories with cultural decay – with a decadent east rather than a progressive and stable europe – was already well grounded. a similar story might be told of romania. again there was romani music, including manele, which retained points of contact with the older lǎutar traditions, and was circulated largely through private performances and on cassettes. again it was considered subversive by the authorities and was given no real access to official media. and again there was influence from neighbouring cultures. as Margaret Beissinger points out, Bulgarian svatbarska muzika crossed the southern border freely, just as Serbian neo-folk idioms made their way to Banat, where Serbian musicians commonly performed at weddings, and from there to the rest of the country (they were also disseminated through foreign radio channels).30 Beissinger also points out that in timişoara underground tapes of lǎutar music, somewhat on the model of Serbian neo-folk, were produced in private studios and then sold on the black market. and she comments on the names assigned to these pop-folk repertories. for a time the generic term muzicǎ sârbeasǎ (Serbian Music) was used to describe the kind of ethnopop that was heard more and more commonly, but always unofficially, in romania. then, in its subsequent (mainly post-Communist) crystallisation, the romanian species of pop-folk was known as muzica orientalǎ; and eventually the older term manele was adopted. like its counterpart in Bulgaria, this title announces a particular historical genealogy and a particular range of associations. the larger message is that Yugoslav neo-folk became popular across much of the Balkans in the 1980s, even before separate indigenous genres emerged in romania, Bulgaria and albania. and there were similar developments in greece, despite the different political context (see chapter 20), suggesting that much deeper questions of identity were raised by this repertory. in the Communist world, the ascendancy of pop-folk registered a shift in the political significance of popular music. it is hard to see popfolk as a counter-cultural movement of the kind represented by svatbarska muzika in the 1970s, for example. indeed it came to take on a range of very different meanings in the late Communist world, many of them unrelated to the political system as such, and for that reason capable of

30 Beissinger 2007.

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outliving it. Most typically, it was regarded as trashy and tasteless. this was certainly the view of those who were keen to reinforce links with the West. So as the european Union beckoned in a post-Communist world, pop-folk was associated by some with a rural, backward culture, by others with a decadent, permissive and eastern culture, and by yet others as a symbol of strengthening ethnonationalist aspirations. later i will examine why such different political positions could be inscribed in this genre. But one part of the answer might well be broached here by looking at the changing status of ‘folk music’ more generally. it is interesting to reflect on how two major categories, ‘art music’ and ‘popular music’, appropriated, hosted, or alternatively rejected, a third category, ‘folk music’, across Communist South east europe. there are two evolving histories here, and they might be presented as follows. Within art music there were three principal stages. the hosted folk ingredient was de rigueur in the immediate post-war years. it was an officially sanctioned – even imposed – marker of both national and (idealised) class identities. the second stage saw the rejection or squeezing out of folk music under a modernist imperative, signalling a form of ‘progress’, an alignment to the Western world, and with that a certain loss of locality. the third stage (at least for a significant number of composers) reinstated folk music in the very different form of a poeticised archaism in the renewed quest for local (Balkan) identities. the trajectory followed by popular music corresponded very roughly to the second and third of these three stages. thus the folk element was initially absent from what was a subversive music in this political context. But in due course it began to inflect internationalist pop-rock idioms, and again the impulse seems to have been a perceived need to foreground local identities within a global culture. What, though, of our third category, folk music itself, considered this time as a host rather than a guest genre? here we might trace a process of generic mixing, as this category opened itself to influences from the other two categories in turn. the two stages by which this occurred have already been outlined. in the first stage traditional music, with clear ritual meanings related to the calendar, was translated to the world of folk orchestras, concert stages and folk festivals. the translation involved the addition of european harmony, and along with that came negotiations with Western (equal) temperament and the introduction of some manufactured european instruments to the folk ensemble. the second stage was marked by a much more obvious engagement with the world of commercial show business, including electronic instrumentation, big sound systems, and the performance conventions and characteristic idioms associated with a

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whole succession of genres of western popular music. the general direction here was towards smaller bands, star soloists and marketing strategies that belonged to a privatised popular music industry. earlier in this chapter i briefly referred to Jean Baudrillard. there is, i believe, some value in relating these two transformations of folk music to the second and third orders proposed by Baudrillard in his theory of simulacra.31 thus the Soviet-style folk orchestras that were found all over this region in the early Communist years might be understood as a kind of displacement of meaning. recognisable symbols ‘stood for’, but at the same time served to occlude, original meanings. the reality represented by a particular system of signs was displaced in effect by an image based on the same system on what Baudrillard called a ‘principle of equivalence’. it was not a new reality, but an image standing for the old reality. it was recognisable as ‘artificial’, but we were asked to believe nonetheless that the artificial image bore some relation to the reality it represented. in many concert performances given by the state folk ensembles, and in the videos they made, this collusion was encouraged by rather literal representations of the real, where village rituals would be reproduced on the stage in the form of little dramatic scenes, framing the songs and dances. Neo-folk, on the other hand, is more easily equated to Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra. it is radically dislocated from any originary reality and instead merely ‘plays at being an appearance’. the folk elements are reified and take on an autonomous quality, their symbolic value now complicated by loss of memory, spurious nostalgia (i.e. for a world that was unknown), and the interpolation of either an alienated urban experience or an experience of exile. in Baudrillard’s terms they become a façade, and if they represent anything it is an absence. there are two points that might be made about this. one is that this third order of simulacra is susceptible to political appropriation, precisely because any reality lying behind the simulacra has evaporated; there is no being behind the appearance. to borrow Baudrillard’s language, the systems of signs now ‘lend themselves to all systems of equivalence’. and the other is that in this third order the simulacra have a capacity to replace reality, to become a new reality, effectively negating the sign. ‘the territory no longer precedes the map’, says Baudrillard with reference to his now-classic appropriation of the Márquez story. this is perhaps especially relevant to the representations of a musical east that became part and parcel of neo-folk music.

31 Baudrillard 1988.

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it was only with the fall of Communism that such third-order simulacra were fully registered. But already in the 1980s, overtly in Yugoslavia and unofficially elsewhere, the stage was prepared for a time when an orientalised pop-folk would be all but ubiquitous, heard in every taxi, and on every radio and tV music programme all over the Balkans. the genre markers are recognisably part of an ottoman legacy. But they are syncretic, and as a result they function on a purely operational level: as signifiers without a single signified. More crucially, the collective identity that might register such symbols as the inscription of a shared history (a history that excludes ‘the West’) engages in a much simpler act of substitution, for which other orientalist markers might and do serve just as well. More often than not such markers are actually products of a western cultural production, the outcome of those globalising tendencies that we associate today with ‘world music’. and it is because both ‘easts’ are present simultaneously – ‘backwards and Balkan’ and ‘glamorous and global’ is how one author describes them32 – that conventional signification breaks down. in this particular imaginary, this myth of the east, only the simulacra are left.

32 Catherine Baker in a paper delivered to the aSN globalization, Nationalism and ethnic Conflict Conference in Belgrade 2006. See also parts of chapter 6 of Baker 2010.

Chapter tWentY

one Got aWaY Popular art Music: Theodorakis at Large among the Chopin celebrations of 1960, one passed virtually unnoticed. on 12 March, the academy of athens honoured the 150th anniversary of Chopin’s birth with a lecture and concert. the concert included some of the seldom-performed songs. It was not the first time they had been given in the Greek capital. Forty years earlier, in 1920, a group of them had been performed by the eminent Greek soprano speranta Calo. One of those in the audience had been Kalomiris, then aged 37, and before the 1960 concert it was an elderly Kalomiris who delivered the lecture on Chopin. subsequently published in the bulletin of the national Conservatory, its title might be translated as The national Vibration in Chopin’s Music.1 Kalomiris began by comparing Chopin to digenes akritas, the hero of byzantine legend, whose double origins (arab-Greek; east-west) epitomised the duality often taken as a determining factor of modern Greek sensibility. Chopin’s double origins (polish-French) were read as analogous, and thus as a kind of validation of Kalomiris’s project for Greek music; it will be remembered that he referred to a ‘Greek-oriental’ style. he strengthened the analogy by discussing Chopin’s importance for the russian nationalists on one hand and for modern French music on the other. we can ignore the false modesty at the end of his lecture. ‘i am neither a musicologist nor a music historian’, said Kalomiris, ‘not even a music critic [. . .]. I am simply a composer, a singer who has also dreamt, however unsuccessfully, of writing music born of the legends, traditions and sufferings of our fatherland. Of course, in comparison to the magnificent song of the polish troubadour, which reaches to the heavens, mine seems coarse, feeble, and unworthy of discussion’.2 needless-to-say, the real message was exactly the opposite. In describing and praising Chopin, Kalomiris was describing and praising himself.

1   Kalomiris 1961. 2 Ibid., 35–6.

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ever the polemicist, Kalomiris used his Chopin lecture to proselytise for his understanding of a Greek national school, although by 1960 this brand of romantic nationalism was already an anachronism. Increasingly the Kalomiris agenda was sidelined by the ‘popular art songs’ associated with hadjidakis and theodorakis, which were received by many as the authentic ‘voice of Greece’.3 there are indeed interesting political issues involved here, given that Greece was the only country in the region to find itself on the american side during the Cold war. Following the elections of 1952, which drew a line under the Civil war, the other post-war music that gained official acceptance (though it was hardly popular) was a modernist project in the spirit of the ‘new music’ of the west. this was associated above all with the two papaioannous and with a group of younger composers who were anxious to stress Greece’s european credentials. as we noted in chapter 12, modernism had been tried and found wanting during the inter-war period. that the composer papaioannou succeeded in acclimatising the new music to Greece where Mitropoulos and Skalkottas failed is less a comment on the quality of the music on offer than on the changing political climate. this was the context for that Kalomiris lecture. On one hand ‘popular art songs’ were emerging as a new kind of national music. On the other hand, there was an avant-garde that could be read as an implicit, US-supported, culture critique of the eastern bloc. the Kalomiris lecture, then, was not just the last gasp of a movement that had already become history; it was also – even if unwittingly – on the ‘wrong’ side of the political divide, committing to the kind of nationalist project associated with the Soviet bloc; indeed Kalomiris’s investment in national opera reinforced the point. I say ‘unwittingly’ because his earlier political affiliations had been Venizelist and then right-orientated. after the war, in the polarised politics of the late 1940s and 1950s, he kept a low profile. But there was little appetite for recrimination against so-called collaborators at this time. For one thing, centre-right parties were much too concerned about the Communist threat to bother with Kalomiris, and for another some of the Communists were inclined to protect him. he may have represented the conservative establishment of Greek music in the 1950s, but his position was largely apolitical, motivated above all by the need to find the most favourable conditions for art.

3 as noted in chapter 3, ‘popular art song’ is not an adequate translation of the term used by theodorakis. a more literal translation might be ‘artistic popular songs’.

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It is instructive to compare this with the approach of theodorakis, whose popular art songs and film scores would become in due course all but synonymous with Greece. theodorakis was not just politically committed to the Marxist left; he had political ambitions and indeed a political career. In his early years he paid a price for his activities in the resistance and Civil war, including arrest and imprisonment, but with the defeat of the Communists – made possible partly by the secession of neighbouring yugoslavia, but mainly by military and financial investment from north america – he channelled his disaffection into his music. I will come to that in a moment. But it is worth noting that his reputation as a composer led to his wider acceptance as an heroic anti-establishment figure, and to a renewed engagement with activist politics. this was more successful when it took the form of worldwide concert tours that could turn his charisma to political ends than when he held political office. he was first elected to the Greek parliament in 1964. then during the dictatorship he became a cult figure of huge symbolic importance, returning from exile as a national hero. In later, post-Junta, years his attempts to secure political influence were less successful, despite several spells as a member of the Greek parliament, and a brief period as a minister. the turning point in theodorakis’s creative development came in the late 1950s. he had moved to paris in 1954, and it seems that this focused his choices prior to his return to Greece in 1959. Before and during the paris years he composed symphonic and chamber works drawing on traditional music – Cretan and other – in the spirit of the national school. But increasingly he expressed his dissatisfaction with existing models of Greek national music, while at the same time resisting the modernist direction of his compatriot Iannis Xenakis, also living in paris at this time. For theodorakis, little of this music, whether national romantic or modernist, was engaging with a wider public. Immediately on his return to Greece in 1959 he launched an attack on the Greek musical establishment in the magazine Kritiki, and a year later – the very year of Kalomiris’s Chopin lecture – he followed through with a manifesto (also in Kritiki) arguing for the reform of musical education, for a programme of popular concerts, and for serious study of indigenous music, including chant.4 he was calling for a national music that would be Greek from the start, rather than one that expressed its Greekness in modern european terms. the first compositional outcome of this new thinking was his song cycle

4 holst 1980, 43–44.

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epitaphios, composed in paris in 1958 to texts by the leftwing poet yannis ritsos about the death of a striker, and presented to the public in 1960. this turned out to be a landmark event. the background to epitaphios, and in particular its relationship to hadjidakis’s lecture on rebetika, was sketched in Chapter 10. however, fine-tuning is necessary, not least to clarify the difference in perspective between hadjidakis and theodorakis. Gail holst tells the story.5 the performance of epitaphios in 1960 made use of the well-known rebetika singer Grigoris Bithikotsis and the bouzouki player Manolis hiotis. two recordings were then made, one by hadjidakis in an orchestration for conventional instruments and with the singer nana Mouskouri, and the other by theodorakis with Bithikotsis and hiotis. that theodorakis had been unable to secure a recording of his own orchestral version because members of the radio orchestra refused to perform alongside a bouzouki player speaks volumes about the continuing prejudice against rebetika. these songs were still associated with a decadent, low-grade culture, at least when presented in the raw form of which the bouzouki was taken to be emblematic. a controversy arose over the two recordings of the piece, and the success of the theodorakis version endorsed his growing empathy with mass culture and popular music. From this point onwards the two composers diverged, though they remained mutually supportive. Between them they carved out a space for a new kind of national music that appealed to a very wide spectrum of Greek society. the songs of hadjidakis, who might be considered the godfather, if not the father, of the new popular art song, are settings of poetry ancient and modern, encompassing a wide range of expression, and with sophisticated, intricate accompaniments often provided or fine-tuned by tasos Karakatsanis. Like several of his piano pieces, they remain at some distance from anything we might want to call popular music and are closer to a light classical idiom. although undoubtedly influenced by some elements of rebetika, these songs are often scored for voice and piano, and their carefully crafted harmonies are positioned a long way from the earthiness of rebetika prototypes. In later life hadjidakis continued to write songs (many to texts by nikos Gatsos), theatre music and film scores for a largely bourgeois audience, eschewing the mass culture eagerly embraced by theodorakis. Some of the songs, including the cycles Mythologia (1965) and o megalos eroticos (1971–71), can sit happily enough in a recital of

5 Ibid., 44 ff.

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art music, and several of the piano pieces are not so distant from pieces by composers from the Kalomiris circle. yet invariably there is a foundation in the familiar melodic and rhythmic patterns of Greek popular music, and on occasion there is a swerve towards an idiom with greater mass appeal. his association with nana Mouskouri, whom he discovered and promoted, but whose later global fame did something to return the favour, helped keep him in the public eye. So too did his Oscar-winning score for the Jules Dassin film never on Sunday, especially given its association with Dassin’s wife Melina Mercouri. One of the key ingredients of hadjidakis’s musical world, distinguishing it clearly from more commercial forms of popular music, was his respect for, and ear for, poetry of real artistic merit. there are analogies here with a particular species of popular, ‘literary’ chanson in France (Brassens, Ferré, Gainsbourg).6 But in any case the new entekhno laïko tragoudhi [popular art song] or ‘poetry set to music’ took its stand on an intimate connection between poetry of status, old and new, and demotic musical idioms. this was no less true of theodorakis. ritsos was only one of the highly valued ‘30s Generation’ modernist poets to whom he turned in later years; indeed his central aim was to present this poetry to a wider public by way of a music with popular appeal (this was not always greeted with approval by the poets themselves). there was, however, a major difference in orientation between the two artists. Unlike theodorakis, hadjidakis was not inclined towards poetry of political commitment. he was reluctant to identify explicitly with populist causes, and it was this more than anything that separated him off from the cultish popularity enjoyed by theodorakis. For theodorakis the message was all, and popular appeal was essential. he forged his melodic style from traditional music of various kinds, including rural dance songs, Byzantine chant and rebetika, but from epitaphios onwards he avoided the kinds of sophisticated appropriations of traditional music associated with the national school, aiming instead at direct communicative simplicity. For this reason his accompaniments tend to be unobtrusive and uncomplicated, for nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the poetic message. at the same time his artistic ambition remained high. he wanted his music to endure, but he also wanted it to reach the people, and that 6 papanikolaou 2007. there are close parallels between the two traditions, and especially the use of high-prestige poetry to generate a ‘superior’ form of popular song. papanikolaou discusses the critical discourses that developed around these two national canons, comparing Brassens, Ferré and Gainsbourg with theodorakis, hadjidakis and Savvopoulos.

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meant establishing clear points of contact with a world they already knew and loved. not for nothing did he give the title Music of the Masses to an account of his work.7 It was epitaphios that crystallised this aesthetic, and in doing so it helped create what was in effect a new kind of popular music in Greece. Several of the songs in this cycle have roots in the rebetika idiom, though that had not really been part of theodorakis’s earlier musical experience, and the bouzouki (pace hadjidakis) is essential to any adequate realisation of the work as a whole. the association of this instrument with disadvantage and repression – with the world of the rebetes – perfectly caught the mood of ritsos’s elegy to a victim of dictatorship, based on an incident from 1936, the time of the Metaxas regime. here poetry, politics and music are inextricably intertwined in a work of affecting simplicity, and one whose melodic substance took its shape and character alike from Byzantine chant, island folk melodies and rebetika. It is no surprise that some of these songs, perhaps especially the third, ‘a Day in May’, have retained their popularity in recitals of Greek popular song. Following the performances and recordings of epitaphios in 1960, theodorakis became more active politically. Several works were banned by the Karamanlis government, and in the wake of the Lambrakis affair (the murder in 1963 of a prominent left-wing dissident) he was thrust to the forefront of left-wing politics as president of the Lambrakis youth Movement. a year later he was elected to parliament. at the same time he continued to compose, extending the range of his new manner in two different directions, neatly represented by two scores of 1964. One was music of almost iconic popular appeal, his film score for the nikos Kazantzakisbased film Zorba the Greek, whose syrtos dance is known the world over. the other was the song cycle axion esti, thought by some to be his finest achievement. the poem, a seminal text by the ‘30s generation’ author Odysseus elytis, took its title and design from the Orthodox liturgy (compare epitaphios), though it is at the same time a celebration of, and lament for, hellenism (the ‘30s generation poets were exercised by this synthesis). accordingly, as Gail holst points out, Orthodox chant is an obvious presence in the melodic material.8 holst’s reference to Stravinsky is also apt, though it would be misleading to suggest that theodorakis had ventured into a Modernist world here, even in his opening depiction of chaos. In

7 theodorakis 1972. 8 holst 1980, 82–99.

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reality it is the group of popular songs (accompanied by bouzoukis and santouri) that stay in the memory rather than the more self-consciously ‘classical’ music. In the end, classifying this music is treacherous. Such was the range of the middle ground theodorakis and hadjidakis occupied that distinctions between ‘art music’ and ‘popular music’ were blurred; hence the term ‘popular art song’. On occasion the borderline could be further smudged by the choice of performer. Just as nana Mouskouri could widen the popular appeal of songs by hadjidakis, so George Dalaras performing theodorakis’s axion esti could draw a work of some classical ambition into the realm of commercially successful popular music. what is never in doubt is the nationalist import of the music. During the Junta it cemented the cultural nation both at home and abroad, and when theodorakis returned to Greece, he was fêted as a national hero. the audiences for his concerts crossed all social boundaries, and the entekhno laïko tragoudhi conquered all. It was a triumph for theodorakis and, in a sense, a triumph for music. yet in subsequent years his political influence waned, and we are left with a hint of the crusader without a cause. It may be that this also influenced his creativity. In the 1970s and 1980s he began to explore new creative territories, and in some cases added a further layer of artistic ambition to his music, perhaps aware that he was losing much of his popular appeal to new forms of popular culture. aside from the ‘flow songs’ composed in these years, departing from familiar dance rhythms but retaining some basis in indigenous melodic archetypes, he developed what he himself identified as a ‘symphonic’ dimension from 1980 onwards, once more turning to european forms and even to opera. with this greater pretension, he moved just a little closer to the position adopted by hadjidakis, whose songs were regarded in some circles as representing a distinctly superior form of ‘popular music’, and who had in any case always had more than a foot in the camp of ‘serious’ music. hadjidakis not only established the Orchestra of Colours, but set up and personally financed a prize for younger Greek composers, of which one recipient was none other than Iannis Xenakis; he even commissioned Xenakis to compose music for a production of the Hiketides [the Suppliants] for the epidauros theatre. and for a crucial few years, he was also Director of the State radio’s third programme. Ideologically committed to modernism, hadjidakis was more aware than anyone that his own talent lay elsewhere. and for younger composers, just emerging from the conservatories, it was the range of possibilities afforded by his popular art song that seemed attractive.

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as to theodorakis, the overriding popularity of his earlier works was seldom regained. Greece was changing, and it seems that its cultural needs were changing too. One symptom was a revival of interest in ‘original’ rebetika in the 1970s, accompanied by re-releases of early recordings. having introduced this music to a wider public, theodorakis was now in danger of falling victim to an ethos of authenticity. But he was also challenged on home ground. younger singer-songwriters were emerging, and they subtly changed the tone of popular art songs to address new audiences. prominent among them were yannis Markopoulos and Dionysios Savvopoulos, left-wing composers whose output might be compared to that of theodorakis, though they each trod an individual path (neither was really suited to the big mass concerts patronised by theodorakis). Both remained in Greece during the dictatorship, and became foci for anti-establishment sentiment at home. holst suggests that Markopoulos, despite securing a following among youth audiences in the 1970s, failed ultimately to mount a successful challenge to theodorakis as a darling of the left, though he did help shake off the association of traditional music with the Junta. Savvopoulos, on the other hand, was a true original, and arguably caught the mood of post-Junta Greece more accurately than theodorakis. Both his satirical tone and the mood of resignation and acceptance that comes through in so many of his ‘rock ballads’ struck a chord with younger audiences (later he played a role in promoting paradhosiaka).9 people were growing weary of heroics. For all that his capacity to speak for the nation diminished, theodorakis lives on, literally and metaphorically, not just for a significant body of work that retains its ability to evoke patriotic feeling, but as the instigator of a particular kind of alliance between sophisticated (modernist) poetry and popular song. this alliance proved to be enduring. there is still an audience today for popular singers and singer-songwriters who remain separate from more commercial forms of popular music. their repertory is catholic, ranging from theodorakis and folksong arrangements to medieval ballads and Sephardic romances, as well as the so-called piotiko tragoudhi [quality song] that is the most obvious direct descendent of the popular art song. these singers are so numerous that to name a few seems invidious. George Dalaras has been mentioned from the (now) older generation, and it should be added here that he was one of those involved

9 as eleni Kallimopoulou notes, he was the producer of the album dhinamis tou egheou [powers of the agean] by the band of that name in the mid 1980s. Kallimopoulou 2009.

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in the revival of rebetika. then there are the divas, including Savina yannatou, eleftheria arvanitaki, haris alexiou and Vicki Leandros. and there are younger artists still emerging today. a singer such as athena andreadis belongs more to the world of popular art song than to commercial pop. what is true of all of these singers is that they eschew the explicit political content – as distinct from a more generalised patriotism or nostalgia – that was part and parcel of theodorakis’s music. art Music: Modernism is Official Greece has hardly figured in recent debates about US cultural aid in post-war europe. the questions raised by these debates have become familiar. to what extent was cultural aid an extension of US foreign policy, and how far were european artists and intellectuals, mostly with explicit leftist sympathies, aware of what George Kennan, architect of the Marshall plan, called the ‘necessary lie’? when the new york times and the journal Ramparts broke the story of CIa covert operations in 1966–67, the floodgates opened; we learnt about nabukov’s Congress of Cultural Freedom,10 about CIa backing for the magazines Preuves, Der Monat, and Encounter, about ‘quiet channels’ such as the Ford and rockefeller Foundations, and about the ‘consortium’ of ex-Communists. as to the awareness of artists, some were no doubt blissfully ignorant. as one national Security directive of July 1950 stated, the most effective propaganda allows ‘the subject [to] move in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’.11 Some were under no illusions: Isaiah Berlin, in private correspondence, remarked that the subject was sensitive: a minefield. and some, including hugh trevor-roper at the launch of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, immediately smelt a rat. there is now an extensive literature dealing with the place of music within the campaign.12 the US Information Service pumped money into american orchestras on tour, scholarships, american house programmes and so on and so forth.13 what remains more of an open question, however, is how far there was an ideological charge attached to particular kinds of repertory. It is tempting to see a mirror image of code switching

10 Saunders 1999. See also Carroll 2003. 11   Saunders 1999, 4. 12 Saunders 1999; Beal 2006; thacker 2007; Monod 2005. 13 Beal 2006.

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in the Soviet bloc, with the avant-garde as an insignia of the Free world: anti-Communist as well as anti-Fascist. In the case of France and occupied west Germany, this oversimplifies the picture; it is not without foundation, but needs qualification. what one might say is that the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the radio stations of the occupied zones in west Germany, and other USIS-sponsored activities made room for an avantgarde to develop (almost a definition of Isaiah Berlin’s so-called ‘negative freedom’).14 But propaganda was only part of the story. Local agendas surfaced, and there are alternative narratives for the ideology of a post-war avant-garde. at least recent literature has exposed something of an asymmetry in earlier musical scholarship dealing with the Cold war era, where ideology and propaganda were regarded as the province of the eastern bloc, and the western avant-garde was somehow apolitical. against this background how are we to locate Greece in the post-Civil war years? political power moved decisively to the right following the elections of 1952, and from that point onwards the Cold war ensured that Communists were confined to opposition. however, if power moved to the right, culture moved to the left. the Communist cause, or at least the cause of a broadly humanist left, gathered around itself the sympathies and talents of a very broad swathe of the artistic and intellectual community. In the battle of ideas, the left held sway, and it was helped by a long tradition of anti-establishment thought in Greece. a figure such as theodorakis belonged centrally within this tradition, and although he could appear a maverick figure at times, he was able to draw a following from right across the social spectrum. that his more political music was periodically banned was of considerable help. But there were other threats to his domination of popular music, not least the sudden influx of americaninfluenced mass culture, siphoning off a major part of his support. this may have been partly responsible for the greater ambition of some of his later music. But the space he might have hoped to enter was already occupied, and not just by the Kalomiris circle. art music, invariably dependent on some measure of official support (even when it appears dissenting), was taking new directions in Greece, and as usual they were inseparable from politics. Greece depended heavily on the US during the later stages of the Civil war, both militarily and economically, and that dependence, closely tied to Cold war strategy, ensured that it became hardly less of a ‘client state’

14 Berlin 1969.

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than its northern neighbours. the truman Doctrine, introduced in 1947 with reference to both Greece and turkey, was the first stage in a sustained US programme (formalised by the Marshall plan and the establishment of natO) designed ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. at this time – the late 1940s – there was still a perceived need to prevent Greece falling under Soviet influence. and it was considered no less imperative to harness both Greece and turkey to natO. It hardly helped that the two nations veered from one crisis to another in relation to Cyprus, but this simply made it all the more essential to maintain stability at all costs, given their strategic importance to the western defence system. One of the costs involved was US support for the military junta, whose human rights record was notorious. In offering that support america lost much of its standing in Greek eyes. It was one of several reasons for the gradual shift of focus away from america and towards western europe that culminated in eU membership in 1981.15 Long before any of this, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the main influence culturally had been Britain. through the anglo-hellenic Information Service and later the British Council there was some exposure to modern British music, including a festival, representation on the Friday evening radio broadcasts, British guest conductors of the athens State SO, and commentaries in the anglo-hellenic review.16 Something of this proselytising mission comes over in the British Council report to the Foreign Office in 1946, from which document it is clear that Cold war positions have not yet been clearly defined. ‘It is felt that russia, in spite of the vast advances which she has made under Soviet rule and in spite of the immense interest of her social, political and economic experiment, differs too widely both in her problems and in her mentality to have much to offer to Greece; while america, though interested platonically in Greece and a source of inexhaustible material supply, cannot really understand or help the Greeks in their present situation’. Such sentiments would have been inconceivable a year later, and not just because of the benign view of Soviet rule. Indeed if we leaf through the pages of the anglo-hellenic

15 In reality, the eeC countries had been Greece’s major trading partners for some time before that. 16 there are some intriguing exchanges between the British Council in athens and the Foreign Office on these matters: including the request to send modern english music ‘urgently by air: they have nothing but Vaughn williams and Quilter’. FO 024/162. 9 March ‘From athens to FO’ (Sir r. Leeper). national archives, London.

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review we can almost literally graph the cultural withdrawal of the British, as they handed over to the Germans and their americans mentors from around 1947 onwards.17 It was in 1952 that the first Goethe Institute outside Germany was founded in athens, and it promoted a series of concerts of music by Greek and German composers that culminated in the highly ambitious Goethe Institute workshops for Contemporary Music, co-organised by the musicologist John G. papaioannou and the German composer Gunther Becker, at that time resident in Greece. then, in the same year, a series of ‘american’ concerts was initiated, funded by the US Information Service and held at their film room on Monday evenings (where USIS-funded propaganda films were regularly shown) with the explicit aim of introducing contemporary music to Greece (there were comparable initiatives in turkey).18 programmes were mainly of music by Greek and american composers, and typically they combined recorded performances of american music with live performances of Greek chamber works. these events not only helped displace the national School; they encouraged the development of a modernist culture among native Greek composers, including, as we noted in chapter 12, established figures such as Zoras and poniridis. this is not to claim political motivations on the part of the composers themselves. rather it is to argue that a space was opened up by Cold war politics for a modernist music that was assured of some level of official backing. to some extent this simply duplicated the pattern observable in western europe. when adorno referred to the ‘ageing’ of the new music, he partly meant the transformation of an avantgarde from the explosive, dissenting ‘new’ of the first half of the twentieth century into the officially sponsored ‘new’ of its second half. But in Greece this sequence was played out in a particularly blatant form. Modernist music was one way to express an allegiance to the west, and to distinguish clearly an official Greek culture from the socialist realism of the eastern bloc. Such cultural aid culminated in the hellenic weeks of Contemporary Music inaugurated in 1966, and running through with several breaks until 1976. the programming tells a fascinating story (especially in relation to the canonising of Skalkottas), but hardly less significant was the pattern

17 I am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for his help with this topic. 18 regarding the introduction of musical modernism in athens see romanou 2006b, 234–7.

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of sponsorship. here we can see very clearly the context within which Greek modernism had its moment in the sun. For the first week (1966) the principal external sponsor was the Goethe Institute. For the second week (1967) the cultural office of the US embassy joined in, and the programme reflected that. then, for the third week (1968), organised within the period of the Junta, most of the funding came from the Ford Foundation, and exactly the same was true of the fourth week (1971). For the last of the weeks (1976), now post-Junta, all external funding was withdrawn, and it is obvious from the acknowledgements and Introduction on the programme that there had been great difficulty in securing local funding.19 the inauguration of the hellenic weeks represented the point at which modernism was finally acclimatised in Greece; the point at which it found a sympathetic hearing and became an official art. admittedly this was a period when young composers tended to study abroad, and several did not return. Of those born in the 1920s and 1930s one might cite argyris Kounadis (1924–2011), Dimitris terzakis (b.1938) and yannis Vlachopoulos (b.1939), all of whom settled in Germany; or anestis Logothetis (1921–94), who chose Vienna. But for those who did come back to Greece, there was now a more receptive climate for the new music. the Greek section of the ISCM and the hellenic association for Contemporary Music (more-or-less synonymous in practice) were founded around the same time as the first hellenic week, along with the hadjidakis composition competition at the technological Institute, and theodore antoniou’s hellenic Group for Contemporary Music. antoniou (b.1935) established the hellenic Group in 1967, and he did much to promote new music in the brief period of its activity before he too decided to base himself in north america, though he continued to spend part of the year in Greece. we might also refer to the key role played by yorgos Sicilianos (1920–2005) in a variety of administrative and media positions. But more than anything, it was the composer yiannis papaioannou’s presence at the hellenic Conservatory that made a difference, for this ensured that contemporary compositional methods, and especially the twelve-note technique, were taught to Greek composers. his own music led the way. In a schematic periodisation of his oeuvre, papaioannou pinpointed 1952 as a turning-point (as we saw, it was a turning-point more generally in Greek music). Strictly speaking, it inaugurated the fourth of

19 In current research in progress, Ioannis tsagkarakis nuances this picture, especially with regard to Ford Foundation funding.

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the six periods he identified, but it is privileged within this periodisation in that it marked his passage into atonality and dodecaphony. It may be possible to give at least a sketchy context for this by attempting a brief characterisation of selected works from different stages of his creative evolution, beginning with his Violin Sonata of 1946. this falls within a period papaioannou described as dominated by Byzantine appropriations, but the sonata stands apart from this. If anything, we hear elements from his earlier engagement with folklore (in the finale) and with impressionism (the slow movement), but the character of the music is determined more by its neo-classical design and its contrapuntal impulse. Of the former we might note the repeated (three-stage) exposition of the first movement, and of the latter we would remark on the lucid counterpoint of the second theme for piano alone, and even more of the development section. the formal and textural clarity of this work is entirely characteristic of papaioannou. Byron was an enduring enthusiasm for this composer. his symphonic poem Corsair was composed in 1942, and his final compositions were the Two Last Songs, settings of Byron that were completed two weeks before his death in 1989. his Seven Corsair dances for piano date from 1950, just prior to the 1952 caesura, and in them we still find clear links with ‘national’ materials, now treated in a more obviously Bartókian fashion. the driving ostinato, circling melodic fragments and percussive dissonance of the first of these seven pieces, for example, immediately suggest the allegro Barbaro. this is a more aggressively modernist idiom than we encounter in the Violin Sonata, but it remains tonally grounded, and in that sense it is still part of papaioannou’s past rather than his future. It was the third Symphony (1953) that marked the transition to a neo-classical serialism, of a kind characterised by textural clarity in the orchestral writing, by a supra-serial thematic writing, and by a contrapuntal style that reveals obvious continuities with his earlier music. this contrapuntal style is found not just in the fugal second movement, but in the cantus firmus technique in parts of the first movement, and in the driving moto perpetuo of the finale (a kind of fugato on strings). throughout the work there is a tightly-knit thematic process, much of it based on motivic cells supplied by the slow introduction. this evolutionary process unfolds across all three movements. relative to his earlier music, papaioannou undoubtedly sacrificed a dimension of memorability in the angular lines of this symphony. yet its phraseology remains grounded in tradition. the period he identified beginning in the mid 1960s represented a more fundamental break. It is

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tempting to compare this with the journey of another ‘Mediterranean’ serialist, Luigi Dallapiccola. Like papaioannou, but a decade earlier, Dallapiccola moved from an early tonal phase into a dodecaphony that negotiated freely with traditional devices and was characterised by melodic priority and contrapuntalism. then, in the mid 1950s, he developed a more uncompromising serial idiom responsive to the musical world of younger composers. Something similar seems to have occurred with papaioannou in the mid 1960s. a work such as the cantata The Funeral of Sarpedon (1966), a setting of Cavafy, might be taken to exemplify this change of manner. haris Xanthoudakis contextualises it by relating it to papaioannou’s numerous other settings of Cavafy (as also to Mitropoulos’s settings), and by considering its possible musical antecedents, including the late cantatas by webern.20 he refers to the composer’s ‘faith in traditional formal prototypes’, but this should not obscure what is new here. there is a considerable stylistic space between this work and the third Symphony. the pointillist textures of the cantata, along with its constantly shifting timbral landscape, its cellular construction, and its avoidance of an explicit musical teleology, all register this music as avant-garde in a much fuller sense than the symphony. Unlike papaioannou, who progressed from a nationalist orientation to a modernist idiom, the Kalomiris pupil Dimitris Dragatakis (1914–2001) was involved in a synthesis of traditional and contemporary elements right from the start. he was less influential than papaioannou, but as a composer he was highly individual. Drawing on music from his native epirus, he developed a distinctive modernist voice, whether in the microstructures characteristic of some of the later pieces (rétrospections for piano) or in large-scale compositions such as the Violin Concerto of 1969. there is a distinct advance from the accomplished but conventional early String Quartet (1957) and essay for Orchestra (1958) to the strikingly original sound world of the Violin Concerto, an evocative accompanied monologue in which distant echoes of epirotic music appear entirely at home in a thoroughly modernist setting, conveying, in the composer’s words ‘all the harshness of the land, and [springing] from its rhythms and dirges’.21 One finds something similar in the Sixth Symphony (1989), at least in its slow movement, where a lament performed on Cretan lyre, together with ison,

20 Xanthoudakis 2004. 21   Quoted in the liner notes of the recording in the collection 20th-Century Greek avantGarde Music: a Cross Section, p. 177.

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is embedded in a dissonant musical landscape. In context it emerges as a postmodern gesture, an archetypal tendency, rather more than a nod towards the Kalomiris agenda, though the final peroration of the symphony is conventionally heroic. One could tell a much fuller story of the Greek avant-garde from the 1960s through to the 1980s. But from an historical point of view, the important point is that it was now a card-carrying official culture, even if inevitably an elitist one. a composer such as yorgos Sicilianos is representative; indeed his was in some ways a stronger creative voice than papaioannou’s. From early works in the tradition of the national School, he entered Bartókian waters with his Concerto for Orchestra and Second String Quartet, and explored serial techniques (and sophisticated rhythmic systems) in works of the 1960s (his Fourth String Quartet is the most systematically organised of all his pieces). another characteristic feature is the alliance he creates between modernist techniques and Classical Greek themes, notably in pieces such as the aeschylus-based epiklesis. the stylistic trajectory of Sicilianos’s music, from tonal, through serial, polystylistic and sonoristic phases to a postmodern idiom from the late 1970s onwards (notably in his Samuel Beckett-inspired Violin Concerto), was broadly representative of the general direction of Greek post-war music. another way of saying that is to observe that he and others followed the direction of the european avant-garde. If this was a general tendency, it was one that allowed for variations. Other avant-garde composers of the same generation created their own worlds. Compare Sicilianos with nikos Mamangakis (b.1929), who studied in Germany, attended Darmstadt, and developed a Berio-like fascination with modern virtuosity as well as with sophisticated number working. at the same time he produced some of the most imaginative and iconoclastic multimedia works of contemporary Greek music, including Parastasis (1969) for soprano, flutes and electronics, and Kykeon (1972), which exists in several versions. Or with Michael adamis (1929–2013), already discussed in relation to the Orthodox liturgy, but no less important for his work in electronic music, having pioneered a studio in athens in the mid 1960s; in the 1980s in particular he developed a form of complex heterophony (beginning with alliostrofa and eptaha in the late 1980s) that echoes similar things in romania. Or with nikiforos rotas (b.1929), who studied in Vienna, and also attended Darmstadt, but who remained somewhat apart from the ‘institution’ of the avant-garde in Greece. In addition to his work in theatre and dance, he made original contributions to electronic music in Greece, notably with antiphonia I (1967) on a text by aeschylus,

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its child’s voice inevitably recalling Gesang der Jünglinge, just as its final breathing recalls the ‘hymn of pluramon’ from Hymnen. Certain gestures were ubiquitous in the Contemporary Music festivals of europe in the 1960s and 1970s. we are reminded of what Leonard B. Meyer once described as the ‘aesthetics of stability’.22 the beehive sonorities that resulted from fairly standardised aleatory devices were one such; and the Varèse-like changing coloration of a single pitch was another. when we listen to a work such as Projections, composed in 1968 by yannis Ioannidis (b.1930), it is hard not to hear these and other devices as part of the anonymous modernist soundscape of their time. and likewise, when we hear the polystylistic moments in the Music for Wind Quintet (1965–66) by Georges tsouyopoulos (b.1930), where tchaikovsky invades the modernist world, we are reminded of similar gestures of parody or stylistic counterpoint in any number of contemporary scores. there appeared to be no ambition in either case to distinguish this music as peculiarly Greek, but rather to see it as a part of european music, as up-to-date as anything from the more prestigious cultural centres. It is possible to read this as a symptom of cultural maturity. Like the hellenism of 1930s modernist literature, it might be argued, the new music dignified modern Greece, allowing it to compete with western europe on its own terms. that ‘the west’ remained largely indifferent to an avant-garde it had initially helped to make possible was largely a matter of straightforward chauvinism. In any case, the ideological charge of the avant-garde weakened soon enough, and its political value lessened as a result. It succeeded somehow in maintaining its status as an official culture, but as Cold war politics lost its immediacy, the tendency was to realign the avant-garde, to see it as at best the spearhead of a wider classical music culture (in which there was little investment in Greece) and at worst as a kind of cultural ghetto. appropriations aside, avant-garde composers had always tended to view their own activities as largely apolitical, if not autonomous, and in this they aligned themselves with more general international tendencies. we perhaps need to ask, then, how valuable it is to invoke a national perspective on this music at all, given that Darmstadt set the trend for composers everywhere. there was what some writers have called (in another context) a ‘national bypass’ operative within this culture.23 admittedly, the postmodernism of the late 1970s acquired a particular piquancy in Greece

22 Meyer 1967b. 23 Malm and wallis 1992.

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with the fall of the Junta, but this point could be over-stressed. the reality is that if modernist composers saw their activities as apolitical, most politicians saw them as not worth claiming. Only within the institution of art itself, embodied in a musical establishment that struggled to gain funding from successive governments, was there a sustained attempt to promote this culture and to construct its tradition as something intrinsically national. and even here the nationalism was less about projecting a particular, culturally unique, brand – a Greek product – and more about holding one’s own in a global cultural marketplace. If anything, it represented a conservative view, a tacit acknowledgement that for art music there was still some life in binary centre-periphery models of national identity that had become obsolete in popular music. Inevitably, perhaps, the agency involved here – proselytising exercises on behalf of a sophisticated and genuinely undervalued culture of Greek art music – increasingly extended to composers whose successes owed little to Greece, though they might conceivably be viewed as representative of ‘another Greece’, and a prominent one: the diasporic nation. at the heart of this lay a form of proprietorship, with nationality foregrounded among many competing modes of identity construction. It was applied to the émigré composers mentioned above, most of whom retained close links with Greece. But above all it was applied to two towering creative figures of the post-war era, men whose association with Greek music was at best indirect. Jani Christou (1926–70), already a cult figure in certain circles, is emerging as a composer of international significance. Born into the Greek community in egypt and educated in philosophy with russell and wittgenstein in Cambridge, he spent only his last ten years in Greece, and even then he had relatively little engagement with its musical life. as panos Vlagopoulos has observed, he was doubly isolated, an outsider to Greek contexts during his early life, but later removed (through his move to Greece) from international contexts.24 at the time of his early death, he was working on what Leotsakos has called a ‘massive stage ritual’ after aeschylus’s oresteia.25 had it been completed, it might well have brought to a culminating stage a process that seems to have been under way through much of his output. that process might perhaps be described as the gradual yielding of music to philosophy, and it was no doubt influenced by his studies

24 Vlagopoulos 2004. 25 Leotsakos 2001.

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with wittgenstein, by his intense interest in Jungian psychology (inspired by his elder brother, a practicing analyst), and by his interest in the myths and rituals associated with ancient cultures, egyptian and Greek alike. In practice the collapse of composition into philosophy tended towards a view of music as a pathway to transcendental states. a turning point was his Mysterion for three choirs, orchestra, narrator and tapes of 1965–66, based on The egyptian Book of the dead. In this work, and in those few of his subsequent anaparastases (stage rituals or psycho-dramas) that were completed as part of a major multi-media enterprise known as The Project, Christou renounced the aesthetic in favour of a form of metaphysics, in which music was an agent privileged by its links with the primordial. these late works are thus programmatic of psychic action, designed to activate trance-like states or even to induce the kind of delirium that might break through civilised veneers to allow contact with our deeper selves. this also involved a change in underlying musical processes. Christou devised a unique notational system in these later years (visually exquisite pictographic devices), and it was especially instrumental in enabling what he described as metapraxes, meaning moments of excess in which performers step outside normative roles. this might be understood by considering two fundamental patterns at work in his music. the first, the ‘phoenix pattern’, was there from the earliest work he recognised, Phoenix Music of 1948–49, and as the term suggests it involves cyclical processes of birth, growth, extinction and rebirth. It is embodied in specific motivic recurrences (a three-note motive that is ubiquitous in his music) and in specific musical gestures (continuous sustained sounds as against characteristic explosions of sound), and it can operate at the level of the unfolding work, the evolving sequence of works, and even the succession of creative periods. If the ‘phoenix pattern’ was a constant, the ‘Lunar pattern’ was a product only of works from his later period, basically post-Mysterion. the musicologist John G. papaioannou explained it as containing the possibility of unpredictable phenomena, like the partial or total eclipse (the composer himself described the shift from one prototype to the other as a shift from ‘praxis’ to ‘Metapraxis’). even in earlier works such as the Second Symphony (1956), characterised by Christou himself as ‘freely atonal’ and registering muted influences from Stravinsky and Berg, there is an element of rhetorical persuasion that overrides any purely musical logic. typically it can produce moments of intense calm, or alternatively of intense hysteria. But in late compositions such as The Strychnine Lady (1967), enantiodhromia (1965–68) and epicycle (1968), this is taken to a

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different level. enantiodhromia is representative. elaborating a philosophical idea of heraclitus, it maintains for most of its course a high-register stasis, though, as in some late Feldman, there is greater incidence within this variegated continuum of sound than appears at first hearing. then towards the end of the work there is a rapid acceleration of activity culminating in a ‘catastrophe’ of immense power and wild energy, in which performers engage in what Christou would term ‘metapraxes’, notably shouting and screaming, before we return abruptly to something like our starting point. this cursory outline of Christou’s achievement reflects the fact that his music still awaits an adequate assessment, papaioannou’s study notwithstanding. If I offer a similarly reductive sketch of another major figure of the Greek diaspora, it is for the opposite reason. Iannis Xenakis (1921–2001) has been a much discussed and debated figure in european post-war modernism. a naturalised French citizen since 1965, he was born in romania to Greek parents, spent his teenage years in Greece, and was active in the resistance before fleeing to paris in 1947. Like Christou, he retained a lifelong interest in the writings and rituals of Greek antiquity (the titles of his works are a powerful symbol of allegiance), but it was only in the post-Junta years that was he able to re-visit Greece, a homecoming every bit as momentous as that of theodorakis, accompanied as it was by major concerts and spectacles (the Mycenae polytope). In some early works and writings Xenakis had explored the possibility of a modern Greek music based on indigenous materials, but this was a passing moment, and from Metastaseis (1954) onwards he forged an original musical idiom from synergies between music, mathematics and architecture. he stood for an emphatically modernist aesthetic, an aesthetic of fierce authenticity, committed to rational questing in music, though that questing could entail an element of play. For him, new modes of thought and perception demanded new modes of action. Ideally we would cleanse our ears of pedigreed habits of listening. we would listen to his music as though it were the first music we had ever heard. Christou and Xenakis were utterly different in many ways, but they shared a radical, uncompromising approach to creativity, a sense of intellectual isolation, and a belief that some guidance for their arduous creative quest might be found in the world of Greek antiquity, ‘the germ’, claimed Xenakis, ‘of the most advanced ideas of contemporary life’. For Christou, this ancient world pointed towards the collective unconscious; for Xenakis, it signalled pythagorean logic and extra-temporal abstract forms. ‘each one of my works poses a logical or philosophical thesis’. For

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both composers, the creative journey was endlessly challenging, and interestingly Xenakis even saw this partly in national terms. ‘Greeks are like that: they are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready to launch out into all kinds of rapid, violent, sometimes fatal actions, and end up by not finding themselves’. Carrying this Greekness with him in the world of cosmopolitan modernism was an asset in later life, a way of marking him as distinctive. But in his early years in paris success was by no means immediate. his anti-serial, anti-pointillist path won him few friends among the avant-garde, and for some time he was ignored by the institutions of modernism in Germany too, despite early performances of Metastaseis and Pithoprakta given by hermann Scherchen. But in the 1960s the tide turned, and the singularity and sheer power of Xenakis’s stochastic music, in which massed sonorities (notated with precision) are controlled by mathematical processes, above all the calculus of probability, succeeded in converting the critics. It is in their attention to the larger features of the form, where the purposeful shaping of sonorities within a space-time continuum takes priority over the miniscule constitutive elements of those sonorities, that these early works of Xenakis may be distinguished from classic essays in multiple serialism in the early 1950s. those essays in serialism were similarly unitary in effect, but they exhibited, in Xenakis’s view, a drastic disjunction of means and ends. thus in Pithoprakta, mass events are created from intersecting, measured glissandi (cf. ruled architectural surfaces) and from pizzicato or col legno ‘clouds’ (cf. kinetic theory of gases), where both continuities and discontinuities are statistically controlled by probability theory. Soon he would use a computer programme to determine these and other derived processes (including mathematical game theory, Markov chains, and ‘sieves’, which allow particular ordered sets of pitches and/or durations to develop by a process of blocking and displacing). Something of this thinking remained with him to the end, but from Synaphae (1969) onwards it was inflected by new kinds of random processes embodied in Brownian movement (random movement of particles within a gas or liquid under thermal agitation), and ‘arborescences’, where voices branch out randomly into tangled polyphonic strands. haris Xanthidakou has written about this, proposing that this new direction was tantamount to an investment in dualism, replacing the monism characteristic of Xenakis’s earlier stochastic music. the techniques and systems at work in Xenakis’s music were multiple, and they have been multiply documented. Of all the composers in this book, he is perhaps the one best served by secondary literature of a

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technical, analytical kind. the more interesting questions, perhaps, concern the fate of subjectivity within an aesthetic such as his. It remains an inescapable paradox that the systemic structures generated by this scientist-composer, irreducibly rational in impulse, have an impact that is brutally visceral. It is another link with Christou. these two outsiders were outsiders in more than just the literal sense. their music exemplifies a face of modernism that extends rather than rejects romantic notions of genius. they were artist-heroes who presented themselves as isolated by virtue of their heightened sensibilities, their pioneering spirits, their idealism, and perhaps their vulnerability. More than most, they embodied the ethos of originality that defined a romantic, and later a Modernist, spirit in the arts. all of this was of its moment, but it already looked like yesterday’s moment in 1989, when the Communist regimes of Greece’s northern neighbours began to fall. By then, the cultural fracture was less severe, as ‘official’ modernisms found a niche in South east europe, irrespective of politics. Modernist composers were doing their thing all over the region, but that thing was increasingly labelled ‘postmodernism’ rather than ‘modernism’, and that term would have been anathema to both Christou and Xenakis. Popular Music: rebetika and Beyond In an earlier discussion of traditional music, I suggested that local styles in Greece might be ‘placed’ in relation to three larger geo-cultural regions: anatolia to the east, the Slavonic Balkans to the north and the western Mediterranean. a similar symbolic mapping, albeit with an enlargement of the regions, is feasible for post-war popular music, globalisation notwithstanding. eastern affinities can once more be identified, but now ranging beyond anatolian, to include egyptian, arab and even Indian, traditions. Likewise, the Slavonic Balkans represented a continuing reference point, especially in the presentation and appropriation of traditional or ‘demotic’ music within popular music contexts, and – overlapping the previous category – in the orientalising of that music. and finally, looking west, the Mediterranean retained some purchase on popular culture (there have been attempts to theorise this by numerous writers on popular music),26 though the real impact now came from an all-pervasive angloamerican mass culture.

26 See, for example, plastino 2003.

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It is true that in the post-war years Greece was largely isolated from its Communist neighbours, and there was no lack of mutual hostility. yet in looking at the background to an emergent popular culture it may be more helpful to consider features that cross political divides than to emphasise the differences. In the 1950s and 1960s there was planned social modernisation under the right-wing governments of Greece as also the Communist governments of the eastern bloc, and common to both was the rapid spread of concrete across the cities and the rush to newly-built city tower blocks from rural populations. this laid the seedbed for an emergent mass culture, and at the same time it helped break down the structures of rural life. even the place of western culture within the two worlds was not so different, whatever the official policy. a fully commercial anglo-american popular music scene remained a forbidden fruit in the eastern bloc, but attempts to counter it with folklorism proved in the end ineffectual, given the widening accessibility of hegemonic mass media. at the same time a resistance to this cultural imperialism – a quest for local identities – was established in popular music, even if this too was eventually subjected to political manipulation. In Greece there was a comparable attempt to promote folklorism. It began in fact under Metaxas, notably with the folk festivals presented at the Olympic Stadium in athens (1937–40), was continued with less obvious political intent by the Dora Stratou theatre, founded in 1953, and was picked up with enthusiasm by the Colonels. Given some of the associations here, it is not surprising that from the late 1970s onwards folklorism was widely regarded as politically tainted in Greece. Folklorism needs to be distinguished from the conservation and revival of local cultures, activities that continued apace on both sides of the political divide. In Greece, there was an historic devotion to the rural nation, however idealised, and this was intensified as modernising tendencies forced a rejoinder, generating a tension between opposing forces in the society and the culture. Local traditions from the regions were thus grouped together to form a ‘national music’, and, crucially, they were associated with the music of the Orthodox Church, another emblem of ‘authentic’ Greece. Under the auspices of Simon Karras in particular, these two musical worlds were brought under a single explanatory framework. and since that framework was strengthened by familiar arguments about historical continuity, the effect was to give a kind of national legitimacy to cultural expressions of ‘the east’. Karras had entrepreneurial flair, and he was a proselytiser of genius. already in the inter-war period he had established a Society for the Dissemination of national Music, and had assumed the role of Director of the Department of national Music at the

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State radio. he also formed a prominent radio ensemble, in which the ‘national music’ of Greece embraced an Ottoman instrumentarium. Most important of all, his theories and methods were widely adopted in the State Music Schools, giving the seal of authority to his understanding of the national music and its history. In due course – roughly from the 1960s onwards – rebetika were added to this cluster of national traditions. they had the advantage that they could point equally to east and west, and were thus able to bolster either component of the longstanding and continuing tension between a perceived need to catch up with western europe and a commitment to traditional values. precisely that tension defined a good deal of Greek popular culture in the postwar years. thus, the singer-songwriters of entekhno laïko tragoudhi could appropriate all three musical components of traditional values (demotic music, Orthodox music and rebetika), while at the same time exploring synergies with more commercial, western-orientated, idioms. Dionysis Savvopoulos was influential here. his early, much admired, album Fortigho [truck] of 1966 drew together native idioms drawn from Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, and in doing so helped set the tone for performers such as Mariza Koch, Kostas hatzis and nikos Xydakis. In musicians such as these the theodorakis tradition lived on as the elitist wing of popular music. this set Greece apart within the Balkans, for it was without any real parallel in neighbouring communist states. In contrast, when we come to consider more mainstream popular culture we begin to find compelling synergies with developments in those states, yugoslavia in particular. nowhere is this clearer than in the role assigned to oriental elements. even as the idiom of rebetika was appropriated by popular art songs in the 1960s, it simultaneously morphed into more commercial forms of Greek popular music (laïka), urban songs that were simultaneously indebted to western traditions of popular music and to oriental styles. these latter included elements from Indian film music, and for a decade or so from the late 1960s there was even a sub-genre known as Indika, touching leading singers such as Stelios Kazantzidis. within laïka there was already a debate about quality. One strand – we might include star singers such as Kazantzidis himself and his one-time associate Marinella, as also Stratos Dionysiou – was considered a high-quality descendant of rebetika. But the bulk of the laïka were widely denigrated as culturally impoverished, and in Greece that produced its own ironies. rebetika, once associated with the lowest rung on the social ladder, came to be regarded as an ‘authentic’ and superior expression of the Greek spirit, while laïka were increasingly viewed as their bastard offspring.

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already by the time of the Junta (1967) laïka were thought of as masscultural songs associated with the bouzouki and were widely promoted by record companies in what had become a newly affluent nation. Laïka developed their own star system – we might take figures such as Lefteris pantatzis and angela Doimitriou as representative – and they were widely performed in music tavernas as well as over the air waves. In general, we could probably claim that the oriental elements in this music performed something of the same double function associated with those in the Slavonic Balkans. In Greece, exactly as north of the border, there was often an uneasy slippage between a Balkan ‘east’ associated specifically with Ottoman legacy and a more fashionable and stylised ‘east’ identified with pop divas (sirens) everywhere. the oriental elements in laïka raised deeper issues of identity, especially in the aftermath of the Junta in the late 1970s. this was a time of self-scrutiny and self-definition in Greece, a time when the old debates about double-descendedness and language were brought into sharp focus, achieving resolution in some particulars (notably language), but allowing for continuing antitheses in others (they were expressed politically in the opposition beween the european orientation of Karamanlis and the traditional nationalism of papandreou). From this point, as we move into the 1980s, patterns of popular culture began to register their receptivity to different cultural worlds in ways that did not always mirror political realities. thus american political influence was on the wane as Greece looked increasingly towards europe, but anglo-american popular culture was in the ascendant. It is at this time that Greek ‘pop music’ (minus the bouzouki) might almost be said to begin. all the familiar sub-genres of western pop and rock were registered, and with all the usual confusing taxonomies. In the 1980s there were new wave bands (Metro Decay, Film noir), punk bands (Deus ex Machina, adiexodo), rock bands (Diafana Krina, endelekheia) and hip hop bands (Vita pis, razastarr), and in later decades other genres (Indie, Metal, techno) joined the parade. this did not always imply surrender to western pop, however. hip hop in particular, because of its origins in black ghetto-land and its prioritising of the verbal text, could use western idioms to critique a western status quo, and at the same time to promote a more local identity. an americanised mass culture was a powerful force in Greece, then. yet by the 1980s the mainstream of popular music, while it certainly drew on western pop-rock, also looked to the north and to the east. as to the former, it is notable that the barriers erected by Communism were beginning to break down at this time. there was still mutual suspicion between Greece and bordering territories (indeed there were border disputes), but the quest for

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a kind of Balkan identity in popular music was common to both sides of the divide. we have noted elsewhere that commercial rom musics of various kinds, cultivated especially in yugoslavia, began to infiltrate Greece in the 1980s. these included Balkan brass traditions, later popularised by Bregović, as also the music associated with well-known Serbian and Macedonian divas. already in 1985 the Greek group Heimerini kolimvites (winter Swimmers) incorporated this ‘Balkan sound’ in their recordings, making use of the well-known Florina band. But the real commercial success story was the transformation of one strand of Greek laïka into something akin to Serbian turbo-folk. Just as in Serbia, laïka came to be symptomatic of one side of a growing divide between a western orientation (epitomised politically in the move to eU membership in the 1980s) and a nationalist resistance to that orientation (epitomised by the coeval activities of the socialist movement pasok). But it was also symptomatic of the down-market side of a divide between educated and popular tastes, with western pop-rock representing the upmarket trend, exactly as elsewhere in South east europe. here there was a wider context. the deluge of pop-folk, with ‘trash’ lyrics and synthesizers, was part of a development associated with the emerging fantasy world of tV music channels right across southern europe and the eastern Mediterranean. the Berlusconi television empire, a monument to kitsch consumerism, is probably its crassest manifestation. this version of an MtV culture did not really come fully into its own in Greece until the 1990s, but already before the fall of pasok it was fast becoming an unmistakable feature of mass culture. what, then, of the eastwards look? the oriental idioms associated with Greek pop and turbo-folk were not unique to the Balkans. But in Greece they took on a rather particular significance, indicative of longstanding cultural proximity to the eastern Mediterranean. this was manifest in particular in the links between Greek pop and the egyptian-influenced turkish arabesk. Some Greek genres were effectively Greek-language versions of turkish counterparts, notably skiladeli, which is almost a Greeklanguage translation of turkish arabesk. there was of course a pre-history to these links. at least since the exchange of minorities tsifteteli was a popular idiom in Greek popular music, with origins in turkish or arab traditions. the genre never really lost its popularity in Greece, but in the post-Junta years it was in a sense reinvented. It represented one of several shared cultural forms that belied the political tensions between Greece and turkey (united in natO, divided by Cyprus) during the Junta, tensions that reached a war footing at one point. and it was in the context

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of a subsequent thaw in these political relations that modern forms of tsifteteli were cultivated. there was, too, an increasing interactivity between Greek, turkish and egyptian musicians during the 1980s, including exchanges, song translation across three languages, and collaborative artistic projects. there were even recordings made in which the turkish and Greek languages appear together (collaborations between Mustafa Sandal and natalia Doussopoulos, for example). and the traffic was increasingly in both directions, as performances of rebetika became ever more popular in turkey, and given by both Greek and turkish musicians. the sense of cultural cross-over in popular music was palpable in all of this, promoting reciprocity between nations where traditional rivalries served to obscure a shared heritage. It goes without saying that such cultural dialogues with turkey were of the greatest interest, not least because they had the capacity to register major claims about roots and identity at a time of increasing political friction between the two nations If we try to make sense of Greek identities in popular music prior to the destruction of the Communist world of the Balkans, we might clear the ground by referring back to the geo-political and geo-cultural tendencies discussed at the outset, effectively describing a spectrum between west and east. a fully americanised mass culture impacted on Greece like a tsunami. there was no escaping it. It generated a wealth of Greeklanguage imitations, but it also provided the framework for a distinctively Greek sound. these rapprochements took different forms, ranging from the infusion of an existing tradition of entekhno laïko tragoudhi and its offspring piotiko tragoudhi with elements of anglo-american pop-rock to the inflection of hip hop by specifically Greek modes of subversive content. Most common of all was the ethno pop that fused western pop-rock with oriental elements, finding common ground with yugoslav turbo-folk on one hand and turkish arabesk on the other. this was the music that seemed to stand for youth culture, and it quickly became the ubiquitous fare of the radio and tV music channels, as well as the ambient music of the streets. By replacing the bouzouki with the synthesizer, it forced a separation from yet another powerful symbol of Greek identity. the bouzouki was increasingly marginalised in Greek pop. It was reified as an unmistakable touristic emblem of Greece, and the homogenised demotic repertory indelibly associated with it has since become the property of Greek restaurants the world over. In summary, Greek pop in the 1980s, like its Serbian counterpart, may have belonged in part to a ‘trash’ or ‘pulp’ subculture, but its eastern

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elements seemed to plumb deeper wells of identity that were strongly suggestive of a counterculture. Something similar also informed the more self-reflective engagement with the east that characterised more elitist strands of popular culture, triggered no doubt by the rebetika revival of the late 1970s and 1980s. perhaps the most characteristic of these strands was the movement known by its adherents as paradhosiaka, which was already beginning to take a distinctive shape by the mid 1980s, associated especially with urban educated youth. the defining characteristic of paradhosiaka was its reanimation of Ottoman instruments (the Irish-born, Cretan-based musician ross Daly was influential here), and its selective appropriation of idioms and systems drawn from Orthodox sacred music, turkish classical music and rebetika. Its rise, in the 1990s, documented in some detail by eleni Kallimopoulou and associated with bands such as ‘power of the agean’, might be viewed as a sophisticated expression of a widespread investment in a ‘Greek tradition’ that may indeed be hard to define, but that seems to embody urban reflections on a rural ideal and fuses these with a neo-Orthodox ideology and a sense of common culture with the Ottoman past.

part FIVe

GLobaL baLKanS

Chapter tWentY-one

aLL ChanGe Brave new World Why does the ancien regime collapse? We might ask this question about the end of the roman republic,1 about Constantinople in 1453,2 about France in 1789, which by convention marked the beginning of the ‘long nineteenth century’,3 and about eastern europe in 1989, the year that rounded off the ‘short twentieth century’.4 Both ‘89s were indeed ‘falls’. They were revolutions in the full sense of the term, where an existing order was displaced, and where part of the impulse underlying the change was mass protest, a movement of the populace (for it is possible to overstate the extent of the orchestration, even if the unique power of modern media to politicise the masses was clearly crucial in the latter case). For both ‘89s, the date marked the beginning of a process rather than a discrete event. Thus in 1989 the (mainly ‘velvet’) reversals in Eastern Europe initiated socio-political transformations that extended through to 1991, by which time the unification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union were both faits accomplis. In South East Europe – at least in former yugoslavia – the process, which involved an accumulation of capital by new elites (in reality close to the old elites), continued well beyond that. The Communist world was never a monolith, however much that image may have informed western policy.5 yet even as the fissures appeared, the inert power of an internationalist political system, allied to imperialist policies where these could be imposed, created certain social and cultural uniformities. The collapse of that world was accordingly responsive to pressures that were uniform in some respects and singular in others. The dynamic of the change is imperfectly understood, even today. But

1   See Alston 2010 for a thoughtful contribution to debates about the End of Antiquity, based partly on what he calls ‘resilience theory’. 2 Runciman 1990 is still the authoritative account, but see also wheatcroft 1995. 3 Doyle 1990. An original take is Schama 1996. 4 hobsbawm 1995. See also the later stages of Brown 2009. 5 Selverstone 2009.

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what is certain is that Gorbachev’s restructuring, and his abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine, had consequences he neither intended nor foresaw. And if Perestroika and Glasnost fomented local nationalisms in Eastern Europe, the decision to allow greater self-determination among client states was in practice nothing less than an imprimatur for the public expression of those nationalisms right across the bloc. This, combined with a near-total reliance on western credit in several quarters, precipitated the collapse, giving head to popular protest. And at this point the flow of influence was reversed. It is true that Glasnost at the Soviet centre provoked protests on the periphery, but after 1989 it was revolutionary change in Eastern Europe that served as an inspiration, a model even, for changes within the Soviet Union itself.6 The price paid for new freedoms was a high one.7 Indeed ‘freedom’ is hardly the mot juste. In Romania, uniquely, the end was violent, partly because there had been no hint of an organised opposition to channel the widespread civil discontent of the later Ceauşescu years. how exactly the events of the ‘Christmas revolution’ in Timişoara came about remains something of an open question, but what followed them was in some ways more of the same, at least until the end of the Iliescu years in 1996.8 Romania was not the only state where the old Communist elites found their niche, where strong-arm tactics continued to play, and where state security had a new incarnation. But it was the one where authoritarian methods remained most blatantly alive, reinforced by shock troops (the infamous alliance between Iliescu and the miners). The difference was that despite support for Iliescu among the rural population, there was now a political channel for the dissenting voice. As a result post-1996 politics enacted a series of pendulum swings, all within the context of a growing pro-western movement that culminated in membership of NATO (2004) and of the European Union (2007). Reform did follow EU accession (though many injustices still remain hidden from view), but one effect of the accession was to accelerate the flow of emigration, as people sought to escape a world where living standards were low, where opportunities for advancement remained limited, and where the political culture was still riddled with corruption.

6 Brown 2009. 7 Ramet and wagner 2010. See also the various other essays on Former yugoslavia in this volume. 8 Siani-Davies 2007.

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Corruption was unavoidable across the bloc during this transition, given that any initiative based on private ownership was dependent on a bureaucracy that could name its price for compliance. It was especially marked in Bulgaria, for whom the collapse of the Soviet Union presented acute economic problems, exacerbated by the international blockades imposed on yugoslavia.9 Again it was largely ex-Communists who dominated the political scene, and again the path to reform proved slow and painful. Attempts to modernise the country were made, but they were thwarted by the vested interests of political elites, and by the power and influence of globally networked criminal gangs which quickly became a law onto themselves, complete with a culture of contract killings. This was gangster capitalism with a vengeance. One is reminded of Smiley in Le Carré’s our Kind of Traitor: ‘Now we’re finished with Communism our next job is to deal with the excesses of capitalism’.10 The new ‘democratic’ Bulgaria rapidly became a key centre for drug and women trafficking, helped by its strategic location on routes between east and west, and this reputation has been difficult to purge. yet, as with Romania, European Union membership has been crucial, for tough conditions were imposed, with ongoing checking and the threat of exclusion clauses. Albania was one of the last surviving Communist states in the Balkans. The various attempts by hoxha’s successor Ramiz Alia to institute reforms, and to arrive at accommodations with hostile neighbours, were not enough to halt the momentum for more fundamental change, and in June 1991 a ‘Government of National Stability’ was installed. A year later Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party outnumbered the Party of Labour in the Government and Berisha became the first non-Communist President of Albania since 1944. But the social and economic problems were too deep-rooted to be resolved by waving a democratic wand.11 within a general context of western-orientated reform, there was political corruption (including electoral fraud) and mishandled economic capitalism (the pyramid schemes and their collapse), culminating in riots and near-anarchy in the mid 1990s. Berisha’s eventual resignation in 1997 was followed by the return of the socialists to power, and all against a background of problems with Greece over mutual minorities and with Serbia-yugoslavia over Kosovo. A brief sketch cannot convey the political and socio-economic

   9 Bell 1998. 10 Le Carré 2010. 11   Vickers 2006.

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chaos of post-Communist Albania. yet despite everything, the direction of change was determinate. In April 2009 membership of NATO was secured, and an application lodged for membership of the European Union. An industry of literature has been devoted to former yugoslavia in the 1990s.12 The outline story is familiar. But it is worth stressing that the last days of yugoslavia were marked by those same nationalist impulses that were promoted all over the eastern bloc. The difference is that the ‘nationalisms’ involved were within, rather than of, the state. In the cases of Slovenia and Croatia the elections of April 1990 reflected the more general liberalisation of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and the Communist parties of both republics ceded power without any real struggle. Serbia was a different matter. The ‘Greater Serbia’ ideology embodied in the SANU Memorandum of 1986 was rooted in Serbian culture, but it was also a backlash against the cultural fragmentation of yugoslavia. In the mode of a nationalist populism, it was this agenda that allowed the rise to power of Milošević, and that led to the secession of all the other republics apart from Montenegro. It is well known that in the wars of the 1990s policies of ethnic cleansing were brutally implemented, leaving deep tears in the social fabric of all the successor states. The Dayton accord, and later NATO’s bombing of Serbia, called a halt, but politically the outcome of yugoslavia’s dismemberment remains uncertain, notably as to a federated Bosnia and herzegovina, and a Kosovo whose independence has been recognised by many nations but by no means all. A striking feature of all these nation states, and it was echoed elsewhere in the bloc, was the intermittent return to power (at various points right up to the present) of the ex-Communists, invariably under a different label. It is the more striking in that it was achieved in several cases by means of democratic election. Partly this was due to the harsh reality of market forces (unmitigated by the social cushioning found in most western democracies), and the removal of the safety net provided by Communist regimes. Partly it came down to the incompetence of inexperienced leaders, and an increasing recognition that the old Communists were rather good at dealing with the forms of corrupt capitalism on offer throughout the region. There was also resistance to the Americanisation of everyday culture (though not to the economic interventions of the European Union), bolstered by an element of spiritual revival that was

12 Among the most recent at the time of writing is Djokić and Ker-Lindsay 2011. But authoritative studies are woodward 1995, woodward 2001 and Jović 2009.

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partly politically driven but partly a reaction to years of repression.13 The result, in any case, was the polarisation of a conservative, often rural, constituency for those politicians who seemed to represent the presumed certainties of the past, and an anti-Communist dissident agenda, premised on the view that true democracy still eluded this region. The dissident voice was (and remains) as much anti-Fascist and anti-Nationalist as antiCommunist, and these days it articulates everything from Green issues to gay rights. In looking at the relative stability of those states from South East Europe that are in the European Union and those that are out, one might balk a little at the schematicism of Andrew Baruch wachtel’s typology based on three of the ‘multis’ (multinational, multiethnic and multicultural),14 especially as this picture has changed radically in recent years for even the most established European partners. however, if we look back at the success rate of the modern nations as they emerged from multicultural empires (habsburg as much as Ottoman), we will have to concede that yugoslavia was the one for which even a notional, ‘proclaimed’ monoethnicity was bound to be unrealistic. This does not mean that a political federation was bound to be unworkable. But the fact that it was tried and found wanting is a measure of the potency of the ethnonational ideal. It is only today, in a context where an ethos of mono-ethnicity informs most yugoslav successor states (whatever the official policy on minorities), that a political accommodation with the European Union seems increasingly likely for each of those states. As the entire region edges ever closer to western Europe, culturally as well as politically, the old diversities give way to new diversities. with this process comes some loss of singularity. how far, we may ask, do the globalising processes found just about everywhere in recent decades, simply extend, mutatis mutandi, to South East Europe? Clearly there has been some such move to the ‘uniform diversities’ of a globalised society, symbolised by the multi-nationals everywhere on display, but vestigial ‘multiform diversities’ remain. ‘Are we there yet?’ might be the cry of constituent nation states in the Balkans as the entire region stumbles towards western Europe, whether or not ‘there’ is a welcome or welcoming destination. A brave new European world, itself multicultural,

13 See Benovska-Subkova 1996 for an account of Christianity in post-Communist Bulgaria. 14 wachtel 1998.

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does indeed beckon, but elements of an older multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-faith Ottoman society and culture, hopelessly problematised by modern ideas of the nation, linger on stubbornly. As one writer sees it, we are today in the final stages of a long transition ‘from the Balkans to South East Europe’.15 In due course, the region may no longer be ‘betwixt and between’. But that moment has not arrived. Meanwhile, it is inadequate to imagine a globalised future that might effectively close the circle with a pre-national, ecumenical past. The shaping power and energy of ethnonationalism have been much too strong to allow for such a simple trajectory, and that power and energy continue to rock the region to this day. Societies in the Balkans have been in flux in recent years, as have cultural forms. Music is no exception. If we look at the longue durée, we can argue that current instabilities in musical life are part of a process: a response to undercurrents of change that issued from the ‘long transition’ mentioned above. More immediately, however, they were a reaction to the political upheavals of 1989. In the remaining chapters of this book I will look at the aftermath of those upheavals, and in particular at how various categories of music and music-making fared in the ‘nineties and beyond. In the popular music field, the response to ‘89, as to the wars of yugoslav succession, was immediate, and almost by definition it enjoyed wide media coverage. For art music the situation was more complex, in relation to both institutional frameworks and compositional praxes. I will look at both types of music in subsequent chapters, and as a framework for investigating them I will consider mechanisms of appropriation. Both popular music and art music could be appropriated by an official politics or alternatively by a counterculture. At the same time they could themselves appropriate other categories such as traditional music, church music and oriental music. In the case of art music one might even argue that an avant-garde could in some contexts be understood as an appropriated repertory. Before turning to this, however, I will register one further response to ‘89 and its aftermath. For numerous composers and performers of art music, the loss of infrastructure, together with the more general unemployment and poverty of those years, resulted in a crisis of confidence and of any sense of a clear social role for their music and music-making; indeed in some cases this brave new democratic world meant real hard-

15 wachtel 2008, chapter 5.

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ship. Inevitably, this strengthened the attraction of foreign parts. For reasons of necessity, studying abroad had long been a leitmotif of Balkan music history, and in many cases there was no return journey. So the exodus of musicians from the Balkans in the 1990s was in no sense new; it was simply accelerated. It is not obvious that international prestige commonly rewarded such emigration (figures such as Xenakis had always been the exception), but there was at least some hope of job security. As to compositional options, the game could be played two ways. One could merge with local environments and leave the Balkans behind. Or one could invest in roots, and in doing so create a distinctive brand. For much of the 1990s, after all, the Balkans could hardly have had a higher profile. It was eminently brand-worthy. Emigration was no less a theme in the popular music field. with the yugoslav wars of the 1990s musicians commonly flitted, either for political or pragmatic reasons, from one successor state to another. Admittedly this was hardly emigration – it was movement without migration – but for many musicians there was a strong temptation to look further afield and to make a career for themselves in the commercial music scene overseas, not always in directly creative capacities. For this reason, and for other reasons too, more directly related to war and politics, many of the leading yugoslav groups disbanded, and as we will see in chapter 23 there was some loss of vitality in what followed. Although in theory bands could aspire to conquering a global market from local sites and by means of overseas tours, there was in practice a real choice to be made, and mainly because of the language. Significantly, in that small handful of cases where some measure of international success was indeed achieved, it was invariably on the basis of an (exoticised) Balkan identity. This was notably the case with Rom divas and ensembles and to some extent with more popular forms of sevdalinka. It was a matter of local branding on the world music scene. And a key issue here – to a lesser extent it was an issue for art music too – was the extent to which ‘the Balkans’ had already established a musical presence outside the region itself. another Balkans: The diasporic Imagination At the root of this question lies the most commonly appropriated of all repertories: traditional music, or, as it may be legitimately described in its diasporic form, folk music. This repertory had long been identity-affirming among Balkan populations abroad, but it exerted a no less powerful

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attraction for their hosts. Not for nothing did the late Mirjana Laušević call her absorbing study of American Balkanites ‘Balkan Fascination’.16 During the 1990s Laušević, a native of Sarajevo, engaged in extensive fieldwork in the North American ‘Balkan music and dance scene’. however, some of the most interesting parts of her book concern the pre-history of that scene: not just her account of the gradual consolidation of folk practices but her analysis of the intersecting ideologies that lay behind those practices. Thus, the ‘settlement movement’, developed by wealthy middleclass Americans from the late nineteenth century onwards, promoted folk dancing within a programme of social meliorism and integration. Paradoxically enough, it was considered both an aid to ‘Americanisation’ for the immigrants, and a healthy antidote to corrupting commercial culture for Americans. As the folk dance movement spread to schools and colleges it took on further layers of significance, ranging from health- and character-building to the quest for history and European roots, the latter a familiar antidote to the ‘newness’ of American culture. In all of this, of course, Balkan music and dance represented just one corner of a much larger field of international folklorism. Laušević further addressed the infrastructures of folk dance programmes during the inter-war years, including the proliferation of festivals (of which the world Fairs were the most high-profile), the appearance of publications and recordings, and the emergence of key teachers and entrepreneurs. Through all of this America was able to promote multiculturalism as a positive value, while at the same time enabling the kind of ‘virtual tourism’ that constructs alterities as imagined peasant communities. It was on the back of these developments that a ‘Balkan craze’ developed in the post-war years, associated with the proselytising work of teacherethnographers, and finding its institutional expression in the New york Balkan Arts Centre, founded in 1966, and in the Balkan camps that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them sponsored by the ‘Eastern European Folklife Centre’, still active today. In this later stage of its development the Balkan scene maintained close links with the region itself, hosting leading musicians from there, employing teacher-ethnographers who had spent long periods of fieldwork in South East Europe, and maintaining close links with Balkan festivals and ensembles. yet there can be conflicted responses when the region itself becomes ‘real’ for Balkanites

16 Laušević 2007.

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in this way. The Balkan village, after all, is largely a construction in this scene: a simulacrum.17 One development that can be associated with the North American scene today, but is not unique to it, is the divide that has opened up between traditional folk idioms and Balkan-inspired dance and rock music, especially popular for weddings and youth dances.18 Laušević did not enter this territory in her book, but we might note that the separation effectively created three types of ensemble: traditional, modern and ‘in-between’, meaning those that attempted to cater for both tastes. There are countless groups (choral, instrumental and dance) that are relatively purist about folk music and dance and that use only traditional instruments: one might cite almost at random the ‘tamburica orchestra’ Prazna flaša [Empty Bottle] from Milwaukee or the Bulgarian-Macedonian group Lyuki chushki [hot Peppers] from washington. At the other extreme there are bands such as Kultur shock from washington or Toids from San Francisco that specialise in Balkan-inspired (and on occasion Middle Easterninspired) rock. As to the third category, bands such as Izvor [Fountain] have been fairly successful in bridging the gap between traditional and modern, maintaining a folkloric ethos, but expanding it where necessary. Likewise Mike Gordon’s washington-based Balkanarama has now gained an international reputation for a practice that crosses borders freely and eclectically. Synthetic approaches are not always trouble-free, of course, and in some bands the difference in philosophy between old and new styles has resulted in complex histories. Greek-American culture is a category all to itself, and one that I will largely sidestep here. Of course it celebrates Greekness, but it does so in ways that maintain a certain independence of the motherland. It has, in short, defined an identity of its own. This is apparent in the distinctive practices and idioms of the Greek-American Church, organ and all, and in the thriving activities of traditional music and dance (where characteristically some native Greeks claim to have difficulty recognising the dances). It is no less apparent in popular music, where Greek-American artists have carved out a singular niche. Among the most distinctive is Diamanda Galas, though to assign Galas to ‘popular music’ is hardly adequate. At any rate, she is ‘Greek-American’ rather more than ‘Greek’. Both her parents 17 At the same time, Laušević is at pains to argue that the Balkan craze created in the end a unique and valuable space within American culture. 18 One might include here the jazz crossovers associated with Don Ellis, notably his famous recording Bulgarian Bulge of 1971.

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were born in North America, and her identification with Greece takes a highly individual form. Drawing eclectically on many streams of popular music, jazz and gospel, she blends them with traditions from the eastern Mediterranean, including the amanedes tradition in Greece. her music is political in the sense of supporting minority causes, but she insists that she is not interested in propaganda, even if some of her pronouncements suggest otherwise. In the end, whatever the rhetoric, her commitment to the aesthetic sphere ensures that she has a restricted but loyal fan base, and if the rhetoric is occasionally divisive, the music tells a more humanitarian story.19 Today there are Balkan scenes all over the world, though few are as highly developed as those of North America and Canada. Only in Australia, where there is a substantial immigrant presence, are they institutionalised somewhat on the American model, with folk festivals taking place all over the country, with a pronounced Balkan presence in the many ‘international’ folk societies, and with sound worlds that range from Bulgarian voices to Bregović-inspired brass bands. There has already been a reference to one band that specialises in Macedonian repertories, Linsey Pollak’s Tsrvena Kniga, but one might also mention Xenos, which specialises in Rom dance music of Macedonia and northern Greece, or BabaGranoush from Preston, which performs a more generic Balkan music that can slide from ethnic music to café music and beyond. On the more popular front there is also a lively dance scene associated with recorded music (the usual remixes) played in bars and clubs, and here the DJ team Balkan Beasts, located mainly in Melbourne, has a prominent role. This takes us into world music, where Balkan specificities (the inevitable ‘gypsy brass’) yield to crossover styles of various kinds, including Middle Eastern music, jazz and reggae, klezmer music, ska, and rock. It is unnecessary to embark on a Cook’s Tour of Balkan music around the world. But it may be worth closing in on my home ground, to convey some sense of the diversity of the offerings, and of the different philosophies that lie behind them. As in the American scene, it is not uncommon for immigrant populations in Britain to initiate processes that then extend to native British participants. This was the case when Dessislava Stefanova, a former member of the Koutev Ensemble, founded the London Bulgarian Choir in 2000. Capitalising on the popular status of the ‘Bulgarian choral

19 Ioannis Polychronakis commented interestingly on Galas in an unpublished paper given at the First Biennial Euro-Mediterranean Music Conference in Cyprus in 2009.

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sound’, this choir – predominantly non-Bulgarian in personnel – has now gained considerable success in competitions, festivals, film soundtracks and recordings. On a more modest scale, there have been attempts to promote sevdalinka on the part of a handful of Bosnians living in London, chief among them Mirza Bašić. This has been done principally by way of World of Sevdah, essentially a website and English-language database, but it has also extended to modest concert organisation, and there is (intermittently) a London Sevdah Choir. The enthusiasm for sevdalinka on the part of certain key figures in British classical music, notably the composer Nigel Osborne, adds a further dimension to this, and it is worth noting that Osborne has composed a ‘sevdah opera’, Differences in Demolitions, which has now been performed both in Mostar and the UK.20 Meanwhile, Balkan folk dance has been cultivated by Balkanplus, currently led by Brian Dowsett. This is a facilitating organisation, offering dance workshops with eminent teachers to native enthusiasts, but also inviting visiting groups from the Balkans and beyond. On occasion Balkanplus has hosted what is now probably the leading UK ensemble for traditional Balkan music, the London-based Dunay. It has a relatively purist approach to instrumentation and style, and through festival appearances, tours, broadcasts and recordings, has acquired something of an international reputation. Dunay performs music from all over the Balkan region, but there are also specialised ‘scenes’ associated with some of the more established immigrant communities. Albania is becoming a modest cultural presence in London. But by far the most prominent of the immigrant communities are Greeks (and even more Greek-Cypriots). The hellenic Centre in London sponsors Greek culture of just about every kind, organising festivals, screening films, and promoting folksong and dance events. At some remove from this is the so-called ‘Institute of Rebetology’, loosely connected to London University’s School of African and Oriental Studies, which proselytises on behalf of rebetika through an extensive website and organises talks on, and concerts of, Greek-Turkish music of the urban tradition. The world music scene is also well represented in Britain, notably through bands such as Gundula Gruen’s London-based Tatcho drom [Romany: ‘True Journey’] Quintet, playing music from the Balkans and beyond, but without the purist orientation of Dunay. One might also

20 Based on a poem by Goran Simić, Differences in Demolitions tells of an exiled builder looking back on his life in Bosnia and on his love for a woman called Sevdah.

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mention Dave Kelbie’s Szapora, and although this seems to have disappeared from view at the time of writing, one of its Bosnian personnel, Téa hodžić, has established the thriving Téa hodžić Trio. One intriguing feature of concerts by such groups is that British audiences happily listen to songs sung in languages of which they have no knowledge whatever. Téa hodžić admits to some bewilderment at this, given that the words of the songs are so utterly central to their significance, and are indeed their true starting-points. And the same goes for other traditions; witness the London-based Algerian band Fantazia, the various Arab musics associated with performances at the Dash Café venue, and the thriving Latin scene in London. If it indicates anything at all, it is that the ‘other Balkans’ is part of a much larger construction of alterity, that it remains an exoticism for British audiences: truly a ‘Balkan fascination’. The Balkans as made in Britain, in other words, tells us relatively little about the Balkans in situ. This is yet more apparent when we turn to the fusion repertory performed by groups such as Trans-global Underground and the Newcastlebased, but now internationally known, Baghdaddies. Such Balkan- or Middle East-influenced world beat can now be heard all over the world in relevant festivals and clubs, and it is a very long way from the folk music and dance scene described by Mirjana Laušević. Closer to popular music than folk music, it often takes its initial impulses from the Rom bands of South East Europe, the more high-profile of which were given international exposure by well-placed western entrepreneurs. Some of these bands were discovered, others constructed. But either way one might want to complain about the manipulation of the musicians by external commercial interests (money is made, but seldom by the musicians). In any case, by the time Taraf de Haïdouks appeared in the films Latcho drom (1993) and The Man Who Cried (2000), there was already a widespread interest in the essentialised Balkan sounds associated with such Rom bands. A little further commercialisation was all it took to seal this interest, and with the help of the German dance producer Shantel, associated with the Bucovina Club in Frankfurt, and the Belgian record label Crammed Discs, DJs began to mix traditional Balkan music with techno drum and bass to create a global dance music widely associated with club culture. Producers and DJs now came into their own, with Balkan traditional music typically forming a foundation layer, remixed electronically with other idioms. Percussion-driven Balkan brass met with Latino beats; flamenco rhythms were blended with heavily manipulated samples drawn from Balkan traditions; Bulgarian vocal magic sat alongside guitar riffs and techno beats. This was ‘global fusion’.

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The production of new recordings along these lines for labels such as Six Degrees involves first a contract with an existing label producing mainly Rom music, of which the most prominent is Crammed Discs, then a selection of suitable tracks, and then a remix for the dance floor (one Six Degrees CD, produced by Simon Emmerson and Phil Meadley, is called ‘Ethnomixicology’). Effectively this creates a new piece, where for example the original vocals might be kept but the instrumental backing replaced by synthesised drum-bass idioms in house music style. Alternatively, in the case of underground DJs, several recordings might be sampled separately and then mixed into one. All this has become a widespread practice in dance music generally. Indeed the tendency to ‘reduce’ other traditions, notably hip-hop and rap, to dance music though remixing, is a common one today, and in most such cases, including those where Balkan CDs are used, the original source is not just modified but totally deconstructed. Leaving aside questions of ontology, or for that matter copyright, it is enough to remark here that ‘the Balkans’ becomes an ambivalent, and largely catalytic, presence in this corner of what is in reality an international idiom. Indeed one might go further and argue that it is an ambivalent presence more generally in world Music, understanding this term in its narrow definition as an independently marketable commodity presented in dedicated festivals such as ‘womad’ and proselytised by journals such as Songlines. Any sense of place here is inevitably reduced to that of a brand. And it is not surprising that this should have attracted criticism on the part of those whose interest lies in Balkan music first and foremost. There is, however, one place that could stake a claim to be the ‘centre’ of these Balkan-inspired fusions, and appropriately it is the fons et origo of the Balkans, understood as Ottoman legacy in South East Europe. In Istanbul today a synthetic image of urban Balkan culture is manufactured through fusion sounds. In the lanes behind Istkal Caddesi music cafés and clubs host a lively mix of international and Turkish musicians performing a wide range of fusion music, where Sufi electronica, gypsy funk and oriental hip-hop not only co-exist but blend. A key player in this history was hasan Saltik, who founded the record label Kalan Müzik in 1991, with the intention – politically tricky at the time – of presenting the music of Turkey’s minority groups (Aynur Doğan’s Kurdish-language Keçe kurdan [Kurdish Girl] was a notable landmark). But it was above all Ahmet Uluğ who launched and promoted modern fusion sounds. he is the co-owner of the nightclub Babylon, which is right at the centre of the live music scene, and also of Doublemoon Records, which transmits that scene to the rest of the world. Musicians such as the rap artist Ceza,

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the fusion band Kolektif Istanbul, and the Sufi-inspired performer Mercan Dede (whose career raises all kinds of questions about the ambivalent role of Islamic music when it is appropriated by a culture it inherently resists) all record on Doublemoon. Accepted that this remains a niche market, it was nonetheless given considerable global exposure when Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sounds of Istanbul, was issued on general release at cinemas all over the world. The ‘centring’ of Balkan fusions in Istanbul – rooting them in a place – draws attention to some of the paradoxes surrounding notions of authenticity with this kind of Balkan beat. It is perfectly true that pre-modern traditional repertories in the Balkans were closely tied to place and loosely defined temporally; i.e. without an obvious history. They had spatial boundaries, in other words, but they tended to flow unimpeded across time. Naturally when such repertories are appropriated by commercial world Music ensembles, and especially when they are mixed with very different repertories, the significance of place is bound to be changed; we are offered in effect something rather like the musical equivalent of cultural tourism (even Crossing the Bridge cannot quite escape this charge, if it is a charge). however the story is arguably rather different when urban music, and especially Rom music, forms the basis of the remix. If anything could be described as ‘authentic’ within Rom traditions, after all, it is precisely the idea of fusion and the related embrace of commercialism. Moreover, a sense of place was always of secondary importance within Rom musicmaking, and was very largely a product of contingency, a market-driven adoption and transformation of local idioms. It is no surprise then that the gypsy bands of the Balkans have themselves been more than happy to be associated with the institution of world Music. They are in a sense working within their own traditions. Today, the leading bands – not just standard Rom bands, but native fusion bands such as Shukar Collective and Mitsoura – are sell-outs at prestigious venues. Nevertheless, several cognoscenti have suggested to me that enthusiasm for this kind of world beat is beginning to wane (possibly related to the revival of live music, of which more later), or at least that it is no longer showing signs of conquering all to achieve the status of a new form of classicism, as once argued by Jan Ling).21 I am not well placed to assess this. But in any event, there can be no doubt that several Balkan musicians living outside the Balkans have found a niche for themselves

21 Ling 2004.

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within this culture, as some of the discussion above amply illustrates. Of course there are still many who work for some sense of an authentic voice of the region (they often tend to operate within the nostalgic orbit of already well-established immigrant communities), and for them the world beyond functions as a kind of counter-site, literally ‘another Balkans’. But for others their Balkan roots function primarily as a useful passport to a career within fusion bands of one kind or another. The point is not to make judgements here, but simply to note that the classic responses of exile – those narratives of nostalgia and acculturation discussed in an earlier chapter – may need a little nuancing to meet this new reality. A third way is effectively opened up by some of the Balkan participants in the world Music scene, one that constructs nostalgia as an aid to acculturation. Nor is this third way entirely unknown in the world of art music. Composers in exile There were obvious reasons for the exodus from Sarajevo and Belgrade during the 1990s. Unlike most capitals in the region, for which the key moment of change was the beginning of the decade, these cities were unable to attempt any kind of renewal until rather later: the mid-decade for Sarajevo and the end of the decade for Belgrade. I will consider the fate of music in both cities in the next chapter, but for now I will look rather at the exodus. In 1989 there were ninety professors at the Music Academy in Sarajevo. In 1995 there were nineteen. At the time of writing there are fifty-three.22 These figures tell an obvious story: a dramatic collapse followed by a process of steady, but partial, re-growth. however, the regrowth has been largely the result of new recruitment. Of those professors who left because of the war, only five have returned. The majority settled abroad. There is a similar story when we look to other musical institutions, notably the Opera and the three professional orchestras. In all, some four hundred musicians left the city during the early 1990s, and they are to be found today in orchestras and conservatories all over Europe, and as far afield as Australia. It should be added that relatively few of the composers who had been active in Sarajevo before the war remained there throughout the 1990s. Conspicuous among those who did remain is Ivan Čavlović, who is also the Director of the Academy. 22 These figures refer to full-time teachers. There are (again at the time of writing) a further forty to fifty part-time teachers at the Academy.

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Of the composers who left, some of the older generation moved elsewhere in the former yugoslavia. Two were discussed briefly in chapter 18. Vojin Komadina and Josip Magdić both left during the war years, the former for Serbia-Montenegro and the latter for Zagreb, and Magdić in particular has maintained a creative interest in folk music from the mountain regions surrounding Sarajevo. Both men were of the generation of the 1930s, and so too was Alojz Ajdić (b.1939), who moved to Slovenia, where he has played a prominent role in music education as well as in composition. The younger generation of composers was more inclined to look further afield. Vojislav Ivanović (b.1959) settled in Greece, and has been associated with jazz and traditional music as well as with concert music and film scores. he founded the Levantine Jazz Trio and has collaborated with leading singers such as Savina yannatou. The Kosovo-born Ramiz Tahiri (b.1950) worked mainly in Zenica until the war, at which point he left for Germany, as did Jasmin Osmanagić (b.1963). Dino Rešidbegović (b.1975) likewise moved to Vienna, and Igor Karača (b.1974) to North America. Several of these composers – Ivanović and Karača in particular – have kept close links with Bosnia and herzegovina. And it is notable too that, aside from their creative deployment of traditional music, some have made explicit references to the war in their music. Magdić’s Sarajevo War Postcards, a suite of ten pieces for organ or piano composed in the midst of war in 1993, each of them pinpointing a particular place in Sarajevo, is emblematic.23 Is there an umbilical cord linking these Bosnian composers to their homeland? And if so, is it a matter of straightforward nostalgia? we might ask the same questions of Serbian composers in diaspora, bearing in mind that Sarajevo and Belgrade inevitably invite comparison in the post-war years. There was indeed an exodus of composers from Belgrade in the 1990s, and in at least one case, Vuk Kulenović (born in Sarajevo before settling in Belgrade), exile to North America in 1996 was a direct result of political protest against the Milošević regime. For reasons that are not immediately obvious a high proportion of those who left Serbia were women.24 They included Nataša Bogojević (b.1966), now in Chicago, Katarina Miljković (b.1959), now in Boston and Aleksandra Vrebalov (b.1970), now teaching

23 As noted on p. 493, one of the CDs produced by the Academy of Music in Sarajevo is dedicated to ‘works by B-h Composers Living Abroad’. 24 See the interesting essay on women and music in Serbia by Jelena Novak (Novak 2011).

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at the City University of New york.25 Of this generation of women composers, several of them members of the ‘Magnificent Seven’, only Isadora Žebeljan (b.1967) has remained in Belgrade.26 All are talented, all have a broadly modernist orientation, and all are interested in success; they are composers, after all. But for Žebeljan, who has a corpus of major operatic as well as instrumental works to her credit, the task has perhaps been easier than for the others. Belgrade may not be the centre of new music, but it provides Žebeljan with a clearly focused identity as a Serbian composer (she was elected to the Serbian Academy at a surprisingly young age), and a base for the highly skilled Europe-wide networking that has made her one of the most widely performed Serbian composers today. For Bogojević, Miljković and Vrebalov there has been a steeper mountain to climb. All have had some success, with teaching posts, a healthy record of commissions and performances by world-class ensembles, some on international platforms. But the North American pool is a large one, and it is hard to be noticed; there are many composers with impressive curricula vitae of whom few in the wider musical world have heard. Following the success of her Formes différentes de sonneries de la rose+croix, Bogojević’s more recent work has veered eclectically between electronic and multimedia compositions such as Bajalica (2007) and polystylistic compositions such as Le beau est toujours . . ., labelled by the composer ‘Neogesamtkunstwerk for Klaus Nomi’. Miljković has a more distinctive and potent creative voice, and one that has taken on a unique identity through her interest in complexity theory in sound and movement, and especially in the application of Stephen wolfram’s NKS (New Kind of Science) to music (works such as Overhearing Complexity of 2006 and nkScape of 2008). A latter-day Xenakis, her video collaborations with Dawn Kramer, notably Cracking of 2008, are truly exciting multi-media experiences. Vrebalov has perhaps the highest profile of the three. The combination of a traditionally ‘romantic’ intensity curve (works such as Passion Revisited for Piano Trio) and an ambitious play with proportional designs, metric modulations and multi-layered structures (the orchestral Orbits of 2002 is a case in point) adds up to a complex yet accessible

25 Also New york-based is the interesting crossover figure Milica Paranosić, who engages in various kinds of performance art, often with educational or socially activist intent, and drawing on classical, popular and world musics. 26 These were Igor Gostuški, Isidora Žebeljan, Ana Mihajlović, Nataša Bogojević, Ognjen Bogdanović, Srdjan Jacimović and Vladimir Jovanović.

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sound world, given added resonance by recourse to stylistic allusions and at times direct quotations. where are Serbia and the Balkans in all of this? For Bogojević they hardly seem a significant presence, beyond her Kolo for Bernard rands. Miljković, on the other hand, returns to traditional materials persistently, and her processing of them, often highly systematic, results in an evocative symbiosis of mimesis and rationality. Thus, her Threads (2005) is based on Balkan women’s chants, initially as scattered fragments, but then expanded into melodic groups and variational processes. ‘having a Balkan background’, says Miljković, ‘I realised that I am caught in a network of threadlike memories, each of which has a specific sound streaming from music of my heritage. This composition is an attempt to follow these threads’. Likewise Window (2006) uses fragments of Serbian folk songs assembled by way of formal mobility, while drop (2007) turns to traditional laments for its melodic substance. A yet more explicit programmatic element is presented in her multi-media White City, written for the violinist Ana Milosavljević. This is a tribute to Belgrade, and is based on a 12-minute recording of the urban soundscape taken from the balcony of the composer’s apartment. The ‘concrete’ sounds of the city are blended with Ana Milosavljević’s pre-recorded violin sounds, and the whole is transformed by the entrance of a live violin part bringing Serbian traditional chanting and prayer into the soundscape. The composer remarks that ‘the video recording, unfolding simultaneously in two different ways, preserves a natural, intuitive rhythm of the “eye of an observer” ’. Vrebalov, too, has employed traditional materials, notably in her early string quartet Pannonia Boundless, where her Vojvodina background is evoked by way of various East European musical references. More recently, in . . . hold me, neighbour, in this storm . . . (2006), she has offered a kind of musical sermon on the political divisions of the Balkans. She was not the first composer to address directly the events of the 1990s. At the beginning of the Bosnian war the Association of Composers had helped organise a public protest begging Milošević to resign, and several felt impelled to offer a creative response to the war. There was Erić’s Images of Chaos I–V, Kulenović’s [War]Boogie, Mihajlović’s Eine kleine Trauermusik, Despić’s Dies Irae and Stefanović’s Lacrimosa; later there would be Exodus (2001) by Ivan Jevtić, who spent the late 1990s teaching in Brazil. In other words, there was a pre-history to works such as . . . hold me, neighbour, in this storm . . ., a response to a commission from Carnegie hall for the Kronos Quartet. Bringing together the sounds of Serbian church bells and Islamic calls to prayer, and evoking primal Balkan percussive energies as well as rural traditional music and urban ‘tavern songs’, this

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work attempts, in the composer’s own words, ‘to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilised sounds of western classical music – that of the string quartet – with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle and tapan. It is a way to piece together our identities – fractured by centuries of intolerance – and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any of us, all so different, were not there’. There can be an uncomfortable ambivalence surrounding such gestures. Arguably a work such as . . . hold me, neighbour, in this storm . . . conflates a number of discomforts. First, there is the facility – in two senses – with which ensembles like the Kronos Quartet feel able to draw world music into the realm of a western cultural production, without a hint that there might be any problematic associated with this transfer. Secondly, there is the presumption of the artist who poses as healer, and in doing so gains the sympathy of the audience before a single note is heard. And lastly, there is the awkward positioning of the outsider who is at the same time an insider. This latter is of course the issue of exile. My own sense is that Miljković succeeds in treating traditional Balkan repertories with an appropriate sense of distance, and that this is at once a more challenging and provocative, though perhaps a less marketable, creative stance than the crude symbolism offered by Vrebalov. Certain other Serbian composers working abroad have likewise been successful – albeit by a very different means – in referring to the homeland in intelligent and questioning ways. One such is Ana Mihajlović (b.1968), a member of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ who is currently based in Rotterdam, and a composer-performer who is equally at home on classical concert platforms and with the ambient sounds of the band Cloud Society. In considering these various careers it is tempting to invoke the question of generation, though I do so tentatively. In my final chapter I will broach it again, suggesting that divisions between the generations have in some respects begun to override differences of class, education and nationality as principal arbiters of style and taste. At the very least we could claim that composers of an older generation such as Xenakis and Ligeti would probably not have made the mark they did on the new music had they remained in Greece and hungary respectively. There was a rather clearer sense of centre and periphery in the 1960s, and for these composers the charismatic centres of new music in Europe and North America proved to be the gateways to international acclaim. Something similar might be claimed, albeit at not quite the same level of international exposure, for composers such as Kelemen and Globokar, who likewise made their names outside their native Croatia and Slovenia respectively. There may have been two-way

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traffic between centres and peripheries in the heyday of 1960s modernism, but there was no real doubt about which was which. Arriving at the centres did not guarantee visibility, of course; they were nothing if not competitive arenas. But avoiding the centres all but guaranteed invisibility. For a later generation the conditions were rather different. we may want to ask if the ‘great composer’ as an institution of western classical music is any longer truly viable (Paul Griffiths has claimed that harrison Birtwistle may be the last of the species),27 or if it can only be understood as the product of a very particular phase of European culture, now suitable for relegation to a category some sociologists have labelled ‘zombie institutions’.28 Perhaps we should be cautious about viewing this as historically specific. In an absorbing meditation on Romanity, Alston and Spentzou remind us that Pliny asked similar questions. ‘Pliny is asking a fundamental question’, they argue. ‘Is it possible to be great in these modern times?’29 whatever the answer, it does seem that younger composers today are less likely than their predecessors to entertain universalist claims for their music or to hold expectations that it will survive the proverbial test of time.30 They are more modest in their ambitions, and are inclined to measure their success cumulatively in terms of a concert here, a recording there (as Ana Mihajlović rather engagingly and gratefully puts it on her website, ‘I had a few big times in my life’). For this generation the major cultural centres are no longer quite the passport to fame they once were, and this may have some bearing on the story of our Serbian women composers. In the end, a clear local identity, such as that carefully cultivated by Žebeljan, may prove more valuable than an allegiance to cosmopolitan modernisms. There was a similar exodus of musicians, including composers, from Bulgaria, and for similar reasons. Bozhidar Spassov (b.1949) left for Germany in 1990, settling initially in Bohum and later in Essen, where he currently teaches at the Folkwang Musikschule and cultivates serial and electronic music indebted to Stockhausen and his circle. Alexander Kandov (b.1949) left for Spain at around the same time. It is worth registering that although Spassov’s two chamber operas are based respectively on ancient German legends and on hans Christian Andersen, and Kandov’s cultivation of electronic music and music theatre belongs to a 27 Griffiths 1995, 324. 28 For a discussion of this term and concept, see Bauman 2000. 29 Alston and Spentzou 2011, chapter 5. 30 The so-called ‘test of time’ has been scrutinised in Savile 1982.

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modern cosmopolitan world, both composers retained their association with Bulgaria. It is hardly invidious to remark that of the two Spassov is the one with an international reputation (indeed Kandov now seems to have largely abandoned composition). Spassov is widely performed today in Germany, and in Europe generally. Like many others at the time, he was no doubt aware that success – economic and reputational – was more likely if he left his homeland. But his departure was motivated more by politics than economics. Like many others, he felt so let down by what he saw as the deeper failure of the 1989 revolution – by the absence of any real change – that he embarked on major acts of protest, including hunger strikes. There were also some ‘local difficulties’, characteristic of the collateral damage done by major political change. In this case it concerned the Composers’ Union. The Union took advantage of new-found freedoms to display an exclusivist, albeit happily a temporary, hostility towards the musicologists with whom they shared the Union, expelling them from the membership and abolishing their journal Bălgarska Muzika (the problem was resolved in 1994 when an independent section of musicologists was established within the Union). On this issue Spassov took the side of the musicologists. Such idealism is not perhaps the norm. It was more usual for composers to leave quite simply because the new market economy, in Bulgaria as in former yugoslavia, was unsympathetic to their needs. Composers such as Dimitar Naumoff (b.1943) and Roussi Tarmakov (b.1949) had enjoyed some success in Bulgaria under the old regime, but both struggled in the ‘nineties. As a result, Naumoff emigrated in 1995 for washington D.C. and Tarmakov in 2001 for Toronto. They are actively involved with musical life in the new world, but their success as composers has been limited and they have now largely abandoned composition. This too is a familiar pattern. Only a few other Bulgarian composers in exile have found anything like the success of Bozhidar Spassov. The classical and jazz composer Milcho Leviev (b.1937), who left Bulgaria for the United States for political reasons in 1970 and whose music was banned in his homeland for a decade, is certainly one. Leviev has had a successful concert career, and currently teaches jazz at the University of Southern California, but he has continued to write symphonic music, and has since been rehabilitated – indeed honoured – in his homeland. Another success story is the émigré composer wladimir Pantchev (b.1948). Pantchev left for Vienna in 1991 and has built a reputation there and elsewhere in Europe. In the orchestral music composed while still in Bulgaria the most relevant stylistic affinities were with Edison Denisov

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and Ligeti, and these composers are still a presence in his music today. however, since leaving Bulgaria Pantchev’s modernist, monodic-heterophonic idiom draws more and more on Bulgarian traditional music both melodically and rhythmically. Thus, the music of Orthodoxy is evoked in the Doublebass Concerto of 2001–2, while traditional agrarian repertories were the inspiration for the Trumpet Concerto of 2002–3. If this plays into a larger pattern, it is one that has already been articulated in this book. It is by no means a question of narrow nationalism (Pantchev’s music has many other points of reference, from Baroque repertories to Mozart and Gershwin). Rather the swerve towards traditional repertories is symptomatic of a quest for roots that seems to be profoundly motivated in this region. In Pantchev’s case such a quest may well have been accentuated by the experience of exile. In Romania the exodus was not dramatic in the early 1990s, though numerous performing musicians, and especially singers, did seek their fortunes abroad at this time. In fact, several of the leading diasporic composers had already left in earlier years. Of these the best-known is Corneliu Dan Georgescu (b.1938), who settled in Berlin in 1987, but one might also cite the Olah pupil Lucian Meţianu (b.1937), who moved to Lausanne in the late 1960s and taught at the Conservatory there, and Gheorghe Costinescu (b.1934), who settled in the US and taught at various institutions, including CUNy. Predictably, Paris was also a magnet, and among the composers who settled there were Mihai Mitrea Celarianu (1935–2003), Costin Cazaban (b.1946), and the popular film music composer Vladimir Cosma (b.1940). however, the diasporic composer with the most notable success, apart from Georgescu, is the Myriam Marbé pupil Violeta Dinescu (b.1953), at present a Professor of Composition at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. Dinescu moved there in 1982, and inter alia her children’s opera der 35. Mai [The 35th of May] (1986) was performed in hamburg and Vienna to considerable acclaim. It is appropriate that she should have been awarded the Society of Composers prize for the most prominent diasporic composer, for she maintains close links with Romania, not least by ensuring the presence of Romanian music at the annual Komponisten-Colloquium she has organised since 1996. when we turn finally to Greece, we note that in most cases the significant waves of emigration pre-dated 1990. The truly eminent of the émigré or diasporic composers, Xenakis and Christou, have already been discussed. however in both cases there remain interesting questions about their reception in Greece. In the post-Junta years that reception was invariably enmeshed with political motives, and in ways that often did considerable disservice to the two composers’ own views on matters

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political. Next in line would be Theodore Antoniou, who for many years maintained a double existence in Boston and Athens (he has now returned to Greece), and who has been responsible for teaching a whole generation of younger Greek composers at the conservatory ‘Musical horizons’ in Kalamata. he carved out a smaller niche for himself in the United States than some in Greece might like to think, but he does remain a significant figure for all that, and he now plays a typically energetic role in promoting contemporary music as director of the hellenic Group for Contemporary Music. his award-winning work oedipus at Colonus (1998) was designed for programming alongside Stravinsky’s oedipus rex. Antoniou is really the only Greek composer of note to have settled in the new world, though Christos hatzis (b.1953) has made a name in Canada for an eclectic idiom that draws in some part from Greek traditions, and Dinos Constantinides (b.1929), teaching at Louisiana State University, has had notable successes, especially with his opera antigone. In a more limited way Vicky Tzoumerka-Knoedler (b.1941), has emerged in dance circles as a composer with an interesting if conservative, voice, often indebted to traditional idioms. For most Greek composers, the familiar west European capitals proved more seductive. Mention has already been made of some of those who settled in Germany or Austria. The most significant were Anestis Logothetis and Argyris Kounadis. Logothetis, who was born in present-day Bulgaria to Greek parents and who studied in Greece, left at an early stage, settling in Vienna in 1942 and following an avant-garde path there (notably with his graphic scores) while at the same time keeping links with Greece (he featured in the hellenic weeks). Kounadis also left for Germany at an early stage, securing a teaching post at the hochschule in Freiburg. Of the younger generation a key figure in the world of new music, also based in Germany, has been the highly successful conductor and composer Konstantia Gourzi, currently a professor at the hochschule in Munich. The picture since the 1990s is harder to sketch for a Greek and Greek Cypriot diaspora. It is still very common for younger composers to study abroad. For Cypriots in particular Britain has been an obvious destination, as it has been too for several Albanian composers, and even some Turkish.31 One is struck in informal conversation that many of the younger composers are very relaxed about whether or not they return to the homeland. Perhaps this is not so very different from the past. At any rate, the

31 Notably the Albanian composer Thomas Simaku and the Turkish composer Emre Araci.

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main object is to find a sympathetic context where a living can be made and where their music might be performed. Certainly it is hard to imagine anything remotely comparable today to the symbolic potency of Xenakis’s visit to Greece in September 1975, when a week of concerts and lectures attracted the widest possible interest. The politics were different of course. And in the immediate aftermath of the Junta music was riding high in Greece, not least because of the Theodorakis concerts (applications for conservatory places increased dramatically at this time). Today’s world is a very different one. It is not just that Greek politicians and the Greek public no longer seem quite so interested in embracing their cultural heroes; they seem not to be making the heroes any more. But that, of course, may not be unique to Greece.

Chapter tWentY-tWo

ConSerVatIon Who needs Classical Music? Julian Johnson would balk at any suggestion that classical music is for an elite, and especially a social elite.1 his is an inclusive message. he pleads for a re-investment in the aesthetic, and for a rejection of cultural relativism. We might want to argue that he proposes a sharper division between art and entertainment – between the autonomy character and the commodity character of music – than is realistic. But his thesis is not really damaged by this. What Johnson wants to suggest is that classical music – multi-layered, dense with information, richly implicative, discursive, and pretentious in a good way – has a capacity to transcend social dependencies, including the dependencies that made it possible in the first place. This should not really be a controversial position. It is incontestable that the ideological privileging of the aesthetic within European culture was socially and politically contingent. But that privilege resulted in ideal conditions for the flowering of creative genius, promoting those very qualities that refuse to yield to contingent explanation. For that reason, classical music retains its capacity to enrich us today. Its universalist aspirations may have been based on a myth (the developing belief that a bourgeois culture might speak on behalf of all), but it turned out to be an immensely productive and valuable myth. the continuity between this tradition and ‘new music’ is another matter. earlier I suggested that creative genius was an historical category instituted in early modern europe. as that category was increasingly embedded within bourgeois culture its Janus-faced character became more marked. there was the great music of the past (the canon) and there was the great ‘music of the future’ (the avant-garde).2 at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these two had been rather cleanly divided, and both were further separated from a third category, which we might label commercial music. in a Modernist age these three – classical,

1   Johnson 2002. 2 see the chapter ‘the Great Composer’ in samson 2002.

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new, commercial – existed in a set of mutually dependent, polarised relations, creating in effect three separate force-fields. and for this reason it became increasingly difficult to understand new music as a continuation or immediate inheritance of classical music, despite obvious continuities on a technical level. if anything, it was perceived by many as a kind of rejoinder to classical music. none of this is to deny the value of Johnson’s ‘aesthetic turn’ as a legitimate present-day response to the hijacking of the aesthetic by one ideology after another. nor is it to suggest that an appreciation of the richness, complexity and discursive character of classical music need be tied to social class. But it still remains yesterday’s music. today the force-fields have partially dissolved. new music can sound like old; classical music can be marketed as commercial; popular music uses the technologies of an avant-garde. But this is not quite a return to some pre-modern stylistic continuum. rather it represents a new and knowing fluidity that threatens to dissolve already-established and institutionalised categories, and with a marked tendency to draw two of them (classical and new) into the orbit of the third (commercial), based on the ruthless imperatives of a market economy. we may not like this, of course. we may bemoan the present and hope for a better future, and we may even aspire to a new music that recovers the ‘depth’ of the old. But it is hard to deny that the structures of musical life changed when printed music and the formal concert yielded to recording technologies. those market-driven technologies have kept performers (and conservatories) in business. But the real victim of the market economy has been live professional music-making, especially at the (mostly non-subsidised) levels of the regional music society in Britain, the more formally constituted eingetragener Verein in Germany or the church concert in France. these three are by no means equivalent, but they were all magnets for musiclovers, and a major source of income for middle-ranking professional soloists. none of them really thrive today. the story is rather different for the high-status formal culture of our major cultural capitals. here, despite recurrent prophesies of doom, classical music still rides fairly high, musical standards remain impressive, and ticket sales are tolerably healthy, even if audiences are ageing. But the infrastructure is under strain, and it only remains in good shape in contexts where market forces are given a little help. in other words, this is a heavily subsidised culture. But then it had ever been thus. opera and classical concerts had always depended in large measure on private and/ or public patronage. at various points blatantly mercantile models came into play, notably in the post-classical pianism of the late eighteenth and

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early nineteenth centuries. within that culture the instrument itself generated interconnected, increasingly specialised and mutually dependent roles, all addressing the needs of a new kind of consumer (they included piano manufacturer, publisher, promoter, critic, teacher, performer and composer). But such corners of free-market economics, embodied in the ‘benefit concert’, could survive only by responding very directly to the demands of popular taste. the more aspirational investment in the piano as an agent of expression, in part a reaction against such mercantile values, was possible only within the framework of a patronal culture, whether of the salon or the subscription concert. when we turn to the former Communist states this issue really comes into focus. here the shift from state patronage to the free market could hardly have been more abrupt. Under Communism there was no shortage of subsidy for the performing arts. artists may not have made their fortunes, but there were plenty of jobs and they had a palpable sense of their place in the community. and when Communism fell, there was accordingly a rather major reality check for artists and performers alike. Classical music, it was quickly learned, does not thrive if left entirely to market forces. we may find some of the evidence by returning to our pairing of sarajevo and Belgrade, two cities whose fates were unhappily linked in the 1990s. For both cities there was a virtual disintegration of formal musical culture during that decade. in sarajevo, where classical music had shallow roots, the opera was hit hardest of all. it collapsed totally during the siege, and re-opened again only in 1996. But despite its avowed policy of introducing two new productions each year it struggles to maintain a professional standard, and today it faces many pragmatic and personnel difficulties. the story of the philharmonic orchestra is happier. it is not what it once was, but like the Music academy, which now mounts an ambitious programme of teaching, scholarship and performance, it is on a steady upward curve. yet before the war there were three orchestras in the city, and of these only the philharmonic remains. the story in Belgrade is similar, albeit on a different scale, and for that very reason endowed with a greater capacity for renewal. it is clear that the economic elites who rode high during the Milošević years had very little interest in any corresponding elitism in the cultural world. where music-making was concerned, most existing institutions – including the symphony orchestras, the opera and Ballet, radio Belgrade, the music festivals BeMUs and the international tribune of Composers, together with the whole music-educational establishment – were very badly battered during the 1990s. naturally there were the financial problems that

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attended all such institutions in a period of hyper-inflation and low salaries, but there was in addition a drastic loss of key personnel, bearing in mind that as many as 800,000 young people below the age of 35 left the country during that decade. it is hardly to be wondered at that there was such a serious crisis of morale among the intelligentsia. the informal café culture of Belgrade, traditionally active and dynamic (and still so today), continued much as before, but formal culture all but ground to a halt. Katarina tomašević takes the Belgrade philharmonic orchestra as a case study of the transition from socialism into the new millennium.3 For all the reasons outlined above, the orchestra changed during the 1990s from a reputable institution, with a cluster of good recordings to its name, into what tomašević describes as somewhat akin to a ‘provincial amateur orchestra’. then, following the ‘democratic revolution’ of october 2000, there was a major change in its fortunes, a change that might be taken as symptomatic of the brave new world of the 2000s. it is a story of entrepreneurship and initiative, in which the new conductor of the philharmonic, ivan tasovac, cultivated key figures in the political and financial establishment, and gained the support of high-profile external figures such as Zubin Mehta, in order to secure both public and private funding for the professionalisation of the orchestra. through skilful management and branding, the orchestra gained a privileged status in serbia, with an influx of young performers, foreign tours and recordings, and a newly renovated building, though this is also used for more popular events. tomašević reminds us, however, that there are less happy aspects to the high profile enjoyed by the philharmonic, notably its almost total neglect of serbian music and its failure to secure a solid audience base for the concert season, due to the prevailing climate of financial hardship. ticket prices are now beyond the means of many of those who had been passionate supporters of classical music in earlier times. if the philharmonic is a (qualified) success story, most of the institutions of classical music have a less sanguine tale to tell, and that includes the national theatre, where both opera and ballet programmes are at a rather mediocre level. no less crucially, the boards of the two major radio stations, radio Belgrade and Studio B, closed the two programmes in serbia that were devoted to classical music, a decision that met with widespread opposition (protests and petitions) from music-lovers and professional

3 in an unpublished paper ‘serbian Music in times of transition’ read at the 17th Congress of the iMs, Zurich 2007.

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musicians alike, but to no effect. this decision was a real blow to classical music in serbia. the tendency now is to concentrate its activities into festivals, which are increasingly separated from, rather than an outgrowth of, regular concert activities (there are very clear parallels in the other arts, notably film; the number of cinemas has dropped drastically, but film festivals continue). the major music festival is BeMUs, currently directed by ivan Brkljačić, but even this is not what it was due to financial stringencies, and the same is true of the international tribune of Composers. Moreover questions are being posed just now about the future viability of the many festivals in serbia, including the noMUs festival in novi sad, the Marble and sounds festival at arandjelovac, and several festivals devoted to individual instruments, such as the international Cello Festival.4 the other side of this coin has been the success of a largely uncritical popular culture. in this respect little has changed since the Milošević regime, and it is doubtless significant that some of the turbo-folk stars of the 1990s – above all Ceca – have had comebacks in recent years. it is only fair to add that little of this is unique to serbia among the postCommunist countries in south east europe. But serbia does bring into very sharp focus the division that lies deep at the heart of the wider region, a division that is thematic to this book. i have referred on several occasions to two serbias. they still exist. there is the serbia celebrated by Milošević and by subsequent populist nationalists: xenophobic, antiwestern, proud of its Byzantine roots and legacy. and there is the serbia that looks to europe. tomašević neatly encapsulates them in two festivals whose character and location speak of the deeper divide: the now-famous trumpet festival at Guča, increasingly branding a commercial form of rom music, and the rock festival eXit at novi sad, which mounts a challenge to the ubiquity of pop-folk (even the locations are telling). the eXit festival is indeed viewed as the province of an elite audience, an intelligentsia whose disdain for pop-folk is total. what seems clear is that this intelligentsia is not supporting – or not in significant numbers – the culture of classical music. the pattern is not so different elsewhere in the ex-Communist Balkans. in albania and Bulgaria one might venture that there had been quite simply too many orchestras, both classical and folk, under the Communists to be remotely sustainable. in Bulgaria almost every reasonably sized town had been well catered for, thanks to generous, if ideologically motivated,

4 Janković 2007.

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state subsidies. and when cuts were imposed, theatres, symphony orchestras and folk ensembles across the country were forced to close, leading to familiar tales of unemployment, and – for those of a feasible age – to emigration. only the leading ensembles, and especially those with the status of national institutions, such as the national theatre and the national symphony orchestra, continued to receive adequate state support. even the Koutev ensemble was affected adversely, obliged to change its programming and its aesthetic in response to newly reduced subsidy. nor was this exclusively a phenomenon of the 1990s. perverse understandings of cost-effectiveness in the artistic sphere continue to beleaguer cultural and educational institutions in Bulgaria to this day, and perhaps especially those that are perceived to have close links to the ancien régime. the pattern in romania is similar in some respects, but significantly different in others. there were predictable difficulties in the early 1990s, especially with provincial orchestras, as performers left romania for more fertile land. But if anything there are now more orchestras in the country than in Communist times, thanks to the competitive ambitions of local authorities, which have been prepared to fund them (as indeed they fund universities and conservatories, for several provincial cities have a university with a music school) to gain prestige. Quality is another matter, and in some cities both performance and educational standards leave much to be desired. in the major centres, Bucharest, Cluj and iaşi, where the level remains fairly high, and where there is national government subsidy, the programming is depressingly conservative. the opera in Bucharest is symptomatic, relying mainly on standard nineteenth-century italian fare. wagner is a rarity, and russian, Czech and twentieth-century repertory likewise. even enescu’s oedipe is performed only as part of the biennial enescu festival, which has separate guaranteed funding. indeed romanian composers are conspicuous by their absence from the programmes of big public concerts, despite lobbying from the society of Composers. on the other hand, ticket prices at the opera, and also at the orchestral concerts of the philharmonic orchestra and the national radio orchestra, remain cheap. only the operetta theatre, which mounts truly innovatory productions, has seen a major price hike. it is no doubt predictable that slovenia, which sports its eU membership, and Croatia, which will be a member when this book is published, should have a happier story to tell with respect to formal culture, including the institutions of music and music-making. and in some measure this is true of Greece too. yet the picture in Greece is a decidedly ambivalent one. the key moment of change here was in the mid-seventies, with

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the fall of the Junta, the symbolically charged visits of Xenakis, and the return of theodorakis. it would be hard to overestimate the effects of the latter. For one thing there were cross-over activities between classical music and popular art song, with many Greek composers now turning to the latter, for reasons that could be idealistic, pecuniary or both. But for another, it raised the status of music generally. Until the ‘seventies the three orchestras in athens (state, radio and opera) consisted of many of the same performers, but with the conservatories turning out many more musicians all this changed, and a new professionalism entered the scene. Much the same could be seen beyond athens, moreover, notably in patras and thessaloniki. this is not to say that the culture shift in the early 1990s passed Greece by. there were both pluses and minuses at this moment of caesura. on the negative side, we might mention that in the 1990s the regular, albeit small, audience base for the concerts given by the athens state orchestra was somewhat dissipated. and likewise, we would note that in the last few years much of the dynamism and ambition associated with the Festival of athens has also been lost. in other words, just as in the exCommunist world, one can see evidence that the institutions of bourgeois music-making took a hit in the new climate of aggressive capitalism associated with the ‘nineties and ‘noughties. the situation in music education likewise remains an unhappy one in many respects, with no real national academy and with an in-built constitutional weakness regarding the status of conservatories. and it remains the case that the best graduates from these institutions are likely to seek their fortunes abroad. on the plus side we would note the mushrooming of big cultural projects from the 1990s onwards, beginning with the Megaron, whose symbolic significance was considerable. it was with the establishment of the Megaron that a new professionalism entered Greek musical life. But it is significant that the major funding for this project derived not from the Greek Government but from the onassis Foundation, which is also at this moment planning to develop a new Cultural Centre for arts and literature. the tradition of sponsorship from wealthy Greeks and expatriate Greeks extends back to the late nineteenth century (the ‘monumental’ projects that characterised town planning in athens at that time owe a great deal to it). and it has continued ever since. Like the onassis Foundation, the niarchos Foundation is currently funding similar major projects, including the new national Library and a proposed ‘Maria Callas’ opera house. projects that would be well beyond the reach of the Greek government, in short, become possible due to these big Foundations. and they are

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invariably projects with the highest possible profile. it is no accident that in Greece the relevant government ministry is the Ministry of Culture and tourism. two further points might be made on the positive side. at the present time, due more to the egotism of Mayors than to philanthropy, there is a Municipality orchestra in athens offering free concerts in various venues to a dedicated audience. this is an unusual and distinctive gesture in today’s world, though issues might be raised about musical quality. and secondly, one would note that the fall-out from the events of 1989–90 had collateral benefits for Greek music. Following the collapse of Communism there was massive immigration into Greece from neighbouring states, and they were states with the highly developed musical traditions we associate with state socialism. this played its part in the professionalisation of Greek musical life. Many of the orchestral players from former yugoslavia and albania now find themselves in Greek orchestras in athens or in the provinces, and several have taken on responsibilities at several levels of musical life; an example would be the rather good orchestra of the City Conservatory in Kalamata, whose director is albanian. it is not the only case in which a Communist loss became a Greek gain. Has Modern Music really Grown old? adorno’s formulation is a suggestive one.5 we are invited to imagine middle age spread inexorably overtaking the avant-garde. however, he signified something rather more than the reification and institutionalisation of the dissenting voice. as noted in chapter 20, he was effectively distinguishing between the spirit of early twentieth-century modernism (especially schoenberg, who brought to a close, as adorno saw it, the humanistic project of Beethoven) and the ‘new music’ of the 1950s (Boulez, stockhausen, Berio). Certainly the ‘new music’ shared with that earlier modernism its commitment to a specialised, progressive and ‘authentic’ art, and to that ‘rhetoric of endless innovation’ so pertinently identified by alastair williams.6 But there is also a sense in which this post-war repertory represented an official art, a modernism that was supported by the institutions. it was far removed in tone from the explosive, campaigning modernisms associated with that earlier period, when the bourgeois-romantic project 5 adorno 1956. 6 williams, a. 1997.

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of greatness truly reached its apotheosis. post-war modernism, in short, was sanctioned rather than dissenting. and in due course it found its place in one corner of a plural cultural field, with its own modest taste public. it was neither threatened by, nor did it threaten, the politics and aesthetics of mass culture. indeed, to the extent that contemporary music softened its tone, modernism became itself historical: a movement to be remembered and even conserved. a further dimension of this story concerns place and identity. in the case of early twentieth-century modernisms, there was a strong sense of place, and indeed of nationality. the modernisms of Berlin and paris were very different in nature. where the one was ‘progressive’ and (later) socially engaged, the other was eclectic, diversified, detached and experimental. and both were different again from the modernisms of st. petersburg and vienna, the former all about the collision of cultures, the latter about an inward-looking crisis of expression, alienated from the public, jealous of the integrity of art and protective of its truthfulness. these are generalisations, but they help us to understand the different projects of Busoni-weill, Debussy, stravinsky and schoenberg. Likewise, the modernisms that developed around the eastern edges of europe – Janáček, Bartók, szymanowski, enescu – were heavily dependent on place and nation. in this respect, as in others, the new music of the postwar years registered a significant change. to a marked degree, though not completely, this music detached itself from a sense of place and nation. there were leading centres of the new music, of course, but they were not inscribed in particular styles; nor did they actively shape particular cultural identities. if anything, they established a norm of cosmopolitanism to which all might aspire. the cluster of changes that took place in creative praxes during the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes collectively filed under ‘postmodernism’, resulted in something of a re-investment in place. it was a widespread tendency, and it took several forms, very often linked to what were taken to be the ancient religious or ethnic roots of a people. something of this has already been noted. importantly, it gave a license to composers once more to celebrate nationhood and regional identity, and that in its turn had some capacity to change the dynamic between centres and peripheries. the fate of new music in south east europe needs to be viewed within this broader context. already i have described two opposing narratives: a narrative of emancipation, which found its appropriate context in the cosmopolitan modernism of the postwar years, and a narrative of homecoming, which aligned itself more naturally to a postmodern aesthetic.

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the second narrative did not entirely supplant the first. rather there was a shift in emphasis between two co-existing impulses among contemporary composers, and it was a shift that may well have been influenced by more material questions. another way of saying this is that the need to negotiate cultural identities no doubt seemed more urgent given the new realities of a post-Communist world. as we have seen, the transfer to an uncompromising market economy wreaked havoc with the Communist culture of state subsidy (hence the exodus), and as a result contemporary music returned once more to the more typically rarefied existence (niche product or ghetto, depending on your taste) with which it has most typically been associated. in major western capitals high-profile public music-making could and did make room for contemporary modernisms, though in the sort of modest proportions that can all too easily smack of tokenism. But in the former eastern Bloc this was more difficult to achieve. those who followed the postmodern minimalist trails blazed by the likes of arvo pärt in estonia and henryk Górecki in poland could well achieve wide, and even mass, appeal. But modernists of the old school were relegated to the college-conservatory circle, where they could indeed secure avid support. we may make a return visit to sarajevo and Belgrade to follow these fortunes. one issue at stake here is the prominence of the academy in the public domain, for it is in the nature of the academy to support new music. it may be precisely because the public domain as a whole is underdeveloped in sarajevo that new music has gained some support there since the war. the academy of Music is central to a good deal of sarajevo’s musical life. it promotes concerts by the sonemus ensemble (a dedicated new music group, comprising staff from the academy, programming only music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), as well as sponsoring recordings associated with the annual symposium Music in Society, and in series devoted to ‘concert music’ and ‘competition works’. these recordings are not commercially available, however, reinforcing the sense of a niche product. (indeed this is a pattern found elsewhere; as noted earlier, recordings sponsored by Composers’ Union in romania cannot be sold in the market place.) the overall impression is of a group of young Bosnian composers – none truly outstanding, it has to be said – who have a clear sense that they belong to, and are valued by, a relatively small community, even if they remain largely hidden from the wider view. there is a political dimension too. the contemporary music that really does reach a wider public – the classic example is asim horozić’s opera Hasanaginica (2000) – is invariably populist, and with an obvious capacity to reinforce the political status quo.

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perhaps the key difference in Belgrade is a simple one, namely that composers have higher expectations. there are more composers than musicologists in the serbian academy, and they are in no doubt that the job of musicologists is to promote contemporary composers. Likewise the composers are all members of a Union that has traditionally been strong and assertive in its support for contemporary serbian-yugoslav music, and that maintains an outlet to the world beyond by way of its Music information Centre. that this has recently become virtual (losing its physical space alongside the slavenski Museum, itself all but closed down it seems, in 1909) is telling. it is indicative of a loss of presence for contemporary composers. they are still featured prominently enough in the pages of novi Zvuk, and in its related CD series, but public performances are largely in University, academy or Composers’ Union circles, or at the annual international tribune of Composers, which is the only major outlet for contemporary composers today. the older generation – whether traditionalists such as Dejan Despić and vlastimir trajković, modernists such a srđan hofman, or avant-garde iconoclasts such as vladan radovanović – is inclined to feel hard done by. no doubt such figures are nostalgic for a time when the contemporary composer was a prominent voice in the musical community. admired or vilified, he or she was at least noticed. among younger composers there is perhaps a greater realism about this. we noted earlier the all-but-inevitable tendency for the more gifted to emigrate, and we could have added to that list Branka popović (b.1977), currently based in Britain, and Jasna veličković (b.1974), who works in the netherlands. yet we also noted, paradoxically, that the serbian composer with the highest profile is one who stayed, isadora Žebeljan. there are other young composers active in serbia today, and again the roll call confirms the intriguing gender weighting mentioned in the last chapter. aleksandra-anja Đorđević (b.1970), known for her imaginative work with traditional Balkan music and her collaborations with Goran Bregović as well as for her contributions to modernist repertory (some based on ancient myth), is a case in point. But it is the success of Žebeljan that really calls for comment. Žebeljan is a genuinely gifted composer, with a recognisable voice. her music is published by ricordi, and it has been extensively performed abroad as well as in serbia, including a prestigious David pountney production of her chamber opera Zora d. this latter is an imaginative interaction between the emotionally charged worlds of a present-day young woman and a 1930s poet named Zora Dulian, and its staging in amsterdam and vienna in 2003 (and subsequently elsewhere) met with real

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public acclaim. in addition, there have been several works commissioned by the Genesis Foundation, including her Clarinet Quintet. Žebeljan has been uncannily successful in finding a voice that seems to meet the needs of her public at different times. her gift for expressive, highly evocative scene setting is already obvious in Pep it Up (1988), notably through its integral use of glissandi, but so too is the hint of subversion, the carefully calculated quota of guarded modernism (the continuum of expressive sound is periodically ‘invaded’ by percussion, and the style veers towards a jazz idiom; the work is subtitled ‘Fantasy’). Likewise the modern folklorisms and blatant historical associations of rukoveti had potency at the time of composition (2000). in the best of her more recent music, and the orchestral work The Horses of Saint Mark of 2004 (written for the venice Biennale) is certainly among the very best of it, there is a coming together of the old and new, resulting at times in a striking intensity of expression. at the same time Žebeljan’s high profile is by no means a simple case of talent surfacing, come what may. her career is a telling demonstration of just how much the success of serbian composers, both at home and abroad, depends on entrepreneurial acumen, political nous, and a capacity to network. this, it may be argued, is as true of London or amsterdam as of Belgrade. But there is a difference, and it speaks of continuing life in the centre-periphery dynamic. the real point is that in Belgrade the contemporary composer has been squeezed to the very edges of the public sphere. in a way this brings us to the heart of the dilemma for new music in the ex-Communist world. Under Communism living composers had found themselves at the centre of things to an extent that was distinctly atypical for a wider late twentieth-century culture. they were visible in the musical community, and whatever the constraints, they were prominent and largely respected. since 1989 all that has changed. the Union of Composers in Bulgaria, which in one form or another now has something like an eighty-year history, makes for an interesting case study of contemporary survival strategies. that it is able to function at all with only a modest subsidy from the Ministry of Culture comes down in part to its ownership of an impressive building in the centre of sofia. here the free market and the new music work together. By renting out several of the upper floors, the Union is in a position to fund much of its activity, including the concerts of ‘new Bulgarian Music’ that take place on a regular basis throughout the year in its philip Koutev concert hall, as well as at its annual spring festival. attending the concerts is akin to dropping in on a private club, where everyone (except oneself) is known to everyone else. the music on

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offer is of distinctly variable quality. stylistically it embraces anachronistic (as distinct from postmodern) romanticisms (rossen Balkanski [b.1968]), simple folk-inspired idioms (nikolay Kaufman [b.1925]), impressionistic soundscapes (stefan ikonomov [1937–94]), neo-Bartókian ‘Balkan’ energies (Krassimir taskov [b.1955]) and self-consciously modernist adventures (emil Mirtchev [b. 1953]). in this context the composers of real distinction stand out in conspicuous relief. several of the older composers discussed in an earlier chapter are still active today. Dimiter Christoff and vassil Kazandjiev, for example, are certainly two of the most distinguished of today’s Bulgarian composers, with characteristically challenging works dating from the 1990s and beyond. indeed Kazandjiev’s Fourth symphony (‘nirvana’) of 2000 and Fifth symphony (Lux aeterna) of 2006 could be considered respective high points of his creativity.7 emil tabakov is also still highly visible as an eminent public figure (he was Minister of Culture in 1997), and in his role as a leading conductor he has been well placed to present his music both at home and abroad. there are signs in some of his later music that the hard ‘Balkan’ edges of his earlier style have been somewhat softened, notably in his requiem of 1994, whose metaphysical dimension has affinities with some of the later music of ivan spassov. Likewise stefan Dragostinov continues to challenge, drawing on traditional Bulgarian music, but in complex, modernist contexts; works such as the song cycles Love Story and Christmas Star (volumes 5 and 6 of The Key to the Mystery) are characteristic. But these later years have also seen him work on experimental multi-media projects such as Happy Music and Motion Grafics (2001). we might add to the list two composers who stand apart for particular reasons. simo Lazarov (b.1948) is notable as the Bulgarian composer who has invested most comprehensively in electronic and computer music, initially by founding the electronic Music studio at Bulgarian radio (no longer in existence) and currently through his teaching of Computer systems and technologies at the new Bulgarian University. he has thus been a pioneering figure in developing an interest in studio and computer composition among the younger generation. Julia tsenova (b.1946) stands out as one of a small handful of successful women composers in Bulgaria, immediately suggesting an interesting, and not easily explicable, contrast with serbia. tsenova is at home in the worlds of pop and jazz as well as of classical music (she currently teaches piano in the pop and Jazz Music

7 For a very detailed technical study of Kazandjiev’s music, see Bojikova 1999.

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Faculty of the state academy of Music), but in the latter field she has developed a genuinely novel contemporary idiom involving pastiche and collage. in her music of the 1990s and beyond she has cultivated a reflective, restrained modernist manner, somewhat inspired by oriental philosophy. works such as her Triptych for piano (1996), Green Silence (2000) and amadeus rondo for Flute and piano (2006) are representative. of the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most distinctive and original voices is undoubtedly that of Georgi arnaoudov. his music has a wide range of expression (there are interesting experiments in extending classical and baroque styles in some works), but the slowmoving crystalline textures – not static, but building intensity steadily and carefully – of Le Temple du silence for two pianos of 1996 perhaps reveal him at his best. inspired by an evocative passage from the Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far east by the new age writer B.t. spalding, this work also reflects arnaoudov’s interest in ancient and Far eastern Music. other prominent figures from this decade include velislav Zaimov (b.1951), currently president of the Union, a relatively more traditional but nonetheless challenging composer. his recent work, including a series of instrumental concertos and symphonies, is invariably carefully thoughtthrough, while smaller-scale works such as the Fourth piano sonata of 2005 are terse and economical in construction, but at the same time capable of considerable poetic intensity. Lubomir Denev (b.1951) is also a significant figure, one of several Bulgarian composers who seem equally at home in the worlds of contemporary classical music and jazz (compare Julia tsenova and Milcho Leviev), and of the younger generation.8 the picture in romania is not dissimilar. For a senior figure such as pascal Bentoiu, the present state of affairs has been so enervating that he has all but stopped composing. the society of Composers continues, though it is embroiled in legal questions over the status of its splendid quarters in the Cantacuzino palace. But its once powerful role has been reduced. exactly as in sofia, funding is maintained by renting parts of the building, as also much of the space within its shop on Bucharest’s Calea vittoria, but compared with the funding it was in a position to offer for commissions and prizes in the past, the present provision is poor. above all, it has lost its role as an arbiter of quality, a role that naturally had its problems, but that worked well for the most part. in the current free market decisions about commissions and performances are commercially

8 For a discussion of Leviev, see Levy 2007.

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based, often arbitrary and without real artistic integrity; in particular they are a prey to the naivety of local mayors. as elsewhere in south east europe, younger composers offer their music to depressingly small audiences either within the club-like atmosphere of the society of Composers, where there is an attractive concert hall, at the University of Music, or at dedicated events such as the enescu Festival (which is contractually obliged to devote part of its proceedings to romanian music, and has an accompanying symposium) and the annual Contemporary Music Festival. in addition there are occasional one-day festivals in provincial centres. Composers active in romania today present us with a wide range of styles, not to say family groupings, from the ‘new romanticism’ associated with husband and wife team Şerban nichifor (b.1954) and Liana alexandra (b.1947) to the more challenging, but still traditionally orientated approaches of mother and daughter team Doina rotaru (b.1951) and Diana rotaru (b.1981). electronic and computer (or more specifically French-influenced ‘spectral’) musics are represented principally by Calin ioachimescu (b.1949), iancu Dumitrescu (b.1944), Fred popovici (b.1948) and (in some works) octavian nemescu, while more eclectic, polystylistic idioms are the province of irinel anghel (b.1969) and Mihaela vosganian (b.1961). But the leading figure today is Dan Dediu (b.1967), currently the rector of the national University of Music and also supervisor of symphonic Music at the society of Composers. in addition to his studies with niculescu, Dediu worked in vienna and at irCaM, and he has been astonishingly prolific, both as a composer and critic. Key works include his chamber opera, Post-ficţiunea (1995), four symphonies, and a substantial body of chamber music and songs. the range of expression is striking, as is Dediu’s obvious concern with continuities in romanian music, drawing on techniques and approaches associated with several of his modernist predecessors. i will end with a very brief word on Greece. as noted in earlier chapters, the story of Greek music in recent times does not seem to fit neatly with our other Balkan stories, at least on the surface. thus Greek modernism was cultivated in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when it was out of favour if not proscribed in the Communist world. Likewise the end of the Junta in 1974 witnessed a decisive swerve towards more popular styles at a time when modernism was really coming into its own across the border. even on this surface level, however, the invariably political resonances of Greek music led to unlikely alliances, as when one of the key sponsors of contemporary music turned out to be Manos hadjidakis. Beneath the surface there were impulses at work that drew Greece into

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the larger Balkan fold. i will suggest in chapter 24 that the underlying narratives that shaped compositional histories in the Communist sector were no less active in Greece. But it is harder to draw firm conclusions about developments since 1990, in Greece as also in the ex-Communist world. Determinate compositional trends are not so apparent. nor can one identify with certainty the most significant composers, given that those perceived to be so are more often than not key personalities in musical life more generally. Consider first two very different, composers of the older and middle generations, both of whom worked in paris for several years. the Messiaen student Giorgos Kouroupos (b.1942) made a good career in France as a respected composer and teacher, and could indeed have stayed there. his return to Greece immediately after the fall of the Junta was largely for idealistic reasons, and was instigated above all by hadjidakis, at that time hugely influential in the determination of culture. working mainly in the third progamme of the radio, Kouroupos has played an influential role in promoting music characterised by new simplicities. in contrast, the composer and musicologist haris Xanthoudakis (b.1950) is a committed modernist, and has made use of various mathematical processes to activate structures that ‘objectify’, without destroying, the expressive impulses that underlie much of his music. he too studied in paris, but after teaching in several conservatories in europe returned to Greece to found and develop the dynamic music programme at the ionian University of Corfu, where he was for a time vice-rector. Consider, secondly, three of the many younger composers working in Greece today, all born in the 1960s, and all sustaining a high reputation. Minas alexiadis (b.1960), who studied in Dusseldorf, has also worked in jazz and has developed a rather specific form of contemporary heterophony in some of his major works. periklis Koukos (b.1960), the most highprofile of the three, explored modernist styles in his earlier compositions, but has subsequently – from the late 1980s onwards – cultivated a neotonal idiom that stands apart from more fashionable, and one might say conventional, expressions of a postmodern aesthetic. and finally nikos Xanthoulis (b.1962), a distinguished trumpeter, has an extensive output for the theatre, including children’s operas and incidental music for the epidaurus Festival. all three are relatively high-profile figures in Greek musical life. yet their music remains somewhat in the shadows. and in this respect too Greece is not so different from its neighbours. new music everywhere struggles to be heard.

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Where Have all the Folksongs Gone? ethnomusicologists seem to enjoy reflecting on what they do, and on what they ought to do. perhaps it is easier to reflect on this discipline than to practice it. so when henry stobart published The new (ethno)musicologies in 2008 he was extending a tradition of debate that already had some form.9 a glance at the journal ethnomusicology makes the point, and it also serves to emphasise that any such self-reflection, and in particular any self-conscious engagement with the ‘new’, necessarily implies a strongly developed sense of the tradition of the discipline. there is a paradox associated with this self-reflection, as philip Bohlman points out elsewhere in the volume.10 Bohlman reminds us that ethnomusicology has cultivated a rhetoric in which ‘newness becomes normative’ and thus ceases to be new. it seems unhelpful, then, to speak of paradigm shifts here in the way one did of musicology back in the 1980s (it would be glib to suggest that in musicology there had been plenty of doing and not enough reflecting). Many of the questions aired by stobart’s contributors are questions that have been raised in one form or another for some time, but that does not make them less germane to the concerns of this chapter. in particular the status of area studies, a topic initially broached by Michelle Bigenho in her ‘view from anthropology’ and picked up later by Martin stokes in his ‘afterword’, deserves some consideration here.11 i have already intimated that until relatively recently there was a considerable space between the scholarly traditions and mentalités of native ethnomusicologists in south east europe and those of the several outsiders (mainly north american) who have worked in this region. at risk of caricature, one might say that there has been a broadly conservative approach to the discipline among many native scholars, an approach that cannot be entirely attributed to the prescriptions of state socialism. this conservatism was especially evident in the tendency to map out – through fieldwork and classification – particular, often quite small, geographical regions while fighting shy of wider interpretative perspectives. the view from outside has been more adventurous, not least in its tendency to replace groups with situations, in its desire to draw the observer into the

   9 stobart 2008. 10 Bohlman 2008. 11   stokes 2008.

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hermeneutic circle, and in the status it has assigned to urban and minority cultures. today these distinctions have much less meaning, such is the fluidity of scholarly commerce, but they have not entirely disappeared. of course, what both approaches share is an investment in area studies, and it is against this background that the views of Bigenho and stokes might be revisited. For Bigenho, a preoccupation with area studies still emerges clearly from the course structures and textbooks of the north american College circle, however much ethnomusicologists insist that they have ‘moved on’. as she sees it, this betrays the lingering presence of the colonialist origins of the discipline and of the ethos of the exotic wrapped up in those origins. stokes accepts the critique, but makes a claim for a form of area studies that transcends this ideology, that allows for an imaginative crossing of boundaries, both physical and repertorial, and that promotes a more critical engagement with constructions of place. what neither author takes any account of is the very different ideology that has informed area studies in the hands of east european scholars, and which catches a different resonance from the origins of the discipline, and from much earlier herderian notions of culture. Bartók’s approach to traditional music was an evolving one, but from the start it involved the conservation of material that had been bypassed by the rationalising tendencies of western art music, and as a result was regarded as both privileged and in some sense ‘pure’. at various stages of his evolving thought this approach was allied to questions of ethnicity and nationhood, and it was this latter tendency that was highlighted in post-war eastern europe. it is not hard to see how all this could rather easily slip into a form of xenophobia that took a step beyond anything found in Bartók. Far from an exoticism, then, traditional music was here understood as a badge of nationhood in the familiar herderian tradition. the verities of local cultures were respected, but they were subordinated to an officially sanctioned and motivated ethnonational agenda, and often at the expense of minority cultures within the state. it would be wrong to associate this approach exclusively with Communist programmes, for it was no less visible in other parts of europe’s ‘periphery’. in practice, it resulted in ambitious, and in the case of Communist states systematic, programmes of collection, with the aim of conserving, and also mapping, the nation’s music. something of this was discussed in chapter 19, where it was also noted that ostensibly countervailing forces stemming from impulses to modernisation were in due course reconciled with the nationalist agenda. to this day, programmes of conservation, revival and revitalisation are

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alive and well in south east europe, as are the festivals, partly a hangover from Communist days. there are still scholars who see a unique kind of strength and lyricism in dying rural traditions, and who view these traditions with a nostalgia infused by national pride. But for others, the study of continuity and change has sloughed off much of this ideological baggage. even for them, however, the focus is often on home ground, if only because accurate reconstruction of a tradition’s history can help prevent its political manipulation. there are other reasons for the focus on home ground. resourcing ethnomusicology can be an expensive business, for a start. But in any case one thing is certain. Fieldwork of the traditional kind is a game with diminishing returns in south east europe, for the very obvious reason that the generation with relevant memory is disappearing. there are, in short, pragmatic as well as ideological reasons for the reorientation of ethnomusicology towards urban repertories, an engagement with new global media (‘e-fieldwork’), performance studies, and activism (‘applied ethnomusicology’). For younger scholars, and especially for those in the university sector, there is also no doubt a strong sense that the evolution of the discipline (‘cutting-edge research’) creates its own imperatives. we are left, then, with a diminishing pool of scholars who continue to plough the older furrows, who still place conservation high on their agenda, and who do so by and large within the framework of national, if not nationalist, scholarship. we have met several of them already. in some cases the mapping has been local, as with athena Katsenevaki’s fieldwork in north pindus, Jelena Jovanović’s research in Šumadija, Dimitrije Golemović’s recordings from plav, or (in an interesting combination of insider-outsider perspectives) Jacques Bouët and speranța rădulescu’s project in the oaş Country. and we might add here the recordings of pomak songs made by nikos Kokkas in western thrace, and by vasilis nitsiakos in Konitsa. elsewhere the framework is the wider nation, as in the continuing projects of the (Merlier) Music Folklore archive in athens, under the leadership of Markos Dragoumis. yet even here – and it is typical of such archives just about everywhere – more time is now devoted to digitising existing collections than to collecting new material. an impressive collection of CDs has already emerged from the Music Folklore archive, covering the islands as well as the mainland, and in some cases mixing old and new recordings. there are previously unpublished recordings from the Dodecanese (Baud-Bovy collected here in the 1930s), recordings of lullabies from all over Greece, of songs from asia Minor, and from siphnos, samothrace,

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aegina, vogatsiko Kastoria, Janina, Leros, pontos, Florina, south euboea, and so on. we may take Croatia as a measure of changing approaches to ethnomusicology in the ex-Communist states. the wider context is ethnological studies more generally, and here Croatia has had notable strengths in dance and folk poetry as well as in music. the major institutions in the first half of the twentieth century were the Department of ethnology at the University of Zagreb and the ethnographic Museum. the Music Department within the Museum, established in 1921, was especially important for the conservationist agenda, and in 1948 it became the institute of Folk art, later the institute of ethnology and Folklore research, with its own Musical Folklore Department. the institute’s first Director, vinko Žganec, spelt out the programmes of collection and classification that were common to all such institutes in the Communist world. Jerko Bezić, a key figure in the institute’s history from the mid 1960s, reminds us that according to terms of reference provided by the First Congress of the yugoslav Composers’ association held in Belgrade in 1950, scholars were enjoined to ‘work on collecting and scholarly elaborating our musical folklore’, leading to ‘knowing and deepening the national musical language’.12 Moreover, familiar prejudices were at work. according to Žganec, ‘conditions [for creating folklore] were more favourable in the village than in the town’.13 During the 1950s and 1960s there was a notable ideological dimension to this research. Collection and conservation were still the principal imperatives, but partisan songs, as well as more traditional agrarian repertories, were included and promoted as models with a specific socially educative role. then in the 1970s a more anthropological approach was adopted, with Jerko Bezić leading the way. the real nature of this shift was the rejection of an idealised, politically motivated and essentially static portrait of folk music in favour of a more direct engagement with traditional music as embedded within a constantly evolving and fluid contemporary culture. then, as Bezić himself reminds us, the 1980s departed yet further from more traditional, prescriptively organised regional studies, partly in response to the evolution of the wider discipline but also to take some account of the neo-folk movement that had by then swept across

12 Bezić 1998. 13 Žganec 1962.

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yugoslavia, departing significantly from an earlier agrarian ethos.14 naila Ceribašić has suggested that these shifts were more apparent than real, however, and locates the true paradigm shift in the 1990s, at which point a much greater variety of approach and method can be detected, including an engagement with diversity, with ‘minorities’ and with the realities of war, to say nothing of a new-found self-reflection as to the true nature of the discipline, very much the point at which this section began.15 at the same time Ceribašić reminds us that conservation has not gone away; rather it has been carried out in a new spirit. it is no longer ‘orientation to the idyllic past’, but careful reconstruction of historical actualities.16 this is an important message. it reaches to the heart of why we need to care about traditional musics, despite their irrelevance to most people’s lived experience today. the more enlightened scholars in south east europe are not attempting to reify these musics in a spirit of nostalgia, presenting them as representative of some mythical Golden age. rather they interrogate them critically, in an attempt to strip away some of the more blatant ideological constructions that have attached to them in the past. in other words, they engage in an act of recovery, which very often becomes an act of discovery. More often than not Ceribašić’s historical actualities blur the sharp lines drawn by nationalist politics, and draw our attention rather to the shared cultural spaces that emerge at local levels. Culture, after all, deals with particulars rather than universals: almost by definition. the institutional energies found in Croatian ethnology are not universally apparent across the region. Financial stringency has been a major issue, and has constrained scholars from exploring beyond the boundaries of the nation state to diasporic communities, the most natural ‘next step’ given that fairly comprehensive collecting was undertaken during the Communist years. Macedonia has found its own solutions to these problems by diverting its energies almost entirely into technology rather than fieldwork, with successful and well-publicised programmes of digitisation centred on the academy and making use of its students. in romania, fieldwork continues, but financial imperatives have dictated programmes that look to immediate neighbours rather than further afield (romanian communities in vojvodina, for instance), or that divert resources to the

14 Bezić 1998. 15 Ceribašić 1998. 16 ibid.

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study of ethnic minorities such as the roma. Much the same has been true of Bulgaria, where monies are still made available to support the bigger folklore festivals such as Koprivstitsa, but where it is increasingly difficult for individual scholars to gain institutional support for their fieldwork. again the tendency has been to look to ethnic minorities, including, as we saw in an earlier chapter, turkish communities in the east. interestingly, it is Greece that has seemed to move with greatest difficulty on the issue of ethnic minorities. at risk of over-generalising, it seems that traditional collection, conservation and digitisation of the national heritage continues apace, notably through the efforts of Dragoumis and his team. it seems, too, that there is openness to new perspectives within the discipline, promoted by pavlos Kavouras at the University of athens, and including various kinds of urban ethnomusicology. what has proved more difficult, and has tended to run up against official opposition, is serious research by Greek scholars into the music of ethnic minorities that maintain their separateness. of course there are exceptions, and some of them have already been noted. But the work of nikos Kokkas on pomaks in western thrace has not been plain sailing. and likewise there has been resistance to the attempts by haris sarris to include music from slavophone villages in the recordings he has made in northern Greece. the official agendas, those dictated by the funding bodies, would prefer not to acknowledge such repertories. Conservation, in other words, is selective.

Chapter tWentY-three

baLKan beat Heroes ‘this is the story about the times when they were big and I was little’. In this way the political commentator Igor Mirković introduced his 2003 rockumentary film Sretno dijete [lucky kid]. the ‘they’ in his narration referred to his onetime heroes, the performers associated with the socalled ‘new wave’ movement that dominated yugoslav popular music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mirković looks back, in other words, from one century to another, and from one political system to another. and as the title of his film indicates, he sees that earlier stage of yugoslav popular culture as a kind of golden age. It is a story of idealism (a privileged moment in the narrator’s life remembered and treasured), but also of some loss of idealism on the part of the heroes themselves and of at least one member of their public. In the closing moments of the film Mirković remarks: ‘I lost that fantastic naïve ability to admire them [the heroes] unreservedly’. even so, his love for his golden age is everywhere apparent; the memories are an active part of his present. nor is he alone. Sretno dijete centres around a reunion of some of the key personnel in Zagreb in 2003, but to track down his heroes Mirković has to travel far and wide: to paris, Budapest, Vienna, Utrecht and new york. Some are still involved with music, some are not; some have achieved material success, some have not. Most are cooperative, and the personal reunions, the exchanges of memories, make for genuinely interesting footage. But one of the most influential of them, Branimir (‘Johnny’) Štulić, proves elusive to the end. although he retains a messianic aura in former yugoslavia, even today, Štulić has consistently resisted all attempts to draw him out of his secluded private existence in holland. accordingly, he refuses to play Mirković’s nostalgia game, a game in which multi-sited interviews set in the present are juxtaposed with footage recorded in the yugoslav capitals, Zagreb in particular, back then in the golden age. naturally this juxtaposition invites us to reflect on what might have been lost. For one, there is the excitement and energy that derived from a specific place at a specific time; and in this respect the kulušić Club in

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Zagreb, where you rubbed shoulders with your heroes, might almost be compared with the Cavern Club in liverpool back in the 1960s.1 the yugoslav capitals may indeed have felt ‘at the edge of the world’, as Mirković puts it, during the Communist era, but for a brief period at least they throbbed with the energy of a vibrant, defiantly self-confident youth culture, played out against a background of decaying socialism. For Mirković, and for others of his generation, Zagreb was the only place to be during this explosion of punk-rock culture, prior to its anaesthetisation by the culture industry. Compare this energy, the narrator seems to say, with the standardised and stereotyped pop-folk played all over the Balkans today. For another, there is the idealism. when Jura Stublić, the frontman of the band Film, tried to articulate some of the values associated with the new wave, he remarked that he and his colleagues disliked ‘people with money’. and it is true that, at least in the early stages, the heroes made relatively little from record sales or gigs, and that money was not really what motivated them. again we are implicitly invited to compare this punkrock anti-materialism with the image and ethos associated with today’s heroes. who, we ask, are today’s heroes? are they the turbo-folk divas of the culture industry, with their kitsch palaces and saccharine sentiment, all available on tap through the tV music channels? Could they even be the machismo heroes of gangster land, no doubt deplored in reality, but idealised and even celebrated in some of the ‘trash’ imagery of pop-folk videos? none of it is quite that simple, of course. For one, Mirković himself makes no such direct comparison with today’s popular music. For another, it would be a mistake to translate an autobiographical film into straightforward social commentary. and for yet another, today’s pop-folk constitutes neither a uniform repertory, nor a repertory entirely lacking in critical edge. nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that new wave fans of a certain generation find it hard to understand how young people today can idolise figures such as Dino Merlin. Mirković’s film unfolds against a background of political events. we see in rapid succession first the celebrations surrounding the fortieth anniversary of tito’s regime and then the public mourning that attended his funeral. we see the small-town atmosphere of Zagreb in those days, a town where just about everything was closed by 10 pm. we see the evidence of economic collapse in the 1980s: the power cuts and electricity

1 See Cohen 1991, 15, for a discussion of the shaping elements created by local contexts.

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shortages, the widespread unemployment. and we see the censorship of rock music, direct and indirect, and based less on political dissent than on the putative immorality of the lyrics. to what extent, then, was the new wave a genuinely critical popular culture. that it was provocative and anti-establishment is clear. and in certain cases (Stublić in particular) it was socially aware and sought to make a difference. But mainly it seemed to represent an attempt to distance social and political immediacies through art, a kind of ‘art for art’s sake’ in response to the greyness of the world. For Mirković and his associates punk rock generated an alternative all-consuming reality; it was more important than life itself. renato Metessi from the band Patrola articulates something of this in the film. ‘I created my own world. So politics was out of mind; we never bothered about that. tito, the party, what was that? It never mattered.’ a more stridently political position came only with the Milošević era. the original heroes, as we noted, dispersed after 1990. Consider Haustor and Idoli, based in Croatia and Serbia respectively. the key personnel in Haustor had been the bassist Srđan (now Samuel) Sacher and the guitarist Darko rundek. But Sacher had already left the band in 1988, leaving rundek as the main driving force. then, in 1990, the entire group disbanded, and their temporary reunion later in the decade proved to be fleeting. as for Idoli, it fell apart in the mid 1980s. the major players, nebojša krstić and Srđan Šaper, continued to collaborate on some projects, but in the end they both left the musical world, with Šaper making a career in marketing and politics, and krstić becoming a doctor and actor. again there was a brief reunion, at least of these two, in 1995. Of the other members of the band, Vlada Divljan eventually settled in Vienna (after a spell in australia) and is a reasonably successful solo artist and leader of the old Stars Band, while Zdenko kolar took a variety of jobs, but is also a member of the old Stars Band. kokan popović, meanwhile, moved to South africa, where he formed a band of Serbian musicians known (no doubt with heavy irony) as Kokan and the Traitors. It is hard to find in any of these later incarnations even vestigial traces of the idealism, the anti-materialism, and the critical energy associated with Mirković’s golden age. Indeed it is reasonable to ask if there are such traces anywhere in today’s popular culture in former yugoslavia. we might consider this question by placing the spotlight on Bosnia. Bijelo dugme was the most high-profile of the new wave groups to disband with the war, with Bregović moving to paris before developing a vie bifurcique in paris and Belgrade. Zabranjeno pušenje disbanded at the same time, or rather it split into two bands. Most of the original group remained with Sejo Sexon

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in Sarajevo and (during the siege) Zagreb, but nele karajlić, himself an ethnic Serb, moved to Belgrade, where in due course he established a second version of Zabranjeno pušenje, and later a third with which emir kusturica was at one time involved. the result has not been promising. It is hard to know whether karajlić’s current pro-Serbian stance is a response to his rejection by Bosnia (his attitude was once very different), but in any case the musical results add up to a very pale shadow of Zabranjeno pušenje in its Bosnian heyday. even at the height of the new wave the bands in Bosnia and herzegovina were clear that their primary audience was a local one. there was a sentimental strain running through some of the lyrics (links with sevdalinka) and often too a faux-heroic quality that might be directed, for example, to local sports figures. But there were also provocative messages, anti-establishment critiques, and parodic gestures. with the departure of the heroes, much of this was lost. the new role models, who include hari Mata hari and Dino Merlin, still probably the biggest figure in pop-folk in Bosnia today, are both more localised (though in Merlin’s case there is recognition beyond Bosnia) and more conformant. and that in turn speaks into a larger narrative about the redefinition of Bosnian identities in the post-war era, marked by new national ideologies, new parties, new cultural associations, and new public spaces for the playing out of national narratives. Music contributed in two ways to these reformations of national identity. ‘national musics’ in modern guise – sevdalinka in particular, but also ilahije – have become ubiquitous. But at the same time a more anonymous pop-folk, common to so much of the Balkans these days’, is given spurious national associations. amila ramović comments scathingly on both the labelling and the marketing of one of Merlin’s CDs, a tribute to ‘Burek’, the familiar pie found all over Bosnia and herzegovina.2 In recent years there have been some indications of a resurgence of a ‘critical’ popular music in Bosnia and herzegovina. attempts to revive the old bands have not been notably successful, but a handful of socially aware, provocative bands have made an appearance, referring freely to a variety of traditions, including that of pop-folk. One such is Letu štuke [airoplane], based in Sarajevo, and led by Dino Šarin, who together with producer Dzani pervan set out to rebel against the narrow limits of today’s popular music scene. Several of their lyrics are both anti-capitalist and

2 ramović 2005.

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anti-nationalist; in ‘Minimalizm’, we learn at one point that capitalism fails to understand the value of small things, and at another that the boot (of nationalism) threatens to trample us into the ground. likewise the rapper edo Majka, a young Bosniak who has collaborated with Šarin and who became known after releasing an album in Zagreb, attempts to examine present-day realities in ways that respect all ethnicities and religions but remain critical of the status quo (‘Jebo vladu’ [Screw the Government]). Or we might cite the reggae-influenced Mostar band Zoster, whose videos (notably the animated ‘ko je jamio’ [who has stolen]) again strike an anti-establishment note. Or dubioza kolektiv, which preaches tolerance; in ‘Štrajk’ [Strike] they plead to be accepted as Bosnians, not narrowly defined by their religion, i.e. Bosniak. there are suggestions here of a new idealism, perhaps even the beginnings of a new core for a creative, dare one say ‘progressive’, pop music in Bosnia and herzegovina. re-Inscribing Yugoslavia Such hints of renewal hardly challenge the ubiquity of pop-folk, not just in Bosnia and herzegovina, but all over the former yugoslavia. this calls for some comment, not least in relation to expressions of nationhood among the successor states. within a classic understanding of cultural nationalism, the spirit of the nation is embodied in its language and in the cultural practices of its people. It is interesting, then, to consider the fates first of language and then of cultural practices in the yugoslav successor states. Serbo-Croat had its dialects, but throughout the twentieth century it was in practice a single language. Since 1990 it has been fragmented, forced apart by nation state politics. when we turn to popular cultural practices, on the other hand, there has been an increasing convergence since 1990, and especially in music, where an orientalised pop-folk rules. the discourses emphasise that similar things can mean different things, but the music tells its own story. It is of some interest, then, to examine pop-folk boundaries between the principal South Slav nations. I will pass over the propaganda ‘war music’ associated with the early 1990s (as discussed by ljerka rasmussen),3 and for that matter the anti-establishment, ‘underground’ rock music cultivated in

3 rasmussen 2007, 61–3.

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Serbia (as analysed by Branka Mijatović),4 and move directly to so-called turbo-folk. I discussed earlier – in the context of Gordy’s ‘destruction of alternatives’ – the association of turbo-folk with the xenophobic policies of Milošević in Serbia. Indeed it is arguable that the genre title ‘turbo-folk’ only really has meaning within this political context, and that the music should be labelled differently in the post-Milošević era. It is enough to remind ourselves of the fortunes (literal and metaphorical) of the leading turbo-folk diva, Svetlana ražnatović (Ceca). that Ceca was the wife of the alleged war criminal arkan, notorious anti-hero of the Serbian wars, has assumed emblematic significance in Serbia, especially given the subsequent murder of arkan. above all, it is emblematic of the extent to which turbo-folk, addressed to (r)urban migrants and new economic elites alike, assumed the status of a national mass culture in Serbia during the 1990s, all but drowning out the dissenting voice. a question naturally arises. Just how far is it possible to disengage the turbo-folk repertory from such associations today? (I might add, incidentally, that the same question arises over the revival of the epic tradition). the treatment of turbo-folk by radio B-92 is of some interest in this respect. In the early ‘nineties, that station carried on what has since become a legendary rearguard action against turbo-folk as nationalist propaganda, promoting both western rock and an indigenous, and increasingly anti-establishment, tradition of rock. when both its airwaves and its physical property were hijacked by the regime in the early stages of the natO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, there was outrage among the intelligentsia, expressed through a major campaign of support that culminated in a ‘Free B-92’ concert involving several of the leading progressive bands. that this same station could present a multi-part history of turbo-folk just a few years later is perhaps the strongest possible acknowledgement that the story of this music, and of the massive support for it among the lowerclass, ‘uncultured’ many, is not to be explained exclusively in the terms of political agendas and political appropriations. In truth, it is not immediately obvious why the turbo-folk idiom, with its distinctive blend of oriental folk and western dance, should have been of propaganda value to the Serbian regime. In an insightful chapter, ljerka rasmussen quotes tomislav longinović’s seductive hermeneutic, in which he argues that ‘techno rhythms [. . .] embraced from the colonial cultures of [. . .] europe proper [are] markers of racial/cultural superiority’, while

4 Mijatović 2008.

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‘the wailing voice of the singer articulates a suppressed, shameful legacy of one’s slavery to the turks who are regarded as a part of inferior cultures and races of the east and South’.5 what this reading draws attention to yet again is the ambivalence surrounding oriental elements in neo-folk and turbo-folk. yet my own sense is that longinović comes down rather too firmly on one side only of a twofold truth. the other side would recognise in turbo-folk a familiar, long-standing tradition in the representation of the (turkish-Muslim) east within Serbian-yugoslav music. I mean here that despite cover stories about a hostile other (as depicted in endless libretti and song texts) the music associated with both turkish and indigenous Muslim populations could acquire positive values, coloured by what Orhan pamuk calls hüzün [melancholy].6 this ambivalence is even greater in those regions of southern and eastern Serbia where the east has been internalised: where it has indeed become ‘ours’. naturally this latter condition is even more germane to pop-folk traditions in Bosnia and herzegovina, where pointers to the east are viewed rather differently. Indeed the politically loaded term ‘turbo-folk’ is avoided in Bosnia in favour of descriptors with local resonance, of which ‘sevdahrock’ is one. there is some irony in this, for Bosnia was right at the heart of the neo-folk movement (halid Bešlić and many others), and lepa Brena was herself born a Bosniak. She was one of several artists who made the switch to Serbia in the 1990s. Some of them – Brena herself, kusturica and karajlić – pinned their colours to a Serbian-yugoslav mast, while others, most famously Bregović, have presented a neutral, apolitical profile that is treated with suspicion in some quarters in Bosnia and herzegovina. the fact is that the boundary between Bosnia and Serbia is so heavily ideological that cultural responses to it are open to intensive questioning, and that goes as much for Dino Merlin’s professed Bosnian nationalism as for Bregović’s professed neutrality and internationalism. this makes the musical border-crossing all the more striking. It offers yet another instance of music’s capacity to bypass, if not to transcend, ideological imperatives, even when song texts tell radically different stories either side of the border. It is not that music ‘tells the truth’ or that it ‘knows best’ (the hermeneutic position), but rather that, as karol Berger puts it, words know one thing and music knows another.7 5 rasmussen 2007, 78–9. 6 pamuk 2005, 93. 7 Berger is here commenting on Carolyn abbate’s text, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’. See Berger 2007, 378.

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rasmussen may be right to suggest that turbo-folk and sevdah-rock have limited credentials as a global music. they have made relatively little impact on global markets (unlike, for example, commercial recordings of Balkan rom bands). and their oriental elements are in the main local, referring to aspects of an Ottoman inheritance that are part of people’s lived experience, however mediated, and however differently understood; and they are, of course, very differently understood by Bosniaks and Serbs. this point is underlined when we consider the view from Croatia. here the tendency is to conflate, or all but conflate, ‘Serbia’ and ‘turkey’ in discussions of neo-folk and turbo-folk, as Catherine Baker has noted.8 at the time of greatest hostility (in the early ‘nineties) the imperative was to mark out a separate, more ‘european’, territory for Croatian popular culture, notably by building on the assimilated tamburica tradition (Slavonia), on klapa repertory (the adriatic) and even on schlager (central europe). But Baker’s story is really one in which the boundaries are increasingly blurred, and where turbo-folk has inexorably encroached on a Croatian cultural space.9 again there may be discursive points to be made about the different signification of ‘the east’ in Croatia (an impulse to accommodate it within a global ‘world Music’ culture rather than recognise it as turkish-Balkan), but the music itself is not always so clear about such distinctions. almost by definition, the further removed we are from the heart of the Balkans, the easier it is to read elements of Ottoman legacy as a form of exoticism. this is the ‘Balkan fascination’ of which Mirjana laušević has written so eloquently in her discussion of the american Balkan scene.10 Questions of identity are naturally much more complicated in Croatia and Slovenia, but to the extent that these new nation states seek to dissociate themselves from the Balkans something of this same exoticising may take place. In the case of Slovenia, more western than the west, there is currently a fascination with Bosnian folk-pop, and it seems unlikely that this involves a great deal of agonising over a Slovenian cultural identity. Matters are more complex in Croatia. as Baker’s work demonstrates, issues of identity here are shot through with ambivalence. It can come down to particulars of presentation, where, for example, some pop videos will render pop-folk elements acceptable by situating the performer in

   8 Baker 2010.    9 Ibid. See also Baker 2007. 10 laušević 2007.

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a transparently western context, and thus distancing her/him from the material (Baker illustrates this by referring to two videos of the same song by Ivana kindl, one looking east, the other west).11 yet however we interpret them, there are commonalities in the mass culture of the former yugoslavia that seem to belie the recent political histories of successor states. From around 2000, moreover, these commonalities have been paraded before a much wider public in the form of the eurovision Song Contest. If anything might seem to reinscribe yugoslavia it is the music and the voting patterns of eurovision. philip Bohlman has looked more closely than most at eurovision, and at the ‘politics of power [and] pleasure’ it embodies.12 In a paper delivered in 2001 he noted the growing presence of South east europe, from the victory of yugoslavia in 1989 to the ever more regular participation of most successor states (apart from Serbia at the time he was speaking), as of the other Balkan states.13 the regionalism that has so transparently dictated ‘block’ voting patterns in recent years, whatever the political divisions within the block, is of course a notorious feature of the contest, as is the growing success of eastern and northern europe at the expense of western nations, where there is perhaps a little more irony in the game. But Bohlman addresses more challenging questions about political imperatives and musical codes. he charts the emergence of South east europe in eurovision against the background of an uneasy alliance between the politics of the (notionally distinctive) nation and of the (notionally unified) continent. and he goes on to identify a common formula that places ‘europe’ at the aesthetic centre of a song and the nation at its periphery, characteristically by way of an idiomatic middle eight. In subsequent contests (subsequent, that is, to Bohlman’s paper) this forms a kind of middleground position, with some songs veering towards the nation and others towards the continent. It was above all the yugoslav successor states that invested in a popfolk approach to eurovision. turkey’s success in 2003 provided one model of an ‘ethnic’ presentation, with explicit ‘belly-dance’ allusions to an oriental harem, just as Ukraine’s winner the following year provided another, with a ‘Xena, warrior princess’ presentation that instigated a tradition of

11   In her paper (unpublished at the time of writing), ‘ “Backwards and Balkan” or “glamorous and global”: locating the “east” in Croation popular music’. this was delivered at the aSn europe conference, Sciences-po, paris in July 2008. 12 Bohlman 2007. 13 Bohlman 2008.

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big percussion that would soon become a recognisable sound and sight at eurovision. In the same year, it was Serbia and Montenegro, with a nativelanguage song, traditional instruments (a kaval solo at the beginning) and nation-historical imagery abounding, that came through to second place, while the english-language, more western-orientated songs of Greece and albania reached third and seventh place respectively. In the winning song of 2005, Greece stayed with the english language, but allowed recognisable elements of local colour in the instrumental interludes, while both Bulgaria (which has not yet made the final) and romania seemed determined to present themselves as good europeans. In this year it was albania and above all Croatia that went for local colour, with the Croatian song (in the native language) conspicuously drawing together dinaric and pannonian elements of the national culture. then, in 2006, Bosnia and herzegovina came to the fore (third place), with hari Mata hari making play with sevdalinka, while Croatia veered in the direction of ethnic kitsch. this time it was Macedonia (in its most successful entry in eurovision) that looked westwards while still working within the broad framework of pop-folk. 2007 was Serbia’s year, and the importance of that victory was considerable, not least as a way to present Serbia in new ways to europe (it was a bonus that Marija Šerifović could be harnessed to minority causes of both sexual orientation and ethnicity).14 It is perhaps a little glib to risk too many conclusions about what eurovision success meant for the shifting sands of identity politics in Serbia. nevertheless one might hasard that it did have some bearing on the ‘two Serbias’ we have encountered on several occasions in this book. Both in musical style and in presentationalbehavioural coding, Šerifović’s Molitva seems to have possessed a considerable symbolic value. naturally it had limited power to dissolve the stereotypes, or to expunge from collective memories the worst excesses of totalitarianism and nationalism, but it did suggest at least the possibility of transcending traditional dualities and of embracing multiplicity on several levels. preparation for hosting the 2008 event in the gaze of the wider world presented its own problems, of course, especially in light of predictable Serbian responses to the kosovan declaration of independence early in the year. But in the end the contest was a triumph of organisation and spectacle. It was a test case for the ‘new face of Serbia’, in which the local

14 Gligoriević 2007.

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environment shaped the event, while the global event shaped the environment. Did it in fact establish a model for Serbia in europe?15 It is tempting to propose that this is ultimately what eurovision provides: a mass-cultural model for the negotiation of national identities within europe. But in reality the contest is too conformant in its stylistic imperatives to allow this. It has become a site for world music mixes of all kinds, but they are invariably subordinated to a standardised mainstream idiom. what Bohlman calls the ‘aesthetic centre’ remains something of a given (albeit one that changes with changing fashions), while at the same time the national identifiers are themselves homogenised, directed to the wider region by means of recognisable but generalised symbols. For this reason the contest neatly accommodates the general tendency for the boundaries between popular music styles in the yugoslav successor states to become increasingly blurred, including endless mutual ‘covers’. eurovision was certainly not the cause of this, but it has become a channel for its very public promotion and display, and that in turn can be originating. while looking at recent developments in art music (chapter 18), I suggested that cultural yugoslavism seems to have greater potential in the aftermath of the state than it did under either of the two yugoslavias. Something similar seems to be happening in popular music. It is not just the voting blocks in eurovision that reinstate yugoslavia. It is also the music. Indeed it could be argued that the music reinscribes not just yugoslavia, but the Balkans. divas Such, at least, is the conclusion of one of Jane Sugarman’s informants. ‘a common Balkan music is emerging, where you can’t tell whether it is Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, albanian, or turkish’.16 the spread of a particular species of pop-folk across South east europe is now total. Generic labels differ, as do the political and historical resonances they evoke: turbo-folk, sevdah-rock, chalga, manele, laïka, and muzika popullore. these genres are not identical. But there is an obvious kinship among them. Sugarman speaks of ‘commonalities in sensibility and experience that might lead the

15 Interestingly the Serbian entry for 2010, by none other than Bregović, was a defiant ovo je Balkan [this is the Balkans], complete with Balkan brass. Bosnia and albania, in contrast, presented a decidedly european face to the world on this occasion. 16 Sugarman 2007, 301.

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region’s national groups to affirm a common “Balkan” identity’. But she goes on to qualify this, emphasising ethnonational distinctiveness, and arguing that the social role of these musics is ‘to nourish a space for a cultural intimacy that is experienced as ethnically specific’. there are clearly some nice distinctions to be drawn here. In some ways the closest parallel, unlikely though it may seem, is with nineteenthcentury nationalisms in art music, which exhibited a similarly paradoxical condition. they staked their claim on their contribution to a generalised culture, in this case an elite bourgeois culture. yet at the same time they asserted their distinctiveness, usually by drawing elements of history and myth, together with suitably sanitised components of folk culture, into a synthetic national tradition. what tended to happen was that each nation presented a variant on a single culture, while at the same time competitively elevating, asserting and promoting its uniqueness. Very much the same mechanisms are at work in contemporary popfolk, however widely separated the aesthetic ambition and the musical style. again the key element of the semiotic is folklore, which is viewed – however spuriously – as a collective expression of national (as opposed to social or regional) identities. and again the general practice is to allow a repertory of generalised idioms to serve as all-purpose musical signifiers, while specificity resides in a poetics of intention and reception. In the case of nineteenth-century national musics that repertory consisted of particular modal types, bourdons and dance rhythms associated with a partly mythical rural culture; in the case of contemporary pop-folk it consists of makam traces, ‘oriental’ ornamentation, and čoček or tsifteteli rhythms associated with a partly mythical urban culture. Moreover, such local signifiers operated/operate within larger stylistic and syntactical frameworks, in the former case determined by the common-practice traditions of bourgeois concert music, and in the latter by genres such as techno music and hip-hop, whose origins lie in african-american traditions of popular music. One key difference is that the umbrella culture of pop-folk is about as far from an elite bourgeois one as it is possible to get. It is by no means a homogeneous culture, for it embraces rural and urban workers, as well as native and diasporic dwellers, but in general it has been marked by its association with a predominantly uneducated, even an anti-intellectual, taste public and with mass-media promotion of its wares; the most strident criticism of pop-folk, it should be noted, invariably comes from the intelligentsia. In the case of turbo-folk, which established something of a paradigm for pop-folk in this region, links with a ‘parent’ culture of neo-folk

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ensured that further associations were made with more regressive forms of nationalism, and these were strengthened by the appropriation of turbo-folk by the Milošević regime. yet, paradoxically enough, one of the things that marked off turbo-folk from neo-folk was its response not only to modern global musical styles but also to video-presentational imagery modelled on a western star system, albeit blended in highly idiosyncratic ways with elements drawn from turkish, egyptian and even Indian presentations of popular music and dance. Both the musical styles and the imagery enabled turbo-folk not just to outlive its association with the politics of xenophobic nationalism but also to influence, if not to colonise, pop-folk right across the region. part of this can be explained by the nature of these societies as they emerged from and reacted against their socialist past, and by the kinds of values that were not just on public display, but were implicitly or even explicitly approved by the new regimes. Once more there was a distinctive mix of Balkan specificities, arising partly from the prevailing gangster capitalism of the early 1990s, and western mass-cultural models, of which the most prominent and influential was probably american ‘music television’. thus, the blatant sexuality of some of the pop-folk videos, at times moving into something close to soft porn, is often linked to a machismo imagery (‘warrior chic’ is a term sometimes used) that harmonises alarmingly easily with traditional Balkan stereotypes involving violence and the subjugation of women. Such associations are positively invited by the ‘folk’ element in pop-folk. On the other hand, the ‘pop’ element insists on the slick modernity of the society that is represented here. the males in these videos are decidedly part of a modern world, specifically a get-richquick world of easy consumption, fast cars and designer clothes: a world that hints at a glamorised criminality (guns, drugs), and one where beautiful women seem complicit in their own exploitation. this latter point needs scrutiny. the question of who exercises power, and conversely who is the victim, in these videos is often moot. Most of the singers are female; they are glossy ‘divas’, marvels of cosmetic surgery, presented as seductive sex objects in a context of male dominance. yet, exactly as with some better-known western pop icons, their beauty can be controlling and even destructive. the tradition of the Siren, who combines the seductions of music with those of the feminine, is an obvious background here, reinforced by settings that are often imaginary, even mythological, in character, where the performance becomes an escape from the drab immediacies of life. the figure of the Siren is ambiguous, however, and its significance has changed from Classical through Medieval and

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romantic to Modern representations; in particular Balkan folk contexts it is conflated with that of the fairy (vila or, in albania, zana). Of the two broad groups classically identified as homeric and platonic, the pop-folk diva tends to belong to the ‘fatal’ rather than the ‘noble and saving’ type; she is more a temptress, in other words, than a pre-raphaelite-like innocent or a Madonna-like paradigm of heavenly beauty, though turbo-folk stars like Ceca also present as iconic victims.17 It is worth noting, moreover, that while there are immediate models for the diva in both east and west – the Middle eastern or Indian dancer-singer; the hollywood screen goddess – ruskin’s ‘fatal‘ Siren, the femme fatale, has often been associated with oriental beauty within western culture. we return, then, to the category ‘oriental’. It is no doubt significant that just about every commentator on Balkan popular music feels the need to problematise the oriental components of pop-folk in relation to identity politics, and that they say rather similar things, irrespective of which national tradition they discuss. the path-breaking collection edited by Donna Buchanan makes the point.18 the oriental topic is interrogated by ljerka rasmussen, who demonstrates the changing shape of ‘oriental’ elements in turbo-folk, assesses the significance of these elements for the Serbian imaginary (partly by quoting Obrad Savić’s neatly-worded ‘attractive codes of occidentalism and obsessive icons of orientalism’), and notes their very different significance in sevdah-rock. Margaret Beissinger in turn shades in the historical background to oriental elements in romanian manele, highlighting the ambivalence at the heart of romanian perspectives on rom musicians – they are at once bearers of the national culture and a threat to it – and documenting some of the ways in which this genre exposes a crisis of modern romanian identity within the new europe. tellingly, many of her observations with respect to social class, urban-rural values and the roles of the media and of private cassette and CD production, meet the Serbian-Bosnian case just as fittingly as the romanian. Vesa kurkela’s chapter in the same volume, in particular his discussion of the background to chalga, demonstrates that the same points apply to Bulgaria. again there are reflections on the ambiguities surrounding oriental elements, including those associated with the roma, and kurkela extends this to an analysis of the visual imagery as well as the musical style

17 these are discussed by henry Stobart in Stobart 2006. 18 Buchanan 2007.

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of the chalga music videos that are his primary concern. the slippage that occurs constantly in pop-folk between Balkan and global orientalisms – to reprise that distinction – is also discussed by kurkela, and he goes further than most in setting up a typology that enables this slippage to be assessed. By pairing his categories through the mechanism of connected antithesis, he is able to make clear distinctions between the oriental themes in chalga videos and the classical ‘discourse of orientalism’ pioneered by Said. and in a perceptive conclusion he pinpoints the paradox that underlies so much pop-folk not just in Bulgaria but across the region, arguing that orientalism ‘mirrors and emphasises its apparent antithesis, the westernisation of culture’. this is why the seductive diva of the music videos, like her machismo (mafioso) male counterpart, can be both a home-grown product and an amalgam of two separate exotic others. It is an all but arbitrary exercise to single out particular divas. In many cases a background in more traditional forms of folk music is evident. a case in point is the Serbian turbo-folk star Jana (Dragana todorović), one of a number of singers whose success in exploiting the local idioms of Serbia has not dissuaded her from living outside its borders. In her concert performances of ‘Šta će ti pevačica’ [why do you need a singer], one of her most popular songs, the musical hybridity – expertly-performed oriental roulades, Serbian folk idioms with folk-iconic accordion accompaniments, and western dance music – is matched by dance and gesture, with the supporting dancers grounding the performance in Serbian traditions. and one can find much the same hybridity in Bosnian-born Indira radić, who rose to prominence in the 1990s and is now a popular artist all over former yugoslavia. her tV pink video ‘ratovanje’ [warfare] is characteristic. If this hybridity is a central reference point, we might then locate to one side of it the Bulgarian diva Ivana (Vania todorova kaludova), whose videos take us into the modern world of city landscapes and stretch limousines (‘Bezumna tsena’ [Crazy price] with the ubiquitous telephone), high fashion and girl power (‘nai-dobrata duma’ [the most beautiful word], and hotel trysts (‘kato na 17’ [17 years Old]). Or, to take a step further in this direction, we might cite the popular Serbian singer Jelena karleuša, who presents as a siren in futuristic, often utterly surreal settings (‘Candy life’, with balloons in the washing machine, or ‘Insomnia’, with the singer as a kind of Darth Vader figure). to the other side is the albanian singer, Maya aliçkaj, who allows folk elements to assume much greater significance, both musically and visually. here it is the traditional music of epirus is that is recreated, from the unmistakable epirotic clarinet style of ‘Guri i rënde në vend të vet’ [heavy stone in its place], to the rhythmic

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ison and pipes of ‘Fustani i verdhë’ [the green dress]. the videos spell out that although Maya is a modern diva, pastoral images of nature, myth and history provide an often disturbing counterpoint (she is juxtaposed with an old albanian peasant woman in ‘Guri i rede’). Strikingly, the ‘Bubulina’ video depicts her as a mermaid (the Siren figure par excellence), and the final image is of a (presumably drowning) male protagonist. Maya is one of the ubiquitous singers on tirana Music tV and StV Super Sonic, which together offer a panorama of albanian pop-folk to anyone spending a quiet evening in a tirana hotel room. her appropriations of traditional music root her firmly in a specific place, and connect her indeed with a specific repertory, the music of southern albania (epirus). not all the singers are as firmly rooted in rural traditions. Macedonianborn Muharrem ameti, no less popular on albanian airwaves, offers an alternative perspective, appropriating either rom musics (especially tallava) or urban oriental idioms that relate to the Greek amanes or the Ottoman gazel. his recording of ‘aman, aman’, one of several covers of this popular song (see also elda Shabani) is entirely characteristic. ameti is one of several male stars on the albanian folk-pop scene, including Bujar Qamili and Mozi, and his style of singing has much in common with male singers of manele in romania (adrian Copilul Minune and nicolae Guta) and of chalga in Bulgaria (Iliqn Mihov Baroveca and Ivo tanev). national specificities notwithstanding, we are left to wonder again at just how far the musical materials and styles of folk-pop, like the liquids in Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernities’, flow freely across the borders. For the most part, the fame of these singers does not reach far beyond their native country, and certainly not beyond the Balkans. pop-folk remains an art for local consumption. this is broadly true even of azis, one of the best-known of the Bulgarian chalga singers, though he has had his outings in a wider global marketplace. a rom musician, and with an earlier career as a folk singer, azis draws freely on rom traditions, but he is known today rather more for his cultivation of a typically androgenous, sexually ambivalent or sexually marginalised image and performance style. as so often, it is possible to relate this image on one hand to some ‘avant-garde’ tendencies in global pop (and it might be noted in passing that even female divas such as Jelena karleusa occasionally exploit it in this spirit), and on the other hand to a more immediate inheritance. I refer here to an older and more specific tradition of drag belonging to the eastern Mediterranean and yet further to the east. It is a familiar trope among some niche communities of Indian popular singers and dancers,

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for example. and closer to home, it is a familiar idiom in turkish arabesk and related egyptian genres, as Martin Stokes points out.19 these days, azis has moved a little closer to the centre. his story neatly demonstrates the finely balanced elements that make for success or failure in this precarious world. attracting his initial following by presenting as slightly scandalous, he rises subsequently to something of an entrepreneur of the music industry, with his own tV show. at the same time he cannot be written off as an establishment figure, for of late his offerings have a critical content they formerly lacked. It is as though he first had to make his name in the circus, and then to become one of its movers, before he could avail himself of that status in order to critique it. Something similar might be observed in kou-kou Band, one of the best and most interesting of the Bulgarian groups today. they too have their own tV show (it was first called Kou kou, then Hushove [exiles], a reference to the nineteenth-century revivialist fighters and exiles, and finally Slavi’s Show). kou-kou Band remains somewhat controversial, for the performers use parody, irony and humour (they are masters of double meanings) to critique many aspects of Bulgarian society and culture today. they are testimony to the dangers of reducing everything in pop-folk to a single (low) level of signification. Of course it can be kitsch. But kitsch is not always what it seems. Greek Mythology the collapse of the Communist world at the end of the 1980s was not without consequences for, and parallels with, the political events unfolding in Greece. From June 1989, in a context of instability and political scandals, there were multiple elections, resulting in coalition parliaments through to the end of 1990. at this point the socialist pasok party lost power and a new conservative, western-orientated politics was initiated in Greece, accompanied by many of the same features, social and cultural as well as economic, that we associate with the immediate post-Communist years in the former eastern Bloc. even the subsequent re-design and re-election of pasok reminds us somewhat of the facelifts and successive re-elections of the ‘old’ Communists north of the Greek border. exactly as

19 Stokes 1992.

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in the ex-Communist states, moreover, the new politics proved conducive to major changes in popular culture, including music. It was really from this point that a ubiquitous Music television, comprising numerous private companies and networks, began to invade people’s private space in a big way in Greece, resulting in a near total saturation of the air waves with foreign music, both from the anglo-american world and from the former eastern Bloc. the 1990s, in short, marked a real departure from existing norms of popular culture in Greece, just as they did elsewhere in South east europe. however, the ensuing wave of pop-folk in Greece encountered certain already-established and uniquely Greek traditions that could not easily be swept aside. the rebetika revival of the 1980s continued as an active force through to the 1990s, for example, as Dafni tragaki has demonstrated in her sensitive ethnographic study of venues in thessaloniki.20 In the context of a nostalgic quest for roots, a cult of authenticity, and a rejection of the (modern) west, the shadow – indeed the active presence – of rebetika continued to shape aspects of Greek popular music, and, as noted in chapter 20, it continued to function as a national identifier. So too did the music of the bouzouki, including the ‘tourist’ music associated with one tradition of laïka. that too had come to spell Greekness, to the outside world and to Greeks themselves. whatever influences came to bear on popular music, rebetika and the bouzouki remained as twin reference points, symbols of Greece, whether for good or ill, whether to be embraced or rejected. It may be for this reason that pop-folk in Greece in the 1990s was significantly more westernised than in the Slavonic Balkans, and also more westernised than Greek pop-folk of the 1980s. In other words, the balance between traditional ethnic elements and western (or global) pop was now weighted towards the latter. there was an imperative that this new member of the european Union should be thoroughly modern, and along with that came a studied rejection of the insularity that might attach to artistic expressions of nationhood. this was a time, after all, of necessary adaptation to west european social and political practices. the models for Greek pop-folk accordingly included leading world artists such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, as well as the turbo-folk divas, and although the ethnic element remained (this was still pop-folk) there was an obvious attempt to present to the highest international standards, as to orchestration and

20 tragaki 2007.

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studio technology (the synthesisers, sequencers and samplers). these standards were broadly achieved in audio terms, though both the technical quality and the general imagery of the music videos produced during the early 1990s remained somewhat anachronistic. It was only in 1996, with the arrival of MaD, explicitly modelled on american MtV, that the world of Greek music videos was seriously modernised. Significantly, it was also in that year that anna Vissi, already a wellknown figure in Greek popular music, achieved iconic status with her album Klíma tropico [Tropical Climate]. In a thoughtful examination of the rise to fame of this ‘Greek Madonna’, as she is widely known, Ioannis polychronakis used Vissi’s career to illustrate some of the see-sawing that has taken place in constructions of Greek identity, as between the draw of the (modern) west and the claims of a national tradition and perceived identity.21 although he does not use the terms, his case study might be linked to the two competing narratives – of emancipation and homecoming – that I used earlier in discussing art music. Interestingly, polychronakis demonstrates how the song ‘Call Me’ acquired many of its ‘Greek-oriental’ features only when it was widely distributed as a single in the United States in 2005. the version performed live during the MaD-Music-Video-awards show in athens in June 2004 emphasised the ‘Madonna’ rather than the ‘Greek’ part of the pairing (the parallel with Ivana kindl’s two versions of a single song, mentioned earlier, is striking). Conversely, the DVD of Vissi’s performances at the athenian nightclub Diogenes palace in 2004 stresses the ‘Greek’ part. polychronakis goes on to suggest that the ambivalence between these two halves of the ‘Greek Madonna’ image played out to Vissi’s disadvantage in her subsequent performance of ‘everything’ at the 2006 eurovision in athens. anna Vissi is still a high-profile pop diva today, although she is in her mid-fifties at the time of writing. She has her rivals, of course, and chief among them is the younger Despina Vandi. each has her followers. But it is tempting in any case to view this rivalry as a construction of the music industry. Both artists benefit from it, and so does the industry itself. this is the way of modern marketing strategies, and it is evidenced again in the skill with which the two divas have crafted their own images on stage and in music videos. Both conform to some of the stereotypes we noted in former yugoslavia and Bulgaria. thus, Vandi can present in some MaD videos as the familiar oriental seductress, as in ‘anavies foties’ [you set things

21 polychronakis 2007.

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on fire], with its gypsy campfire setting and ethnic drums in the middle eight. In others she can be an iconic victim (‘na tin xerese’ [enjoy her presence/Company]);22 compare Vissi in ‘Call Me’. If anything really separates them, it is perhaps determined by generation, for Vissi remembers in many of her performances the lure of the bouzouki culture: ‘kanena’ or ‘Methismeni mou kardhia’ [My Drunken heart]) are examples. and she remembers too her early experience with the popular art song tradition, notably in a song such as ‘Den thelo na ksereis’ [I don’t want you to know], which she performs with piaf-like intensity and emotion. In a word, that she retains a more grounded sense of an indigenous Greek tradition of popular music than her younger rival. It seems hard to escape the controlling power of our two narratives in all of this. even those movements that set out in defiance of Greekness often proved in the end unable to resist its pull. Consider the emergence of hip-hop in Greece in the late 1980s. It began of course as an import from the United States, and remained a marginalised style right through to the mid ‘nineties, with the usual informal distribution networks (chief among them pirate cassettes), and with the familiar associations with particular post-industrial neighbourhoods, whose invisible borders were jealously guarded. But with the emergence of the group Hemiskoubria [half Sardines], and especially when this group collaborated with well-known artists such as elpidha [hope], hip-hop was drawn closer to the mainstreams. this was still a music created in defiance of tradition, and specifically of a national tradition. however, as the hip-hop groups became more individual in style and character, even this began to change. Increasingly the conflicts of style, somewhat as in conflicts between US east and west coast styles of hip-hop, began to take on a national dimension, determined by whether or not one looked away from Greece (the commercialised brand) or towards it (the ‘authentic’ brand). From the late 1990s and into the 2000s, these two tendencies were epitomised by nikos Vourliotis [niVo] and tXC (terror X Crew) respectively. the latter began as a trio, but in due course american-born DJ alX, together with artemis efthimis (ae), renamed it as tXC. It was at this point that the associations with narratives of Greek nationalism and Greek identity became pronounced. reacting forcefully against widespread perceptions of the genre and of the group as representative of a

22 It should be said that the text here is heavy with irony, where ‘na tin xerese’ means exactly the opposite of what it says.

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‘nasty’ subculture, tXC set out to reconnect with a national heritage, and they looked to all the usual sources to do so. In this way the world of hip-hop, or as it was then increasingly known, ‘urban music’, found itself somewhat bizarrely invaded by references not just to the Classical past but also to the world of post-Byzantine Orthodoxy. the old debates about double-descendedness thus found an unlikely site for their continuing articulation in modern Greece. what this shows above all is that whatever the influences that came from the Communist and ex-Communist north, or indeed from the global music scene, Greek popular music retained an identity that was essentially distinct, almost at times in spite of itself. If there are synergies that remain vital in this music, they are with the eastern (anatolian) rather than with the northern (Slavonic) neighbours. the voices of the Fathers refuse to be silenced.

Chapter tWentY-Four

on bounDarIeS anD eVentS In Theory If we look back over the various stories in this book, we can scarcely ignore the proliferation of boundaries in South east europe. there are boundaries of all kinds. they divide societies; they separate ethnicities and genders; they draw lines between the generations, and between musical styles. there are boundaries of place, and boundaries of time: partitions of political and cultural spaces, and markers that punctuate the flow of history. Spatial and temporal boundaries are often interlocked. Where communities have been separated, where borders have been created, there is usually a pre-existing ground – a social ontology – that renders the separation intelligible if not predictable. but there may also be a defined moment of severance. an agency may intervene; a moment of rupture may occur, and from that point onward division will be formalised. in short, there may be an event. i will explore a little further some of the implications of boundaries and events for a cultural history. this will mean looking again at questions of alterity, for the relation between self and other underlies any discussion of boundaries. But it will also mean reflecting again on the event, the ‘singularity’ whose disruptive force can make structural change possible both for individuals and for societies. some key points about the philosophical underpinnings of the event are relevant to our stories. one is that subjectivities are dependencies; the subject is shaped, indeed alain Badiou would argue it is created, by the events to which it is ‘subjected’ (we happen).1 another is that the limits of transformative possibilities created by the event are infinite. a third, and now we move to a more pragmatic level, is that investing in the event allows for breakdowns in historical narratives, countering or attenuating putative plots. Both the instigation of Communist rule in south east europe (red amy incursions and the yalta declaration) and its dramatic fall half a century later might seem to conform to this latter criterion. Both occurred at, or emerged from, moments of maximal stress, and both 1 Badiou 1988 and 2006.

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might be understood to have sprung from the ‘void’ that Badiou identifies when conventional power is no longer able to police the anarchic multiplicities inherent in any situation. the evental site, for Badiou, is located at the edge of this void, outside the normal ‘state of the situation’ as between centre and margin, included and excluded, and it is this location that enables a reversal, a transformation within the structure. an event, as Badiou understands it, exceeds its context. admittedly it is not always entirely obvious how this criterion is to be tested in practice. indeed it remains a matter of judgement whether even those key moments of inception and closure in the history of Communism in europe do in fact qualify; the issue at stake is presumably how far they may be understood in relation to a pre-existing socio-political ground. But what is not in doubt is that both moments resulted in truly massive structural transformations, and that these were manifest politically, socially and culturally. significantly, both also involved acts of separation and division. and, even more significantly, violence loomed large over both transformative moments. there was the violence of world war ii and the red army advances that drove a wedge through europe, and there was the orgy of violence, terrifyingly proximate both temporally and spatially to our own civilised version of europe, that tore asunder a formerly unified nation state when Communism fell. Most of us find it hard to make sense of the inhumanity that confronts us when we look into particular corners of Balkan history in recent decades. the brutality of the succession wars has been widely publicised; but there was also the treatment of minority populations in Bulgaria and romania in the later stages of Communist rule; and there was the ruthless suppression of a dissenting voice in albania. despite abundant evidence that it is a norm of human history, that it is hard-wired into all our histories, this impulse to do violence to people and places, as well as to ideas and symbols, continues to shock and disorientate us. it is redundant to specify Balkan traumas in any of their harrowing detail. we have the histories in plenty, and we have the personal accounts of those who lived through these times. yet, as susan Brison reminds us in a moving account of her own violation in an entirely different context, ‘the challenge of finding language that is true to traumatic experience is [. . .] a daunting one’.2 ironically, perhaps, it is fiction that can sometimes meet this challenge, conveying more potently even than autobiography the effects of violence

2 Brison 2003.

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on subjectivity. we need only think of the powerful and disturbing recreation in fiction of a Bosnian woman’s experiences in the rape camps (it has echoes of Brison’s experience) in slavenka drakulić’s as if I am not there.3 this is not new. Lucan’s Pharsalia (the Civil war) is not exactly fiction, but it is not exactly history either. and as shadi Bartsch and efrossini spentzou have separately demonstrated, its rhetorical and poetic force conveys vividly and powerfully the disintegrative effects of violence and violation, and above all their capacity to break down both personal and social boundaries. Bartsch points us towards the (Kristevan) ‘abject’. ‘the abject’, she remarks, ‘[. . .] is what disturbs identity, system, and order, disrupting the social boundaries demanded by the symbolic.’4 spentzou in turn associates the abject with the Kantian ‘sublime’ in her masterly exegesis of Lucan’s Caesar. ‘there is an “excess” to Caesar’, she notes, ‘that can hardly be adequately represented’. ‘he breaks free of conventions and his extremity means that he can neither be controlled nor understood.’5 for spentzou, it is only through the category of the ‘sublime’, marked by both transgression and incomprehension, and imbued with what terry eagleton calls an ‘annihilating, regenerating power’, that this figure can be afforded any measure of explication.6 while spentzou makes no reference to Badiou, her language does nonetheless resonate with Badiou’s account of the transformative potential of the exceptional – the unique – state of affairs, something that emerges ‘from the edge of the void’, and stands apart from the intrinsic stabilities of structural norms. ‘the sublime Caesar is an overbearing figure precariously perched on the edge, the chaotic moment of transition from the dying republic to . . . something else. his abject perversion makes him catastrophic and irresistible at the same time. indeed, rousing transitions just before vast historical changes often end as repulsive periods of terror’. Caesar’s fate is of course well known. and Balkan dictators are no Caesars, despite an analogous love of ‘excess’. 1989 witnessed the demise of some dictators and the rise of others. it witnessed too the invasion of social and cultural spheres by political events, with all their destabilising power. in the ‘chaotic moment of transition’ (spentzou) of the early 1990s, social structures changed abruptly, and cultural life changed too. it 3 drakulić 2001. 4 Bartsch 1998. 5 spentzou, forthcoming 2014. 6 eagleton 2008.

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seems that at such moments of transformation anything might happen; in Badiou’s terms, the transformative possibilities are infinite. it seems too that in the throes of such convulsive changes – the shift from a Communist to a post-Communist world – new sensibilities could be forged, new subjects created. My first case study is about boundaries. in my second and third boundaries and events are drawn together. and the events in question were wars. it goes without saying that war brings ethical questions into sharp focus. for immanuel Kant it represented the natural state of things, a state from which peace might be considered an abstention or intermission. and if this abstention is a condition towards which we must strive, it is also one that contains within it the residue and memory of war. the interconnection of war and peace, the sense that they are not opposites, has been widely acknowledged in the literature.7 as i noted in chapter 14, for some writers it even privileged the troubled Balkans, in that the region might be located close to the ‘laboratories of truth’. yet, as Jacques derrida points out, that relation was turned on its head by emmanuel Levinas, certainly one of the most influential of all modern thinkers, and one for whom ethics has a primary position, in the literal sense that it precedes ontology. for Levinas, the violent rejection of the other (a state of war) is only possible because of an original openness to the other, the ‘pre-originary hospitality’ of what he calls the face-to-face. war is thus somewhat akin to ‘an allergic reaction’. it also contains within it the residue and memory of peace, and it is perhaps not unreasonable to suggest that this residue and memory is manifest above all through culture.8 again it needs to be stressed that Levinas worked from an ethical rather than an ontological premise. the face-to-face (with a transcendent other and with others) may be inherently violent; in the case of the ‘others’ it certainly involves a power relationship. But it is the sense of responsibility, the ethical duty, we have towards the other (before whose rawness, and in the ineluctable presence of what Levinas calls ‘the third’, we are abject) that gives us meaning as subjects. for Levinas, there cannot be a subject without an other, just as for Badiou there cannot be a subject without an event (we are, in short, ‘subjected’ to either the other or the event). the parallels between these two very different thinkers might be extended. Just as Badiou can conceive of infinity – can even give it an

7 for a discussion, see pick 1993, 14–15. 8 Levinas 1981. see also schroeder 1996.

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ontology – by way of its theoretical, abstract mathematical projection, so Levinas can conceive of infinity through a transcendent alterity. ‘to approach the other in discourse is [. . .] to receive from the other beyond the capacity of the i, which means exactly: to have an idea of infinity’. such parallels can be deceptive, of course, but we will extend them one stage further through a return to the issue of violence and the political.9 for both Badiou and Levinas the entire realm of the political is inherently violent, though they draw very different conclusions from this defining condition. for Badiou the violence of the political is a necessity, transforming existing ontologies and creating new ones; for Levinas, on the other hand, the realm of the political is a deception, rendering impotent the transformative power of the face by bringing it into view and ‘effacing its unicity’. in practical terms, Badiou’s message can be construed as a call to action. Levinas, in contrast, challenges us with a plea for personal responsibility. since our sense of self is utterly dependent on what is irreducibly different we have an obligation to that difference. needless-tosay, this can hardly constitute a political agenda; if anything it represents a utopian aspiration for a better world and a lesson in self-improvement. it would seem, then, that for Levinas the capacity of ethics to influence politics was limited. terry eagleton expresses something of the same, and in typically forthright terms. if the political tends towards the degenerate, the most ethics appears to be capable of, he argues, ‘is to shake it up from time to time’.10 it will be worth turning from two eminent philosophers to one eminent sociologist as a postlude to these reflections, with the inevitable consequence that we introduce an historical dimension to the discussion. in his challenging studies of the changing conditions of contemporary social and political life, Zygmunt Bauman, whose own Postmodern ethics offers some of our most perceptive commentaries on Levinas, gives specific contemporary relevance to boundaries and events. his work focuses especially on urban settings, and we will return to it in the final chapter. But for now i will note that his reading of the shift from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ modernity deprives events of much of their energy. the world depicted by Bauman is one of ‘instant living’, of the ‘manipulation of transience’; it is a present (and here he quotes Guy debord) ‘which wants to forget the past and no

   9 for a meditation on violence and contemporary culture, see the introduction to Bogue and Cornis-pope 1996. 10 eagleton 2008.

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longer seems to believe in the future’. since social and cultural forms are no longer given time to solidify in this world, the capacity of events to transform it is correspondingly reduced. Bauman is alive to the ethical implications of what he calls this ‘seductive lightness of being’. the world he portrays is one where ‘the advent of instantaneity ushers human culture and ethics into unmapped and unexplored territory’.11 as to boundaries, Bauman’s analysis of the meetings of strangers in our modern world (‘when strangers meet strangers’) is not exactly a cheerful one. Inter alia, it adds new categories to the classic strategies already identified by Claude Lévi-strauss for dealing with difference. thus, in addition to Lévi-strauss’s ‘exile or annihilation of the others’ and ‘suspension or annihilation of their otherness’ (emic and phagic strategies respectively), both potently linked by Bauman to rather specific types of modern public space, there are the ‘non-places’ which serve to keep differences at bay, and there are the ‘empty spaces’ where differences are wittingly or unwittingly occluded from our individual mental maps. Bauman’s exposition of the ‘great transformation’ we are currently living through adds up to an uncertain and in some ways a bleak portrait, but we may be entitled to draw some reassurance from it with respect to the boundaries that continue to divide communities in the Balkans. in our present age of ‘liquid modernity’, might one hope that such divisions are part of a history that slowly draws to a close? and if this is indeed the case, does this closure entail a loss of identity among the relevant protagonists? Greece and its neighbours the recent thaw in hostilities around much of the present-day Greek border might well be viewed in this light, an attribute of the wider social transformation Bauman describes. it might also be an implicit acknowledgement that traditional constructions of Greek identity, forged by language, religion and culture and progressively defined against alterities of various hues from ancient times to the present, are becoming harder to sustain, and the more so following the large influx of immigrants from the 1990s onwards. Greece traditionally worked to assimilate and hellenise its non-Greek populations, including the arvanites and the aromanian vlachs living within its borders (Lévi-strauss’s ‘phagic’ strategy). those who proved unassimilable – the

11 Bauman 2000.

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slavophone and Muslim communities in the north, and the roma everywhere – were marginalised, affirming Greek identities through their alterity (the ‘emic’ strategy). But recent patterns of immigration have been of a rather different order. while for many Greeks these new immigrants may seem to occupy Bauman’s ‘empty spaces’, barely registering at all on their individual mental maps, they do nonetheless signal an encroaching multiculturalism at odds with traditional Greek ideas of nationhood. one should not overstate the case. the Greek ethnos, cemented by orthodoxy, remains powerful, but the effects of globalisation, softening the edges of hermetic identities, are ever harder to ignore. for much of the twentieth century there was a less amenable story to tell about alterities. as national boundaries were carved out of empire across this region, Greece was involved in a succession of disputes with its neighbours, and some of these linger on today. Moving from west to east, we note that since the declaration of albanian independence there have been difficulties over respective minorities in Greece and albania (especially over the expulsion of the Cham albanians), though currently relations are relatively good. next we encounter the controversy surrounding the naming of a newly independent Macedonia; Greece has consistently refused to accept the constitutional name, which it views as potentially irredentist and an appropriation of its own historical legacy. Continuing eastward, we note that while present-day relations with Bulgaria are good, the two nations were on opposite sides of three separate wars in the early twentieth century; and in the last of them Bulgarians occupied parts of northern Greece, leaving a legacy of hostility that has been hard to expunge. then there is turkey. Leaving aside the shared ottoman legacy, the twentieth century has witnessed wars, the population exchange, the istanbul pogrom, the aegean dispute, and Cyprus. yet here too relations are currently improving, especially following the ‘earthquake diplomacy’ in 1999. against this background, it may be interesting to return to three stories about Greece and its neighbours. they take us around the political borders from west to east. and as they do so, they traverse other boundaries: from pre-modern through modern to postmodern cultures and societies; from traditional music through art music to popular music. Maria todorova reminds us that if we study boundaries we foreground divisions right away, whereas if we study spaces we allow that there might be unities.12 in reality it is rather hard to examine the one without the other, but it

12 todorova 1997.

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does come down partly to how we frame our questions. My three stories reveal some of the tensions that arise when we shift our perspective from boundaries to spaces and back again. and i will suggest that they are very often tensions between politics and culture. the first of them concerns the polyphonic music of epirus, discussed briefly in chapters 2 and 9. in an essay published in 2003, the anthropologists vassilis nitsiakos and Constantinos Mantzos surveyed both Greek and albanian literature about this music, and in doing so they showed us how two mutually incompatible national traditions were constructed around it, and how each tradition was given historical depth, returning us respectively to hellenic and illyrian pasts.13 More recently eckehard pistrick has extended this work to look to the public presentation of polyphonic song today, notably in Greek and albanian festivals, and he looks also at the ideologies that inform those festivals.14 all of this exhibits a familiar enough pattern. Music has to belong to someone to have an identity, it seems. and as political borders force cultural communities either side of a line, invented histories validate the new spaces. we may remember too that that this tradition is shared with vlach communities. this complicates the binary Greek-albanian picture, adding a minoritarian dimension. vlachs are not of course a single group. nor do they articulate a single politics. you will hear very different stories about identity if you travel around the vlach villages of epirus and western Macedonia, or indeed if you simply trawl the blogs on the internet. you will encounter a pro-romanian faction (it has its heroes, and its history).15 you will find assimilationists, Greek vlachs, for example, who are insulted to be called a minority given what they and their forefathers did for Greece, but who are also conscious of material advantages offered by Greek affiliation. and you will meet nationalists, if that is the right word: members of the vlach association in albania or the pan-hellenic association of vlachs, who resist assimilation to any national culture, who demand language rights in education, hold annual conferences on vlach culture, and so forth. there are, in short, conflicted vlach identities.

13 nitsiakos and Mantzos 2003. 14 pistrick 2008. 15 Many vlachs/arumanians settled in romania, accounting for the section of ‘arumanian polyphonic songs’ on the Music of romania Lp produced by unesCo in the 1970s, as part of its collective project Music atlas. the sleeve note is at pains to distinguish this polyphonic style from what it considers authentically romanian traditional music. in other words, romania wants to claim this culture in one place, and to disown it in another.

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the politics of nationalism thus divided a relatively homogeneous culture into two separate national cultures, while at the same time creating a divide between majorities and minorities. it feels important to unpick these processes by investigating epirotic polyphony more closely, despite the frankly limited reach of such research (it is performed only by small handfuls of the older generation, or else by secondary ensembles). this is not a matter of idealising traditional cultures, which does them no favours at all; we respect them more by critiquing them. nor is it about therapy. this music has no real capacity to glue back together cultures that have been split apart by nationalism; and it remains impotent in the face of minoritarian struggles over identity; in other words, i am not really interested in ideas of music mystically transcending ideology in some way. what it is about is getting the history right, or as right as we can. and here the kind of deconstruction offered by nitsiakos and Mantzos is the easy bit. a harder task is to peel away layers of history through detailed comparative study of the several surviving species of this music and of neighbouring musics. this is the value of the work done by scholars such as Katsanevaki and pistrick. through their research an alternative music-historical atlas takes shape, based on shifting cultural rather than political borders. it relies on evidence-based continuities rather than crude survivalist theories and it reveals the fluidity of borders within shared cultural spaces, rather than the firm lines drawn by nationalist politics. pre-modern cultural verities are local, and these scholars are alive to that. paradoxically it is a sensitivity to place that enables us to get the history right, as i put it earlier. and it is by getting the history right that we create a bulwark against the abuse of the past by the powerful, or to put it another way, the abuse of culture by politics. My language here betrays the ethical imperative. in recovering and preserving something old and all but lost to us, we model a unified culture, one that resists appropriation and accepts responsibility for the other. this may not change the politics, but it may ‘shake it up from time to time’. the music itself remains passive throughout, innocent of the politics that besiege it. indeed, if we feel any sense of responsibility towards it, it may be precisely because it lacks any real capacity to talk back to the political world. this is a major difference with my second story, which focuses on art music and on the border that separated Greece from its northern Communist neighbours from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. this is the Cold war era, and the context is well-known: the yalta declaration, and the ensuing Civil war, with Greek Communists persecuted in huge numbers,

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many of them fleeing across the borders. in chapter 20 i discussed the role of the west, and especially the united states, in promoting Greek modernism from the 1950s onwards. on the face of it this represented a stark contrast to official art in yugoslavia, as discussed in chapter 18. however my suggestion here is that if we focus on what composers said and did rather than on which side of the ideological divide they found themselves, we will be struck by the commonalities between Greece and its northern neighbours. and i suggest further that the two competing narratives i identified in relation to the Communist world – a westernorientated narrative of emancipation and a quest for Balkan roots and Balkan identities – were no less applicable to Greece. indeed i would argue that these narratives between them shaped the development of post-war art music in the Balkans. the first narrative, facilitated by Great power politics in Greece and impeded by them in yugoslavia, has already been discussed at length, and it will be developed further shortly. But the second narrative requires further exposition. Katy romanou points out that for a period in the 1950s Greece and yugoslavia tried to revive some of their collaborative ventures of the early 1930s.16 there had been various projects affirming a Balkan cultural identity at that time: the periodical Les Balcans, edited by alexandros papanastasiou, four so-called Balkan conferences, and an interBalkan concert conducted by Mitropoulos. in the 1950s, some of those threads were picked up again. there was a yugoslav concert in athens in 1952; there were visits from Manolis Kalomiris to Belgrade in 1952 and 1953, followed by eulogistic articles on music in yugoslavia in the Greek press. and there were plans for a series of festivals in athens, Belgrade and istanbul. it is unnecessary to elaborate on these collaborative programmes. in the end they foundered, and they did so primarily because by the late 1950s, as romanou suggests, Greece and yugoslavia were both more interested in their separate relationships with the west than they were in each other. in other words, the first narrative began to take precedence over the second. that first narrative – i called it a narrative of emancipation – reached a determinate stage in the early 1960s. it culminated in two major festivals, one on each side of the political boundary. they were treated separately in earlier chapters, but will be linked here in the context of Great power sponsorship. the first was the Zagreb Biennale. as noted earlier,

16 romanou 2010.

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one of the principal reasons the Biennale was able to survive – and indeed to become an enduring success – was that Kelemen and his colleagues were in a position to play the soviets off against the americans in the sponsorship stakes.17 the other was the hellenic weeks of Contemporary Music in athens. this too was a landmark event, but in the end it was not sustained, mainly because american funding was withdrawn after the fall of the Junta. the point here is that the hellenic weeks foundered because, unlike yugoslavia, Greece was at the mercy of one of the two superpowers. this was in the late 1970s, and by then my second narrative – of homecoming, of Balkan identities, of the quest for roots – had begun to re-assert itself, displacing and eventually subsuming the first. this development was discussed in relation to the Communist Balkans. But again it is worth noting that it influenced Greece no less than its Communist neighbours. it may be a little over-glib to put it in this way, but one might argue that if the composer yiannis papaioannou was the emancipator in Greek postwar music, the self-conscious stylist and innovator, then dimitris dragatakis was the seeker after archetypes and roots. in this respect he found common ground with Ljubica Marić in serbia, with Konstantin iliev and ivan spassov in Bulgaria and with Ştefan niculescu and tiberiu olah in romania. and we noted earlier how this marriage of archaism and modernism offered a distinctive identity to composers from this region. in this second story about art music, as in the first about traditional music, a divided politics both created and actively promoted a divided culture. it differs from the first story, however, in that the cultural world then worked to cross the divide. in both, music was hijacked by politics, but in the second it talked back. if we take a bird’s eye view of post-war art music in the Balkans, what we see i think is that while political appropriations pulled Greece and its northern neighbours apart, the ‘talking back’ actually drew them together through shared narratives of emancipation and of Balkan identities. that was then. in today’s world, native scholars – disenchanted in the main – fight the corner for art music in a hostile environment, struggling to gain recognition and funding from successive governments. in the process, they are inclined once again to construct musical traditions as intrinsically national, unique brands that might hold their own in a global cultural marketplace. this is understandable. But it is not comfortable to see division originating from within rather than

17 Kelemen 1971 and 1995.

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from without the institution of art. we need to recognise chauvinism for what it is, and we need to acknowledge that it can come from us as well as from politicians. My third story, where the border extends further eastwards to turkey, can be covered fairly briefly, as it has been extensively rehearsed in recent chapters. for many of what we might call the cultural elite in south east europe, including Greece, the rise and spread of pop-folk proved threatening precisely because its oriental component was regarded as an alien element that polluted the native heritage. yet the revival of rebetika in the 1990s, and the earnest engagement with a discourse of authenticity that accompanied that revival, began to change this picture, as dafni tragaki documents.18 we might remind ourselves, moreover, that rebetika became hardly less popular in turkey at this time; Şebnem susam-saraeva refers to the ‘return to anatolia’.19 and, to round off the picture, we have the development of what elena Kallimopoulou calls paradhosiaka.20 all of this signals an ever-increasing dialogue between Greece and turkey in popular culture, and on several levels: a ubiquitous pop-folk, and at the same time a more elitist and sophisticated popular music scene. this is important, because of our three stories, this is the one that is closest to most people’s lives today. the development of musical dialogues between Greece and turkey in recent years has no doubt been facilitated by a high-level politics of rapprochement pursued on both sides from the usual self-interested motives; the debate about the european union rumbles on. But these developing dialogues are also to do with generations. as i will suggest in the final chapter, youth today, unlike their parents and even more their grandparents, seem to resist notions of culture as something solid and fixed, something to which one is born. alongside the very real and powerful sense of a Greek identity there is, then, a developing sense of a rather wider Greek-anatolian identity, and especially among the younger generation. ‘tormented by history’, Greek nationalists would no doubt seek to understand this as a form of reclamation, while turkish nationalists would naturally see it differently. as so often in the Balkans, there is no single narrative in play. at the time of writing, there is discussion of a proposed fence to be built at a

18   tragaki 2007. 19   susam-saraeva 2006. 20 Kallimopoulou 2009.

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strategic crossing point between Greece and turkey, a symbolic gesture of antagonism (utterly futile in practical terms) by the Greek authorities towards growing numbers of illegal immigrants. yet elsewhere it has been a contrary narrative – a politics and culture of rapprochement – that has seemed to dominate. the question asked by many in recent years has been just how far the culture may have influenced the politics: how far, in other words, has cultural work helped deconstruct traditional and ongoing hostilities.21 the world is certainly changing, and Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis seems to have some purchase on that change. as we watch popular culture seep across increasingly porous political and social boundaries, or even in some cases flow freely across them, we may be tempted to see further evidence of the transformation from heavy to light modernity. the liquid metaphor is Bauman’s. Music Partitioned . . . a glance at the map says a great deal with respect to Cyprus. the island is just a few miles from the turkish coast and distant from mainland Greece. this accounts partly for continuing insecurities among the Greek Cypriot majority on the island. it also accounts for the sense of entitlement among turkish Cypriots, bearing in mind that Cyprus was under ottoman rule for three centuries before coming under British administration from 1878. almost from its belated start Greek Cypriot nationalism, with powerful support from the Church, took the form of enosis (union with ‘the motherland’, as they perceived it, in a spirit of panhellenism), rather than an independence movement (Cypriotism), and understandably this was resisted by the turkish Cypriot population, who had a four-hundred year history on the island, and who accordingly boycotted the plebiscite on enosis in 1950. the results of this plebiscite – more than 90 per cent of the Greek Cypriot population in favour – were in any case ignored by Britain. from this point, and faced with anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare by the radical pro-enosis eoKa, British policy was to look favourably on – indeed to energise – turkey, effectively widening the space between the two communities on the island and even condoning the discourse of taksim [partition] that accorded with the aims of the radical turkishCypriot organisation tMt. it was a policy of divide et impera. and it

21 nye 1990.

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was against this background, with enosis looking increasingly unlikely, that archbishop Makarios iii was obliged to come out in favour of independence. at the Zurich talks between Greece and turkey (brokered by the us) a highly conditional independence giving rights to both communities was indeed achieved (1960), under the protection of Greece, turkey and Britain. however, this satisfied neither party, and in particular was regarded as a betrayal by the more nationalistic Greek Cypriots. accordingly, inter-communal violence broke out in 1963, and it is really from this point that a culture of conflict accelerated among the nationalists on both sides. in particular the turkish Cypriot minority was marginalised. Many of them were either forced into, or formed themselves into, enclaves. the (then discontinuous) Green line dates from that point. ironically, the violence had abated, and discussions were under way, by 1967 when the Greek Junta took power. the coup d’état of July 1974 was jointly masterminded by the Junta in athens and the radical Greek Cypriot nationalist group eoKa B, at which point Makarios iii was forced into exile.22 the coup in turn precipitated the two-stage turkish invasion of 1974, with London and washington standing by. this invasion was ostensibly designed to protect the turkish Cypriot minority on the island, and there is a perfectly credible case that it was within turkey’s rights as one of the three protecting powers to undertake it in order to re-establish the status quo. it was not so much the invasion itself, then, but the subsequent occupation of the northern territories – the fact that the turks remained and extensively settled what would later (1983) be called the ‘turkish republic of north Cyprus’ – that ensured that the new state, de facto part of turkey, would be recognised only by turkey and would be subject to international embargo, as it remains today. the invasion effectively brought down the Greek junta and ensured the return of Makarios, who remained president of Cyprus until his death in 1977. it is possible to argue – indeed it has been argued by daniel pick – that war has an anchoring effect in the constitution of collective identities, that having forced a separation it then freezes the newly defined positions.23 in 1974 there were two wars in Cyprus: two violent ‘events’, orchestrated respectively by Greece and turkey. there was the Junta-backed coup

22 few accounts of recent Cypriot history can avoid allowing their ‘subject position’ to come through. for studies that emphasise the global players, see Mallinson 2005 and papadakis, peristianis and welz 2006. see also the trenchant, far from balanced, article by perry anderson (anderson 2008). 23 pick 1993.

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(Makarios described it as a Greek invasion of Cyprus), and there was the turkish invasion. the effect of these events was to reset the terms of Cyprus’s political life, creating a partitioned island. existing structures were erased, and a chasm was opened up between two communities that had for the most part, extremists on both sides apart, co-existed for many years before 1963. the divisions were not in any case exclusively about ethnicity. papadakis, peristianis and welz remind us of the politics of left and right on both sides, where right-wing politics promoted enosis with respective motherlands, while left-wing politics promoted Cypriotism.24 how, we may ask, did the cultural world respond to the partition of the island? in particular, how far did music of all kinds contribute to the construction or confirmation of identities in the separate communities? what has been the role of public policy, and conversely of private initiative, in fostering both music-making and music pedagogy? which initiatives have been established to promote bi-communal musical activities, and to exploit the ‘soft power’ of music as a means of crossing political divides? to what extent is the traditional music of the island a shared heritage, and is it actively promoted today? what about popular music in Cyprus? does it have a distinctive identity, or is it simply a carbon copy of contemporary trends in Greece and turkey respectively? and how far can one identify continuities with musical traditions prior to the events of 1974? a more detailed study of music in Cyprus would need to address these questions more closely than can be justified in the present volume. But at least i can make a start. if we were to sketch a history of music in Cyprus we would return at least to the Lusignans and their musicians, for there was an ars nova practised by french musicians in nicosia, leaving a distinguished material trace.25 we would have stories to tell about the renaissance period, including the ‘Cypriot’ madrigals of Gian domenico Martoretta, who stopped in Cyprus for an extended period in the mid 1550s and dedicated ten of the twenty-eight madrigals of his Terzo Libro to noble Cypriot families.26 we would discuss the emergence of domestic european music-making associated with the British accession in the late nineteenth century.

24 in their introduction to papadakis, peristianis and welz 2006. 25 Günther and finscher 1995. for a wider study of society and culture under the Lusignan Kingdom, see nicolaou-Konnari and schabel 2005. 26 see Maria antonella Balsano’s introduction to Book 2 (Martoretta 1988), and her unpublished paper ‘the Cypriot Madrigals of Giandomenico Martoretta’ read at the 2009 Biennial euro-Mediterranean Music Conference, 18–20 september 2009.

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and we would refer to works such as Cypriana (1943) for solo piano by the Cypriot-american composer anis fuleihan (1900–70). european art music, in other words, had a presence on this island at particular stages of its earlier history. Likewise post-Byzantine chant was also cultivated by the Cypriots, though Cypriot chant lacks the regional identity of, say, the smyrnean school of the late nineteenth century or even of the thessalonians today.27 and finally, ottoman traditions were well established from the late sixteenth century onwards; indeed the Mevlevî tekke in Lefkoşa (on the turkish side of the city) functioned as an important early school of music and poetry (mevlevihâne). as for traditional music, this – as one might expect – belonged to the wider Greek-anatolian region, though there are distinctive features (often a faster tempo) that identify it as Cypriot. the major dances were familiar ones originating in asia Minor and found also in Greece: using the Greek names, they include the sirto, the karsilama, the tsifteteli, and the zeibekiko. there have been projects on both sides of the island documenting recordings of these dances and dance pieces from the pre-1963 era, some with turkish-Cypriot musicians and dancers, some with Greek Cypriots, and some with a mixture of the two ethnicities. the blind violinist Mehmet ali tathyay (1920–88), who appears with his trio on many of the videos housed by the Lefkoşa folk association, had major exposure and exerted considerable influence on the course of traditional music among the turkishCypriot community. from 1963 onwards, there are predictable stories to tell about the attempts to draw this island-wide repertory into national narratives of both Greece and turkey, attempts that have not always been acceptable to either Greek Cypriot or turkish Cypriot musicians. Culturally, no less than politically, Cyprus presents something of a microcosm of the wider Greek-anatolian region, while at the same time offering something distinctive, not just because all islands inflect generic idioms one way and another, but because the British presence – as in the ionian islands – left its own mark. thus, from 1879 onwards european music was cultivated both at diplomatic residences, at British (and also french) schools, and by way of the British army bands. teachers and

27 i am grateful to alex Lingas for information about this tradition. it seems that during the venetian period Cyprus did seem to be developing distinctive regional idioms similar to those found on Crete (notably the works of John Korkodotos and hieronymos tragodistes). nicoletta demetriou has written interestingly on the attempts by theodoulos Kallinikos to draw Byzantine and demotic traditions together in support of familiar readings of a continuity in Greek music history (demetriou 2008).

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performers were almost entirely non-Cypriot, but by the early twentieth century Cypriot-run music associations and private music schools began to appear in Larnaca, Limassol and nicosia. Most existing accounts of this fail to acknowledge that not all were dedicated to european music. in several of the associations ottoman and european traditions co-existed, and some were devoted exclusively to ottoman classical and semi-classical music. Moreover, it would not be correct to assume that ottoman traditions were exclusively the preserve of the turkish Cypriot community. in the case of the Cypriot branch of dar-ül-elhan [abode of sounds], founded in 1925, turkish Cypriots were the prime movers, and the history of this organisation, culminating in its debut on Cyprus radio in 1953, is really a history of the conservation, teaching and transmission of ottoman-turkish traditions.28 to an extent, then, Cyprus joined certain other parts of the Balkans in preserving ottoman traditions that had been proscribed in turkey. it needs to be emphasised that musicians could move between traditions. Larnaca-born Mustafa Kenan, for example, conducted the orchestra and chorus of dar-ül-elhan in the 1930s and 1940s, while also performing with the Music association “Mozart”, conducted by the best-known of the Greek-Cypriot composers, solon Michaelides. Later, after independence, he also played in the ethnically mixed orchestra of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. from the reviews of concerts given just before and after independence,29 we learn that successive concerts might alternate turkish music and western music, or indeed combine the two. it was really the events of 1963 that separated the communities and prised apart their cultures. this was the point at which Cypriots became Greek-Cypriots and turkish-Cypriots rather than turks and Greeks. and from this point onwards there is no reference in the Greek-Cypriot press to turkish-Cypriot musical activities.30 indeed it was increasingly difficult for the turkish Cypriots to maintain an active cultural life at this time. Both the dar-ül-elhan and the Kâmran aziz ensemble ran into difficulties, though the turkish Cypriot philharmonic society was founded in the 1970s by yilmas taner, still an influential (and politically privileged) figure in north Cyprus today, son of the pioneering musician Zeki taner, and father of the salaried state artist, the pianist ruha taner. 28 yeşilada 2008. 29 these have been usefully brought together in adanir 2001. 30 this is confirmed by the current doctoral research by anastasia hasikou in the public information office in Cyprus.

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not surprisingly, the two parts of the island have fared very differently economically and culturally since 1974. with partition there are always winners and losers. it is to the great credit of the Greek Cypriots that they succeeded in building a prosperous modern state with a high per capita income and low unemployment following partition, re-designing a tourist industry whose prime locations had been in the north and forging a successful commercial economy prior to the crisis of March 2013. as the economic base of the society gradually strengthened, moreover, educational and cultural activities were increasingly promoted. today there are numerous festivals, the Cyprus symphony orchestra, a Centre for Cypriot Composers (with Music information Centre), youth state orchestra, and music programmes at the university of nicosia (formerly intercollege) and the european university of Cyprus, as well as at private schools such as the arte academy. at the time of writing a major Cyprus Cultural Centre, to an innovative architectural design, is nearing completion. there is also a quite well developed compositional culture on the Greek side. aside from Michaelides, one could cite composers such as Michalis Christodoulides, who makes creative use of makam-s and a Middle eastern melos more generally (o Saratsinos, composed in the early 1990s, is characteristic, including an opening taximi), and patras-based andreas Georgiou, who uses traditional melodies in some works (Steile me mana sto nero [Mother, send me to the fountain] for solo guitar) but more typically allows folk elements to provide a kind of background ambience (Costantia and dhoron exagnismou [Gift of purification]). there is even a symphony, Kypriakes eikones [Cypriot icons] and one-act Chamber opera, Manoli . . .!, by the Limassol composer vassos argyrides, best known for his work in film and tv.31 Composed in 1990, and based on the coup of 1974, Manoli . . .! is a work of considerable expressive power, and it has already secured productions in Kaiserslautern and hamburg. other notable composers are Mikis Costeas, tasos stylianou and andreas Moustoukis. it would be hard to claim the same successes for north Cyprus, where there have been the inevitable economic and social problems that accompany a proscribed state. north Cyprus is a unique case. But it also presents similarities with other fragments of territory – small, isolated, defensive – that have calved off from larger units, the outcome of nationalist violence and consequent ethnic separation. we will encounter other cases in these last two chapters. seeking to establish or confirm an independent

31 papaeti 2010.

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nationhood, they try to build a national culture almost ab initio, but they are vulnerable and exploitable both from without and from within. Characteristically they will be prone to a corrupt political culture, and to an establishment that enjoys and protects its privileges. north Cyprus is obviously heavily dependent on turkey, and that in turn has bred resentment at what are taken to be exploitative and controlling policies. indeed what is not always appreciated is that turkish Cypriots (those whose mother and father are both Cypriot) are a minority, and that their relations with anatolian settlers are not harmonious. there is also a considerable population of ex-pats living in the Girne (Kyrenia) area in particular, and that too has a cramping effect on the survival of a local culture. at the time of the annan plans there was real enthusiasm in the north for peace, but when the final plan was rejected, following the referendum in 2004, a different mentality ensued. one can feel tangibly the force of Badiou’s point about subjectivities and events. in north Cyprus today the philosophy is ‘live for the moment’, or perhaps ‘don’t face the reality’. none of the current options for resolution appear particularly attractive to the turkish-Cypriot community. the attempts to build a culture in this part of the island have a ramshackle quality that is not without a tragi-comedic element, as in the fate of the so-called state symphony orchestra and Choir, now reduced to three fully-salaried members, and with a building so under-used that it was occupied by squatters. More active is the Lefkoşa Belediye orchestra, but its ambitions as a classical ensemble have taken a knock, and it now performs an almost entirely popular or light-classical repertory. Moreover there is little belief among the (accomplished) performers in the conductor, whose appointment was largely political. during my period in north Cyprus, critiques of this state of affairs were in the newspapers and on the radio. there is a group of committed younger musicians who have pressed for reform, but as yet with little success. Building something sustained is notoriously difficult in north Cyprus, as in all such regions. it is easier to invest in festivals. some, such as the famagusta festival of popular and world musics, cultivate an indigenous audience. But more often they are linked with tourism, as in the two festivals at Bellapais abbey organised by the north Cyprus Music foundation (yilmas tanner) and the Cyprus Music association (halil Kalgay).32

32 for an idealised view of north Cypriot culture, see oberling 2007.

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it is no doubt symptomatic that the one university Music department (at the eastern Mediterranean university) has been forced to close, though the Music education department has survived, and there are impressive teachers at the high school for fine arts and Music in Lefkoşa and at a private music school in Girne, with a choir that has had international exposure. there are also plans for istanbul technical university to establish a campus in north Cyprus, with a Music department focusing (with obvious ideological resonance) on turkish Classical Music. the once-thriving tradition of performing this music has declined in north Cyprus, and there is some resentment today at the tendency of some of the more nationalistic of the anatolian settlers to play Mehter music on their radios and in their cars as a kind of affirmation of a turkish national culture. Certainly turkish music seems to have no particular privilege at the moment, taking its place alongside other non-european repertories, including a highly successful tango group and several jazz ensembles. if anything is privileged it is Cypriot folk music and dance, with several ensembles, a folk association, and research projects for conservation and analysis, some of them shared with the Greek side of the island. a bi-communal project, Uniting Through Traditional Music [uttM], led by panikos Giorgoudes and funded mainly by the un, began in 2004, and another eu-funded project is currently under way in Lefkoşa, in which multiple performances of Cypriot music and dance are compared and analysed. in general the traditional music in north Cyprus has not been well preserved. indeed some ethnomusicologists there are of the view that after 1974 there were deliberate attempts to downplay it in order to draw the turkish Cypriot community closer to turkey and to loosen their links to their Greek-Cypriot compatriots. if this is the case, it may not be entirely confined to the turkish side of the island. on the Greek side the music is certainly better preserved, but the links with Greece have been emphasised and strengthened since 1974. such are the familiar mechanisms of nationalist appropriation of culture. even as common repertories are edged apart by the politics of the motherlands, internationally funded projects try to draw them together again. prior to the referendum in 2004 there were many such bi-communal projects, notably associated with meetings in Ledra palace, symbolically in the ‘dead zone’. they include the various projects promoted by Jeunesse Musicale Cyprus, an impressive bi-communal choir, the movement dance for peace (common traditional instruments), tango orchestras on both sides of the island that collaborate on occasion, and a popular music duo that straddles the two communities. perhaps more striking than this deliberate

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bridge building (the Barenboim approach) is the wider tendency – already noted in the last section – for popular music to ignore political divides. there are the usual global idioms of popular music found in Cyprus, associated especially with an active club culture on both sides of the island, bearing in mind that there is now freedom of movement across the Green Line. and there is a pop-folk idiom that looks both to east and west, but without associating these orientations with either community (thus, the live music scenes on the Greek side tend to look west in Limassol, which incidentally hosts kantades societies exactly analogous to dalmatian klapa, and east in nicosia). the future remains uncertain. Current administrations in turkey are bullish, consolidating and strengthening their hold on north Cyprus, and less swayed by the lure of the european union than once they were. in the meantime those nations who are unhappy about turkish accession continue to use Cyprus as a reason, or a convenient excuse, for their opposition. if you spend time with musicians, you will see the best and the worst of it. you will see how easily music can be exploited and manipulated by both political and commercial interests. you will see how corrupt and nepotistic administrations can prey upon a musical culture, and can frustrate well-meaning attempts to reform it. But you will also see how a love of making music and of thinking about music can override all of this, drawing people together, whatever their ethnicity, politics or religion. and you will see too that the music associated with youth culture is a shared music, barely ruffled by events and largely indifferent to boundaries. the one frustration that seems common to all is the omnipresent ‘guiding’ hand from without, always dictating and always prescribing. if a solution is to be found to a problem of some fifty years vintage, it will have more chance of sticking if it comes from within. . . . and Not Quite Partitioned two decades after the partition of Cyprus, the dayton accord finally brought an end to the war in Bosnia and herzegovina. there are parallels. in both cases an act of war resulted in a formal separation of ethnoreligious groups. But there are also major differences. for one, there were three groups involved in Bosnia; and during the war every possible permutation of enemy pairings was in evidence. for another, there is the matter of scale. there was much devastation in Cyprus in 1974, but nothing that happened there was on the scale of Bosnia and herzegovina. and for a

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third, the division of Bosnia and herzegovina into two separate political enclaves, republika srpska and the Bosnian federation, was the product of an internationally sponsored peace treaty, and with only limited local support. it was a foreign imposition, but it has status in international law, whereas north Cyprus is recognised only by turkey. republika srpska does have legitimacy, but in the eyes of many the decision to establish it as a largely autonomous region is hard to justify. other things aside, there is no real geographical logic to the region; the inter-entity Boundary Line was negotiated somewhat arbitrarily according to the status quo at the time. the dayton peace was an international construction, just as much of the responsibility for the war must be assigned to the international community. even so, ‘dayton Bosnia’, a fudge in terms of sovereignty norms, did at least stop the bloodshed.33 despite the division, Bosnia and herzegovina is a single state, albeit with a cumbersome institutional structure. the office of the high representative commits to strengthening cross-sector state institutions, but the reality on the ground is somewhat different. agreement between national representatives at state level is rare, and the two entities largely govern themselves, and have separate police authorities. any referendum held in republika srpska, not that such a thing is likely, would certainly result in an overwhelming vote for independence. in other words, it is the international community that holds Bosnia and herzegovina together. even so, the regeneration of this country from its low ebb in the mid 1990s should be presented as a success story on material, economic and cultural levels. it is the politics that remain in question. although populations are drifting back slowly to their places of origin, republika srpska remains predominantly serb today, and the federation mainly Muslim and Croat. the different nationalities co-exist more easily than in the immediate aftermath of the war, but ethnonationalist forces remain powerful, and few could confidently rule out conflict in the future were the international pressure to ease. violent events are transformative. and the post-dayton political transformation naturally had implications for cultural life. Many of the basic structures of musical life remained as in the pre-war years, of course, and were common to both federation and republic. this was especially the case

33 the most thoughtful dissection of dayton i have read is woodward 2001, which also contains useful analyses of the acceptance by european powers of slovenian and Croatian sovereignty in the early 1990s.

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in music education, though even here one might note that the curricula (if not the structures) of the national music schools have been drifting apart over the years. But for musical life more generally the changes were bound to be considerable once a formal boundary was in place. in earlier chapters i tried to give some indication of how musical activities were slowly regenerated in sarajevo following the trauma of war. in truth they had never stopped entirely even in the darkest days of the siege. i leave aside here the iconic figure of vedran smailović, the ‘Cellist of sarajevo’, who used music to draw the eyes of the world to sarajevo for a time in a gesture that inevitably echoes pablo Casals with his Catalan folk melody. rather i refer to the continuing activities of the academy, thanks to the determination of the few, and even the continuing, if greatly emaciated, concert life that just about functioned, sometimes underground, in the city.34 sarajevo remains of course the cultural as well as the political capital of Bosnia, but when republika srpska gained its semi-autonomous status it acquired a separate capital and began to develop a separate cultural life. in the aftermath of the war, there were debates about where the seat of government should be located. east sarajevo, centred on pale, staked its claim, but the association of pale with radovan Karadžić and with the worst excesses of Bosnian serb wartime activities counted heavily against it. there is an academy of Music within the university of east sarajevo today, but its activities remain little known (hosting the 58th Trophée Mondiale de l’accordéon in 2008 gave it momentary exposure), and it has no real contact with the more prestigious academy. in any case Banja Luka, Bosnia’s second city, beautifully situated on the river vrbas in the northern hills of Bosanska Krajina, was chosen as a more amenable administrative capital, and it is effectively the cultural centre too. in prewar days, Banja Luka was home to a typically Bosnian mélange of ethnicities. today, of course, it is mainly serbian, and much of its islamic heritage has been eliminated or suppressed. But despite the destruction of the ferhadija Mosque (now under reconstruction), other mosques and Muslim cemeteries survive. during a stay there i did occasionally hear the call to prayer drifting across the city. Musically, the local hero is vlado Milošević, whose compositions make frequent reference to the folk music of surrounding territories in

34 i am not aware of published accounts of music in wartime sarajevo. But for a vivid account of just what it meant to be a musician in a war-torn city (osijek) in the early 1990s, see hadžihusejnović-valašek 1998.

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the Krajina. the academy of Music in the university of Banja Luka is named after him, and in april of each year it organises the ‘days of vlado Milošević’, a mini-festival of concerts, exhibitions and theatrical events. as in sarajevo, the academy is located right at the heart of musical life, supplying teachers for the music schools and performers for a recently formed symphony orchestra, currently conducted by vanesa Kreminović. unlike its companion academy in east sarajevo, moreover, it maintains active relations with the academy in sarajevo (it should be remembered that already in the early twentieth century Banja Luka had developed a musical life along western lines; indeed its first private music school predated the one in sarajevo). however the academy struggled to re-build its activities after the war, and the struggles are by no means over. for several instruments and theoretical subjects it has to depend on visiting professors from Belgrade. and while the strings are well catered for, there remain difficulties with wind instruments, harp and percussion. exactly these problems exist in north Cyprus, and as we will see in the final chapter, they exist in Kosovo too. the politics may be very different, but the structure is similar, as these small secessionist regions seek to build an independent culture in the wake of war and in a climate of financial stringency. as in north Cyprus, it has been easier for republika srpska to fund annual or one-off festivals than to establish and maintain regular series. and again the difficulties are epitomised in the attempt to establish a viable symphony orchestra, regarded as essential to cultural ambition and international prestige, but expensive to run and maintain, and demanding of high-quality teaching to ensure a satisfactory inflow of good instrumentalists. in Banja Luka the plans for an orchestra began in the early years of the new millennium, but it has become a reality only in the very recent past. it does have government support, but it still relies on some outside performers for its occasional concerts in the cultural centre Banski dvor, and for the overseas tours which have just begun. it is abundantly clear that a formal culture of this kind is in its embryonic stages in republika srpska, in music as in the other arts. there is little evidence of an active ‘new music’ scene, though one student at the academy in Banja Luka, dalibor dukić, can claim the distinction of having composed the first symphony from republika srpska! in art music cooperation between republic and federation is good, and there seems little rivalry. this is also true to some degree of the many amateur choirs and folk ensembles found in Bosnia and herzegovina, for they do indeed perform all over the country and participate in each other’s festivals. But there is also evidence here that music can reinforce

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division as well as heal it. we saw in an earlier chapter how devotional islamic hymns (the now ubiquitous ilahije i kaside) and sevdalinkas were given propagandistic significance in the federation, becoming in effect an official national music. in a similar way the serbian orthodox and folkloristic repertories, very much in the Mokranjac tradition, that are associated with choral societies in the republic, of which the most famous is undoubtedly the Jedinstvo [unity] choir in Banja Luka, can take on a political tenor, even inadvertently. the annual choral festival Zlatna Vila [Golden fairy] in nearby prijedor celebrates this tradition and presents it to the world. Likewise the tamburica orchestra of Banja Luka and the many folk ensembles and festivals in the republic, together with a ‘trumpet culture’ in the spirit of Guča, are showcases for essentially serbian traditions. it seems clear that in this way music plays its part in forging a common sense of identity between the serbs in republika srpska and serbs everywhere. that may not necessarily be a good thing. it comes down to a familiar tension between territory and ethnicity; in other words, do Bosnian serbs want to stress the adjective or the noun in this label? if we look to deeper causes, we might say that the borderline between trauma-induced nostalgia (as discussed at length by svetlana Boym) and nationalist propaganda is not always easy to draw.35 the former would seek to establish roots from a profound sense of insecurity, whereas the latter would seek to proselytise and might seek to conquer. this tension exists, moreover, on both side of the inter-entity Border Line. we should perhaps not make too much of it. nor should we make too much of the widening gap that seems to have opened up between traditional repertories either side of the line. the separate cultures do after all cross the border. But they remain separate cultures. if there are any grounds for optimism that the destructive nationalism of the past may recede, they perhaps lie, as in Cyprus, with the levelling effects of Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’, which permeates all strata of society but which certainly influences the younger generation more than their fathers and mothers. the issue of the generations will be addressed more fully in the next chapter, but i should say here that for the young people of my own acquaintance in republika srpska (not a representative sample, i freely admit), no prospect is more horrendous than the return of conflict. Many of them seek opportunities to emigrate not so much because they

35 Boym 2001.

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are dissatisfied with their lives here and now, but because they fear for the future. and the music they listen to seems to confirm this ecumenical position. turbo-folk, still imbued with political memories, has lost much of its popularity among the youth of republika srpska in favour of more international western styles or of politically neutral serbian and Croatian stars such as Zdravko Čolić in Belgrade and severina vučković in Zagreb. By way of a brief footnote on the generations, it will be worth adding here that two of the most prominent musicians in republika srpska today are a father and daughter from Banja Luka. they are Bosnian serbs, and both have symbolically nailed their colours to the adjective rather than the noun. the father is dušan Šestić, a well-known local composer, whose achievement it is to have composed the national anthem for Bosnia and herzegovina (there is, as a matter of fact, a separate ‘hymn’ for republika srpska, composed by Mladen Matović). and the daughter is Marija Šestić, a graduate of the academy in Banja Luka, who represented Bosnia and herzegovina in the eurovision song Contest in helsinki in 2007 with the ballad rijeka bez imena [nameless river]. she was twenty at the time and was placed a respectable eleventh in the contest. Bosnia and herzegovina once led the way in popular music circles. it now trails badly. it needs new stars, and it is encouraging to see that Marija Šestić continues to build an impressive reputation in local circles. the question for Cyprus is whether a divided people might eventually come together. the question for Bosnia and herzegovina is whether a supposedly unified state might eventually split apart. for despite sustained attempts to create cross-sector collaboration by the paymasters and their administrators, the republic and the federation seem to be emphasising rather than smudging the line that separates them. they increasingly present the aspect of symmetrically mirrored independent entities, even down to the iconic placement and significance of Brčko and Mostar within republic and federation respectively.36 in pessimistic moments, one might well feel that dayton has been more holding operation than resolution. as usual, music can either reflect or resist underlying political tendencies. no genre is ‘safe’ in this respect, but in general it is the music with national resonance – the music of the church and of the folk – that reflects, and the music that crosses national boundaries – the music of concert halls and clubs – that resists. people use music, but they are also used by it.

36 in both towns inter-ethnic warfare was replaced by experiments in externally imposed multi-ethnic administrations.

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enDGaMe degenerations one person’s progress is another’s degeneration. enlightenment discourses gave this truism form, and debates over music were in keeping. Consider the competing claims on behalf of harmony and melody (‘charming the ear’ versus ‘touching the heart’) in a well-known polemic of the late eighteenth century, and in its aftermath. harmony could be a triumph of Western rationality (rameau) or a symptom of cultural decay (rousseau). It could enable new, ‘artificial’ forms of expression, or it could suppress and constrain older, more ‘natural’, ones. It was intrinsic to the West and to the march of modernity; indeed it codified the separation of the modern West from world culture. Yet its subordination to system (Weber’s ‘progressive rationality’) drew it towards over-mechanisation, over-refinement, or both. As for melody, this was widely recognised as signalling an expressive imperative, but its status as either derived or originating remained in question. For rousseau and his followers it was ancient and speech-related. Accordingly, if it were to be squeezed to the margins by an increasingly sophisticated harmonic process, this would be a symptom of cultural decline. the Marxist critic Fedele d’Amico would later understand musical modernism in just those terms; he called it La crisi del canto.1 reductive exercises of this kind encourage the belief that coherent patterns underlie the messy complexity of historical processes. We might be tempted, for instance, to relate these readings of music history to a conventional dialectic of rationality and mimesis. however, there are two complications here. One is that any reading may be given a positive spin in one quarter and a negative spin in another. the rameau-rousseau debate, which still echoes faintly today in a debate between lydia Goehr and reinhard strohm, bears witness to this.2 the second is that thoughtful commentators recognise that each term in the dialectic contains elements

1   d’amico 1962, 465–6. 2 goehr 1994; Strohm 2000.

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of the other. the specific line here is that an increasingly rationalised tonal harmony was eroded from within, but the general message is that as systems tend towards autonomy, they overrun the logic of their development and go into decline. if there is a forcefield between rationality and mimesis, in other words, its poles will be heavily mediated.3 processes of modernisation, in other words, are not just subject to competing interests (are they good or bad?), but may embody conflicting elements (does the rational ‘contain’ the irrational?). all this has some purchase on the repertories i have discussed in this book. the debates over Orthodox chant are a case in point. One would distinguish here between enlightenment-engendered Chrysanthine reforms, which set out to rationalise an existing practice (exactly as Ottoman art music would be rationalised some time after), and the later move to harmonisation, which sought to modernise – in effect to westernise – the chant. But characteristically both these historical moments were accompanied by a rhetoric not just of innovation and tradition but of progress and degeneration. Or consider the debates about art music in this region in the modern era, where the opposition between cosmopolitan modernism and folk-based nationalist idioms was typically couched in terms of the coldly mechanical (the rational) versus the warmly organic (the mimetic). for some these were starkly opposed positions (Osterc, dobronić). But for others a recovered mimetic impulse could jump-start the decaying machine, creating in effect a different species of modernism (Slavenski). and consider too the ethical terms in which that same mimetic impulse (vital, pure, of the people, bypassed by a self-destructive rationality) was contrasted with the hybrid popular music of the cities, especially the music of the roma. if we understand ideas of progress and degeneration in the widest sense they are timeless, alive in the ancient world and alive today. But as controlling agents of history they were formalised and interlocked – as inverted but well-nigh identically structured discourses – in enlightenment thought and in the positivist-darwinist-modernist successors to that thought. they culminated in nietzsche, and (in fictionalised form) in the moralising of Settembrini in thomas mann’s novel The Magic Mountain.4 world war i, which interrupted and changed the course of mann’s great 3 an interesting case study of this, with a bearing on east and west in music, is Lendvai’s discussion of two natural principles (vertical and horizontal, rational and organic). See Lendvai 1983. 4 mann 2011.

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novel, seemed to draw a line under this symbiosis, and where it lingered world war ii finished the job. in the later twentieth century, progress and degeneration were disaggregated in the discourses of cultural as also of social histories. Specifically there was a loss of faith in the former. One could remain committed to the necessity of the modern, but it seemed more difficult to link this with a belief in progress. Only in the Communist world was there a calculated propagandistic attempt to preserve that belief, and even to maintain its specific associations (in the case of music, an over-rationalised avant-garde, a healthy music of the people, a degenerate popular culture). elsewhere it withered, or led a kind of underground existence as a latent Utopianism (une promesse de bonheur). degeneration was another matter. daniel pick’s classic discussion of degeneration as cultural history locates itself, with perfect logic, in the ‘age of progress’, meaning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating – in more than a simple chronological sense – in the first world war.5 Looking at medico-psychiatric and social-scientific discourses, at criminal anthropology, and at fictions of degeneration, crime and decay, his magisterial study gathers together several themes already discussed in this study, and some about to be discussed. and it analyses with acuity how stereotypes of west and east emerged around this potent pairing of progress and degeneration. in essence, ‘the west’ is harnessed to progress (albeit a progress that harbours – indeed produces – degeneracy), while ‘the east’ is equated with degeneration (albeit a degeneration that carries the potential for renewal). naturally stereotypes of this kind distort reality, but they can become self-affirming, and often to the point at which even those stereotyped may begin to believe in them. Let us fine-tune the stereotypes. One class that emerged from europe was the orientalism practised by sophisticated western artists at the turn of the century. a european image of asia, racially and sexually degenerate but replete with vital life forces, confronted a europe of decadent modernity, associated with the coldly mechanical, trade-obsessed western city. the east was branded as enervating and seductive for the most part (pick’s book Svengali’s Web is informative as to music, and there are relevant commentaries by david weir and Stephen downes),6 but its ‘primitive’ qualities might also revitalise, and fin de siècle orientalism

5 pick 1989. 6 pick 2000; weir 1995; downes 2009. for weir, decadence ‘provides a conceptual focus that helps to unify the cultural transition from romanticism to modernism’.

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played with both possibilities. it did so always in a spirit of appropriation, and with musical manifestations that are well known and wide-ranging. a second class of stereotype emerged from the post-freudian eurasianism associated with certain russian émigré intellectuals in the early twentieth century. here a quite different version of the east might redeem the west, as the transformative power of russian spirituality was invoked to counter a godless and soulless western rationality. in music, for example, eurasianists such as pierre Souvtchinsky depicted Stravinsky as a messianic outsider, though in truth he could as well be associated with primitivist as with spiritual renewal, and for that matter with futurist artifice and mechanisation (the music of Le Sacre can invoke the modern city as easily as a primitive rite!).7 the in-between status of the Balkans is reinforced and illuminated by these west-east stereotypes. On one hand the region can be represented as aspiring towards western rationality, chasing the modern, seeking to catch up. it presents, in short, a weak, emulative version of a modern urban culture. On the other hand it may be thought to echo, and to remain fatally attracted by, a lingering mimetic impulse associated with the east, where mimesis might equate with expression and sensuality, but also with unchecked barbarism. this informed a third, homegrown class of stereotype, the Barbarogenius of Zenitist fame, a peculiarly Balkan version of transformative power, and one that contains elements of both orientalism and eurasianism. it is in fact closer to the latter than to the former, in that the source of regeneration lies in a putatively stable world of traditional rural societies, a world standing for what Buruma and margalit have called the ‘old certainties’, grounded in faith and given cultural expression in ritual forms.8 during daniel pick’s ‘age of progress’ this world was already fast disappearing, and in the second half of the twentieth century it was all but irrevocably lost. But it lingered in corners of the old europe, and in the Balkans longer than almost anywhere else. its stubborn survival in this region created an in-built resistance to influences from west and east alike. the story of music and musical life in South east europe seems to reflect this in-between status rather clearly, presenting as it does an underdeveloped but aspiring western culture, a heavily mediated oriental legacy, and a cluster of robust but receding indigenous traditions. even the hybrid

7 humbertclaude 2006. 8 Buruma and margalit 2004.

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popular music most listened to today right across the Balkans somehow fits the picture, for it brings all three of these ingredients together in a kind of synthesis. Of course, there is not much doubt about where this pop-folk really originates. it is first and foremost a species of a modern, western, urbanised mass culture, and where it points to an exoticised east or to native ‘folk’ traditions, it does so primarily to establish local (Balkananatolian) identifiers within that mass culture. despite appearances, there is not much more than a trace of the orientalist and Zenitist impulses of the early twentieth century in pop-folk. and what remains of those impulses has now been both commodified and neutered, subsumed by the culture industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an industry that in the eyes of many, and despite the prevalent cultural relativism of postmodern discourses, is itself a symptom of cultural degeneration. there is a long history of reading mass culture as an index of social and cultural decline. patrick Brantlinger demonstrated that this attitude – in essence the belief that forms of mass entertainment tend towards a debasement and trivialisation of culture – was already alive and well in the ancient world, citing the heraclitean axioms that virtue is rare and the multitude is bestial.9 Likewise, we are reminded by Buruma and margalit that Juvenal, in his satire on ancient rome, equates the commodification of culture to moral laxity.10 however, it was in post-french revolution europe that this view gained decisive momentum, as the secularisation and commercialisation of european societies promoted a sharper polarisation of attitudes, and creative elites increasingly protected themselves from the forces of massification. already in the early nineteenth century processes of industrialisation and early forms of mass production were seen to be destructive of art and culture. Such views were given expression by Blake and the english romantics, as also by Stendhal and Balzac, well before they were articulated by fin de siècle ‘decadents’. if there was a natural culmination point for this history, and one that seemed to validate all earlier discourses of degeneration, it was again the first world war, the terminus of pick’s account. war and accounts of it do indeed focus the theme of degeneration. it will be as well to make my general remarks on this subject in the previous

   9 Brantlinger 1983. 10 Buruma and margalit 2004, 28. analogies between ancient and modern decadence became fashionable in the nineteenth century. already in gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) analogies between contemporary mores and the declining years of the roman empire were made explicit.

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chapter a little more specific by returning one last time to the war in Bosnia and herzegovina. in the siege of Sarajevo we have a powerful instance of modern urbicide, to use a term that has recently gained currency, notably in the work of martin Coward.11 here a modern city became the principal target of ethnonationalist violence, in a strategy that, as Coward suggests, was partly aimed at destroying plural spaces. there was an attempt to kill the city, a city that in so many ways represented the acme of a modern youth culture in the Balkans, not least in music. music was certainly not the gravest of the many casualties of this war, but it was a casualty nonetheless. One of the most dynamic pop-rock scenes in former yugoslavia was decimated by the events of the early 1990s, a victim of both physical and cultural siege, for turbo-folk could be in its own way a kind of weapon. the dispersal of the bands amounted to an almost complete collapse of that scene, and there has been little of comparable value since. Classical music fared little better. it will be remembered that the infrastructure for a classical music culture was all but destroyed at the time, and its subsequent recovery, in both Sarajevo and Banja Luka, has been slow and painful. the siege of Sarajevo, and in particular the destruction of its great library, was really a sustained attempt to eliminate all traces of a long tradition of islamic culture in Bosnia and herzegovina. it represented the brutal summation of a history of ethnonationalism that had developed much more widely in europe after 1870, closely linked to ideas of nationhood, racial degeneracy, and religious persecution (for the notion that islam puts the brakes on progress was a long-established one). we should be cautious about bandying about accusations of genocide, which must surely stand as the most brutal face of degeneration: barbaric, regressive, uncontrollable, not just defying reason, but engulfing it.12 But the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia took such an extreme form that serious commentators such as Susan L. woodward have felt no compunction about invoking this term, even if no less serious commentators (maria todorova) have rejected it.13 genocide or not, the devastation was immense, and in its aftermath all cultural forms were transformed. thus, the sacred music of islam and the secular ‘oriental’ tradition of sevdalinka, both already freighted with ideology in the early 1990s, were assigned a highly public

11   Coward 2008. 12 Levene 2005. 13 woodward 1995. todorova 2000 (here in relation to Kosovo in 1999).

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role – a celebration of nationhood in which original meanings were lost – in the post-dayton federation. it is hard to imagine that those perpetrating the slaughter saw themselves, and were viewed by others, as heroes. yet this was indeed the case, and it highlights another dimension of war, one well attested in discourse. for war has often been viewed as the romance of history, and war heroes everywhere as the embodiment of virtue: ‘our finest hour’. moreover, discourses of war link it not just to virtue but also to culture. in his book, War Machine, daniel pick refers to a range of writers from hegel to william James and ruskin in support of this linkage.14 this is ruskin: ‘all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war’ (or consider harry Lime on the medicis). here war is the antithesis of degeneration; it is a check on the lethargy of a declining culture, an antidote to social decay. for Bosnian-Serb nationalists, it was the necessary means to preserve the ethnic, Christian self. it was something great and heroic, something incorruptible, recovering ancient glories and infusing the modern nation with lifeblood, with a new and necessary toughness and vitality. hence the continuity between the (purifying) acts of the early 1990s and those heroic deeds celebrated by the guslars, for we should note that the tradition of epic song was no less subject to transformation than the tradition of sevdalinka. indeed it is hard to purge the Serbian epic, and even the gusle itself, from such associations today. there is an explosive friction between these two faces of war, barbaric and heroic, degrading and noble. and there is friction in turn between each of those faces and a third face of war, as epitomised by the 1995 natO intervention in Bosnia and herzegovina, the so-called Operation deliberate force. the calculated, dispassionate violence – putative precision bombing and the rest – perpetrated by natO forces exhibited war as a ‘machine’, an ‘unstoppable engine’, a marker of progress, the end-product of an advanced military-industrial complex in which politics, technology and big business are inextricably linked.15 as pick puts it, it is ‘intrinsic to modernity; politics by another means; industry under another name’. Something of this was already articulated in embryonic form in one of the classic documents of rationalist war theory, Clausewitz’s on War of 1832, and Clausewitz was certainly alive to the frictions. he was also alive to the paradoxes. the rational war machine, ostensibly distant from the

14 pick 1993. 15 See Johnstone 2002, with reference to the later interventions in Kosovo.

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irrational passions of war on the ground, marches irrevocably towards anarchy. as a semi-autonomous system, it builds its own momentum, overruns its own capacity, and spins out of any real control. Little that is good ever comes from war, it seems. as todorova puts it: ‘whoever wins, everyone will lose’.16 even such a powerful symbol of music’s redemptive power as the strains of albinoni resonating in the ruins of Sarajevo tells a story that has ended badly. the wars of yugoslav succession confirmed for many a sense of the Balkans as an aberrant site of degeneration, a cancer corrupting the body of europe. this stereotype, popularised and given respectability by robert Kaplan, is just that: a stereotype. the wars were in fact a delayed but logical, though not inevitable, outcome of the epic conflict between declining empires and emerging nation states that had wreaked havoc all over europe earlier in the twentieth century. this was conflated with the more immediate collapse of both political and civil order that occurred when a semi-socialist society was transformed to a market economy in the context of extreme economic decline, a decline caused more by the international climate than by internal politics. none of that diminishes the horror. But the narrative of the wars and of their aftermath should not be mystically separated off from the rest of european politics. everything witnessed in the Balkans was part of all our histories at one time or another. as elsewhere, the violence in Bosnia and herzegovina could generate defiance in an heroic mould, and that in turn could be reified (the oppressed can become the oppressors). as elsewhere, myth and history could contribute to a perversion of heroism, and one that could convert with alarming ease into barbarism. as elsewhere, the engine of war could take its own course, and the controlling finger of the outside power could prove, in the end, anything but controlling. it is not the Balkans that spells degeneration, but war itself, wherever we find it. Generations to paraphrase Confucius, it is human habits, not human nature, that change over the centuries. war has been with us from the beginning, and it will not go away. But it may be fought by proxy, and that has been the preference of major powers since the end of world war ii. the goal has

16 todorova 2000, 169.

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been to displace conflict, to remove it to a site as far as possible from the boundaries of the power bloc. in some cases war is literally ‘outsourced’, as armstrong puts it in War plc.17 this does not mean that ethnonationalist conflict has been eliminated from within the blocs. it is still prevalent in the post-imperial structures of the former Soviet Union, and it lingers too in parts of europe. But it is hard to imagine a war between member states of the european Union, and as the Union expands, now incorporating several of the Balkan states, its internal security grows stronger, at least in relation to competitive nationalisms (i leave aside new kinds of threat). there is a further factor here, related somewhat to Bauman’s analysis of the transformations in contemporary society. Cultures and mores are undoubtedly becoming more uniform right across europe these days. there is a price to pay for this in terms of the richness and diversity of european societies, but there is also the advantage, or potential advantage, that the political divisions of the past may come to exert less and less influence. So at least one might hope. and if there is any one group that seems to justify that hope, it is the younger generation. in studies of identity politics the key markers of difference have traditionally been religion, social class, ethnicity and gender. to the extent that we define ourselves through any of the first three categories we implicitly invoke genealogy. to return to the proverb of an earlier chapter, we ‘resemble our fathers’. none of these categories is immutable, of course, though some are more fixed than others, and much depends on the societal context. throughout history it was by no means uncommon for people in the Balkans to switch religions, very often for political reasons. Likewise they could migrate across social groups, though this was not always easy in the more traditional societies. and they could even defy conventional ethnic definition, a less common move, for sure, but one that did (and does) occur among minority communities such as roma, and especially at population censuses. needless to say, if people do change their religion or their perceived ethnicity they strengthen the identity marker in question by asserting its importance. the fourth category, gender, is another matter. for obvious reasons, it is more resistant to change, but even here, as noted in chapter 23, gender ‘bending’ has a history in performance contexts, and, at least in the modern world, gender transfer is also possible. the one category that remains beyond our control, except in the realm of wishful thinking, is generation. Consider the proverb again. we may

17 armstrong 2008.

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‘resemble our fathers’, but we may also ‘resemble our times’. indeed, the full message is that we ‘resemble our times more than we resemble our fathers’. the suggestion is that generation may be an even more potent marker of difference than any of the others mentioned above. it may, in short, outweigh genealogy as a determinant of our identity. in a powerful essay on russian social and intellectual history, Stephen Lovell addresses this question in some detail.18 he examines the shift from genealogy to generation (to what he describes as ‘cohort thinking’) with reference both to social practices and institutions, and also – indeed principally – to literature and criticism. Lovell’s argument is directed specifically to russia, and he is anxious to complicate, in a good way, over-facile readings of the shift to generational consciousness, notably by unpicking key nineteenth-century texts, and by distinguishing between their original meanings and their later resonance. But the broad trajectory from genealogy to generation remains intact in his exposition, and several of the ‘commonsensical’ reasons he gives for that trajectory can have a distinct bearing on our story. we may return at this point to the transformative, and often violent, ‘event’. One implication of the ‘event’ that was not considered in the previous chapter is its capacity to separate the generations. the argument would be that it is precisely at moments of extremity, of maximal stress, of dramatic change, even of reversal, that young people will be provoked into finding common cause with their coevals, and that this will override, if not directly oppose, inherited values. the french revolution might be taken as the paradigmatic case, and this in turn would link generational consciousness to processes of rapid modernisation, especially in the context of the increasingly nationalised armies (binding together their personnel in a collective mentality) that followed the revolutionary period. generational difference, it has been suggested, would then have been further nurtured by the subsequent, and to some extent consequent, formation of new civic institutions in the early nineteenth century, as also by the massive cultural shift from court to city. Lovell, focusing on russia, is at pains to emphasise that this transition is anything but clear-cut, but he does accept the pedigreed view that by the 1860s russia had produced something akin to a ‘youth culture’ in the modern sense, and that this was indeed the earliest such culture anywhere in europe.

18 Lovell 2008.

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Stepping outside russia, it has likewise been argued, notably by paul fussell, that world war i created a new wave of generational thinking in western europe, brushing aside the remnants of genealogical thinking associated with pre-war societies.19 ‘Out of the world of summer, 1914, marched a unique generation’. daniel pick suggests that fussell is too quick to see the great war as establishing new paradigms, arguing that the ‘topos of inevitable war’ insolubly linked to that conflict had itself a lengthy pre-history, as indeed had the ‘perception of an absolute schism between the pre-industrial rural world and an atomised, rootless modernity’.20 yet at some point changes become qualitative. Just as the generation of 1870 crystallised ethnonationalism as a just cause for war right across europe, so it was the generation of 1914 that fused once and for all ideas of modernity that are embodied in technological progress, and in destructive power. as though on a time loop, we may watch several of these features play out again in parts of South east europe in the late twentieth century. indeed it is precisely because modernisation was delayed until the second half of that century in the less socially advanced parts of this region, and was therefore greatly compressed, that generational thinking came into its own at this time. perhaps the most poetic depiction of the process is ismail Kadare’s fictional account of the collision of traditional mores and (violent) modernities in gjirokastër during world war ii. in his wonderful novel Chronicle in Stone, the ‘disenchantment’ of the old world by science and rationality, as also by war and violence, opens up a new space for a new generation, and resets the terms on which that generation might engage with the world around it.21 it is a parable of enforced and rapid modernisation, and it bears witness to similar processes elsewhere in the Balkans. add to this generational bonding the impact, and then filching, of existing models of youth culture from the west, mix in the effects of those socially transformative processes identified by Zygmunt Bauman as peculiar to our present era, and we can see how easily a relatively unified voice belonging to the younger generation – effectively yet another generational shift – could develop in the Balkans in the late twentieth century.

19   fussell 2000. 20 pick 1993. 21   Kadare 2007.

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this voice is more often conformant than subversive. But in any case it is distinctive, and clearly set apart from the voice of the fathers. in the ensuing case study i will suggest that this gap between the generations could be as relevant to art music as to popular music. But for now i will focus on the latter. we have already noted that popular music in this region carved out a stylistic space in which elements of local culture could be somehow blended with elements of western pop. we noted too the ambivalent function of oriental elements, and above all their capacity to unify the entire Balkan-anatolian region. we should now stress the countervailing tendency. it is hardly surprising, given the globalised, ‘light’ modernities identified by Bauman, that many features of this music, and of the culture it stands for, are all but indistinguishable from youth cultures everywhere. Balkan pop-folk may be a distinctive brand, but all the brands work in pretty similar ways these days. it is a bizarre prospect, no doubt, but i will briefly compare youth cultures in two capital cities, London and prishtina: one of the oldest capitals in europe and one of the youngest, a city at the apex of developed europe and one that has, to put it gently, some little way to go. the contrast is stark. yet if we look at the patterns of young people’s lives in these cities we will find much common ground, and it is ground that separates them from their elders. there is the ‘dot com revolution’. we all google today, but the younger generation is born to it, and has neither knowledge nor conception of a pre-google world. the transformative effects of this instantaneity on how youth today learn, socialise and communicate, self-evidently momentous, are not essentially different in London and prishtina, and the ubiquity of mobile phones reinforces a culture of the moment, a dislocation of time and place. there is a digital playground on offer in both capitals that simultaneously connects and isolates young people today, locking them in their bedrooms but at the same time (literally) allowing them to hook up with others. it is a playground that excludes adults in the main, though that too is changing, as today’s youth become tomorrow’s adults (the term ‘kidulthood’ has been coined in some quarters to address a second generation of ‘youth culture’, a perpetual childhood). music has been profoundly influenced by this digital revolution. the star system remains in place; and in this respect one difference between our capitals is that prishtina cultivates both a global and a local system, while London has only the former. But alongside this there is a new ‘age of the amateur’, or rather an age of do-it-yourself celebrity. we can all put our music out there, and reality tv can make a celebrity of the person next door. downloading music is no less a commonplace. the

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dubious ideal of a free culture has taken root, and accordingly the value of recorded music has been diminished, so that several artists now make their music available free in the certainty that it will pay off in other ways. this is one respect in which prishtina has not yet caught up with London. the material product – Cd or even cassette tape – still counts for more over there. But this difference is just about time lag. the dJ culture is still alive in Kosovo, though the biggest of the club scenes, the internationally known Spray, has been closed and its activities dispersed. what has not yet been fully registered, however, is the new enthusiasm for live music – the growing weariness with dJ mixes – that seems to mark youth culture in London today. this really amounts to a kind of comeback of the live experience, associated especially with the 02 arena.22 if this means that prishtina is locked into an earlier stage of youth culture, it also means that there are fewer equivalents in Kosovo to the more disreputable side of that culture in present-day London. the world of ‘chavs’, binge drinking, drug abuse, gangs and hoodies has given rise to the novel term ‘ephebephobia’ (fear of teenagers), one that expresses the gulf between the generations in no uncertain terms. this is not unknown in prishtina, but it is less of an issue than in London. Of course prishtina had, and to an extent still has, its mafia and its trafficking, but this is organised crime (there are anyway parallels in London, where some of the super-wealthy from dubious business communities overseas have taken up residence), and has little to do with generation.23 the more general get-rich-quick ethos of the 1990s and early 2000s is distinctly relevant, however, and in both cities it has resulted in notable changes in social patterning, with money, consumer branding and postcodes counting for more than traditional class-based hierarchies. this whole ethos has suffered a hammer blow of course. in London in particular there has been a dramatic loss of faith in the world of the City number crunchers (banker bonuses et al.) following the collapse of the money markets. But what remains immune is the culture of celebrity: the footballers, their wives, and music stars of either gender. if the 2000s do indeed reveal certain convergences in the values and social practices of these two cities, then the increased mobility of the last two decades, alongside the communications revolution, has taken this a stage further. prishtina is now a (literal) presence in London, which is

22 for theoretical reflections, see auslander 1999 and Lysloff and gay Jr. 2003. 23 glenny 2008.

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one of the most multi-ethnic capitals in the world today. Kosovars have flooded into London alongside all the others from eastern europe who have serviced the British labour market from 2004 onwards. Conversely London is a (virtual) presence in prishtina, which is in contrast a largely mono-ethic city. thanks to Satellite tv, things British are avidly followed, and they extend from english premier league football (everyone supports a team), to the latest UK fashions, to rock and pop music, to harry potter. there are even local Kosovan versions of familiar UK tv shows. and there is one further expressive paradox. prishtina is a muslim city, but you will look hard to find the veil, let alone the burka. to see both in abundance, you must look to London, officially Christian, and de facto secular. Balkan Ghetto: The Story of Kosovo from prishtina we segue to a broader discussion of Kosovo, one of the most troubled corners of the political landscape of former yugoslavia. Kosovo places in sharp relief the central tension in just about all contested claims for nationhood, a tension between historical precedence and ethnicity. an outsider can be dispassionate about such matters: can see both sides of the case. But this hardly helps. where conflicts of this kind fester, it invariably means that an original injustice, or perceived injustice, has been ‘topped up’ over the years, and both sides in Kosovo claim just that. the divide is ages old, but it was opened wide – indeed it became an unbridgeable gulf – following the events of 1999. the future is uncertain. the international community is still divided about recognising Kosovo as an independent state, though the international Court of Justice has ruled that the declaration of independence was at least legal (which does not in itself legitimate the state), and there are on-going discussions with the european Union.24 in any case, if statehood is to be sanctioned, the Serbian community in the north of the country will certainly refuse to accept it. the parallels with Bosnia and herzegovina are tantalising, and not without their ironies. if a semi-partitioned Bosnian state seems to model a solution for Kosovo, then an independent Kosovo seems to model a solution for republika Srpska.

24 Justifying recognition is usually based on arguments of either ‘remedial secession’ or ‘earned sovereignty’, though problems may be raised in relation to each of these doctrines in the case of Kosovo. for an analysis of causes, see todorova 2000.

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at the time of writing, the european Union encircles the western Balkans. the border describes an extended arc enclosing italy, Slovenia, hungary, romania, Bulgaria and greece (as well as Cyprus). Only albania and the successor states of former yugoslavia (Slovenia, and by the time this book is published Croatia, excepted) are now left on the outside, and all are in the queue, as indeed is turkey. a glance at the map exposes the anomalous political geography here, and it is no surprise that the western Balkans is commonly described as a ghetto. if such it is, then Kosovo is a ghetto within a ghetto. there are of course two ethnic communities in Kosovo, and one community’s friend is another’s foe. interestingly, they take rather different positions in relation to their respective motherlands. the minority Serbian community places its allegiance unambiguously with Serbia and aspires to a restoration of the status quo; it makes little or no distinction, in other words, between a Kosovo-Serbian identity and a Serbian identity. in contrast, the albanian community is less enthused by any idea of a greater albania that would incorporate Kosovo. Just as most turkish Cypriots feel more Cypriot than turkish, most Kosovars feel part of Kosovo, not albania. there can be no doubt that the country struggles economically, despite powerful backers on the world stage, for there is institutionalised corruption at high levels, there are limited opportunities for tourism, and there is a heavy dependency on outside subsidies. accordingly, like north Cyprus and republika Srpska, Kosovo has exiguous funds to disburse for cultural initiatives. One message that comes across as with a single voice is that the golden age for this province was the 1970s, when it benefited from the best years of tito’s yugoslavia. there was some easement of anti-albanian discriminatory practices at this time, notably at school level, and there was also an attempt to build a cultural life. One should not over-egg the pudding, but as noted in chapter 18 there was a decent Symphony Orchestra at radio-television priština (as it then was); likewise the association of Composers became independent of the yugoslav association, the faculty of music at the academy of arts in the University was established, and a professional choir commissioned and performed new music and toured extensively. the ‘red hall’, still the leading (unattractive) venue for major concerts, was at the centre of a high-profile musical life, hosting musicians from other yugoslav republics, and there were opportunities for Kosovar musicians to take part in festivals throughout the federation. music in the schools was reputedly at quite a good level. all this changed after 1990; indeed it was already changing during the course of the previous decade. it is not going too far to say that musical

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life more-or-less ground to a halt in the 1990s, symbolised by the virtual closure of the red hall, and certainly its unavailability to albanian musicians. the only option for such musicians was to use either the faculty, until in due course they were excluded from that too and were obliged to create their own ‘parallel’ faculty in private homes, or to turn to the churches, for these did indeed offer a degree of protection (a women’s choir was able to flourish in just this way). those concerts that did take place by the albanian community became in a way political events, and were accordingly well supported, notably by academics and political figures on the albanian side. a case in point was the post-graduation concert given in January 1995 by Beza Luzha, who somehow persuaded the Serbian director of the red hall to make it available and invited a number of musicians from the albanian community to participate. the success of this symbolic event, and the atmosphere it generated, was such as to give serious pause to such activities for the remainder of the decade. Of course the turning point was the infamous war and ethnic cleansing of 1999. this was the ‘event’ that transformed Kosovo. and in its aftermath, in the context of a natO protectorate and the gradual return of many who had left, the most pressing questions were not about culture, but about survival, and in some cases (unhappily) about reprisals. for a small group, however, the task of building or re-building a culture was perceived to be vital right from the start. ‘the faculty’, as it is widely described, had been the engine room of Kosovo’s music for some time. Unsurprisingly, many of the professors who left in 1999 or before did not return. But others drifted back after the war, in several cases from tetovo, and what they found was chaos. already a week after the natO forces moved in, the priority for faculty members was to ensure the security of the premises and especially of the instruments. Only then could the process of reconstruction begin. the first concert to be put on was organised by Besa Luzha on 27 and 28 november 1999 (28 november is albanian flag day), with programmes ranging from Bach to Copland and with several of the players brought in from albania. then, under the baton of faculty professor Bahri Çela, the faculty rehearsed and performed mozart’s requiem. the symbolic potency of these concerts can be imagined fairly easily. from that point the reactivation of musical life proceeded apace. as in republika Srpska and north Cyprus, one priority was to establish an orchestra, always a high-prestige national symbol. already in 1999 a project to reactivate the Kosovo philharmonic (which had been a State institution) was announced and a budget set. initially it was confined to string players (on salaries from the ministry of Culture), but wind players were

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imported for concerts, first from albania and later mainly from macedonia, which was cheaper. even some of the soldier musicians from KfOr were roped in to swell the ranks! Over the years the quality of this orchestra is said to have improved, and under their current Japanese conductor they are at last able to use local wind and percussion players, since some teaching provision in relevant instruments is now available at the faculty. audience numbers are robust, but without question the most striking thing about the audiences is that they are predominantly young, inverting the normal state of things in formal musical culture. admittedly the concerts are free, and just now there is a debate about whether or not some modest charge should be made in the future. we return to generations. it is not obvious why classical music concerts draw in the young in this way. partly it may simply be that any events attract attention in prishtina, especially when they are free. partly it may be that the average age in Kosovo is in any case astonishingly young (at the time of writing, twenty-six). But it may also be symptomatic of the palpable energy of one sector of Kosovo’s youth, of their determination to build a national culture, and of their rejection of the violence of the recent past. it is worth noting that the promotion of classical music among Kosovar youth is an active aim of the festival dam, initially a student-organised event, but now dedicated to young performers generally, and attracting some impressive international ensembles. dam is only one of a cluster of Kosovo festivals. exactly as in north Cyprus and republika Srpska, the promotion and sponsorship of festivals has proved a great deal easier than the maintenance of regular concert series. already in 2000, just a year after the war, the first of the ‘Bach weeks’ and the first of the international Chamber music festivals were established. then, in addition to dam, the april new music festival reMusica, now a key event in the Kosovo diary, was inaugurated, directed by one of the leading Kosovar composers rafet rudi (b.1949). Other festivals followed, including the flute festival ‘new Spirit’, the prishtina Jazz festival, more recently a dedicated Chopin festival, and a clutch of events dedicated to traditional music and dance. there are comparable festivals in the other arts, incidentally, and especially in film, with the prizren documentary film festival now an internationally recognised event. although new music has relatively little exposure beyond the dedicated festival, the artistic quality of the Kosovar music on parade at reMusica is often rather high. Composers such as Zeqirja Ballata and mehdi mengjiqi are performed, as is mark Koci, who has been living in London for some 20 years now. rafet rudi is also well represented, with works that range

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from his Symphony of 1974, with a strikingly original slow movement surrounded by more familiar neo-classical gestures in the outer movements, through poetic impressionisms such as Les cloches arberesh for solo piano of 1993, to his intensely expressive Laudatio funebris for soprano and strings of 2006. music does seem to run in families in the Balkans. we encountered doina and diana rotaru in romania; we met Zeki, yilmas and ruha taner in north Cyprus; and we have dušan and marija Šestić in republika Srpska. in Kosovo there are two such cases. One of the founding fathers of Kosovo’s concert music was fahri Beqiri, and his son valton Beqiri (b.1967) has also been a key figure in musical life, a composer of relatively conservative bent, a teacher at the faculty, and at one stage minister of Culture. Likewise rafet rudi’s daughter donika rudi (b.1982) is among the most promising of a younger generation of Kosovan composers, with a specialisation in chamber and electroacoustic works. there are active attempts to promote young composers in Kosovo today, by the Kosovar Centre for new music and also by dam, which now sponsors a composer competition. there is of course another community engaged in music-making in Kosovo, but its activities are now sidelined – even suppressed – and confined to north of the river ibar, where Serbs live in a state of semi-limbo. Certainly there is little in the way of an independent formal musical culture there, aside from the music of the Church. the Kosovo Serbs regard themselves quite simply as part of Serbia; they are not energised to build something new. this is the real difference between the two communities. what neither seeks nor wants is the bi-communality that constitutes the agenda of the protecting powers, in Kosovo as in Cyprus and Bosnia and herzegovina. this agenda can carry penalties for a majority albanian culture as well as a minority Serb one. the institute of albanology in prishtina has a long history of distinguished scholarship on albanian and Kosovan culture, including music. today it is the site for impressive research into traditions of epic song by Zymer neziri and his colleagues, and into north albanian vocal traditions by rexip munishi. however, the title of the institute, however longstanding, is regarded as a provocation to the international authorities, and as a result these scholars now struggle to achieve anything. funding is not forthcoming for conferences. even salaries are under threat. it is truly hard for culture to rise above politics. youth culture in Kosovo today has many similarities with that in the other marginalised regions i have considered. Some of this has been touched upon. the rock culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s, epitomised by the

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highly successful rock festival Boom, has largely been replaced by a club culture. as noted earlier, the big club Spray has been closed, but its activities continue in a way, in that the organisers now put on events in various other locations; there is a sense in which Spray has dispersed rather than disappeared. more recent interests are in hip-hop and rap, and there are efforts to bring international stars to the Stadium in prishtina, often funded by major commercial concerns such as mobile phone companies, with obvious vested interests. there is widespread support for some of the high-profile divas, notably (during the time i was there) the albanian singer aurela gaçe. and finally there is a homegrown, socially aware music cultivated among some of the younger bands in Kosovo today, including the freelancers and the glasses. this youth culture has the levelling effects found everywhere today. But the divisions between communities in Kosovo run very deep. it would be an unusually optimistic commentator who trusted in the capacity of any music to heal them. are We There Yet? in his controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand sets out to undermine the claims of Zionist historiography as to the ethnic integrity of the Jews.25 his mission is to question their status as ‘a people’. however, in the course of his (much refuted) argument, Sand makes a broader plea, quoting marcel detienne: ‘how can we denationalise national histories?’ this is a challenging question, and one that has the widest possible resonance. for present purposes, we might reformulate it. ‘how can we denationalise music histories?’ might be our question, and it is one with special relevance to studies of music in the Balkans. it is not a matter of denying the role and importance of nationalism in the music histories of this region, but rather of recovering aspects of those histories that have been suppressed or distorted by.an all-pervasive national perspective. when we tell this story as a series of discrete national histories, as it has mainly been told from within the region itself, we demote commonalities that are everywhere apparent. at the very least, we might allow new distortions to counter the old. we might bypass the nations, in other words, and tell the story differently: as a tale of shared cultural substrata, of common imperial legacies, and of the lure of modern europe.

25 Sand 2009.

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there is a musical culture in South east europe that remains rooted to the spot, a cluster of repertories welded to their local settings. these repertories – the traditional agrarian and ritual musics associated with pre-modern rural societies – tap into cultural layers that are buried deep and would once have covered vast spaces. yet if the relevant musics have remained in their places, at least within relatively recent history, those places have become increasingly isolated. they have been left high and dry, islands of local culture marooned by the tides of modernity. Soon they will be all but washed away. But where they remain, they bear eloquent witness to a cultural life that crossed the shifting borders separating not just the modern nations but also the older empires. they have been oblivious to politics, though not impervious to its manipulative designs. pre-modern musics give an underlying cultural unity to those regions in which they have survived, connecting disparate parts of the Balkans to each other, linking the Balkans to anatolia, to north africa, to parts of russia, and to some of the remotest corners of europe, and separating all of these from modern europe. there is also a culture in South east europe that moves freely and spreads quickly. much of it flows from the shared, markedly multicultural, imperial pasts of these territories. if we look at the music of this region through the lens of empire, we re-focus not just the pre-national era, but the period of nationalist ascendancy itself, and even our present age. the point has already been made that concert programmes right across South east europe, even in the heyday of nation-state politics in the late nineteenth century, were actually markedly similar. we noted too that there were commonalities across the urban popular musics of the Balkans in the early twentieth century, and that there is also something of a ‘common Balkan music’ associated with today’s pop-folk, however it might be labelled. yet despite all this, the national dimension seems hard to shake off in music histories. even donna Buchanan’s admirable collection on popular music and the Ottoman ecumene, despite its central premise, tells its story nation by nation. Something of the geopolitical perspective of empire has already informed our observations. we could summarise it here by recognising two ‘culture areas’ that had distinctive properties, though with many overlaps and extensive leakage between them. One would be aligned to conventional narratives of european music history, with shaping influences from venetian, habsburg, and in some areas russian or British, imperial cultures. Both the contextual and the compositional histories of music in this culture area were shaped very largely by the wider practices

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associated with these empires, and such was the solidity of this base that emerging nationalisms often amounted to little more than local colouring. in some regions, venetian cultures ceded to those of habsburg or other empires; in others regions the habsburgs had a more longstanding presence. But in any case the structures of musical life, whether of the court or the city, and the compositional praxes that emerged from those structures, were common to all, however competitively would-be nations might assert their uniqueness. even the traditional music to which they turned when validating their nationhood was largely a shared music. the other, and by far the larger, area was shaped by a Byzantine legacy and by an Ottoman imperial culture, and accordingly it remained at some remove from modern europe. musically it was united by a continuous tradition of Orthodox liturgical repertory, by idioms associated with Ottoman classical and semi-classical music, many of them inherited from the Byzantine empire, and by various species of islamic sacred music. emergent nationhood was not really the key determinant in transforming musical styles here. more crucial was the general process of modernisation that accompanied the colonisation of this culture area by the fashions and ideas associated with an increasingly dominant ‘western europe’, resulting in dialogues – variable as to time and place – between Byzantine-Ottoman and european traditions. in this way the second culture area increasingly aspired towards the condition of the first. there were straightforward transplantations of european art music to territories where such music lacked any roots at all, with attendant difficulties of assimilation. there were attempts to modernise Orthodox liturgical repertories, accompanied by controversies over the integrity of the tradition. and there was the widespread co-existence – it might be relatively peaceful or more directly competitive – between alaturca and alafranca varieties of popular music. the Balkans emerges from this account as a region whose musical identity was pulled this way and that by politically powerful forces and their cultures. it is not a misrepresentation. But we might put it another way. the Balkans was a site visited by musical styles whose centres invariably lay elsewhere. repertories and idioms from east, west and north swept across this peninsula, and as they did so – losing something of themselves and acquiring something new – they paid scant attention to national borders. it is the general inclination of music to flow and to spread in this way. it is part of the strange power it exerts, and one of the reasons that governments have been keen to harness and control it. the goethe institute, the alliance française, the British Council: all such institutions speak

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of a need to direct cultural forms, to keep them in check, and at times – it should be said – to help them along a little. where culture goes, after all, trade may follow stealthily; and so may politics. Conversely, where politics and trade go, culture may be dragged along behind. Just what follows what is moot. all options are possible, and all are in evidence in the Balkans. Karl marx had a rather more straightforward understanding of what follows what. it is tempting to dismiss it as over-schematic and prescriptive, lacking the fluid circuitries i have proposed above. But if we look to the deep structures we might allow that it carries conviction, albeit with two qualifications. first, we might recognise, with max weber, that ideologies and cultural forms – part of marx’s so-called ‘superstructure’ – are not simply outgrowths of a socio-economic ‘base’ but have some capacity to influence that base.26 and second, we might accept that not all changes in the superstructure emanate from the base. it was this second claim – less ambitious than the first – that underpinned Carl dahlhaus’s argument when he used the paradigm of cultural nationalism to demonstrate that an idea could change the course of music history.27 dahlhaus’s point was that an investment in what he called the Volksgeist hypothesis, and in the principle of authenticity it embodied, resulted in major changes to the syntax of music, and in making it he was really bolstering a familiar enough theoretical position, one that acknowledges the limited autonomy of the aesthetic. perhaps there might be a rejoinder to dahlhaus. it is true that the idea of nationalism changed music history. But, as i argued earlier in this book, in doing so it produced only local varieties of a single bourgeois culture, a culture generated from below. no doubt contrary to his intention, dahlhaus succeeded only in refining, and not really refuting, the basic marxist or neo-marxist position. within marx’s so-called ‘superstructure’ there may of course be further debates about the priority of culture and politics. Should cultural nationalism be represented as the seedbed that nurtured political nationalism? Or was even herder’s theory essentially a political one, in that the (political) idea of nationhood preceded its cultural definition? either way, modern nations have proved themselves adept at manipulating existing cultures. But they have been less adept at making cultures anew. and that is why the national perspective, important though it is, can so easily distort cultural histories. its tendency is to mark out cultural territories as national when

26 weber 2002. 27 dahlhaus 1980.

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they have in reality a different origin and a different import. in effect, it seeks to equate the political and the cultural, categories that stand more often than not in a dissonant, or at least a contrapuntal, relation. thus, the best efforts of european nation states to generate national cultures have not really succeeded in disguising the deeper, socially generated, commonalities between them. if this has been more widely recognised by ethnomusicologists than by historical musicologists, it may be because the cognates of these disciplines are rather different. the ‘cultural turn’ in a good deal of recent social sciences research (to which ethnomusicology is proximate) has long demoted nationhood as a means of understanding culture, even as it challenges the homogenising, reductionist tendencies of a eurocentric, modernist perspective.28 it is entirely characteristic of this cultural turn, for example, that postcolonial studies in several disciplines have tended to favour mobile mini-histories over static grand narratives, and that they have preferred to highlight the diversity of co-existing languages, faiths and culture to be found within, let alone without, the european heartlands than to present stark alterities of religion or ethnicity. the best of such studies have sought to engage with local specificities. they have tried to do so in nuanced terms and in recognition that culture is a social process, and at the same time they have tried to relate this local scale to wider regional and global, but less often national, scales. On the surface this may seem to mirror present-day political orientations towards both sub- and supra-national collective identities. But the difference is that these political tendencies are still driven by nationalism, either in the form of separatist movements seeking self-determination or of wider hegemonic alliances motivated by the vested interests of particular nation states. this latter tendency is exemplified above all, of course, by the european Union. there can be no doubt that the slow-burning project of european integration has worked to blur the borders separating nation states, creating uniformities in culture as well as in politics and trade.29 Like pre-modern societies and like multicultural empires, modern europe of its nature tends towards supra-national structures. this is evident on different levels of cultural articulation. the effects on everyday culture of the ubiquitous multi-nationals need hardly be spelt out; they are everywhere to be seen. Likewise the popular cultural forms associated

28 naylor, ryan, Cook and Crouch 2000. 29 See the chapter ‘towards a new europe’ in rietbergen 1998.

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with today’s youth are largely europe-wide. and equally the products of an elite culture, including what remains of an avant-garde, are untrammelled in the main by national traditions. in this respect even those nations in the queue are partly there already. that said, europe is not a one-way street. there seems to be no difficulty on the part of leading politicians in reconciling fervent europeanism with the most chauvinistic brands of nationalism. this is where trade and politics – to revert to earlier language – tend to drag culture along behind. for the politics of nationalism, and the consequent determination to assert a national culture, remains strong right across the continent. if it has been difficult for national borders to drive wedges into deeply embedded shared cultures, it has been no less difficult for the european project to erase totally the borders separating national cultures, however artificially these have been imposed. the moral in all this is that no single narrative will account adequately for the ebb and flow, the constantly changing currents, of politics and culture in modern europe. the european Union in the end exposes starkly what i earlier called the counterpoint of culture and politics. a shared culture will not generate a shared politics. neither will a common politics guarantee a common culture. Colm tóibín puts a particular slant on this when he remarks that although europe today remains ‘a loose and uneasy collection of competing nation states’, it is also ‘a collection of cities, each of which has been vastly improved by membership of the european Union, with some space in between’.30 tóibín acknowledges, then, the continuing power of a divisive nationalism, but he implies that europe’s real achievements are to be found not on this political level but rather on a cultural level. the major cities embody the unifying triumph of humanism (note the faint but unmistakable echoes of the classical polis), of economic success, of efficiency, of tolerance, of international law, and of cosmopolitan reason (or, as Settembrini puts it, of ‘reason, analysis, action, progress: these, and not the slothful bed of monkish tradition’, nor the ‘inaction’ of the east).31 for tóibín, then, the european Union is something more than the sum of its parts; it embodies an ideal that can transcend the corruption of its petty officialdom, the idiocies of its bureaucracy, and even the anarchy generated by its over-developed systems. it represents, when all is said and done, the civilising power of ‘the west’.

30 tóibín 2010. 31   mann 2011.

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Quite apart from its celebration of the enlightened city, so often taken as a symbol of degeneration, tóibín’s analysis challenges the lack of selfbelief that seems everywhere apparent in the west today. as the scare quotes above suggest, the west has been for some time now a category subject to interrogation. an earlier chapter referred to an extensive recent literature on Occidentalism that either extends or inverts an earlier portfolio on Orientalism. it includes plural readings of the west from afar, deconstructions of hostile stereotypes of the west; and in the case of alastair Bonnett a probing account of the whole idea of the west, as perceived by westerners and non-westerners alike.32 Bonnett is anxious to delay the idea of the west. he notes that as ‘an intelligible field of study’ this idea is little more than a hundred years old, its discourses only gradually defined as separate from related discourses about race (white crisis) and class (communism). his case study of Ziya gökalp, atatürk’s principal ideologue, is naturally germane to our topic. gökalp argued for a position that is in a real sense ‘betwixt and between’, rejecting the east, aspiring to the west, but fostering a national culture nourished by indigenous traditions (these latter included islam, incidentally, though gökalp was adamant that religion must be separate from the state). in the end gökalp’s middle way proved difficult to sustain. it yielded first to secularism and then to islamism. the interplay of forces in turkey has been replicated in various parts of the Balkans: the same problematising of an oriental inheritance, the same aspiration to modern europe, the same commitment to a national culture. that turkey, as well as a cluster of Balkan states, is now (at the time of writing) lined up to join the european Union, though i doubt it ever will, may seem like the latest stage in the triumph of ‘the west’, an apparent affirmation of hegel’s claim that history moves from east to west. But again we need to stress that the march to modernity is only one of the narratives in town. true, the european Union remains something of a Shangri-La for some of those still on the outside. But just as we approach the point when anomalous spaces on the map might be coloured in, when we might indeed be ‘there’, the european project undergoes significant change, its centre of gravity drifting eastwards, and its stability increasingly in question. the future of monetary union is now regularly debated, and if the euro goes (if the stronger economies reach a point where they refuse to support the weaker), it is doubtful whether political unity will

32 Bonnett 2004.

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hold. this has already produced a change of rhetoric on the part of aspiring nations, with an increasingly bullish turkey now inclined to argue that europe needs turkey as much as turkey needs europe, and at the same time displaying an aggressively nationalist politics that does not exclude terms such as ‘neo-Osmanism’.33 europe, for its part, has the greatest difficulty with the idea of admitting an islamic state to its community. it is easy to understand why watchel subtitles the final chapter of his recent book ‘from the Balkans to South east europe’. that is part of the story, for certain. yet is perhaps a little surprising that he of all people fails to acknowledge the contrary messages emerging from the cultural world, and in particular from music. there is a narrative of emancipation, but there is also a narrative of homecoming, of roots. there is a strong current drawing this region inexorably westwards, but there are eddies, undertows that pull it back constantly to the east. robert Kaplan found the right metaphor, but used it to the wrong ends. nations are haunted by empires in the Balkans. peace is haunted by war, history by myth. modern cities are haunted by rural villages. politics is haunted by culture. when we listen to music of all kinds from this region we cannot but be aware of the power of cultural memory. if the music transmits any single message, it is that South east europe is haunted by the Balkans.

33 Oktem 2011.

GLoSSarY ahengu shkodran aksak

urban genre/repertoire from Shkodër, albania ‘Limping’ asymmetrical rhythm (in ottoman theory, specifically 2+2+2+3) amanedes Greek-language ‘oriental’ urban genre/repertory arabesk turkish vocal genre with arabic influences ashiki songs albanian songs of Ottoman provenance Baïdouska Dance and dance song from thrace Čalgiya Urban ensemble/repertory from the eastern Balkans, especially Macedonia Cântarea româniei romanian National song Festival: ‘singing for romania’ Chalga Bulgarian ethno-pop genre Çifteli Plucked two-string instrument from albania and Kosovo Čoček Dance and musical genre associated especially with Balkan roma Copla sephardic popular song similar to, but not identical with, the spanish genre of the same name Daouli large double-headed drum Doina romanian traditional genre, highly ornamented and in free rhythm Dromos Greek term for mode/makam (literally, ‘road’) Duge pjesme ‘long songs’ associated especially with south slav traditional music Dvojka serbian neo-folk genre Dvojnica Double flute found in the Balkans Echos a mode within the 8-mode system of Byzantine music theory Entekhno laïko tragoudhi Popular art song developed in Greece in the 1960s, combining popular musical idioms and sophisticated poetry Fanfara Brass ensemble from the Balkans Fasil suite in ottoman classical music Floyera Traditional shepherd’s flute Gaida Bagpipes from the Balkan region

670 Ganga Gazel Gusle Haiduk Hasapiko Hore boiereşti Horă lungă Ilâhi Ison Kalamatianos Kângë kreshnikësh Kanûn Karsilama Kasida Kaval Kemânçe Klapa Kolo Küdüm lahuta laïka lăutari longa Makam Mandilatos Manele Mehterhâne Muzica lăutărească

glossary Type of traditional singing from the Dinaric alps Traditional vocal genre from Turkey one-string, bowed instrument used to accompany epic song outlaw or resistance fighter in the Balkans Greek folk dance (traditionally a ‘butcher’s dance’) Boyars’ hora [round dance] romanian long song Islamic devotional hymn Drone used in Byzantine chant and traditional singing Greek circle dance albanian epic songs, especially frontier warrior songs Traditional plucked instrument (zither) 9-beat couples dance from asia Minor Islamic hymn of praise to the Prophet Traditional end-blown flute found in the Middle East and Balkans Traditional bowed spike fiddle found in the Middle East and the Balkans Traditional a capella ensemble / repertory from the adriatic littoral Collective folk dance from the south slav regions, especially serbia and Bosnia Pair of small hemispherical drums associated with Turkish classical music albanian, one-string bowed instrument (see gusle) Greek popular music Traditional instrumentalists in romania Traditional Balkan – ottoman dance in 2/4 metre system of modes and practices in ottoman classical and semi-classical music (arabic maqām) Couples dance performed at weddings, associated with Thrace Ethno-pop genre from romania Military band in the ottoman Empire Urban popular music performed by professionals (usually roma) in romania

glossary Na glas Na bas Ney Nisiotika oud Paradhosiaka Peşrev Piyyut rebetika raichenitsa santûr saz seyir sevdah-rock sevdalinka sirtos skiladeli strigături svatbarski orkestri svirala synkathistos Taksîm Tallava Tamburica Touloum Tsamikos Tsifteteli Turbo-folk Usûl Vlachs Zeibekiko

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Traditional (ancient) mode of singing in the Dinaric alps and similar territories ‘Modern’ mode of singing in 3rds in the slavonic Balkans End-blown flute originating in Turkey songs and dances from the Greek islands Pear-shaped lute from the Middle East and North africa Urban ‘oriental’ idiom / genre of Greek music Instrumental form in ottoman classical music Jewish liturgical poem, sung or chanted Urban popular songs in Greece Bulgarian wedding dance Cimbalom-like instrument from the Middle East long-necked lute used in ottoman music Melodic direction within makam traditions Ethno-pop genre in Bosnia and Hercegovina ‘oriental’ love poetry and songs from Bosnia Greek traditional dance type Ethno-pop genre in Greece; akin to Greek-language version of Turkish arabesk shouts or cries within romanian traditional music Bulgarian wedding music Traditional reed pipe from the south slav regions Traditional Greek dance and dance song Improvisatory prelude in ottoman music Popular music genre associated especially with albanian and Kosovan roma Plucked stringed instrument and ensemble associated with south slav traditional music (Turkish Tanbûr) Bagpipe from Pontos Greek-albanian traditional dance (of the Chams) Traditional dance (and rhythm) from the Balkans and anatolia Ethno-pop genre from serbia rhythmic cycle within ottoman theory General term for latin peoples (speaking an eastern romance language) in the Balkans Traditional Greek dance in 9/4 or 9/8

672 Zikr Zil Zonaradikos Zournas

glossary ‘remembrance of God’ ceremony in Islam ottoman-Turkish finger cymbals Traditional dance from Thrace Double-reed wind instrument found in the Middle East, Central asia and the Balkans

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InDex1 Abatzi, Rita 286–7 Abbasid dynasty 137 Abbate, Carolyn 601n Abdülaziz, Sultan 219 Abdülhamit II, Sultan 219 Abdülmecid I, Sultan 219, 237 Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahānī 137 Academy of Athens 519 Adamič, Emil 345 Adamis, Michael 150, 534 Adanir, Eralp 632n Adanir, Fikret 119n Adiexodo 543 Adler, Guido 340 Adorno, Theodor W. 254, 270, 307n, 376, 379, 406, 415n, 530, 580 Aeschylus 534, 536 Ahengu shkodran 295, 500 Ajdić, Alojz 564n Ajvatovica 61 Akin, Fatih 562 Aksak rhythm 88, 283 Aksoy, Bülent 121n Alafranca 159, 219, 279, 662 Alan Kuju 98 Alaturca 65n, 152, 219, 233, 279, 291, 662 Albéniz, Isaac 290 Albinoni, Tomaso 649 Albright, Daniel 412n Alecsandri, Vasile 265 Aledo, Pedro 191 Alessandrescu, Alfred 409 Alexander, Ronelle 220, 477 Alexandra, Liana 587 Alexandria 25 Alexandru, Tiberiu 43, 44n, 140n, 406n Alexiadis, Minas 588 Alexiou, Haris 527 Al-Farabi 137, 154 Algazi, Isaac 23n, 26 Algazi, Leon 26 Ali Pasha (of Tepelena) 180–1, 183, 232–3, 239 Alia, Ramiz Tafë 551 Allcock, John B. 116n, 166n, 167n

allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 206 Alliance Israélite Universelle 31, 290 Alston, Richard 549n, 568 Amanedes 71, 177, 179, 181, 285, 287, 513, 610 Ameti, Muharrem 79, 610 Amico, Fedele d’ 642 Anastenaria 95–6, 312, 357 Andersen, Hans Christian 568 Anderson, Perry 629n Andreadis, Athena 527 Andreeva, Tsanka 454n Andreis, Josip 190–1, 198n, 202n, 345, 348n, 350, 472 Andreyev, Leonid 361 Andrić, Ivo 36, 63, 123, 189, 279 Andricu, Mihail 449–50, 460–2 Anghel, Irinel 587 Anglo-Hellenic Information Service 529 Anglo-Hellenic Review 529–30 Annan, Kofi 634  Anoyanakis, Fivos 140n, 322 Anthi 98 Antokoletz, Elliott 379n Antonescu, Ion 415 Antoni, Lorenc 494 Antoniou, Theodore 531, 571 apollon 326n Arabesk 297, 300, 505n, 544–5, 611 Araci, Emre 571 Ardeleana 86 Arel, Sadettin 158, 281–2 Argyrides, Vassos 633 Aristoxenus 87n Arkan (Željko Ražnatović) 511, 600 Armistead, Samuel G. 15n, 16n, 17, 21n Armstrong, Stephen 650 Arnaoudov, Georgi 454, 586 Arnaoudov, Vassil 352 Arnič, Blaž 345, 360, 475 Arnold, Matthew 251–2, 267 Arsenije III, Patriarch Čarnojević 63 Arvanitaki, Eleftheria 527 Arvanites 91, 93, 96, 621 Asachi, Gheorghe 265

1 The index proceeds alphabetically irrespective of diacriticals.

706 Aščerić, Ines 161, 162n Ashiki songs 102, 170, 297 Ashkalije 78–9 Ashkenazim 15–6, 17n, 22, 31 Astroakustika 386–7, 389 Asuar 24 Atanasov, Georgi 353 Atanasov, Vergiliy 140n Atanasovski, Petre Vasilev (‘Pece’) 295 Atatürk, Kemal 122, 219, 666 Athens 72–4, 148–9, 171, 210–1, 233, 255–8, 260, 285, 287–8, 303, 305–8, 314, 317–9, 327, 329, 416, 530, 534, 541, 571, 579–80, 591, 594, 613, 625–6 Athens Technological Institute 260, 531 Athinganoi 98n Athos, Mount 145–6, 148 Atriadis, Dimitris 285 Attias, Moshe 26 Attridge, Derek 33 Aubert, Laurent 38n Augustinos, Gerasimos 70 Augustinos, Olga 237n Auschwitz-Birkenau camp 417 Auslander, Philip 654n Avramovski, Risto 491–2 Aydin 70 Âyîn 155, 282 Ayvalik 287 Azis 610–1 Aziz Mahmud Hüdâyî 155 Azra 508–9 B-92 Radio 512, 600 BabaGranoush 558 Babić, Damjan 504 Babylon 561 Bacewicz, Grażina 465 Bach, Alexander 243 Bach, Johann Sebastian 269, 395, 463, 657 Bačka 63, 84 Badalić, Hugo 244 Badiou, Alain 33–34, 35n, 616–20 Baghdaddies 560 Baglama 72 Baidanov, Georgi 353 Baïdouska 97 Baja Mali Knindža 511 Bajamonti, Julije 196 Bajić, Isidor 103n, 339 Bajramović, Šaban 300, 502 Baker, Catherine 518n, 602–3 Bakić-Hayden, Milica 276

index Balakirev, Mily 306 Balareva, Agapia 102n, 353n Bălgarska muzika 453, 569 Balivet, Michael 137n, 161n Balkanarama 557 Balkan Beasts 558 Balkan mountains 46 Balkan wars 76, 247, 250, 335, 446 Balkanism 272, 276, 398 Balkanplus 559 Balkanski, Rossen 585 Balkanton 501 Ballata, Zeqirja 494, 658 Ballos 286 Balsano, Maria Antonella 630n Balzac, Honoré de 646 Banac, Ivo 239, 241n Banat 51, 63, 84, 86, 172–3, 198, 205, 211, 238, 515 Bandă 88 Bandić, Alma 300 Banja Luka 207–8, 470, 638–9, 647 Banski Dvor 639 Baqqashot 23n Baralić-Materne, Maja 170n, 171 Baranović, Krešimir 349, 369, 416 Baremboim, Daniel 636 Baroutas, Kostas 210n Baroveca, Iliqn Mihov 610 Bartók, Béla 42, 44n, 55, 86–7, 89, 112, 325, 327–8, 363, 365, 370, 374, 376, 379, 383, 388, 393, 406, 409–11, 442–3, 459, 491, 532, 534, 581, 585, 590 Bartsch, Shadi 618 Bašić, Mirza 559 Baskar, Bojan 189 Bastias, Kostis 318 Baud-Bovy, Samuel 181, 185, 227, 315n, 591 Baudrillard, Jean 496, 517 Bauman, Zygmunt 28n, 568n, 610, 620–2, 628, 650, 652 Bayezit II, Sultan 18 Bayram 99, 153 Beal, Amy 527 Beaton, Roderick 182n Bećirović, Radovan 106 Becker, Gunther 530 Beckett, Samuel 534 Beckles Willson, Rachel 432n Beethoven, Ludvig van 118, 245, 306, 309, 407, 411, 440, 580 Begović, Milan 348 Beissinger, Margaret 515, 608 Bejtullahu, Alma 77n

index Bektaşi order 72, 122, 153, 162–3, 167, 169, 172, 239, 297 Bëleta Shqypëtare 239 Belgrade 18, 51, 57, 59, 66–7, 91, 171–2, 203–5, 229–30, 247, 261, 263–4, 332–4, 336–9, 343, 358–9, 363, 367, 370, 372, 375, 377–80, 383–4, 417, 437n, 456, 471, 474–6, 480, 487, 490, 503, 506, 508–10, 512, 563–6, 575–6, 582–4, 592, 597, 600, 625, 641 Bell, John D. 551n Bellene camp 421, 438 Bellini, Gentile 218 Bellou, Sotiria 74 Belonis, Iannis 303n, 311n, 313, 321 BEMUS 575–6 Benaroya, Samuel 26 Benbassa, Esther 18n, 20n, 31n Benjamin, Walter 35 Benmayor, Rina 289n, 291 Benovska-Subkova, Milena 553n Benson, Leslie 468n Bentoiu, Pascal 410, 465–6, 586 Beqiri, Fahri 494, 659 Beqiri, Valton 659 Berat 164 Berg, Alban 537 Berger, Karol 268, 601 Berger, Wilhelm Georg 465 Berio, Luciano 481, 534, 580 Berisha, Sali 551 Berlin 235, 317, 326–9, 354, 358, 378, 416, 464, 570, 581 Berlin, Isaiah 527–8 Berlin (Treaty of) 198, 217, 238–9, 444, 446 Berlusconi, Sylvio 544 Bernal, Martin 133n Bernières, Louis de 70n, 167n Bersa, Blagoje 246, 346, 349, 360 Besa 107 Bešlić, Halid 503–4, 601 Bessarabia (Moldova) 212, 444 Bezić, Jerko 187, 343, 592 Bezić, Nada 201n Bhabha, Homi K. 82, 114, 115n, 203, 275, 277 Bigenho, Michelle 39, 41n, 589–90 Bihać 470 Bijelo Dugme 44, 504, 507–8, 510–1, 597 Bijelo Polje 106–7 Binički, Stanislav 204, 264, 337–8 Birtwistle, Harrison 568 Bithikotsis, Grigoris 522

707

Bitola [Monastir] 18, 160, 294 Bizet, Georges 236 Bjelić, Dušan I. 32n, 123n, 276n, 407n Blake, William 646 Blato Club 508 Blažeković, Zdravko 192n, 202n, 340n Bloom, Harold 412 Boban Marković Orkestar 100 Bobinac, Marijan 360n Bodas 24 Boethius 154 Bogdanović, Ognjen 565n Bogdanov-Kocko, Petre 490 Bogojević, Nataša 564–6 Bogue, Ronald 620n Bogumilism 478 Bohlman, Philip V. 229n, 589, 603, 605 Böhm, Joseph 264 Boia, Lucian 28n, 32n, 211, 212n, 395n Bojikova, Milena 585n Bolgarski rospev 148, 238, 333 Bolshevik Party 437 Bombelles family 200 Bonifacić, Ruža 108n Bonnett, Alastair 666 Borodin, Alexander 319, 382 Boru 153 Bosanquet, Rovert Holford Macdowall 386 Bosanska vila 337 Bošković-Stulli, Maja 106n, 186n Boué, Ami 14n Bouët, Jacques 40–41, 43, 591 Boulanger, Nadia 491 Boulez, Pierre 455, 580 Bourdieu, Pierre 37n, 59n, 82 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis-Albert 228 Bouzouki 72–3, 75, 179, 286–8, 313, 522, 524–5, 543, 545, 612 Boym, Svetlana 27, 62, 150n, 640 Božič, Darijan 486 Božic-Bužančić, Danica 196n Bracewell, Catherine Wendy 186n Brahms, Johannes 247, 399 Brăiloiu, Constantin 87, 406, 408, 442, 448, 497 Brandl, Rudolf 94n, 99n, 176, 502 Brantlinger, Patrick 646 Brašov [Kronstadt] 206 Brassens, Georges 523 Bratislava [Pressburg] 200, 203, 383 Braudel, Fernand 46, 189 Brâul 296–7 Brauner, Harry 497

708

index

Bravničar, Matija 342 Brčko 641 Breazul, George 216n, 498 Brecht, Bertolt 478 Brediceanu, Tiberiu 42, 461 Bregović, Goran 44, 100, 504, 507, 544, 558, 583, 597, 601, 606 Brena, Lepa 506, 601 Bresler, Joel 291 Brezhnev, Leonid 445, 550 Brînduş, Nicolae 466 Bringa, Tone R. 58n Brison, Susan 617–8 British Council (The) 529, 662 Brkljačić, Ivan 576 Brown, Archie 549n, 550n Bruči, Rudolf 476, 487 Bruckner, Anton 345 Buchanan, Donna 446, 500, 503, 608, 661 Bucharest 171, 213, 215n, 216–7, 236, 264, 409, 433, 460, 462, 464, 467, 498, 578 Bucovina Club 560 Buda (Budapest) 64, 172, 201, 203, 206, 224, 333, 346, 370, 595 Budva 470 Bugarštica 185 Bujić, Bojan 194n, 348, 350, 374n, 376 Bukovina 211, 238 Bunić, Ivan 191 Burada, Gheorghe 216 Burgana, Josepo 290–1 Bürger, Peter 267–70 Burian, Emil František 371 Burke, Peter 32n Bursa 158 Buruma, Ian 645–6 Busoni, Ferruccio 327–8 Butt, John 268 Buttler, Ljiljana 300 Byron, Lord (George Gordon) 532 Caesar, Julius 618 Café chantant 180, 419 Căianu, Ioan 206 Čakavian dialect 191 Čakovec 370 Ćaleta, Joško 110n Čalgija 77, 176–8, 283, 287, 294–6, 513–4 Callas, Maria 579 Calo, Speranta 519 Calvino, Italo 454 Campbell, John C. 468n Cankar, Ivan 246 Cantacuzino family 586

Cântarea României 451, 498 Cântec de dragoste 296–7 Cântec doina 296–7 Cântece bătrâneşti 296 Cantemir, Demetrius 138n, 156–7, 214, 282 Cappadocia 70–1, 94, 315, 319 Cardoza, Abraham Lopez 17n Carnegie Hall 566 Carney, George O. 38n Carpathian mountains 44, 47, 103, 397 Carrer, Pavlos 232–3 Carroll, Mark 527n Casals, Pablo 638 Casey, Edward S. 35, 36n Cassaba [Turgutlu] 290 Castaldi, Alfonso 409 Caudella, Eduard 237, 391, 398 Cavafy, Constantine P. 316, 318, 328, 331, 533 Cavallini, Ivano 191 Cavern Club 596 Čavlović, Ivan 492n, 563 Cazaban, Costin 570 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 434, 450–1, 466–7, 513, 550 Ceca (Svetlana Ražnatović) 577, 600, 608 Cecchini, Tomaso 194 Cecilianism 332, 385 Cela, Bahri 657 Celarianu, Mihai Mitrea 570 Çelebi, Evliyâ 14, 121, 155, 163–4, 167 Çelebi, Taşçızâde Receb 156 Cengić, Bato 44 Cepenkov, Marko Ceribašić, Naila 82n, 416n, 419, 422, 502n, 593 Cerkveni glasbenik 340 Certeau, Michel de 135n Cetinje 104, 113, 470 Ćetkovic, Gordana 108 Četniks 106, 416, 422 Çetta, Anton 185 Ceza (Bilgin Özçalkan) 561 Chalga 177, 514, 605, 608–10 Chams 622 Chanter, Tina 33n Chartier, Roger 139, 254n Chianis, Sam 182n Chios 209 Chirescu, Ioan 150 Choiseul-Gouffier, Le Conte 165 Chomsky, Noam 45, 105

index Chopin, Fryderyk 237, 305–7, 396–7, 399, 519–20, 658 Christodaktyli 100 Christodoulides, Michalis 633 Christodoulou, Nikos 322 Christoff, Dimiter 454, 585 Christou, Jani 260, 536–8, 540, 570 Chrysanthos of Madytos 146–7, 150, 643 Cichon, Ludmilla 27n Çifteli 186 Cimarosa, Domenico 255 Cimbalom 88, 90, 406 Cimmeria 94, 96n Ciobanu, Gheorghe 144n, 146n, 175n, 216n Ciobanu, Maia 466 Cioroianu, Adrian 397–8 Cipra, Milo 480 Ćirić, Marija 340n Civil War (The Greek) 74, 97, 258–9, 520, 528, 624 Clark, Bruce 69 Clark, Victoria 133n Clausewitz, Carl von 648 Clejani 175, 296 Clogg, Richard 82n, 302 Cloud Society 567 Cluj-Napoca [Kolozsvár] 201, 206–7, 217, 244, 434, 578 Čoček 99, 294, 505, 606 Cohen, Sara 596 Cohen-Lînaru, Mauriciu 236–7 Čolaković, Zlatan 106n, 186n Čolić, Dragutin 367, 475 Čolić, Zdravko 641 Collin, Matthew 512 Cologne 456, 483–4 Columbia Records 285, 294 Cominform states 419, 424, 437n, 468 Comişel, Emilia 429 Confucius 649 Congress of Cultural Freedom 527–8 Constantine I, King 211n Constantinescu, Dan 462, 464–5 Constantinescu, Paul 410, 416, 449, 460–1 Constantinides, Dinos 571 Constantinidis, Yannis [Kostas Yannidis] 235n, 259, 313, 315–6, 420 Conversi, Daniele 221 Cook, Ian 664n Copla 24–5, 181, 289–91 Copland, Aaron 657 Corfu 209–10, 232–3, 248n, 254, 255n, 588 Cornis-Pope, Marcel 620 Ćosić, Dobrica 476

709

Cosma, Octavian Lăzar 215, 265n, 400, 449 Cosma, Vladimir 570 Costeas, Mikis 633 Costinescu, Gheorghe 570 Cottaar, Annemarie 292n Courtoys (the younger), Lambert 192 Coward, Martin 647 Cox, Harold E. 212n Cozbă 296 Craiova 216–7, 264 Crammed Discs 560–1 Crete 147, 151, 168n, 194, 209, 424, 521, 533, 546, 631n Crimean War 216, 237 Crnjanski, Miloš 62, 64, 68n Crouch, David 664n Cümbüş 290–1 Cune, Predrag Gojković 502 Cuza, Alexandru Ioan 216 Cvetko, Dragotin 195n, 198, 366n, 472 Cvetković, Sonja 338n Cvijić, Jovan 189, 337 Cyprus 209, 529, 544, 558, 571, 622, 628–37, 639–41, 655–9 Cyril and Methodius 143, 490–1 Dahlhaus, Carl 33, 232, 663 Daija, Tish 430, 458 Dalaras, George 525–6 Dalkas, Antonis 286 Dallapiccola, Luigi 533 Daly, Ross 546 DAM 658–9 Danforth, Loring M. 92n, 96n Danilo I, Prince (of Montenegro) 113n Dankoff, Robert 14n, 120, 152n, 163n, 164n Danon, Aben 25n Danon, Jakob 417–8 Danon, Oskar 420, 474 Danube 47, 84, 203, 207, 397 Daouli 71, 95, 98 Darmstadt seminar 450, 462, 464, 480–1, 484, 534–5 Dar-ül-Elhan 632 Darwin, Charles 138 Dash Café 560 Dassin, Jules 523 Dast-gah 21 David-Fox, Michael 435n, 438 Dayton accord 13, 552, 636–7, 641, 648 Debord, Guy 28n, 620 Debray, Régis 377

710

index

Debussy, Claude 307, 323, 350, 358, 361–3, 404, 427, 581 Dediu, Dan 466, 587 Delčev, Goce 490 Deletant, Dennis 415n Deleuze, Giles 411 Delić, Iiijaz 301 Demetriou, Nicoletta 631n Demović, Miho 192, 195n Denev, Lubomir 586 Denisov, Edison 445, 569 DeNora, Tia 407–8 Đerđelez, Alija 220, 458 Derrida, Jacques 34, 619 Deseterac 185, 224–5 Despić, Dejan 487, 566, 583 Detienne, Marcel 660 Detoni, Dubravko 483 Detrez, Raymond 237 Deus ex Machina 543 Devčić, Natko 480 Dević, Dragoslav 53–54 Devşirme system 152 Diafana Krina 543 Dietrich, Wolf 294 Digenes Akritas 95, 227, 519 Digenis, Dimitrios 210 Dimić, Nataša 332n Dimitroadou Maria 422n Dimitrov, Georgi 420, 433, 447–8 Dimov, Ventsislav 98n, 294 Dinaric Aps 44–8, 52, 54, 63n, 103, 107, 110, 183, 189, 420, 603 Dinescu, Violeta 570 Dinev, Petar 150 Dionysiou, Stratos 542 Dionysos 392, 395 Diskoton 504 Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von 206 Divljan, Vlada 597 Djokić, Dejan 552n Djurić-Klajn, Stana 67n, 173n, 198n, 332, 338, 359, 472, 474, 477 Dobronić, Antun 246, 339n, 340, 342–4, 347–8, 350, 365, 367, 371, 378, 475, 479, 482, 511, 643 Doğan, Aynur 561 Doimitriou, Angela Doina 43, 297, 405–6, 409 Doliner, Gorana 187 Domeneginis, Franciskos 209, 232, 233n Donaueschingen 372 Donizetti, Gaetano 219 Donizetti, Giuseppe 218

Đorđević, Aleksandra-Anja 583 Đorđević, Bora 511 Đorđević, Jovan 242, 509 Dorn, Pamela 26, 289n Dostoevsky, Fyodor 238n Doubleday, Veronica 177n Doublemoon Records 561–2 Dounias, Minos 314, 315n Doussopoulos, Natalia 545 Downes, Stephen 644 Dowsett, Brian 559 Doyle, William 549n Dragatakis, Dimitris 533, 626 Drăgoi, Sabin 460 Dragostinov, Stefan 456, 585 Dragoumis, Markos 136n, 288n, 591, 594 Drakulić, Slavenka 618 Dresden 346, 358 Dreyfus, Laurence 269 Driessen, Henk 189n Dromos 73, 99, 284 Držić, Marin 191 Dubioza kolektiv 599 Dubrovnik [Ragusa] 113, 191–7, 346, 471 Duge pjesme 45 Dukić, Dalibor 639 Dulian, Zora 583 Dumitrescu, Ioan 449, 461, 587 Dunay 559 Dunin, Elsie 39n Dunn, Ross 80 Durham, Mary Edith 51n, 52, 60, 61n, 106, 108, 116, 166–7, 179, 184, 429n Đurić, Tomislav 55n Đurković, Miša 505–6 Đurković, Nikola 230 Durrell, Lawrence 52 Dušan, Tsar 59, 225, 230 Dvojka 506 Dvojnice 54 Dvořák, Antonin 247, 398 Dylan, Bob 542 Dzhurov, Plamen 456 Eagleton, Terry 618, 620 Eastern European Folklife Centre 556 Eberst, Anton 417, 418n Echinos 96 Echos 21, 135–6, 138, 143, 145, 147, 149 Edirne [Adrianople] 150, 158 Edituri Muzicale 449, 467 E-fieldwork 591 Efthimis, Artemis 614 Egyptian Book of the Dead (The) 537

index Ehrlich, Henri 236 Eigen, Michael 278n Elbasan 164 Električni orgazam 508 Elgar, Edward 231, 235 Eliade, Mircea 29n, 59–60, 412n Eliot, Thomas Stearns 116n, 267 Ellis, Don 557 Elsie, Robert 14n, 163n Elytis, Odysseus 524 Emanuel, Aguilar 21n Emerson, Joan 429n Emmanuel, Maurice 228 Emmerson, Simon 561 Encounter 527 Endelekheia 543 Enderun 155 Enescu, George 217, 237, 280, 313, 325, 327, 391–412, 442–3, 448, 450, 460, 462–5, 479, 501, 578, 581, 587 Entekhno laïko tragoudhi 523, 525, 542, 545 EOKA 628 EOKA B 629 Ephebephobia 654 Epidauros Theatre 525, 588 Epirus 47, 76, 180–1, 183, 208, 220–1, 227, 238, 250, 533, 609–10, 623–4 Epitheorisi technis 422n Erdödy family 200 Erić, Zoran 487–8, 566 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 41n, 82 Erikson, Erik 38 Erkel, Ferenc 442 Erlanger, Baron Rudolphe d’ 290n Eskenaze, Roza 177, 288 Esterhazy family 200 Ethnomixicology 561 Ethnos 326n Etzion, Judith 24n, 25 Eurasianism 645 Euripides 392 Eurovision Song Contest 603–4, 641 Evanghelatos, Antiochos 316 Evans, Arthur 166 Evros 93, 95 EXIT festival 577 Ezân [‘adhān] 153, 160, 168, 173 Ezgi, Suphi 158, 281–2 Fackler, Guido 417 Fanfară 88, 99 Fantazia 560 Farhat, Hormoz 137n

711

Farmer, Henry George 136, 137n Faroqhi, Suraiya 56, 158n, 218 Fasil 155–8, 177–8, 282–3, 294 Fauré, Gabriel 314, 399 Fauriel, Claude 228n Feldman, Morton 464, 538 Feldman, Walter 108, 137n, 153, 157, 281n, 282 Ferat Ali Afendi 96n, 97n Fermor, Patrick Leigh 94, 97n, 98, 146, 176, 179 Fernández, Angel Pulido 15 Ferrara-Florence, Council of 143 Ferré, Léo 523 Ferris, Costas 75 Fidetzis, Byron 234, 322 Filiopoulos, Giannis 148n Film 508, 510, 596 Film Noir 543 Filotei sân Agăi Jipei 214 Finscher, Ludwig 630n Firca, Clemensa 410 Firfov, Živko 295, 490, 499 Fisher, Laura Gordon 104n Flambouro 98 Flamenco 27, 90–1 Flechtenmacher, Alexandru 207, 216, 236n, 264–6 Fleg, Edmond 392–3 Fleming, K.E. 223, 277 Florina 91n, 100, 544, 592 Floyera 97, 107, 141 Foerster, Anton 247 Foley, John Miles 104n Fonton, Charles 157 Footman, David 52 Ford Foundation (The) 527, 531 Foretić, Silvio 483 Fortis, Abbé Alberto 112, 195 Fosler-Lussier, Danielle 442 Fotino, Dionysios 216n Foucault, Michel 111 Fournadjiev, Nikola 356 Fracile, Nice 85–6, 87n, 89 Franciscan order 000 Franck, César 236, 345 Frangou-Psychopedis, Olympia 234, 303n Franković, Dubravka 245n Fraser, Angus 292n Frashëri family 239 Freelanders (The) 660 Freiberg 481 Freiburg 486, 571 Freidenreich, Harriet Pass 14n, 15n

712

index

Frejdenberg, Maren 18n Freud, Sigmund 62n, 645 Frolova-Walker, Marina 431n, 433n, 450 Frula 54 Fruška Gora 51 Fulanović-Šošić, Miroslava 45n Fuleihan, Anis 631 Fussell, Paul 652 Gaçe, Aurela 660 Gaci, Pjetër 458 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 335 Gadže 292 Gagauz 93 Gaida 85, 89, 96–7, 141, 181, 461 Gainsberg, Fred 285 Gainsbourg, Serge 523 Gaj, Ljudevit 241–2 Gajdov, Stefan 490 Galanté, Abraham 21n Galas, Diamanda 557–8 Gallipoli 150 Ganga 44, 51, 107 Gaqi, Thoma 459 Garašanin, Ilija 225n Garfias, Robert 296 Garnett, James 138 Gatsos, Nikos 522 Gautier, Théophile 646n Gay Jr., Leslie C. 654n Gazel 71, 158, 179, 610 Gazi Giray Han 155 Gazimahal [Kösemihal], Mahmut Ragip 122n Gelbart, Matthew 139n Gellner, Ernest 114, 222–3 Genesis Foundation 583 Gennep, Arnold van 278 Georgescu, Corneliu Dan 466–7, 570 Georgieva, Stefanka 417n Georgiou, Andreas 633 Gerbić, Fran 247 Gershwin, George 570 Gesemann, Gerhard 298 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe 449 Gilbert, Shirli 417 Giorgoudes, Panikos 635 Giovanni, Janine di 76 Gjirokastër 164, 500, 652 Gjoka, Martin 425 Gjoni, Simon 458–9 Glagolitic (script, chant) 187–8, 191, 243, 349n Glahn, Denise Von 37

Glasbena Matica 246, 339, 361 Glasnost 550 Glasses (The) 660 Glazbeni vjesnik 340 Glenny, Misha 134n, 654n Gligorijević, Jelena 604n Glinka, Mikhail 378 Globokar, Vinko 472, 484, 567 Gluck, Christophe Willibald 195 Goebbels, Joseph 318 Goehr, Lydia 642 Goethe Institute (The) 530–1, 662 Gogla, Anton 201n Gökalp, Ziya 219, 666 Goldberg, Halina 307n Goldšmit, Slavko 418 Goldsworthy, Vesna 32, 52n, 116–8, 166, 167n Goleminov, Marin 96n, 357, 452 Goleminov, Mihail 454 Golemović, Dimitrije 53n, 54, 102n, 109, 591 Gomirje 59 Goodwin, Jason 120n Gooley, Dana 407–8 Gorbachev, Mikhail 445, 550 Gordon, Mike 557 Gordy, Eric D. 505n, 511–2, 600 Górecki, Henryk 453, 455, 582 Gostuški, Igor 565n Gotovac, Jakov 339, 342, 348–50, 354, 416, 475 Goudi coup 302 Gourzi, Konstantia 571 Gracia, Donna 18n Gramatikova, Nevena 169n Granados, Enrique 290 Graz 194, 416 Great Novena 60 Greenberg, Robert 241n Greene, Graham 269 Greenfeld, Liah 221–3 Gregorian chant 119, 136, 139 Grellmann, Heinrich 292 Grgić, Miljenko 193n Gribajčević, Mehmed 299 Griffiths, Paul 568 Grigoriu, Theodor 465 Grocheo, Johannes de 139 Gross, David 35n Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (The [New]) 136, 369, 472 Groven, Eivind 386n Gruen, Gundula 559

index Grupa 220 508 Grupa umetnika 372 Gruža 51, 53–54 Guattari, Félix 411 Gubaydulina, Sofia 445 Guča festival 54, 100, 577, 640 Gučetić, Nikola Vitov 192 Gudilas 237 Gŭdulka 95 Guentcheva, Rossitza 447 Gulin, Valentina 112n Gundulić, Ivan 191 Günther, Ursula 630n Gusinje 40n, 107 Gusle 36, 49, 85, 104–6, 108–9, 185, 205, 220, 225, 511, 567, 648 Guta, Nicolae 610 Guzelimian, Ara 30 Hába, Alois 365, 371, 477 Habermas, Jürgen 262n Hacı Arif Bey 157 Hadjidakis, Manos 74, 258–60, 423, 520, 522–5, 531, 587–8 Hadjigeorgiev, Dimiter 353 Hadow, William H. 245n Hadžihusejnović-Valašek, Miroslava 638n Hadžiselimović, Omer 165n Hâfız Post 156 Haidouks 352–3, 439 Halay 99 Hale, Thomas A. 105n Halevi, Yehuda 22n Hall, Richard C. 39n Hamparsum Notation 157 Hampe, Felix 15 Hanslick, Eduard 246 Harapi, Tonin 430, 456, 458 Hardie, Philip 105 Hari Mata Hari 598, 604 Hasapiko 73, 286 Hasikou, Anastasia 632n Haskalah 29 Haskell, Erica 82n, 502n Hasluck, Frederick W. 145n, 162, 167 Hasluck, Margaret 116, 167n Hatib Zâkirî Hasan Efendi 155 Hatze, Josip 246, 339, 342–3, 346, 349 Hatzis, Christos 571 Hatzis, Kostas 542 Haustor 509, 597 Hawkesworth, Celia 36n Hayden, Robert M. 276

713

Haydn, Joseph 195, 245 Haydn, Michael 206 Head, Matthew 152n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 101, 648, 666 Heidegger, Martin 37, 275 Heimerini kolimvites 544 Hellenic Association for Contemporary Music 259–60 Hellenic Group for Contemporary Music 531, 571 Hellenic Weeks of Contemporary Music 530–1, 571, 626 Hemetek, Ursula 293n Hemsi, Alberto 25–26, 290–1 Henderson, G. P. 209n Heraclitus of Ephesus 538, 646 Hercigonja, Nikola 420, 422–3 Herder, Johann Gottfried 112, 140, 229, 245, 590, 663 Herrin, Judith 117n Herşcovici, Philipp Moyseyevich 445 Herzfeld, Michael 112, 134, 146n, 182n, 407 Hesychasm 144–5 Hickok, Michael Robert 161n Hidirellez 99 Hilandar Monastery 148, 229 Hilleprand-Prandau family 199 Himma 154 Hindemith, Paul 316, 366–7 Hiotis, Manolis 522 Hip-hop 543, 545, 561, 614–5, 660 Hirschon, Renée 69n, 70n Hitler, Adolf 415, 444 Hobhouse, John C. 166n Hobsbawm, Eric 134n, 549n Hodgkin, Katharine 36n Hodžić, Téa 560 Hoerburger, Felix 94n, 99n Hofman, Ana 55, 499–500 Hofman, Srđan 487, 583 Hogg, Bennett 512n Hohenzollern dynasty Holst-Warhaft, Gail (Holst, Gail) 50, 74n, 521n, 522, 524, 526 Homer 104–5, 608 Hora 86, 99, 175, 296–7, 404 Horă lungă 43 Horozić, Asim 582 Horvat, Stanko 481 Hoxha, Enver 162n, 426, 429, 431, 457, 551 Hrelkov, Nikolai 354 Hristić, Stevan 340, 358–60, 475

714

index

Hristov, Dobri 87, 148, 150, 238, 333–4, 351, 353–5 Hristova, Dora 352 Hrvatski glazbeni zavod 201 Hudson, Robert 511n Hugo, Victor 307 Humbertclaude, Eric 645n Hunt, Yvonne 182n Hunter, Mary 152n Huntington, Samuel P. 116 Hupchick, Dennis 212n Hutchinson, John 223 Hvar 194, 196 Iaşi 213–6, 236, 264–5, 391, 434, 578 Ibn ‘Arabī 154 Ibrahimi, Feim 429, 458–9 Ichijo, Atsuko 222n Idelsohn, Abraham Z. 22n, 23n Idoli 60, 508, 597 Ieromonahul, Macarie 214 Ifaistos 98 Ikonomov, Stefan 585 Ilâhi [ilahija] 3, 26, 61, 153, 158, 170–1, 181, 385, 598, 640 Ilić, Dragutin 230 Ilić, Jovan 102 Ilić, Miroslav 506 Iliescu, Ion 550 Iliev, Konstantin 448, 452–3, 455, 626 Illyrian(ism) 46, 108, 110, 190, 200, 222, 241–3, 245, 342, 347 Imamović, Zaim 502 Imvros 302 Indika 542 Ioachimescu, Calin 587 Ioannidis, Yannis 535 Ioannina [Janina] 180–1, 239, 592 Ionian Academy 209 Iordanova, Dina 506 Ipavec, Benjamin 247 IRCAM 587 Irig 68 Iron Gates (The) 47 Irwin Robert 152n Isakovič, Vuk 64 ISCM 366, 371, 408 Islam, Aida 163n, 168 Ismail Dede 157 Ison 47, 148, 299, 320, 382–3, 462, 533, 610 Isović, Safet 502 Istanbul [Constantinople] 37, 71, 92, 143, 145–7, 149–50, 153, 155–6, 158, 160, 180–1,

211, 214, 218, 227, 238, 256, 285, 288–9, 305, 311–2, 320, 549, 561, 622, 625 Istria 189–91, 387, 418, 472, 480, 494 Ivana (Vania Todorova Kaludova) 609 Ivanišević, Jovan 493 Ivanović, Vesna 113n Ivanović, Vojislav 564 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 392 Izmir [Smyrna] 18, 23n, 70–1, 147, 158, 180, 211, 219, 258, 285, 289–91, 302–3, 305, 310, 315 Izvor 557 Jacimović, Srdjan 565n Jackson, Michael 612 Jagoda, Flory 25n Jakova, Prenkë 426–8, 457 James, William 648 Jana (Dragana Todorović) 609 Janáček, Leoš 325, 363–4, 374, 383, 389, 403, 442, 581 Janissaries 65n, 152, 162, 218, 359 Janković, Jelena 577n Jarnach, Philipp 326 Jarnović, Ivan Mane 196n Jasenica 52, 54 Jasenovac camp 417–8 Jedinstvo Choir 640 Jeffery, Peter 22n, 30n, 137n, 139, 143 Jeftić, Dragan 55 Jelavich, Barbara 3n Jelić, Vinko 194 Jenkins, Richard 29n Jenko, Davorin 230–1, 242, 264–5 Jerusalem 13, 27, 35, 290 Jesuits 66, 197–6, 199, 206, 208, 425 Jeunesses Musicales Cyprus 635 Jeunesses Musicales Macedonia 470 Jevrejski glas 16, 22 Jevrejski život 16 Jevtić, Ivan 566 Jezernik, Božidar 32, 35, 171, 213n Jirák, Karel Boleslav 365 Joachim III, Patriarch 148 Johnson, Julian 573–4 Johnson, Robert 88 Johnson, Sherry 41n Johnstone, Diana 648n Joksimović, Božidar 264 Jonson, Ben 88 Jora, Mihail 410, 449–50, 460–2 Jordan Misja Music School 426 Jordania, Joseph 72n Joseph II, Emperor 198

index Josif, Enriko 476–7, 487 Jovanović, Jelena 53–54, 56n, 591 Jovanović, Jovan 334n Jovanović, Vladimir 565n Jović, Dejan 468, 552 Juchzer 47 Judah, Tim 59n, 225n Jugoslavenski muzičar (Muzičar) 340 Jugoton 501 Jukić, Ivan Franjo 185 July theses 513 Jung, Carl 537 Junimea 214–5 Jutkević, Sergej 428n Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis) 646 Južni vetar 504–6 Kadare, Ismail 104, 116–7, 185, 225, 652 Kadrî, Ama 156 Kafe aman 71–2, 74, 177, 179–80, 294 Kagel, Maurizio 462 Kairos 33–34 Kajkavian dialect 197 Kalamatianos 182, 286, 315 Kalan Müzik 561 Kalauz, Alojz 230 Kalemi, Spiro 427n, 456n Kalgay, Halil 634 Kállay, Benjamin von 54n, 207, 239 Kallimopoulou, Eleni 75n, 526, 546, 627 Kallinikos, Theodoulos 631n Kalomiris, Manolis 74, 211, 231, 233–4, 237, 256–9, 280, 302–27, 354, 407, 416, 423, 519–20, 523, 528, 533–4, 625 Kalophonic chant 145 Kâmran Aziz Ensemble 632 Kandov, Alexander 454, 568–9 Kângë kreshnikësh 185–7 Kant, Immanuel 618–9 Kanûn (kanonaki; zither) 27, 71, 77, 86, 141, 177 Kanun of Lek 107, 116n, 458 Kaplan, Robert D. 134n, 649, 667 Kapon, Abraham 15 Karača, Igor 564 Karača-Beljak, Tamara 299 Karađorđević dynasty 51, 204, 223, 229 Karadžić, Radovan 638 Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović 106, 185, 205, 224–6, 241–2 Karagöz 218 Karajlić, Nele 598, 601 Karakatsanis, Tasos 522 Karamanli 70

715

Karamanlis, Kostas 524, 543 Karamouza 98 Kardamis, Kostas 209n, 210n, 233n, 255n, 422n, 530n Kardelj, Edvard 469 Karleuša, Jelena 609–10 Karlovac chant 67 Karnes, Kevin C. 332n Karras, Simon 140, 541–2 Karsilamas 97, 286, 631 Kasida 171, 640 Katakouzenos, Alexandros 210 Katalinić, Vjera 252 Katharevousa 226, 303 Katsanevaki, Athena 46n, 47, 55, 87n, 102n, 142n, 180–2, 221n, 228n, 591, 624 Katz, Israel 24n, 25–26 Kaufman, Dimitrina 177, 178n Kaufman, Nikolay 27n, 585 Kavakopoulos, Pantelis 94n Kaval 71, 97, 141, 603 Kavkaz Club 508 Kavouras, Pavlos 97, 594 Kayseri [Caesarea] 70 Kazandjiev, Vasil 455, 585 Kazantzakis, Nikos 146n, 303n, 308, 311–2, 524 Kazantzidis, Stelios 74, 542 Keil, Angeliki Vellou 98n, 99n Keil, Charles 98n, 99n Kelbie, Dave 560 Kelemen, Milko 481–4, 567, 626 Kemal, Ismail 425 Kemânçe 71, 77, 141, 177 Kempf, Davorin 483 Kenan, Mustafa 632 Kennan, George 527 Ker-Lindsay, James 552n KFOR 658 Khachaturian, Aram 445 Khadzhiev, Parashkev 447 Kharkiv [Kharkov] 257, 302, 306–7 Khrennikov, Tikhon 437, 445 Kidulthood 653 Kiev 67, 143 Kilar, Wojciech 453 Kindl, Ivana 603, 613 King, Charles 114 Kinross, Patrick 120n, 133n Király, Ernö 89 Kitsikis, Dimitris 135n Klapa 109–10, 602, 636 Klephts 72, 94n, 179n, 183, 187, 227, 232 Klezmorim 293

716

index

Knapp, Bettina L. 62n Knudsen Jan Sverre 82n Koca, Osman Efendi 156 Köçek Derviş Mustafa Dede 156 Koch, Mariza 542 Koci, Mark 658 Koço, Eno 295n Köcsögduda 86 Kodály, Zoltán 370, 442 Kodeksi 508 Kogoj, Maciej 339–40, 360–1, 366 Kohen, Moritz 418 Kokan and the Traitors 597 Kokkas, Nikos 94n, 591, 594 Kolar, Zdenko 597 Kolarić, Pajo 108 Kolektif Istanbul 562 Kolettis, Ioannis 226 Kollár, Ján 240 Kolo 49, 54, 107, 420 Kolo Ensemble 202, 499 Kolokotrones, Teodoros 94n Komadina, Vojin 492–3, 564 Komotini 96, 98, 288, 294 Kondos, Vivienne 96n Konitsa 91n Konjović, Petar 332n, 339–40, 342, 347, 363–5, 369, 372, 375, 475 Kono, Kristo 457–8 Konstantinou, Elena 327n Konstantinov, Aleko 356 Konstantinović, Radomir 32n Koprivstitsa 500, 594 Korais, Adamantios 226 Korçë 295, 425, 457 Korkodotos, John 631n Körner, Theodor 244 Kös 152 Kos, Koraljka 63n, 66n, 347n Kosovo, Battle of 59, 184, 225, 230 Kotor 108–9, 113, 194, 208, 470, 493 Koukos, Periklis 588 Kou-kou Band 611 Kounadis, Argyris 531, 571 Kouroupos, Giorgos 588 Koutev, Philip 352, 356, 451, 499, 502, 584 Koutev Ensemble 295, 499, 503, 578 Kovalcsik, Katalin 89n Kozačinski, Manuilo 66–67 Kozina, Marjan 345, 360, 475 Kozinović, Lujza 187 Kragujevac 203–5, 229, 261 Krajanski, Ernest 371 Kramer, Dawn 565

Krauze, Zygmunt 455 Kreibig, Eduard 215n Krek, Gojmir 340, 345 Krek, Uroš 340, 484 Kreminović, Vanesa 639 Kristeva, Julia 17, 33n, 49–50, 62, 75, 618 Kritiki 521 Krleža, Miroslav 365, 367, 474 Kronos Quartet 566–7 Krstić, Dimitrije 67 Krstić, Nebojša 597 Krstić, Petar 337–8 Krushchev, Nikita 445, 450 Krustev, Alexander 353 Krustev, Venelin 354n, 421, 433n, 447–8 Kuba, Ludvík 15, 113, 208, 298, 351 Küdüm 161, 171 Kuhač, Franjo 245–6, 263, 298, 342, 347, 351, 482 Kujumdziewa, Svetlana 144 Kukuljević, Franjo 242 Kulenović, Vuk 487–8, 564, 566 Kuljerić, Igor 483–4 Kultur Shock 557 Kulušić Club 508, 595 Kundurov, Aristotelis 319 Kunstreligion 268, 384, 410, 440 Kuper, Adam 116n Kurkela, Vesa 506n, 608–9 Kurrenay 153 Kurti, Palokë 425 Kusić, Dane 153n Kustorica, Emir 44, 100, 507–8, 598, 601 Kuzelich, Danijela 487n Kyriakidis, Stilpon 182 La Alborado 15 La Benevolencia 15 La Gloria 15 Laberia Club 425 Lacan, Jacques 17, 49–50, 62n Lachmann, Robert 22n Lada Federation 247, 337 Ladino 23n, 24, 289 Lado Ensemble 499 Lahuta 185–6, 225, 295 Laibach 510 Laïka 542–4, 605, 612 Lajić-Mihajlović, Danica 106n Lajosi, Krisztina 236n, 265–6 Lajovic, Anton 340, 342, 345 Lakešić, Iloja 493–4 Lalas, Dimitrios 322 Lamartine, Alphonse de 52

index Lambelet, Georgios 234, 235n, 304, 313, 325 Lambelet, Napoleon 324 Lambrakis, Grigoris 524 Lampe, John. R. 335n Lara, Manuel Manrique de 15, 25, 289 Larissa 160 Larousse Dictionary 429 Lausanne conference 69–71, 92 Laušević, Mirjana 556–7, 560, 602 Latcho drom 560 Lăutari 174–6, 214–5, 236, 283, 287, 296, 360, 397, 405, 498, 513, 515 Lavrangas, Dionysios 234 Lazăr, Filip 409–10 Lazar, Prince 59, 225 Lazarapole 295 Lazarian rituals 48–49 Lazarov, Simo 585 Le Carré, John 551 Le Goff, Jacques 117n Leake, Colonel William M. 165 Leandros, Vicki 527 Lear, Edward 166 Lebič, Lojze 486 Leeper, Sir Rex 429n Lehár, Franz 104n Leipzig 321, 333, 358 Lendvai, Ernő 379n, 643n Lenin, Vladimir 468 Leotsakos, George 211n, 233–4, 254n, 256n, 259n, 322, 324, 420n, 429–30, 456n, 536 Lesbos 159, 183 Leskovik 296 Letu štuke 598 Levač 332 Levant 21, 87, 135, 276, 405, 564 Levantine Jazz Trio Levene, Mark 647n Levi, Erik 416n Lévi-Strauss, Claude 621 Leviev, Milcho 569, 586 Levin, David 170n Levinas, Emmanuel 101, 619–20 Levy, Claire 177, 178n, 586n Levy, Isaac 21n, 26, 289 Levy, Kenneth 30n, 136n Levy, Moritz 14 Levy, Sultana 291 Levy, Yasmin 27 Leyser, Karl J. 117n Lhotka, Fran 349, 365 Liavas, Lambros 94n

717

Ligeti, György 462, 481, 567, 570 Light, Andrew 28n Lind, Tore 145n Ling, Jan 562 Lingas, Alexander 631n Lipatti, Dinu 407, 410 Lipovčan, Srećko 489n Lipsitz, George 506n Lisinski, Vatroslav 242 Lissa, Zofia 442n Liszt, Franz 78, 293, 307, 315, 319, 378, 398, 404, 407, 442 Little, Bliss Sheryl 235n, 313n, 315n, 319n Livadić, Ferdo 242 Livanios, Dimitris 226 Liveralis, Iossif 232–3 Livorno 24 Ljubljana 201, 338–9, 343, 361, 366, 471, 474, 485–6, 490–1, 508 Lloyd, Albert Lancaster 186, 294, 429 Logar, Mihovil 366–7, 474, 475–7 Logothetis, Anestis 531, 571 London 69n, 425, 559–60, 584, 653–5 London Bulgarian Choir 558 Longa 121 Longinović, Tomislav 600–1 Loos, Helmut 250n Lord, Albert 104–6, 185, 186n, 220, 225–6, 298n Lortat-Jacob, Bernard 40n Loutzaki, Irene 497n Lovell, Stephen 651 Lowenthal, David 36n Lozanova, Galina 169n Lubarda, Petar 476 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) 618 Lucassen, Leo 292n Ludwig-Pečar, Nada 492 Lukačić, Ivan 194 Lungu, Nicolae 150 Lupascu, Marian 175 Lusignans 630 Lutajuća Srca 59 Lutosławski, Witold 454, 465 Luzha, Beza 657 L’viv [Lwów] 237 Lyra 71, 95–6, 533 Lysdahl, Anne Jorunn Kydland 386n Lysloff, René T.A. 654n Lyuki chushki 557 Macarie, Ieromonahul 214 MacIntyre, Alasdair 33n, 439 MacKenzie, John M. 117n

718 MAD 613 Madonna 612–3 Magdić, Josip 493, 564 Magris, Claudio 62 Mahala Rai Banda 90 Maheras, Evangelos 422n Mahler, Gustav 392 Mahmud II, Sultan 155n Maiorescu, Tito 32n, 215 Majer-Bobetko, Sanja 195n, 242n, 340n, 348n, 350 Majka, Edo 599 Makam 4, 21, 23, 25–6, 71, 73, 99, 136–8, 155–8, 168, 175, 179, 281–4, 287–8, 290, 295–6, 299, 405–6, 606, 633 Makarios III, Archbishop 629–30 Makedonski, Kiril 490 Makriyannis, Yannis 257n, 258 Malakasis, Miltiadis 307 Malcolm, Noel 63n, 76, 161, 391n, 398 Malec, Ivo 481 Malëshova, Sejfulla 427 Maliaras, Nikos 140n Mallinson, William 629n Malm, Krister 43n, 535n Mamangakis, Nikos 534 Mamula, Nada 298 Manchev, Tomi 492 Mandilatos 96 Manele 513, 515, 605, 608, 610 Mann, Thomas 643, 665n Manojlović, Kosta 339–40, 342–3 Manolov, Emanuil 353 Manoussos, Antonios 233n Mantzaros, Nikolaos Halikiopoulos  209–10, 232–3, 242, 254–5, 257 Mantzos, Constantinos 46n, 221n, 623–4 Mantzourani, Eva 330n Maragî, Abdülkadir 154 Maramureş 40, 42–44, 47, 211 Marbé, Miriam 462, 464, 570 Marble and Sounds festival 577 March, Richard 108n Marcus, Scott Lloyd 281n Margalit, Avishai 645–6 Maria Theresa, Empress 198 Marian-Bǎlaşa, Marin 42n, 497n Maribor 471 Marić, Ljubica 367, 477–9, 486–8, 626 Marija Bistrica 60 Mariovo 40n Marinella 542 Marinković, Josif 205, 231, 337

index Marjanović, Shlata 110 Marko Kraljević of Prilep, Prince 104, 220, 230 Markopoulos, Yannis 526 Markov chains 539 Markovac, Pavao 340, 417 Marković, Tatjana 56n, 64, 203–4, 205n Márquez, Juan Manuel 517 Marshall Plan (The) 527, 529 Martinů, Bohuslav 442 Martoretta, Gian Domenico 630 Marulić, Marko 191 Marx, Karl 335, 521, 642, 663 Marxism-Leninism 424, 436, 438, 448 Mascagni, Pietro 346 Matheisen, Thomas J. 136n Matičič, Janez 484 Maticki, Miodrag 123 Matija Gubec 368 Matović, Mladen 641 Matz, Rudolf 340 Mauleón-Berlowitz, Judith 16, 22, 105, 289, 290n Maurer, Franz 14 Mauss, Marcel 37n Maya (Maya Aliçkaj) 609–10 Mayr, Simon 255 Mazower, Mark 46, 160, 177, 220n, 321 Mažuranić, Ivan 106, 185, 242 McNeill, William 80 Mea, Elvira de Avezedo 17n Meclis 157 Međedović, Avdo 106 Medić, Ivana 345n Međimurje 348–9, 370–2, 374, 377–8, 380, 382, 386–7, 389 Međugorje 60 Megaron 322n, 579 Mehmed VI, Sultan 156 Mehta, Zubin 576 Mehter (Mehterhâna) 65n, 152–3, 157n, 164, 173–4, 214, 216, 635 Menčetić, Vladislav 191 Mengeel, Maurice 498n Mengjiqi, Mehdi 658 Mercan Dede 562 Mercouri, Melina 523 Merlier, Melpo 72n, 94n, 326, 591 Merlin, Dino 596, 598, 601 Merriam, Alan 139 Meşkhâne 155, 157, 282 Messiaen, Olivier 375, 385, 462–3, 588 Meštrović, Ivan 337 Metastasio, Pietro 195

index Metaxas, Ioannis 71, 73, 258–9, 318, 419, 496, 497n, 524, 541 Metaxas, Nikolaos Tzanis 233n Metessi, Renato 597 Meţianu, Lucian 570 Metro Decay 543 Mevlevî order 22, 122, 154–5, 158, 161–2, 170, 282, 631 Mevlüt 153 Meyer, Leonard B. 412, 535 Michael, King (of Romania) 450 Michaelides, Solon 632–3 Micić, Ljubomir 123, 373, 375, 377 Miglia, Guido 189 Mihajlović, Ana 565n, 566–8 Mihajlović, Milan 488 Mihalovici, Marcel 460 Mijatović, Branka 600 Mikić, Vesna 345n, 476–7 Miklaušić-Ćeran, Snježana 201n Mikov, Lubomir 169n Mikuli, Carol 236n, 237 Miladinov, Dimitar 238, 243 Miladinov, Konstantin 238, 243 Milan 234, 290 Milanović, Biljana 262n, 264, 335–6, 339n, 358 Miletich, John S. 185n Milewski, Barbara 417 Milin, Melita 68n, 135n, 341, 476–7 Miljković, Katarina 565–7 Miljković, Ljubinko 53 Miller, Jeffrey 278n Millet system 19, 29, 64, 69, 145, 151, 237 Milojević, Miloje 335n, 340, 343, 358–9, 362–5, 367–8, 388, 417 Milojković-Djurić, Jelena 15n, 208n, 238n, 337, 339n, 343n Milosavljević, Ana 566 Milošević, Jovan 493 Milošević, Miloje 493 Milošević, Predrag 366–8, 417, 475 Milošević, Slobodan 77, 84, 511–2, 552, 564, 567, 575, 577, 597, 600, 607 Milošević, Vlado 298, 492, 638–9 Milovuk, Milan 204 Milton, Giles 71n, 219n Mintev, Georgi 454 Minune, Adrian Copilul 610 Mirković, Igor 509, 595–7 Miroč 296 Mirtchev, Emil 585 Miso, Pirro 140n, 296 Mitko, Thimi 239

719

Mitropoulos, Dimitri 260, 326n, 327–9, 520, 533, 625 Mitsoura 562 Mladost 474 Moba 54 Moiseyev Ensemble 496 Mokranjac, Stevan 68–9, 148, 150, 205, 231, 332–6, 339, 343, 351, 360, 363–4, 368, 492, 640 Mokranjac, Vasilije 476, 487 Moldovan, Mihai 466 Moldoveanu, Nicu 150 Möller, Eberhard 250n Monaldi, Miho 192 Monat (Der) 527 Moniuszko, Stanisław 442 Monod, David 527n Montague, Lady Mary Wortley 18, 19n, 154n, 165 Montesquieu 165n Moraitis, Thanasis 91n Moréas, Jean 314 Morgenstern, Juraj Karlo Wisner 200 Morin, Edgar 118 Morlachs 32, 44, 107, 111–2 Moscow 358, 432, 435–6, 444, 446–8, 450–1, 457, 461, 474, 497 Mostar 13, 300, 470, 559, 641 Mostar Sevdah Reunion 300–1 Mosusova, Nadežda 360n Mousika chronika 326 Mousiki zoi 326 Mouskouri, Nana 522–3, 525 Moustoukis, Andreas 633 Mozart, Amadeus 217, 268, 570, 657 Mozi, Aladar 610 Mukaabele 154 Mukayyad 154 Mulić, Redžo 494 Müller, Theodor 215 Munich 322, 333, 346, 358, 362, 571 Munishi, Rexhep 45n, 659 Munteanu, Viorel 150 Murad IV, Sultan 155 Murgu, Eftimiu 235 Murko, Matija 104 Musical Quarterly 347 Musik in Geschichten und Gegenwart (Die) 472 Musikalen pregled 353 Musikalen vestnik 353 Musique concrete 480–1 Musorgsky, Modeste 323, 363–4, 477 Mussolini, Benito 425

720

index

Mutlak 154 Muzicescu, Gavril 150 Muzička revija 340 Muzički glasnik 339–40 Muzikološko Društvo FBiH 493 Myaskovsky, Nikolai 445 Mystère des voix bulgares (Le) 352 Nabukov, Nicolas 527 Nadel, Siegried F. 72 Nagyvárad [Oradea] 206 Nai [Ney] 27, 141, 157, 282 Najara, Israel 23, 25 Nakkare 153 Nakşibendi order 163, 168, 170–1 Naples 210 Napoleon Bonaparte 190, 197–8, 209, 223, 280 Nash, Peter H. 38n Nasi, Thoma 425 Našice 199, 346 NATO 77, 529, 544, 550–1, 600, 648, 657 Naumoff, Dimitar 569 Naylor, Simon 664n Nazos, Georgios 211, 231, 256–7, 303, 306 Nea estia 326n Nea phorminx 326n Negrea, Marţian 460–1 Neikova, Rouja 96 Nemec, Krešimir 360n Nemescu, Octavian 466–7, 587 Nenov, Dimitar 357–8, 448 Neoellinika Grammata 315n Neo-folk 505–8, 512, 515, 606–7 Nettl, Bruno 31n Neubauer, John 244 Neuberger, Mary 169n New York Balkan Arts Centre 556 Neziri, Zymer 185, 659 Nezirović, Muhamed 14n, 16n, 22n Niarchos Foundation 579 Nichifor, Şerban 587 Nicolaou-Konnari, Angel 630n Nicosia [Lefkosia, Lefkoşa] 630–3, 635–6 Niculescu, Ştefan 402, 462–3, 467, 587, 626 Nietzsche, Friedrich 312, 346, 373, 392–3, 643 Nikolić, Sofka 299 Nikolov, Lazar 448, 452–5 Nikolovski, Mihailo 491 Nikolovski, Vlastimir 490 Ninou, Marika 75 Niš 166, 171–2, 469

Nisiotika 73 Niško Polje 56, 499 Nitsiakos, Vasilis 46n, 221n, 591, 623–4 Njegoš, Petar II Petrović 104–6, 113, 225 Noli, Bishop Fan Stilian 425 NOMUS 577 Norris, David 32, 172 North, Frederick Earl of Guildford 209 Norwich, John Julius 189 Nottara, Constantin 409 Noumas 257, 306, 313, 326n Nouras, Kostas 285 Novak, Jelena 564n Novák, Vitězslav 371 Nova muzika 340 Novi akordi 340 Novi Sad 89, 204, 261, 264, 334n, 469, 577 Novi Zvuk 52n, 583 Nye, Joseph S. 628n Oană-Pop, Rodica 264 Oberling, Pierre 634n Obradović, Aleksander 487 Obradović, Dositej 103n Obrenović, Prince Mihailo 103n, 173, 203–4, 223, 229, 261–2 Obretenov, Svetoslav 353–4, 421 Occidentalism 119, 123, 608 O’Connell, John Morgan 219n Odak, Krsto 348–9, 365, 371, 475 Odeon recordings 295 Odessa 212 Ohrid 146, 151, 168, 294, 470 Oktem, Kerem 667n Oktoechos 142, 332, 399, 478–9, 487 Olah, Tiberiu 462–3, 570, 626 O’Laughlin, Niall 340n Old Stars Band 597 Olga, Queen 147 Olick, Jeffrey 36 Oltenia 211 Onassis Foundation 579 Opatija Festival 479 Operation Deliberate Force 648 Orchestra of Colours 525 Oresteiada 91n Orff, Carl 477 Orientalism 119, 272, 398, 608–9, 644–5 Ormenio 97 Ornea, Zigu 415n Oro Ensemble 499 Orpheus 92n, 96n Ortakov, Dragoslav 490 Orwell, George 484

index Osborne, Nigel 559 Osijek 108, 172, 197, 199, 201, 346, 418, 469, 638n Osmanagić, Jasmin 564 Osterc, Slavko 340, 342, 344, 349, 365–7, 375, 388, 486, 511, 643 Ottescu, Ion Nonna 409 Oud (outi) 71, 77, 95, 141, 287–8, 290 Özergin, Kemal 164n Ozgijan, Petra 487 Özkirimli, Umut 135n, 142n, 221n Paddison, Max 415n Paisiello, Giovanni 255 Palamas, Kostis 257n, 306–7, 310, 318 Paldum, Hanka 300n, 506 Pale 638 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 332 Palikrusheva, Galaba 48n Paljavo kazalište 508–9 Pallis, Alexandros 307, 324 Palmer, Alan W. 160 Palmotić, Junije 192 Pamuk, Orhan 37, 601 Panagiotakis, Nikolaus 147n Pančevo 204–5, 224, 230 Panhellion Records 285 Pankrti 508 Pann, Anton 236n Panov, Anton 490 Pantatzis, Lefteris 543 Pantchev, Wladimir 569–70 Papa, Loni 458 Papachristodoulou, Polydoros 94n Papadakis, Yiannis 629n, 630 Papaeti, Anna 633n Papafeio Orphanage 321 Papaghika, Marika 286 Papaioannou, John G. 259–61, 327, 520, 530, 537–8 Papaioannou, Yiannis 259–61, 520, 531–4, 626 Papakostas, Christos 92n Papanastasiou, Alexandros 625 Papandopulo, Boris 349, 416, 480 Papandreou, Georgios 423, 543 Papanikolaou, Dimitris 523n Papapavlou, Maria 100n Paparigopoulos, Kontantinos 134n Papazov, Ivo 514 Parać, Frano 483 Parać, Ivo 346 Paradhosiaka 75, 506, 526, 546, 627 Paranosić, Milica 565n

721

Parida 24 Paris 213, 217, 233, 314, 320, 322, 358, 361–2, 365, 372–3, 380, 409, 481, 491, 521–2, 538–9, 570, 581, 588, 595 Parisini, Rafaele 210 Parpara, Chrysi 326n Parry, Milman 104–6, 185, 186n, 220, 226, 298n Pärt, Arvo 582 Partch, Harry 386 Pascu, Ion Mihai 211n Passeron, Jean-Claude 82n Patai, Raphael 17n Paton, Andrew Archibald 165n Patras 210, 579 Patrola 508, 597 Paunović, Milenko 358–9 Pavelić, Ante 415, 419 Pavlović, Aleksander 487 Payumdzis, Stratos 287 Peçi, Aleksandër 459 Peja [Peć] 4, 59n, 113, 146, 151 Pejačević, Dora 246, 346–7, 356 Pejačević family 199 Pejović, Roksanda 140n Pelagić, Vasa 238n Pennanen, Risto Pekka 15n, 70, 72, 170, 283–7 Peno, Vesna 68n, 332n Pentzopoulos, Dimitris 70n Perči, Ljerka 200n Perestroika 550 Perica, Vjekoslav 58n, 60 Peričić, Vlastimir 69n, 386 Peristeris, Spiros 287 Peristianis, Nicos 629n, 630 Perković-Radak, Ivana 332n Perlea, Ionel 409 Permeti 178, 295 Perpessas, Harilaos 328n Pervan, Dzani 598 Pesaro 346 Peshev, Panche 420 Peşrev 156–8, 282 Petkanov, Konstantin 357 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca] 102 Petrescu, Ioan 460 Petri, Egon 329 Petrič, Ivo 486 Petrides, Ted 182n Petridis, Petros 319–21 Petrovaradin 66 Petrović, Ankica 25n, 44n, 47, 170, 294 Petrović, Danica 53n, 67n

722

index

Petrović, Metropolitan Mojsej 67 Petrovic, Princess Darinka (of Montenegro) 113n Petrović, Radmila 53n Petrović-Njegoš, Petar II 104–6, 113, 225 Pettan Hubert 201n Pettan, Svanibor 77–8, 294 Pettifer, James 76 Peycheva, Lozanka 98n, 294 Phanariots 138, 156, 174, 211–4, 218, 283 Philiki Etairia 212 Phorminx 326n Piaf, Édith 614 Picasso, Pablo 373 Pick, Daniel 271n, 629, 644–6, 648, 652 Pidal, Ramon Menéndez 15, 21n, 25n Pindus mountains 46–47, 183–4, 187, 591 Pinjo, Mirsad 208 Pinotti, Elisabetta 232 Piotiko tragoudhi 526 Pipkov, Lyubomir 352–6, 451–2 Pipkov, Panayot 353 Piraeus 70, 72–3, 179, 285–5, 287–8 Pironkov, Simeon 453n Pistrick, Eckehard 623–4 Piyyut 22–23, 25 Pizmon 23 Plamenac, Dragan 194n Plastino, Goffredo 540n Plato 154, 608 Plav 40n, 109, 591 Plemmenos, John 138n, 212n Pleyel, Ignaz Josef 200 Pliny the Younger 568 Płonowska-Ziarek, Ewa 33n Plovdiv [Filibe] 238, 433, 455 Podgorica [Titograd] 107–9, 113, 116 Polet 508 Politis, Nikolaos 182, 316 Politopoulos, Haris 309n Poljanski, Branko V. 373 Pollak, Linsey 558 Polychronakis, Ioannis 558, 613 Pomaks 82n, 92, 94–5, 96, 98–9, 175 Poniridis, Georgios 319, 530 Pontos 70–2, 93–4, 592 Pop, Adrian 466 Pop, Ioan 43 Popa, Vasko 476–7 Popescu-Judetz, Eugenia 138n, 152n, 154, 156 Popović, Branka 583 Popović, Kokan 597 Popović, Tatyana 225n

Popović-Mlađenović, Tijana 332n Popovici, Fred 466, 587 Porter, Sir James 165 Porumbescu, Ciprian 237 Postoli, Foqion 458 Poulis, Panagiotis 157n Poulton, Hugh 61n Pountney, David 583 Power of the Aegean 546 Powers, Harold 281n Prague 64, 203, 241, 341, 345, 363–7, 371–2, 395, 453, 458, 474–5, 477, 480, 487, 493 Pratt, Mary Louise 68n Prazna flaša 557 Pre-Raphaelites 608 Preuves 527 Prifti, Naum 458 Prijedor 640 Princip, Gavrilo 13 Prishtina [Priština] 4, 494, 653–60 Prizren, League of 239 Pro musica viva 486 Prodanov-Krajišnik, Ira 474n Prokofiev, Serge 329, 365, 401n, 445 Prokopiev, Trajko 490 Propp, Vladimir 17, 105 Prošev, Toma 491 Protić, Đorđe 113 Prusac 61 Psakhos, Constantinos 136, 149n, 228n, 326n Psycharis, Yiannis 303n, 306 Puccini, Giacomo 234 Pucić-Sorkočević, Jelena 195 Pythagoras 538 Qamili, Bujar 610 Quental, Antal de 19n Quilter, Roger 529n Quirós, Felipe Torroba Bernaldo de 18n Raasted, Jǿrgen 143n Rachmaninoff, Sergei 355 Rački, Franjo 243 Radenci 471 Radić, Dušan 476–7, 487 Radić, Indira 609 Radica, Ruben 481 Radovanović, Vladan 488 Radović, Branka 494n Radoviš 48, 81–2 Radstone, Susannah 36n Radu, Ioana 501

index Radujevac 296 Rădulescu, Ion Heliade 216, 265–6 Rǎdulescu, Speranţa 40n, 43, 405, 502, 591 Radulović-Vulić, Manja 493 Raichenitsa 99, 353 Raichev, Alexander 453n Rajičić, Stanojlo 367, 475–7 Rajković, Zorica 100n Raljević, Sanja 505 Rambo Amadeus 510 Rambouillet talks 77 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 642 Ramet, Sabrina P. 59n, 508, 510, 550n Ramović, Amila 493, 598 Ramovš, Primož 484 Ramparts 527 Randall, Annie J. 497n Raskolniki 148 Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 75n, 496, 504–6, 599–600, 602, 608 Raţiu, Adrian 462, 464 Ravel, Maurice 314, 324, 355, 363, 404, 409 Razastarr 543 RCA Victor 285 Rebetika 70, 72–5, 179, 258–9, 283–7, 289–90, 294, 301, 405, 423, 522–3, 527, 540, 542, 559, 612, 627 Red Army (The) 416, 444, 616 Red Hall (The) 656–7 Redžepova, Esme 502 Reed, Carol 269 Reger, Max 321, 392n Reggae 558 Reinhard, Kurt 72n Reinhard, Ursula 72 Reinhardt, Max 354 ReMusica 658 Rešidbegović, Dino 564 Režek, Ivo 371 Rhodes 18n, 23n, 25 Rhodope mountains 46, 93–4, 95n, 96, 98, 333 Riadis, Emilios 149, 321–5, 407 Riblja čorba 509–12 Rice, Timothy 46n, 499, 503, 514 Ricordi publishers 583 Rietbergen, Peter 664 Rihtman, Cvjetko 492 Rijavec, Andrej 366 Rijeka 194, 197, 469, 471 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai 309, 323 Rinuccini, Ottavia 192

723

Ristić, Marko 362 Ristić, Milan 367, 475–7 Ritsos, Yannis 258–9, 522–4 Rizvanolli, Esat 494 Rockefeller Foundation (The) 527 Rodotheatos, Dionyssios 233, 256 Rodrigue, Aron 18n, 20n, 31n Rogalski, Theodor 409–10, 460–1, 501 Rogošić, Marko 494 Rojko, Uroš 486 Rolling Stones (The) 509 Roma 54, 65, 77–9, 83–4, 87–90, 92, 94, 98–101, 108, 121, 152, 158, 164, 174–8, 180, 200, 278, 283, 287, 290, 292–9, 415, 418–9, 502, 507, 512–5, 544, 555, 558, 560, 562, 593, 602, 608, 610, 621, 643, 650 Romaioi 146, 304 Romanić, Teodor 208n Romaniot Jews 29 Romanou, Katy 146n, 149n, 210n, 228n, 256n, 306n, 309, 317, 330n, 530n, 625 Romberg, Bernhard 215 Rombou-Levidi, Marika 97 Rome 143, 333, 337, 358, 416, 549 Rossini, Gioachino 217, 219, 255 Rotaru, Diana 587, 659 Rotaru, Doina 587, 659 Rotas, Nikiforos 421, 534 Roudometof, Victor 58n Roukounas, Kostas 286 Roussé 433 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 112, 642 Roussel, Albert 320 Rudi, Donika 659 Rudi, Rafet 494, 658–9 Rumelia 92, 120, 151, 238 Rumi, Djalal al-Dīn 392n Rumiana, Margaritova 169 Runciman, Steven 549n Rundek, Darko 509, 597 Rusinow, Denison 240–1 Ruskin, John 608, 648 Russell, Bertrand 536 Ruzitska, François 236 Ruzitska, József 206 Ryan, James 664n Šabac 261 Šaban, Ladislav 201n Sabor 197–8, 484 Sacher, Srđan (Samuel) 597 Sachsenhausen camp 417 Safavids 158 Safī al-Dīn al-Urmawi 154

724

index

Šafranek-Kavić, Lujo 340 Sahlins, Marshall 134n Said, Edward W. 62, 117, 152, 276, 609 Sakač, Branimir 480 Sakellarides, Ioannis 147, 149, 228 Salabert publishers 407 Salihović, Selim 299 Saltik, Hasan 561 Samā 154 Samaras, Spyros 233–4, 243, 303 Samlaić, Erih 418 Samson, Jim 33n, 279n, 307n, 310n, 573n Samuel, Raphael 36n, 437 San Stefano (Treaty of) 217, 238, 446 Sand, Shlomo 660 Sandal, Mustafa 545 Sandžak of Novi Pazar 63, 106–7, 116, 238 Santûr [santouri, santorini] 71, 525 Šaper, Srđan 597 Sarajevo 13–16, 18, 35, 44n, 81, 161, 170–1, 207–8, 297, 299–301, 337, 341n, 384n, 470, 490, 492, 502–4, 506–8, 556, 563–4, 575, 582, 598, 638–9, 647 Sarakatsani 82n, 93, 94, 179 Šarin, Dino 598–9 Şarkı 156, 158 Šarlo Akrobata 508 Sarris, Haris 594 Satie, Erik 361–2 Saunders, Francis Stonor 527n Sava, Saint 59 Savaihis, Lambros 287 Savić, Obrad 32n, 123n, 276n, 407n, 608 Savile, Anthony 568n Savin, Risto 247, 339 Savremenna muzika 353, 451 Savvopoulos, Dionysios 523n, 526, 542 Saz 27, 71, 73, 169, 299–300 Saze 178, 283, 287, 295–6 Schabel, Chris 630n Schaeffer, Pierre 481 Schama, Simon 549n Scherchen, Hermann 539 Schlager 602 Schlegel, Friedrich 244 Schneider, Marius 72n Schnittke, Alfred 445 Schoenberg, Arnold 260, 270, 316, 326–31, 360–1, 367, 372, 379, 387, 409, 477, 580–1 Schott Music 383 Schreker, Franz 360, 372 Schroeder, Brian 619n Schubert, Franz 399

Schwartz-Salant, Nathan 33n Scola Cantorum 217 Sedak, Eva 344–5, 350, 364n, 370–1, 376n, 379, 480n Seferis, Giorgos Selâm 282 Selim III, Sultan 157 Selverstone, Marc J. 549n Semâ 154 Semsis, Dimitris 287–8 Serafimovska, Velika Stojkova 48, 49n Seress, Hugues 379n Šerifović, Marija 604 Serocki, Kazimierz 465 Seroussi, Edwin 21n, 25n, 26n, 27 Serres 98, 160 Şeştarî Murad Ağa 156 Šestić, Dušan 641, 659 Šestić, Marija 641, 659 Sevdah-rock 602, 605, 608 Sevdalinka 4, 27, 102, 109, 169, 178, 283, 287, 297–301, 364, 405–6, 502–3, 505, 513, 559, 598, 604, 647–8 Sèvres (Treaty of) 302 Sexon, Sejo 597 Şeydî 155 Seyir 281–2, 284, 299 Shabani, Elda 610 Shakespeare, William 466 Shantel 560 Sharia law 29 Shaw, Ezel K. 120n Shaw, Stanford J. 14n 120n Shebalin, Vissarion 445 Sheholli, Bahtir 162n, 170 Shehu, Bashkim 494 Shiloah, Amnon 18n, 21n, 23n, 24n, 55, 137n Shkodër 166, 178, 295, 425–7, 429, 457–8 Shopi 48, 81 Shostakovich, Dimitri 445 Shukar Collective 562 Shupo, Sokol 55, 164n, 456n, 459 Siani-Davies, Peter 550n Sibelius, Jean 356 Šibenik 194 Šiber, Ivan 438 Sibiu [Hermannstadt] 206 Sicilianos, Yorgos 531, 534 Siena 481 Signell, Karl 155n, 158n, 174, 281, 283 Şikar, Şemtov 26 Sikelianos, Angelo 303n, 310 Sikimić, Biljana 88n

index Sikorski, Kazimierz 455 Siliqi, Llazar 427 Silverman, Carol 78, 176n, 293n, 502 Silverman, Joseph H. 16n, 17, 21n Silvestri, Constantin 410 Simaku, Thomas 571 Simić, Goran 559 Simić, Vojislav 362n Šimičić, Darko 375n Simões, João Gaspar 19n Sinaia 398 Sinasos 70 Sirakouli, Vasiliki 100 Sîrba 296–7 Sirens 607–9 Şirli, Adriana 399n Širola, Božidar 340, 343, 348–50, 416 Sirri, Sadeddin 163 Sirto 121, 286, 631 Six Degrees 561 Ska 558 Skalkottas, Nicos 260, 316, 326–31, 520, 530n Skalovski, Todor 490 Skendi, Stavro 67n, 186 Škerjanc, Lucijan Marija 345, 360, 475 Skiladeli 544 Skjavetić, Julije 194 Sklad 340 Skopje 77, 160, 163, 168, 294, 396, 470 Škroup, František 207 Skryabin, Alexander 328n, 357, 363, 385, 387 Slapšak, Svetlana 224n Slavenski (Štolcer Slavenski), Josip 246, 348–50, 363, 365–6, 369–90, 394, 401, 407, 420, 443, 480, 487–8, 643 Slavenski, Milana 372–3 Slavonia 198–9, 202 Šlezinger, Josif 103n, 203, 207, 229, 261–5 Slovenska muzika 340 Smailović, Avdo 492 Smailović, Vedran 638 Smetana, Bedřich 305, 442 Smilkov, Romeo 454n Smith, Anthony 221–2 Smith, Dave 429n Smith, Jonathan M. 28n Snel, Guido 13n Socialist Realism 432, 434, 439, 449, 451, 453, 473–4, 476, 479–80, 496 Socor, Matei 448–9, 460 Sofia 18, 160, 171, 337, 433, 451, 456, 499, 584, 586

725

Sofos, Spyros A. 135n, 142n, 221n Sokoli, Ramadan 140n, 427, 459 Sola, David Aaron de 17n, 21n Solakzâde, Miskalî 156 Solomon ibn Gabirol 22n Solomos, Dionysios 232, 242 Sombor 261 Sonemus Ensemble 582 Songlines 561 Sophia, Queen (of Greece) 211n Sophocles 392–3 Sorkočević, Antun 195 Sorkočević, Luka 195–6 Sorkočević, Marina 195–6 Souvtchinsky, Pierre 645 Spalding, Baird T. 586 Spanoudi, Sofia 331n Spasova, Rozalina 417n Spassov, Bozhidar 568–9 Spassov, Ivan 454–5, 585, 626 Speer, Daniel 88 Spencer, Edmund 165 Spentzou, Efrossini 568, 618 Spirić-Beard, Danijela 358–9 Split 191, 193–4, 196, 208, 343, 346, 469 SPRAY 654, 660 Sprengnether, Madelon 62n Srca, Lutajuća 59 Srebotnak, Alojz 486 Srem 63, 84, 173 Sremac, Stjepan 100n Sremski Karlovci 65–7, 113, 223–4 Srpski književni glasnik 337, 339–40, 359 Stäbler, Gerhard 429 Stainov, Petko 353, 355–6, 358 Stalin, Joseph 420, 424, 428, 431, 434, 437, 444–5, 449, 468 Stamitz, Johann 195 Stanković, Kornelije 67–9, 103n, 148, 204, 224, 230–1, 233, 333 Stara Gradiška 418 Stara Zagora 433 Stefani, Jan 206 Stefanija, Leon 485 Stefanova, Dessislava 558 Stefanović, Ivana 488, 566 Stefanovski, Goran 369 Stein, Murray 33n Steiner, George 346, 412 Steinhardt, Inacio 17n Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 646 Stephănescu, Gheorghe 217, 398 Stephanis, Gaetano di 193 Stipčević, Ennio 189n, 193n, 194n

726

index

Stobart, Henry 589, 608n Stockhausen, Karlheinz 488, 568, 580 Stockmann, Doris 186, 429 Stockmann, Erich 186, 429 Stoianov, Blazho 453 Stoianovich, Traian 117n Stoin, Elena 421 Stoin, Vasil 87, 351 Stojanović, Petar 338 Stojanović-Novičić, Dragana 485n Štokavian dialect 197n, 241 Stokes, Martin 151n, 297, 301, 505n, 589–90, 611 Stolz, Benjamin A. 186n Stoyanov, Vessilin 356, 360 Stojkov, Stojan 491 Štokavian dialect 197n St. Petersburg [Leningrad] 456, 490, 581 Stratou, Dora 499, 541 Strauss, Richard 234, 362, 392 Stravinsky, Igor 320, 323n, 374, 379, 385, 389, 410, 459, 476–9, 482, 524, 537, 571, 581, 645 Strigături 43 Stroe, Aurel 462, 464 Strohm, Reinhard 396n, 642 Strossmayer, Bishop Josip Juraj 243, 245 Strunck, Oliver 21 Stublić, Jura 508, 596–7 Štulić, Branimir (‘Johnny’) 508, 510, 595 Stylianou, Tasos 633 Sublime Porte 18, 59n, 120, 151 Subotica 204, 469, 509 Sufis 61, 122, 153–4, 160, 162, 164, 168, 170–1, 561 Sugarman, Jane 176, 239, 605 Suk, Josef 371 Süleyman I, Sultan 151, 244 Sulzer, Franz Joseph 212 Šumadija 51–56, 81, 374, 591 Sünnet 99, 153 Supek, Olga 100n Susam-Saraeva, Şebnem, 627 Šutka 79 Suvorov, Maksim 66–67 Svašek, Maruška 441 Svatbarski orkestri 514–5 Sv. Cecilija 202, 340 Sveti Stefan 470 Svetlić 55 Svirala 54 Svolos, Yannis 311n Swets, Wouter 87, 295

Syngros, Andreas 256 Synkathistos 96 Syros 210 Syrtos 182–3, 524 Szapora 560 Szymanowski, Karol 305, 313, 325, 357, 369, 391–6, 399n, 411, 442, 581 Tabakov, Emil 456, 585 Tadjwīd (tilâvet) 153, 160 Tahiri, Ramiz 564 Taigetus mountains 46 Tajčević, Marko 363, 365, 369, 377, 475 Taji-Farouki, Suha 61n Takovo 54 Taksîm (taximi) 23, 157, 282, 286–8, 405, 633 Tallava 75, 77–9, 610 Tambal 296 Tamburica (tanbür) 108–10, 141, 157, 166, 177, 282, 299, 301, 511, 557, 602, 640 Tamindžić, Borislav 494 Tănase, Maria 501 Tanbûrî Ali Efendi 157 Tanbûrî Cemil Bey 157–8 Tanec Ensemble 295, 470, 490, 499 Taner, Ruha 632, 659 Taner, Yilmas 632, 634, 659 Taner, Zeki 632, 659 Tanev, Ivo 610 Tanzimat 19n, 122, 158, 218, 237 Tapan 98, 141, 153, 287, 293–4, 296, 567 Tarabuka [darbuka] 109, 141, 177 Taraf de Haidouks 90, 296n, 560 Taraful Gorjului 501 Taragota 90 Ţăranu, Cornel 462, 465 Ţara Oaşului 40–4, 47, 81–2 Tarmakov, Roussi 569 Taskov, Krassimir 585 Tasovac, Ivan 576 Tatcho drom 559 Tathyay, Mehmet Ali 631 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 345, 535 Te’amim 22 Tenedos 302 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 104 Teresa, (Mother) 459 Terzakis, Dimitris 531 Terzetes, Georgios 227 Terzopoulou, Miranda 93 Tetovo 45n, 77, 168, 657 Thacker, Toby 527

index Thasos 94 The Man Who Cried 560 Theodorakis, Mikis 74, 258–9, 422–3, 520–8, 538, 542, 572, 579 Thermopylae, Battle of 115 Theresienstadt camp 417 Thessaloniki [Salonica] 14, 18, 25, 31, 76, 98n, 177, 288, 321–2, 579, 612 Thomas, Adrian 432n Thompson, Paul 437 Thrace 46, 70, 83, 91–100, 153, 160, 177, 183, 238, 294, 302 Timoşoara 173, 205, 213, 215n, 515, 550 Tipoplastika 54 Ţîpurituri 41 Tirana 76, 100, 167n, 295, 426–8, 430, 457, 610 Tito, Josip Broz 58–9, 84, 107, 335, 368, 390, 420, 423, 434, 444, 468–9, 473–5, 489, 508,596 TMT 628 Todorov, Kosta 354 Todorov, Todor Vasilev 351n Todorov, Tzvetan 437 Todorova, Maria 2, 36n, 76, 80n, 272, 276–8, 622, 647, 649, 655n Tóibín, Colm 665 Toids 557 Tokumaru, Yoshihiko 30n Tolinger, Robert 113 Tomašek, Andrija 422 Tomašević, Katarina 66, 68n, 69n, 262n, 263, 358, 362n, 367n, 576–7 Tomažić, Tamara 480n Topola 51, 55 Torp, Lisbet 73n Touloum 71 Toundas, Panayiotas 288 Traeger, Paul 167n, 184, 429n Tragaki, Dafni 612 Tragodistes, Hieronymos 631n Trajković, Vlastimir 487–8, 583 Trans-global Underground 560 Transylvania 40, 44, 47, 85–6, 151, 198, 205–6, 211, 214n, 235, 238, 408, 433, 444, 461, 465 Trebinje 500n Trebizond 180 Treitler, Leo 30n, 138–9 Trevor, Roy 104n, 115–6 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 527 Trgovčević, Ljubinka 247 Trieste 191, 203

727

Troelsgård, Christian 136n Trophée Mondiale de l’Accordéon 638 Trotter, William 329 Truman Doctrine 529 Tsagkarakis, Ioannis 531n Tsamikos 182–3 Tsenova, Julia 585–6 Tsetsos, Markos 254n, 311n, 312 Tsibiridou, Fotini 95n Tsifteteli 73–4, 99, 175, 286–7, 544–5, 606, 631 Tsiovas, Dimitris 223, 258 Tsitsanis, Vassilis 74, 259 Tsouyopoulos, Georges 535 Tsrvena Kniga 295, 558 Tsurtsumia Rusudan 72n Tuksar, Stanislav 191n, 192, 193n, 196n, 245–6, 343 Tulip Age 218 Turbo-folk 506, 512, 514, 544, 577, 596, 600–2, 605–8, 612, 641, 647 Turda, Marius 240n Tutev, Georgi 452–4 TV Palma 512 TV Pink 512, 609 TXC (Terror X Crew) 614 Tzoumerka-Knoedler, Vicky 571 Ufkî Bey, Ali (Wojciech Bobowski) 156 Ugrešić, Dubravka 62, 369 Uluğ, Ahmet 561 Umayyad dynasty 137 UNESCO 47, 51, 623n United States information Service (USIS) 528, 530 Uskoks 186 Ustaše 106, 340, 350, 415, 417–8, 420, 422 Usûl 25n, 87, 155–8, 283 Uzelac, Gordana 222n Valaades 70 Valaorites, Aristotle 227 Valpovo 199 Vamvakaris, Markos 72–3, 259, 286, 288 Vancea, Zeno 410 Vandi, Despina 613–4 Vanhal, Johann Baptist 200 Varaždin 197, 200–1, 370, 371 Varèse, Edgard 387–8, 535 Varna 354, 433 Varon, Ishak 26 Varvoglis, Marios 313–6, 326n Vasari, Giorgio 218

728

index

Vaughan Williams, Ralph 235, 311 Vedral, Vaclav 264 Veles 294 Veličković, Jasna 583 Velimirović, Miloš 136 Venice 24, 151, 189–91, 193–4, 196, 208, 218, 661–2 Venice Biennale 389, 584 Venizelos, Eleftherios 302–3, 308–10, 318, 520 Ventura, Fra 193 Verbunkos 86, 90 Verdery, Katherine 468n Verdi, Giuseppe 219, 234, 244 Verona 194 Versailles (Treaty of) 240, 248, 250, 354, 446 Vickers, Miranda 183n, 551n Vidalis, Giorgos 286 Vienna 64, 147, 151, 197–201, 203–5, 213, 224, 230, 236, 241, 243–4, 264, 306, 330, 333, 338, 345–6, 358, 360, 365, 395, 419, 456, 534, 564, 569–71, 581, 583, 587, 597 Vieru, Anatol 462–4 Vila 608 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste 351n Vimer, František-Franjo 113 Virovitica 199 Višegrad 36 Višnjić, Filip 224 Vissi, Anna 613–4 Vita pis 543 Vital, Moshe 23n Viteazul, Prince Mihai 235–6, 265 Vlachopoulos, Yannis 531 Vlachs 47, 82n, 89, 91, 94, 101, 104, 111, 220–1, 226, 621, 623 Vladigerov, Pancho 354–8, 416, 451–3 Vladimerscu, Tudor 212 Vlagopoulos, Panos 228n, 258–9, 536 Vlorë [Valona] 18, 425 Vojna Granica (Military Border) 63, 65, 68–9, 81, 83, 186, 198 Vojvodina 51, 63, 83–91, 94, 96, 103n, 108, 168, 172–3, 197–8, 203–5, 230, 238, 261, 338, 566, 593 Volner, Ivo 418 Vorpsi, Pëllumb 459 Vosganian, Mihaela 587 Voudouris, Lilian 322n Vourliotis, Nikos (NiVo) 614 Vranje 102, 178, 364 Vrebalov, Aleksandra 565–7 Vucinich, Wayne 207n

Vučković, Severina 641 Vučković, Vojislav 340, 343, 367–8, 417 Vujić, Joakim 242, 262, 263n Vukdragović, Mihailo 474 Vukovar 418 Wachmann, Eduard 216 Wachmann, Ion Andrei 216, 236, 264–6 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch 225, 227, 334n, 336–8, 469, 553, 554n, 667 Wagner, Cosima 322n Wagner, F. Peter 550n Wagner, Richard 215n, 235, 247, 306, 308–9, 318, 322, 358, 362, 392, 409, 416, 578 Wagstaff, Malcolm 165n Wallis, Roger 43n, 535n Warsaw Autumn Festival 260, 450, 455, 482, 484 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 314 Weber, Carl Maria von 217 Weber, Max 135n, 138, 642, 663 Weber, Zdenka 350n Webern, Anton von 487, 533 Weich-Shahak, Susana 24n, 25, 290n Weill, Kurt 326, 581 Weir, David 644 Welz, Gisela 629n, 630 West, Rebecca 167 Wheatcroft, Andrew 19n, 120n, 549n White, Hayden 254 Wiener Figaro 354 Wiener, Leo 15 Wightman, Alistair 393n Wilkinson, John Gardner 14n, 104n, 106n, 115, 166 Willems, Wim 292n Williams, Alastair 580 Williams, Chris 167n Wilton, Robert 106n Winchester, Simon 134n Windschuttle, Keith 152n Wisłocki, Stanisław 455 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 536–7 Wolf, Hugo 369 Wolff, Larry 32, 111, 114, 276, 395 Wolfram, Stephen 565 Womad 561 Woodward, Susan L. 552, 637, 647 World Fairs 501, 556 World Music 27, 80, 90, 169, 175, 518, 561–3, 567, 602 World of Sevdah 559 Wright, Owen 156n, 282

index Xanthi 93–4, 96, 98, 100, 294 Xanthoudakis, Haris 232, 260, 328n, 533, 539, 588 Xanthoulis, Nikos 588 Xena Warrior Princess 603 Xenakis, Iannis 96n, 260, 319, 422, 429, 463, 521, 525, 537–40, 555, 565–7, 570, 572, 579 Xenos 558 Xenos, Alekos 259, 318, 421–3 Xesyrtos 96 Xydakis, Nikos 542 Xyndas, Spyridion 233 Yack, Bernard 221–2, 268 Yalta Conference 443, 616, 624 Yamaguchi, Osama 30n Yannatou, Savina 527, 564 Yapaci, Haim 26 Yeşilada, Ekrem 632n Yetka, Rauf 158, 281–2 Young, Antonia 56n, 116n, 166n, 167n Ypsilantis, Alexander 212 Yugoslavism 224, 240–2 YU-Grupa 59, 508 Yusuf bin Nizameddin 155 Yusuf Dede 156 Zabranjeno pušenje 509, 597–8 Zadar 196 Zadeja, Çesk 456–8 Zadeja, Tonin 295n Zagreb 201–2, 243, 245, 247, 335, 338–9, 343, 363–4, 370–2, 416, 471, 481, 490–1, 493, 508–10, 564, 592, 595–6, 598–9, 641 Zagreb Biennale Festival 479, 481–2, 625–6 Zaimakis, Yiannis 422n Zaimov, Velislav 586 Zajc, Ivan 201n, 243–5, 342, 347, 349 Zakynthos 147, 232 Zambelios, Spyridon 182 Zana 608 Žanić, Ivo 108n, 225, 420n, 436n, 438n

729

Zannos, Ioannis 137, 281n Zappa, Frank 542 Zatrijebač 107 Žebeljan, Isadora 565, 568, 583– Zečaj, Emina 299–300 Zeibekiko 73, 286, 288, 631 Zeitschrift für Musik 416n Zekaî Dede 157 Zemun 65 Zenitism 123, 373, 375, 377, 381, 384, 509, 645–6 Żerańska-Kominek, Sławomira 154n Žero, Muhamed 300n Žganec, Vinko 348, 448, 592 Zhdanov, Andrei 424, 427, 437, 439–40, 445 Zhivkov, Todor 445 Žiča 59 Židovska svijest 16 Zikr (dhikr) 154, 170, 385 Zil 161 Zingarelli, Niccolò Antonio 255 Zionism 16, 31, 660 Živana (‘blind Živana’) 224 Živković, Mirjana 370 Zlatarić, Dinko 191 Zlatić, Slavko 472 Zlatna Vila Festival 640 Zlatorog 353 Znamennïy chant 144, 148 Znepolski, Dencho 421 Zog I, King (of Albania) 425 Zografski, Tomislav 491 Zonaradikos 93, 96 Zoraqi, Nikolla 457–8 Zoras, Leonidas 317–9, 416, 530 Zoster 599 Zubović, Alma 170n Zupančič, Beno 476n, 500 Zurla (zournas, zurna) 3, 97–9, 141, 153, 287, 293, 296 Zvecka Club 508 Zvuk 340–2, 365, 367, 511