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Tamburaši and “Sacral Buildings” on a Balkanizing Peninsula
The tambura is silent now, the rifle tells the tale.
Radovan Milanov and Antun Nikolić, “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja”
Spring 2010: Drinking tea in a moderately lit, below-ground café in Osijek, I mentioned to Antun (president of the STD “Pajo Kolarić”) the existence of a youth Farkaš tambura orchestra in Ruse, Bulgaria.1 I knew from visiting Ruse in 2009 that its leaders were seeking additional international collaborations, and Antun suggested the possibility of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s orchestra traveling to Bulgaria. Several parents, however, expressed “fear” at the prospect of sending their children to Bulgaria. Antun attributed this reaction to concern about the musicians’ young age. Yet one of the orchestra’s directors told me that she, too, felt “fear” at the thought of leaving Croatia for unknown countries. All were happy to welcome the Bulgarians if they came to Osijek. However, anxiety over travel to proximate foreign territories among this generation of young adults (who had been children or youths during the war) was strong enough to prevent a trip to Bulgaria, despite the “Pajo Kolarić” orchestras having recently traveled to such destinations as Hungary, Austria, Serbia, and the Netherlands.2
The orchestra’s director, furthermore, had grown up in the nearby Croatian region of Baranja before being evacuated to the country’s interior during the war. She thus had witnessed firsthand the fact that living within Croatian territory did not guarantee a secure, fearless existence; intermittent ethnic tensions and problems with untripped landmines and buildings weakened by shellfire keep the threat of further destruction alive even today. Under what conditions, then, would this director and the parents travel to foreign territories that presented no such physical threats? Nearly two decades after the war, how did experiences and narratives of daring movement into war-torn territories interact with the affect of a fear that has persisted despite attempts to rationalize it into insignificance?
Such a dissonance between thought and feeling is affective block at its most basic: the ability of feeling to block (in delimitation) a conscious, rationalizing, and contradictory understanding of the world. It does so through an accrual of embodied intensity that in its generation is “disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration” (Massumi 1996, 219). Yet this chapter also examines the “interanimation” (Gray 2014, 9) in musical spheres between affective and narrative registers of security and risk. Probing under what wartime and postwar conditions affective attachments, tales, and eventually traveling musicians themselves reached beyond the boundaries of secured Croatian lands, it shows how a nation-state’s core territory emerges physically and discursively through the common site of the body. It argues ultimately for a new way of understanding the emergence of terms of becoming and of Otherness (a national “we,” a racialized distinction of “us” and “them”) through intimate, musical relationships with dangerous areas and presence. It thus demonstrates how this affective block is also an aggregation of feeling, a building of intense intimacy as individuals begin to feel like a “we.”
One of the first dangerous areas abandoned was Baranja, whose refugees saw both themselves and tambura traditions as passive wartime victims and did not immediately hear in this music the potential for responding physically to the realities of warfare. The particular poignancy of this northeast Croatian region’s capture for its residents instead often inspired tambura music composition as a form of communication from afar. Ballads such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (“Istinu svijetu o Baranji reci”) connected narratives of threat, endangered traditions, and calls to armed engagement. Released in 1992 by Slavonski Bećari, it tells of the peaceful village life of food, wine, family, and tamburaši that the Šokci, one of the easternmost groups of Croats, had enjoyed in Baranja before its occupation by an “evildoer” (the Yugoslav People’s Army).
A resonant song for Croatians during Baranja’s 1991–1998 occupation, it was, however, only partially accurate in its claim that the tambura had fallen silent while the rifle narrated (and caused) the falling of “cold steel” and other wartime dangers. Certainly from the perspective of Croats such as the “Pajo Kolarić” director (then a child), who had fled from Baranja, the rifle and not the tambura was sounding in their home villages. This likely rang true despite the fact that their Serb neighbors or the Yugoslav soldiers positioned there could have been playing instruments at the time. As Kruno Kardov notes, Croats in nonoccupied cities such as Osijek imagined towns and cities in Eastern Slavonia and Baranja not merely cleansed of Croats but altogether devoid of residents, though many Serbs remained throughout the occupation (Kardov 2007, 66). Yet as this song demonstrates, tambura music was also an effective sonic medium by which to “tell the tale” of war to nonoccupied Croatia and the world beyond. In this respect, the tambura remained decidedly outspoken throughout the war.
In 1992, however, tambura performance was also becoming important for reclaiming Croatian territory, establishing postconflict transnational networks, and other material processes that, like the advance of riflemen, have reconfigured musical performance’s human geography in Croatia and beyond. Tambura music’s connection to danger became most concrete during this period as some tamburaši, far from playing it safe, used songs and performances to confront not only discursively but also physically the actions of Yugoslavian forces. Prominent tambura ensembles’ movement during and after the war and the conflicts’ narrativization in publications, song texts, and other media illuminate the resonance and affective capacities of war, danger, and aggression for tambura performance in independent Croatia.
I consider these processes’ material and spatial dimensions by examining diverse divisions and intimacies in relation to national musical belonging, which has intensified since 1991 through tambura networks centered in Croatia. The chapter focuses on the regional and international activities of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” as a primary case study while also examining affiliated or comparable professionals such as Slavonski Bećari and the tambura/rock singer and songwriter Miroslav Škoro. All hail from Osijek, which Yugoslav forces bombarded but never occupied. I consider their performances and discourses on tambura music during and after the war, both in Croatia and abroad. The chapter further elaborates “national intimates” as an approach to transnational nationalism, its tambura narrativization, and the intersections of secession, militarization, diaspora, affective block, and constructions of national music.
In examining the flows and disjunctures in ensembles’ movement across these territories to reconnect to intimates beyond Croatia’s new national borders, I also consider the nature of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, or “balkanization,” as it has of course also been labeled. This term, which emerged from studies of Southeastern Europe, has come to connote rupture and fragmentation in geopolitical entities the world over. Its use reflects the focus of much political discourse, journalism, and scholarship on the creation of separate, often mutually hostile or fearful nation-states out of larger republics such as Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and Sudan.3 Just as notably, however, national independence has often been cause for intensification of communal ties and intimacy across the very borders it has erected.4 I consider the affective work of making and narrativizing border crossings through musical performance in contexts of wartime danger and fears.
DANGEROUS PERFORMANCE
The most pressing territorial concern for such ensembles throughout the 1990s was the return to lands where tamburas had perceivably fallen silent. Armed conflict and bombing severely limited transport of passengers and mail via car and train, and Croatian media saturated their programs with fear-inspiring reports on the dangers of accessing contested regions (Povrzanović 1993, 140). Even for those in areas not directly affected by the encroaching Yugoslav forces, occupied Slavonian territories and cities in danger of capture and destruction became objects of longing tinged by threat. Several prominent tambura ensembles took advantage of opportunities to fight for, return to, and reclaim these territories. Their efforts to stabilize the state’s outlying lands and borders were important not only for physically and symbolically instituting Croatian sovereignty but also for resurrecting access to communities in neighboring states, Central Europe, and North America.
The act of pushing toward the front lines and borders responded to the perceived and, for many tamburaši, physically experienced dangers of war. Svanibor Pettan notes that the war “brought together musicians and musical genres that would otherwise hardly be considered compatible. The shared necessity to neutralize the threat made folk musicians, opera singers, and rappers perform on the same occasions” (1998, 14). Music fulfilled three functions: encouraging “those fighting on the front lines and those hiding in shelters,” provoking and humiliating “those seen as enemies,” and calling on “those not directly endangered—including fellow citizens [and] the Diaspora” (13).
Often situated or originating in East Croatian regions that felt the war most heavily, tamburaši themselves spanned the spectrum of endangerment. Their responses often extended beyond such discursive functions to include direct physical, musical, and affective engagement with the war’s dangers. Analyzing music’s relationship to territories and deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari write that musical expression is “inseparable” from a minoritarian becoming “because of the ‘danger’ inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward destruction, toward abolition” ([1980] 1987, 299). “Music,” furthermore, “has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential ‘fascism’?” (299). In taking up the call to arms (to arm themselves with instruments), tamburaši engaged affective, embodied flights toward the destruction of dangerous performance. Through the musical deterritorialization of wartime milieus and their own minoritarian becomings (Yugoslavs were becoming Croats), they simultaneously reterritorialized themselves as citizens of the new nation and physically assembled these milieus into a sovereign state.
Dangerous Media
In 1991–1992 many prominent professional tambura bands released war-themed musical media, such as Škoro’s and Zlatni Dukati’s videos for “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu,” one of the period’s most iconic tambura songs (see the introduction). The tambura band Dike (The Glories) released a similar video for “Oj Hrvatska Mati” (Oh Mother Croatia). They paired lyrics telling Croatia to “grieve not” (for the “falcons” will sacrifice themselves for her) with war footage and shots of the band in camouflage fatigues.5 They reinforced their image as protective “falcons” by posing with helmets in a trench for a publicity photograph (reprinted in Ferić 2011, 259). Three of them hold their tamburas outstretched over the trench’s lip, aiming them like rifles, while one reaches an arm overhead as though throwing a grenade. Another holds a tank ammunition round raised upward from his pelvic area, which along with the butt of the round remains hidden behind his nearby tambura bass. This suggestive image of wartime virility responded to “Serbia’s ‘masculine’ and warlike [musical] self-representation,” defending Croatia, which was symbolized as a “mother figure [who] is proud but also worried for her son/defender” (Ceribašić 2000, 226, 230).
A number of tambura bands, including Agrameri, served in the war (Baker 2010, 36). Zlatni Dukati’s members also attempted to enlist (Bonifačić 1998, 138), reinforcing tamburaši’s perceived duty to protect and reclaim Croatian lands by any means at their disposal. The “rejection of their applications confirmed […] the powerful propaganda role of patriotic songs and the activities of the Zlatni Dukati in a war-time situation,” and the government instead had them perform “on the very front lines, and at numerous charity concerts” (138), mobilizing them as a political instrument, a territorializing machine of martial affect.
As numerous studies demonstrate, discursive and other symbolic practices concerning wartime musical performance significantly impacted Croatian ideologies and actions during this period (Bonifačić 1998; Pettan 1998; Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998; Ceribašić 2000; Bogojeva-Magzan 2005; Baker 2010). Catherine Baker in particular has privileged the discursive framing of the past and present in musical texts, devoting an entire chapter of her book to what she calls the Presidential narrative of the war (2010, 11). I examine here how musical affect and related material forces mobilized individual and social bodies in wartime and postwar territories, blocking and otherwise impinging on discourses (subalternating ubiquitous representations) and ultimately “circulating and transforming official and unofficial historical narratives” to render history “as a feeling” (Gray 2014, 9). I begin with discourses on danger, or opasnost, that emerged in popular music—and acutely in tambura music. I reexamine narratives and other discursive formulations cited by tamburaši (and earlier scholarship) through the lens of race and show how these contributed associatively to the affective capacities of playing dangerously and coalesced into narratives of territorial reclamation and heroism. Taking up Lila Ellen Gray’s observation that “tidy chronologies and official historical narratives are sometimes displaced, giving way to a version of history that is such because it feels so” (9), I examine the particular dynamic of affective block that allows such feelings to dominate.
Narratives of the Push toward the Front Lines
Popular music groups referenced “danger” frequently in both wartime lyrics and discursive framings of their work for the armed resistance. For example, the rock band Opća Opasnost (Common Danger, a reference to Yugoslavia’s shelling of Croatian cities) sang numerous songs about Croatia’s war heroes. The band began forming in 1992 when two members were serving in Croatia’s 131st Brigade, uniting poetic textual address with physical military action (Radio Našice 2011). Marko Perković “Thompson,” whose rock career also started while he was serving in the Croatian Army and who, like Opća Opasnost, has collaborated with tamburaši, was criticized for lyrics suggesting aggressive military retaliation in Serbia in his hit war anthem “Bojna Čavoglave” (Čavoglave Battalion). Catherine Baker quotes a Croatian journalist defending the song as “‘not giv[ing] off an atmosphere of malign aggressiveness’ but just reflect[ing] the reality that ‘life is dangerous’” (Kuzmanović 1992, translated in Baker 2010, 38). Aggression and atmosphere (see chapter 4) were already common descriptors of musical affect, suggesting the author’s awareness of music’s potential to move beyond representation to something more pernicious, even as she denied this particular song’s culpability.
Opasnost and opasno (“dangerously”) became closely associated with the war’s effects during this time. In a wartime ethnography of Croatian public culture, Maja Povrzanović deemed fear “one of the most basic and intensive emotions” that “arises as an accompaniment to actual or anticipated danger” (1993, 121). Fear’s intensity as a response to wartime dangers imbued musical performance in Croatia during this period with capacities for aesthetic and affective elaborations of trauma. In tambura and other popular music genres, opasno and opasnost registered as a theme for compositional response to the destruction of battle and bombardment, as one way in which “culture redefines objective situations of danger and threat” and “the terrifying become[s] domesticized, ‘tamed’, or, at least—familiar” (147). Yet even as fear and danger yielded some of their intensity through mediation, the musical vehicles for this redefinition simultaneously became less domesticized, tamed, and familiar, participating in an excitingly dangerous intimacy “formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (Berlant 1998, 288).
Alongside invading Yugoslav forces, whose government and peoples they came to represent, neotraditional Serbian “folk” genres such as newly composed folk music (Novokomonovana narodna muzika) and turbo-folk became common targets. Croatian musicians, critics, and journalists denounced these musics’ encroachment on Croatian territories as dangerous. These genres have been popular among some Croats since before 1991. Yet as Catherine Baker demonstrates, Croatian media and society in general denigrated venues that played these musics as “dangerous places populated by gangsters, footballers, prostitutes and celebrities,” and journalists “employed various strategies to mark folk clubs as other and dangerous, such as the use of flood/invasion metaphors” (2010, 149, 153). The tamburaš Veljko Škorvaga restarted Požega’s “Golden Strings of Slavonia” tambura song festival in 1992 “to ‘create new Croatian music’ as ‘a substitute for folk music, especially the newly-composed music we were bombarded with for years,’” “warn[ing] of ‘a danger such a melos might return’” (Baker 2010, 67, citing Škorvaga in Topić 1992). “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors restored their own festival with specifically Catholic overtones, citing Marin Srakić, assistant bishop of the Đakovo-Srijem diocese, on this beloved music’s importance as an alternative to what he called the “racket” (buka) of the discotheques (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1995, 51).
This music’s perceived threat depended closely on its association with Serbs, whom official media often racialized as biologically foreign during this and earlier wars. Tomislav Longinović writes that the “abject position” of Serbs due to their historic colonial subjugation as “serfs” or “servants” (cognates of “Serb”) “makes them ‘black’ despite their genetic ‘whiteness’ in the eyes of the West” (2000, 642). Although “Serbian treatment of the Ottoman colonial heritage […] manifests European fear of contamination with an alien, ‘oriental’ civilization,” their “turbo folk features the ‘oriental’ sound as the essence of racial being and belonging, which it appropriates from the culture of Ottoman invaders as a metaphor of its own colonial power over other Yugoslav ethnic groups” (642). Associations of such invasive, destructive power with Serbian popular music registered in a primary-school textbook’s story of a boy who “had just started school when ‘they’, ‘some kind of bearded army’, arrived with ‘strange songs’ (as in the familiar news image of bearded Četnik paramilitaries occupying Vukovar) and ‘destroyed my city’” (Baker 2010, 44, citing Pilas 1997, 102–103).
Allusions to beards drew on reinvigorated constructions of ethnic difference. These harkened back to stylistic and military opposition between World War II–era Ustašas (extreme Croat nationalists with clean-cut visages who resembled their Nazi allies and Catholic clergy) and Četniks (extreme Serb nationalists sporting beards styled after Ottoman-era Serbian hajduk bandits and Orthodox priests) (Hayden 2013, 7–8). Emphasis on Serbs’ distinct physical features, including facial hair, dates back to the Ustašas’ “aggressive, militant language […] permeated by biological (and, therefore, materialistic) concepts, such as blood, race, and instinct” (Djilas 1991, 114). Though never formalized into a coherent racist theory, such language racialized Serbian enemies “in the same way in which the Nazis treated people they considered both racially inferior and racially dangerous” (119).
In Croatia in the early 1990s, similar sentiments registered beyond neo-Ustaša circles in popular songs about Četniks’ physical, biological, and therefore racial or even taxonomic difference. “[P]rimitives, non-humans, savages, hoofs are common denotations in [sung] statements about the enemy, whose behavior is explained as an animalistic or demonic nature” (Prica 1993, 53). The cover of Zlatni Dukati’s 1995 EP Nema više suživota (There’s no more coexistence) similarly represented Serbs as horned demons whose long, pointed teeth merge into beards as the monsters writhe upward from a can bearing a Serbian banner and resting on a map of Croatia. In turn, Serbian sources sometimes demonized returning Croats as “vampires” who, for instance, reentered Vukovar “like a dance macabre” with “horns, songs and provocations” (Berić 1998, 92). In challenging what they perceived as the combined encroachment of Serbian propaganda, turbo-folk, and neo-Četniks, several tambura bands working within official media advanced a particularly effective discourse: the narrative reclaiming of Croatian lands from Serbia’s physically dangerous army, politically dangerous media, and culturally dangerous music. As these and amateur ensembles confronted their fears and faced such external(ized) threats, feelings of intimacy and otherness also began to accrue around state media narratives of resisting Serbia as a racially dangerous people.
MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND AUTHORITY
To what extent, then, did such narratives also arise from the bottom up? Julia Kristeva notes that in much of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, she distinguished from the ideological tyranny of the thinker-cum-politician an important form of “authority no longer based on the notion of domination but on that of a nature composed of differences” (2000, 67). Kristeva reminds us that “the discourse proper to this other authority […] is, quite simply, narrative” (67). Narrative arises in service not of a sovereign singularity but of a unity of disparate subjects whose authority rests on a commonly analyzed and projected historical trajectory. As I argue here, the narrative of overcoming dangerous Others and their music using both rifles and tamburas resonated with Croat citizens for the authority and responsibility that it recognized and demanded at lower (nongovernmental) levels across the new country.
Philip Bohlman argues that “music intersects with nationalism not simply to narrate the past, but rather to contribute profoundly to the ways we perceive and understand the history of the present” (2008, 261). Michael Largey similarly writes that each of several “modes of cultural memory—recombinant mythology, vulgarization and classicization, diasporic cosmopolitanism, and music ideology—produces narratives that connect the present with an idealized past” (2006, 19). In 1990s Croatia, musicians’, ideologues’, and diasporic communities’ narratives of reclaiming territories recognized internationally as Croatian, and of pushing beyond to proximate intimates constituting a projected “Greater Croatia,” connected back to several periods embedded in nationalist cultural memory, each more idealized than the one succeeding it (see March 2013). In reverse chronological order, these include the short-lived, Axis-aligned Independent State of Croatia, formed in 1941; the Party of Rights’s mid-nineteenth-century self-determination project, which inspired later, Nazi-aligned separatists; and the medieval reign of King Tomislav, whose territories the Party of Rights sought to reconstitute as a sovereign state (Gow 2003, 229n8). The authority and responsibility vested in Croats through such narratives in the 1990s were rooted in reflections upon this succession of actions and near-successes.
Bohlman also argues that music “expressed national aspirations even before the rise of the modern nation-state” and “charted the landscape of struggles and great events that would inscribe the fate of the nation on its history” (2008, 253). Croatia’s past national movements were commemorated in nationalist musics long before it achieved independence. “[M]usical genres become narrative the moment they are enlisted in the service of the nation,” and such service rather than the realization of national aspirations enables this inscription of fate (250). With the advent of nation-states, however, national music, in which “reinforcing borders is not a primary theme,” shifted to nationalist music, which “often mobilises the cultural, even political, defence of borders” (250). The concern with territory and borders has certainly been a primary stake in Croatian musical nationalism and its engagement with the past. Yet Bohlman’s own narrative of evolving deployments of musical national narratives warrants an additional observation that I proffer throughout this chapter: narration of (and via) musical events inscribes the nation’s fate not only on its history but also on its present, which in war is lived and felt in service of the future (when the nation expects to fulfill its promised territorial defense or expansion). As suggested in Dubravka Ugrešić’s evaluation of Croatian wartime ideology, this required narrative as well as physical violence: “In the name of the present, a war was waged for the past; in the name of the future, a war against the present. In the name of a new future, the war devoured the future” ([1995] 1998, 6).
The emphasis on futurity in both pushing through occupied territories toward Croatia’s borders and narrating attempts and successes at realizing territorial sovereignty responded to physically proximate dangers and perceived threats. The fearsome, bearded, turbo-folk-driven, and sometimes racialized Četniks whom many Croatians perceived as threats certainly had their counterparts in actual Serb militiamen encountered in person or in official media. Their existence, however, frequently took on mythic qualities as racialization developed into animalization and demonization, paralleling the projection of a lack of human life onto Baranja and Eastern Slavonia (where only dangerous creatures were conceivable). The “fear of small numbers” provoked by minority Serb militias was all the greater for their perceived “cellular,” nonvertebral organization, which “destabilizes [society’s] two most cherished assumptions—that peace is the natural marker of social order and that the nation-state is natural guarantor and container of such order” (Appadurai 2006, 32–33). Narrations of musical and militaristic counters to perceived threats from within the nation-state, as well as actual armed attacks from the much larger Yugoslav army invasion, drew their force from the increasing intensity of experiences of fear (Povrzanović 1993). As Brian Massumi writes, “fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter” (2010, 54). Feeling the affective fact of threat as fear lent urgency to the actions (and their narration) through which musicians and other agents sought to create a future alternative to that which loomed in the presence of bearded Četniks. While actual histories of Četnik and Ustaša violence inflect narratives of future security, musical affect affords alternative moments of historical listening that block the rationalizable constructedness of cultural truths. This simultaneously makes cultural truths an aggregate of experience and understanding separate from (even subaltern to) affective fact and obstructs such truths’ surfacing for conscious deconstruction.
The abundance of narratives of Croatia’s push to reclaim and move beyond borderlands should not suggest a dwindling role for spatiality and materiality. Rather, discourse became imbricated with physical endeavors that must be considered simultaneously in order to ascertain their combined affective work in Croatian tambura music. As Michel Foucault has argued, “the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and canalized in every society […] by way of certain procedures whose task it is to subdue the powers and dangers of discourse, to evade its heavy and threatening materiality” (1984, 10–11). Such materiality, I argue, threatens not merely in accompanying discourse (unless properly controlled) but also in organizing discourse, especially narrative, with a force that states may not ultimately succeed in canalizing. It is to nonstate actors’ imbricated actions and narratives and their inspiration and divergence from official strategies that I now turn.
THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CROATIAN TAMBURA MUSIC
Of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s and youth orchestras’ several concerts in Croatia and nearby countries during the 2009–2010 school year, my longest fieldwork period, the most ambitious program was the society’s weeklong International Festival of Croatian Tambura Music. Organized each summer in Osijek and in other Croatian cities and enclaves (such as Sombor, Serbia; Pécs, Hungary; and Parndorf, Austria), this juried, noncompetitive festival brings together numerous tambura choirs and children’s, “junior” (youth), and “senior” (adult) tambura orchestras to perform for gold, silver, and bronze plaques.6 I attended most of the 2010 festival’s ten consecutive evening performances (May 14–23) and researched its history in archives in Osijek and Zagreb.
In 1961, seven years after its own founding, the STD “Pajo Kolarić” organized its first biennial Festival of the Tambura Music of Yugoslavia. Its eventual name change reflects a shift in the festival’s orientation from pan-Yugoslavian outreach to an embrace of Croatia and its intimates that closely parallels political events in the late 1980s and 1990s. This history held particular weight for the festivals’ organizers and participants, who quickly began to narrate its accomplishments in print.
In 1989 the festival still carried its original name, and booklets distributed to participants and audiences in the final years emphasize representation of ensembles from across Yugoslavia. The 1987 booklet states: “Our amateur-tamburaši from Subotica [Serbia], Varaždin [Croatia], Samobor [Croatia], Drniš and Posedarje [Dalmatia: Croatia’s coastal region], even all the way to Artiče in Slovenia, have demonstrated a high level of professional musicianship” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1987, 1). The 1989 festival booklet welcomed “one more druženje of tamburaši from our entire dear homeland” and noted representation for most Yugoslav republics (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1989, 5). The gerund druženje derives from družiti se (“to be friendly”) and connotes “friendly associating.” The booklet’s author stressed active processes of mingling, but druženje may also have the more general quality of “intimacy,” as it is also sometimes translated. Its root is drug, a noun used in Yugoslavia and later the Republic of Serbia to invoke a “comrade,” though Croats would abandon the term in favor of the synonym prijatelj (“friend”) as part of the Croatian language’s cleansing in the early 1990s.7 Having programmed ensembles from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Tuzla, Bosnia, the 1989 festival’s organizers celebrated broadening Yugoslavia’s tambura movement despite the growing financial crisis across Eastern Europe (7–8).8 Their booklet’s public articulation of druženje among Yugoslavia’s many regions and peoples was in keeping with STD “Pajo Kolarić’s” multiethnic composition and compliance with Yugoslav doctrine.
The 1991 festival did not convene, as militarization and violence that escalated from late 1990 led to full-scale war following Croatia’s declaration of independence in June 1991. In 1992 the festival organizers and “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors—with the exception of ethnic Serbs, one of whom told me that he could not work at “Pajo Kolarić” after the war’s outbreak due to assumptions that he supported “Četnik” militias—moved the event to Križevci, near Zagreb, which unlike Osijek had not been heavily shelled. The festival’s president, Professor Frano Dragun, wrote about their affective resilience, despite not being able to meet in Osijek, “the cradle of Croatian tambura”:
[B]arbarian hordes from the east and domestic Serbian highway robbers have disabled us […] devastating all that which not one army had ruined since the Roman Empire and its Mursa [Osijek’s antecedent.] Osijek has lost more than 800 of its Osijekans, and it has left more than 4,800 cripples on the conscience of those who have none at all. After all that our spirit is not destroyed. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1992, 6; my translation)
The event’s name—XVth Festival of Tambura Music of the Republic of Croatia in Osijek—emphasized its now explicitly Croatian orientation while connecting it to its previous fourteen meetings in Osijek and downplaying the alternative location. The “idealized past” (Largey 2006, 19) of this festival’s Croatian nature, implicit in the titular change, and the “inscri[ption of] the fate of the nation on its history” (Bohlman 2008, 253), evident in Dragun’s narration of Osijek’s enduring “spirit” over centuries of conquest, established an important connection between Croatian culture and spirit (whose Christian overtones I also explore in this chapter). These immaterial essences had remained and, Dragun suggested, would continue despite the physical destruction of buildings and people.9 The short 1992 festival comprised three concerts featuring nine orchestras from unoccupied Croatian regions. The only foreign ensemble was Slovenia’s group from the previous two festivals: the largely Croatian orchestra “Oton Župančić,” which performed as a guest of the festival. The festival’s geographically and ethnically narrower focus functioned as a bastion of Croatian culture, identity, and resilience in the midst of wartime violence.
REEXPANSION OF THE FESTIVAL
During the 1990s the festival’s media outlined an agenda for, and narrated, its expansion in two successive stages: (1) the festival’s return to Croatian cities ravaged and/or occupied during the war and (2) the inclusion of ensembles from Croatia’s intimates. I examine the second of these in a later section. The first stage began in October 1992, when the organizers arranged a special, nonjuried performance in the church on Osijek’s main square by three of the festival’s participating orchestras: “Pajo Kolarić,” Križevci’s ensemble, and “Ferdo Livadić” from Samobor. Reflecting on the event the following year, president Frano Dragun wrote that the
performance in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (popularly [known as] the Cathedral), the speech and the holy Mass of the illustrious bishop […], will remain permanently in the hearts and memory of numerous Osijekans, church dignitaries, the government and other guests. At last the tamburica, as our Croatian national instrument, has very successfully entered the sacral building. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation)
The festival’s return to Osijek reclaimed not only the bombarded city but also the Croatian Catholic Church. Religious institutions’ ostracism and official separation from socialist society had largely prevented public church concerts for decades. It had also been difficult to perform concerts honoring only Croatian musicians, instruments, and folklore within the doctrine of multinational Yugoslavian folklore, and “enter[ing] the sacral building” for a nationalistic concert doubly reclaimed space formerly under Yugoslavian legal and military control. Local Serbs, furthermore, were unlikely to attend a performance in a Croatian Catholic church, and selecting the “Cathedral” for the principally public concert effectively placed it in a space out of reach of the “enemy,” whether construed as Orthodox Serbs or atheistic Yugoslavs.10
This concert in Osijek’s largest Catholic church took place just four months after the bombardment of the city had ceased, and the war’s dangers and destruction were readily apparent to all who resumed playing there. The Croatian National Theater, which hosted many of the 1989 festival’s concerts, was heavily damaged by bombing in November 1991. Its position almost directly across Županijska Street from the “Cathedral” made its ravaged halls a poignant reminder of Osijek’s yearlong devastation. As ethnologist Lela Roćenović of the Samobor museum notes, the tambura orchestra “Ferdo Livadić” changed performance sites for her city’s 750th anniversary that year because the organizers were “well aware that public opinion would condemn playing and singing near the commemorative board” of the borough’s fallen soldiers (Roćenović 1993, 161). “Ferdo Livadić” and other participants’ subsequent performance in Osijek’s main church thus fit a broader pattern of relocating celebratory music from sites attesting to the war’s human and architectural casualties. Significantly, they chose a church: a space that had endured, both physically and spiritually, the socialist period and Yugoslav conflicts and that contrasted with the secular, physically compromised theater.
Osijek’s theater was only restored to performance condition in 1994, and several alternative spaces, often literally underground, harbored Osijek’s musical activity even before the bombing’s cessation. Recording and airing new pop songs symbolically resisted the bombing, and particular “importance was placed at that time on the creative act of composing” (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 169). A “rich palette of musical events […] took place at that time,” developing further in the months after the bombardment with events such as the festival’s culminating “Cathedral” concert (176).
The symbolic reclamation by STD “Pajo Kolarić” of Croatian territory continued in May 1993, when the event (now larger and renamed the Festival of Croatian Tambura Music in Osijek) returned home. It has continued to meet there annually ever since (twice as often as before the war). Affirming the connection between musical activity and the war effort, Frano Dragun wrote of the “massive” 1993 festival that “in spite of the proximity of the [war’s] front line, economic hardships, and internal and international tensions, WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy, so on the front line, thus also in culture” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation). The 1993 festival also featured a Mass with tambura music in the “Cathedral.” Duško Topić, who prepared a special tambura accompaniment (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 180), directed the performance by the Folklore Choir and Orchestra of his recently renamed Croatian Cultural-Artistic Society “Osijek 1862” (hereafter HKUD “Osijek 1862”).11 The festival’s many orchestras from all over Croatia, even Dalmatia (where tambura music historically was not prominent), evinced widening interest in the tambura as a Croatian instrument within “national integration ideology” and in reviving Croatian patriotic and religious songs banned in Yugoslavia (Bogojeva-Magzan 2005, 108–109). As Ruža Bonifačić argues, this growing interest was due in part to the military and political involvement of professional bands such as Zlatni Dukati, whose service helped establish them as Croatia’s most popular musicians (1998, 138).
AGENTS OF MUSICAL NARRATIVES
Such ideology and support for military and political resistance to Yugoslavia are also evident in Dragun’s selection and capitalization of the pronoun “WE.” This term held a particularly territorializing capacity in 1990s Croatia, since “boundaries and territory, the key issues at stake in Eastern Slavonia, were fundamental to establishing or reinforcing a distinctive Croatian national identity—a means of defining the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Klemenčić and Schofield 2001, 48). The pronoun “I” largely disappeared from Croatian popular music, becoming associated with Serbian romantic songwriter subjectivities (Crnković 2001, 38), while “us,” “we,” and especially “our” strongly encapsulated “the abstract nation” during the 1990s (45). Citizens’ common term of endearment for Croatia became lijepa naša (our beautiful), an abbreviation of the Croatian national anthem “Our Beautiful Homeland.”
In this way citizens constituted discursively and through physical acts of proximity and intimacy what Alexei Yurchak has termed a “public of svoi [ours]” (2005, 116).12 In postsecession Croatia, however, the result was not the deterritorialized milieu of Yurchak’s Soviet public but a territorialization of public sociality through the state, its lands, and its borders. Discursive formulations of “us” and “them” in the former Yugoslavia most typically connote racial or ethnic (as opposed to gender or age) distinction. Interlocutors frequently asked me Jesi li naš? (“Are you ours?”). This question can pertain to shared ethnicity or shared citizenship, but the latter is folded into the former, since Croats abroad acquire citizenship by virtue of ethnicity. Croats who learned that I was not from the Croatian diaspora often expressed surprise that a non-Croat would research “their” music. As I argued previously, this territorialization itself was a means of becoming by virtue of setting the minoritarian “WE” onto new lines of flight from the majoritarian Yugoslav collective. This went hand in hand with racializations of Serbian Others, surfacing both in explicit discourse on biological difference and in more broadly interpretable commentaries on belonging based on ethnicity and citizenship (“WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy”).
This division into a culturally supreme “us” and a musically, militarily, and at times racially inferior “them” paralleled popular songs’ emphasis on religious and ethnic differences (Baker 2010, 25). Following Ceribašić (2000), Baker notes that gender, too, framed important distinctions, though implicitly (within narrative roles rather than within “us” and “them” narratives); women mostly sang emotional and prayerful rather than expository songs, though they “were more likely to be ‘expository’ than men purely ‘emotional’” (2010, 28). Of Meri Cetinić’s famous “Zemlja dide mog” (My granddad’s country), Baker comments: “Cetinić’s narrator remembered her grandfather telling her about ‘people not like us’ and looked to a day when a well-known person (presumably a euphemism for an enemy who did not need naming) would want to take the land. ‘We’ would not let go of it” (28). The juxtaposition of an unnamed, hostile Other with a specified “us” parallels the contrast in detail between an unspecified zlotvor (evildoer) and the concrete agents “we,” “Šokci,” and “peaceful people” in male artists’ recordings such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (whose call for the Drava and Danube Rivers to address the world draws closely on “Our Beautiful Homeland’s” plea for the Drava, Sava, Danube, and sea to tell the world of the Croat’s love for his people).
For Arendt, as Kristeva writes, the “essence of narration” is not “coherence intrinsic to the narrative, that is, as the art of storytelling”; what matters instead “is to recognize the moment of the achievement and to identify the agent of the history/story” (Kristeva 2000, 55). The emphasis on “us/we/ours” in narrative songs, festival publications, and government proclamations and agendas recognized and proclaimed the agents of Croatian wartime resilience. History is necessarily idealized as the narrator constructs a narrative out of “true history”; as Kristeva herself argues, the “art of narrative lies in its ability to condense the action down to an exemplary period of time, to take it out of the continuous flux, and to reveal a who” (55). Thus the “who/we,” through this revelation, becomes separated from “them.” Idealized histories of past distinction interject to confirm the truth of racial and religious difference, despite or perhaps in response to the decades-long propagation of alternative truths in Yugoslavia. The created agent’s remainder—the Other—becomes an all-too-familiar, perhaps intimately known, yet ultimately unnamable enemy or barbarian, for to name it would be to create another “who.” At most, such media reduce enemies to the pronoun “they” (oni), which in Croatian and Serbian is also the deictic “those” and thus “function[s] in a heightened indicative way” (Tomlinson 2015, 311n1). Only intimate, wartime knowledge of the Other makes the term sensible. Unlike “we” (mi), oni implies distance, either physical or personal, for to apply this pronoun rather than proper names to those present is considered rude (Đurašković 2007). “We” is the agent of an ever-new narrative and the subject of an intimate becoming that generates closeness with others who are “ours” and distances those who are not, while “they/those” is the term of an intimately distant minor presence.13
Yet an agent—a “who”—does not suffice to generate narrative. As Kristeva writes: “The actor alone, no matter how heroic his exploit, does not constitute the marvelous action. Action is marvelous only if it becomes memorable. […] It is the spectators who bring the story/history to completion, and they do so by virtue of the thought that comes after the act, and this is accomplished via recollection” (2000, 54). The constant acts of spectation, audition, and recollection that contributed to the narratives of independent Croatia involved, first, the narrators themselves: pedagogues and tambura promoters such as the festival’s president, Frano Dragun, and songwriters such as Antun Nikolić “Tuca.” Yet they soon sought ever broader publics: festival participants, local audiences (the public of svoi), the state, its citizens, its intimates (near and far), and finally the “world.” Reaching spectators beyond the local and prompting their thoughts and recollections required further acts: moving into occupied lands and reestablishing physical contact with communities beyond territories under Croatia’s legal or practical sovereignty. These acts in turn warranted further recollection and narration. Thus within narratives of Croatian resilience and territorial reclamation we can recognize deep dependence on physical acts, not just as sources of histories/stories, but also as a means of producing actors and spectators. In this oscillation between discursive and physical endeavors, musicians and audiences heightened and blocked in aggregate one another’s divinely guided affective resilience (spirit) as they reterritorialized themselves on the Croatian state.
FORMERLY OCCUPIED TERRITORIES AND CROATIA’S INTIMATES AT THE FESTIVAL
Building a resilient population and state demanded new spectators and agents, and the widening of participation in tambura music within Croatia also extended to involving Croatia’s intimates. Starting in 1993, the CFU provided general sponsorship for the festival. For the 1994 festival, which officially convened “under the auspices of the Republic of Croatia’s president Dr. Franjo Tuđman,” CFU president Bernard Luketich wrote: “We are especially honored that this year’s Festival theme is ‘all for one, one for all’ because it has also been the slogan of our Union for one hundred straight years” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1994, 69; my translation). Luketich specifically mentioned Osijek as an important guardian of the Croatian tambura tradition, and he had a close personal connection to its festival; Željko Čiki, assistant to the festival’s president (later its president, and executive director of the HKUD “Osijek 1862”), was also godfather to Luketich’s grandson, Derek Luketich Hohn, who became a well-known semiprofessional tambura musician and instructor in Pittsburgh.
The war was not over in 1994. The Yugoslavian Army would shell Zagreb in 1995 in retaliation for Croatia’s Operation Flash offensive, which retook lands held by the Republika Srpska Krajina (Republic of Serbian Krajina, or Borderland). Battles were renewed over parts of the Krajina along the Bosnian border, which significant Serbian populations had assisted in temporarily seceding from Croatia; these eventually terminated with the signing of peace agreements in Erdut, Croatia, and Dayton, Ohio. Osijek’s troops participated in these efforts, but the violence was now no longer close to their own homes.
As Osijek’s own wartime suffering subsided, songwriters and festival publications refocused their attention on nearby territories recently occupied by the Yugoslavian army and subsequently (until 1998) controlled by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES). As Baker notes, during the siege of Vukovar, Zlatni Dukati and its manager/arranger Josip Ivanković began releasing new songs about this severely damaged East Croatian city, which was close to their hometowns. They declared in the magazine Arena: “We will be the first to enter Vukovar with tamburas! We played in that holy Croatian city last and that power does not exist that can impede us in this intention” (Stažić 1995; also cited in Baker 2010, 41; my translation). The description of Vukovar as “holy” is significant, as the reestablishment of religious practice was closely associated with Croatian independence and tambura music and resembles Frano Dragun’s earlier statement about the tambura reentering Osijek’s “sacral building.” Using music to reclaim occupied territories, make these achievements audible on Croatian media, and hail a public of spectators/auditors to validate these feats through their narration became a common and religiously charged endeavor in the mid-1990s.
The 1996 festival booklet discusses the organizers’ desire to move the festival into occupied territories. Frano Dragun noted that they were holding the festival under
complicated socio-political and economic conditions. A part of Lijepa naša that is situated immediately alongside us still is not free. Consequently we cannot also present part of our Festival’s program in our Croatian and once beautiful [city of] Vukovar, the picturesque Ilok or the rich Beli Manastir.
But, we firmly believe that we will realize our idea […] in 1997. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1996, 9; my translation)
To support this idea and tambura music’s further spread throughout Croatia, the organizers of the festival decided to reinstate the Croatian Tambura Alliance (CTA) in Osijek. They emphasized renewing rather than creating the 1937 Alliance, which had ceased to exist after World War II “due to well-known reasons”—a reference to the abolition of specifically Croatian institutions in postwar Yugoslavia, whose coded nonrecognition (non-narration) resembles the non-naming of well-known enemies in 1990s Croatian songs (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1996, 8). Plans for the upcoming festival’s move into occupied territories were foremost among the renewed CTA’s concerns.
