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INTRODUCTION

Dangerous Playing and Affective Block

May 2010: “Even as a child he played dangerously,” Damir told me, referring to the Croatian American tambura virtuoso Peter Kosovec, whose recordings we were discussing as we drove through the Croatian city of Slavonski Brod. Damir was himself a well-respected performer of the berda (or bas tambura, the lowest member of a family of plucked, fretted tambura chordophones that had reemerged as Croatia’s national instruments in the 1990s during Yugoslavia’s wars of dissolution); he knew Peter from North American tours that he (Damir) had made with his Slavonski Brod tambura band. Damir also knew Peter from the tambura compositions that the latter had been writing and recording since 1994 (when the Michigan-born tamburaš¹ was thirteen years old) and premiering since 1997 at the Golden Strings of Slavonia festival in the nearby city of Požega. There, Kosovec’s speed and deftness in improvising solos of great technical complexity, wide pitch range, and daring interchange between chromatic and diatonic scales had earned him an even wider reputation as someone who could play as “dangerously” (opasno) as any contemporary tamburaš.

Numerous well-respected tambura players in Croatia, as well as in Croatian communities in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary, made similar comments about Jerry Grcevich’s abilities. The famous tambura player, composer, and NEA National Heritage fellow, then in his fifties, had involved Kosovec in several Pittsburgh-area projects, including the band Gipsy Stringz, and was still largely regarded as one of the tambura world’s finest bandleaders, composers, and virtuosi. The attribution to these two Croatian American men of “playing dangerously” was an implicitly gendered appraisal of musical bravado and the highest form of praise a Croatian musician could bestow on a fellow male tamburaš. It evinced the intimate familiarity and respect with which musicians across a transnational Croatian tambura performance network regarded one another’s fast and progressive techniques on this popular, traditional, and nationally charged instrument.

Yet as the term itself suggests, playing dangerously, if ideally progressive and thereby stimulating in its virtuosic technical execution, also threatens with a transgressive power, a sonic capacity for an affective mix of excitement and fear. This is due in no small part to the common recognition across the former Yugoslavia of dangerous playing, less in Croatian or Serbian than in Romani performance, with its associations of racial, geographic, cultural, and sometimes religious Otherness.² Take, for example, “Lijepe Ciganke” (Beautiful Gypsy women), a recording by Bosnian singer Halid Bešlić, who with this and other popular newly composed folk music hits has dominated Croatian music markets and venues since its release in 2003.³ The text sets the song’s nighttime scene of “crazily” performing tamburas and Romani dancers with an evocative opening line describing older Cigani “playing dangerously” as the scent of “wine and smoke” wafts in on the breeze.⁴ For a Croatian, Serbian, or other non-Rom tamburaš, playing dangerously warrants praise from that musician’s peers but also risks transgressing into the often revered yet (allegedly) socially and corporally deleterious practice of the Cigan: the crazed “Gypsy” nightlife and unrestrained affect attributed to Roma musicians and their clientele (and associated especially with Croatia’s religiously distinct [Orthodox] neighbor Serbia). Thus another Croatian musician told me in somewhat halting English at a gathering of Croatia’s finest tamburaši that Jerry, who played most dangerously of all, “is Gypsy faah-cker.” He noted that this was a joke but claimed that “all” of Grcevich’s Croatian peers referred to him in this way.⁵ This appellation attests to the social, cultural, and (perhaps sexually) embodied transgression that musicians risk by playing in a style (and in groups such as Gipsy Stringz) that can earn them distinction on Croatia’s “national” instrument but also possibly inscribe them in the sonic and affective realm of racialized Others and the reverence and suspicion accorded to their style.

NATIONAL INTIMACY, RACIAL DANGER

This book is about performing dangerously and the intimacies that such affective transgressions jeopardize but may also engender. While tracing these intimacies’ development in precarious contexts of war and postwar states, it argues that music’s danger lies primarily in its power to affect individuals and communities in ways that counter rationalist ideologies, discourses, and narratives that otherwise dominate social ordering. Musical affect is dangerous, however, not because it is divorced from conscious thought, as contended in much affect theory, or because it represents purely the frightening unknown. Rather, affect’s close dialectical relationship with discourse, narrative, and even ideology is what makes it dangerous: its capacity to subsume (and its more limited capacity to be subsumed by) rationalizations of cultural, religious, and racial boundaries such as those that have been enforced among Croats, Roma, and Serbs, particularly since Croatia’s 1991 declaration of independence and war with Yugoslavia. Music’s common reception as both cultural text and somatic experience makes it particularly salient in the affective and discursive dynamics of race. As Adriana Helbig writes of the emergence of “the notion of race as an explanatory variable of inequality” after Ukraine’s 2004–2005 revolution, “music helps make this type of discourse accessible and malleable on various levels and allows performers and audiences to engage and maneuver through complex mazes of previously unarticulated ideas” (2014, 22). In this sense, music can become both useful and threatening.

This monograph examines in particular the roles that such dangerous affects and racialized feelings play in a national music. The tambura’s national status has emerged in waves over the past two centuries of Croatian history, even as musicking on the tambura—or tamburanje (“tambur-ing”), as such activities are known to practitioners—comprises a diverse set of practices that persistently cross national and racial boundaries, as well as those of genre and style. As such, Playing It Dangerously refers not only in a narrow sense to the particular virtuosity to which many tamburaši aspire but also broadly to the multiple transgressions that tamburanje has mobilized, elicited, and enabled as musicians, rather than playing it safe, have countered physical and social threats during and following the “Homeland War” with Yugoslavia.⁶ The transgressions that make such performance dangerous have been messy and often contradictory, at times breaking with Croatian ideals of Catholic and European behavior while simultaneously confronting the war’s physical threats to churches and other sites of national resistance.

This is not to say that tambura music’s contexts are always so serious; the gerund tamburanje connotes jocularity in addition to performance and is a play on the word tamburaš, reinterpreted not as a noun (its proper usage) but as a verb conjugated into the second person singular, with -aš humorously suggest ing the meaning “you tambura.” When not connoting actual harm or threats, the adjective “dangerous,” opasan (fem. opasna), can even refer humorously and deprecatingly to someone who “presents himself as worthy but isn’t” (Hrvatski jezični portal; my translation), linking the idea of danger to good-natured boasting and slights. Yet in striking contrast, musicians expressed deep earnestness when describing their peers as playing dangerously, privileging the adverbial form (which has retained its more serious connotations)⁷ and reintroducing humor as a distancing mechanism only when the intensities of playing dangerously were felt to risk too much. The concept’s flexibility in describing a range of lighter and more intense feelings highlights the dynamic relationship between discourse and the affects that it responds to and channels. It also speaks to a continuum of intimacies with racially or geographically distanced musicians such as local Roma and foreign-born Croats and the wielding of musical feeling as a resource that can distribute acts of inclusion along various axes of discursive meaning.

The danger in the practices considered here, far from deterring musicians and fans, accentuates their affective capacities and constitutes them as the locus of a delicate yet intense, sometimes even threatening, intimacy operating within and between Southeast European communities. The eliciting on a transnational plane of a danger that is desirable for its corporeal excitement and of an intimacy that threatens in its binding (even as it comforts) affords an ideal opportunity to examine the materiality of musical nationalism and racialization in the wake of regime change and violence. This book elucidates the musical unfolding of the recent past and ethnographic present through the interconnections of two assemblages: reterritorialized geographies of public consciousness and national sentiment (Croatia and its intimates) that tambura music has helped to reconfigure since Croatia’s war with Yugoslavia; and affective experiences and responses in which musicians feel (do not merely discourse on) racialization and closeness in the bodies, relationships, and spaces that they incarnate.

This book is ultimately about the material work of musical affect in generating intimacy, aggression, and racialized sensibilities in contexts of physical and social danger. Taking musical performance as an illustrative confluence of affective, linguistic, and somatic faculties, it examines how new understandings arise and coalesce around terms such as “dangerously” and “Cigan” through both embodied and discursive modalities and through the continuities and differentials between them that change dynamically in the spaces of musical ritual and encounter. Asking what happens when musicians’ feelings conflict with their thoughts, I introduce the concept of affective block to theorize the musical and sensorial responses that aggregate in the body beyond (yet variably inclusive of) systems of conscious thought, social discourse, and cultural referentiality. These responses constitute a block—an aggregation of intensities and desires (often complex or unspecified) that amounts to a sense of selfness and Otherness and that holds capacities for both sequestered resilience and outright emergence through what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call “becoming” ([1980] 1987)—yet they also are able—unless strategically controlled—to block: to circumvent and supersede referential understandings that are configured and learned socially.

Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “becoming” provides an important framework for the confluence of affect, race/ethnicity, and territory, especially in the first half of this book. Becoming, as a process of simulation, is less about resemblance than feeling; it “is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming” ([1980] 1987, 272). Performing and listening to music are ready modalities for establishing these relations, yet it is important to distinguish their role here from the identity work of racializing musics analyzed by scholars such as Adriana Helbig (2014). “Becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone,” rather it “is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 272, 259). It does not refer to conscious identification or higher-level representations, whether of subject positions or of underlying psychological states; rather, its signification, its simulation, is of a term (ethnic, gendered, etc.) in which one invests considerable feeling. This may align with the nominal identity one is perceived to have or may differ dramatically (something one becomes only temporarily). This makes it a useful analytic for understanding race, particularly in Eastern European countries where, as Anikó Imre notes, racial understanding frequently informs national consciousness without the term “race” ever being used or acknowledged (2005, 84).

Becomings may be associated with specific territories (see Tomlinson 2016), yet also involve a deterritorialization, such as when musicians employ the affect of performing intensely or dangerously for (at least) temporary release. It is a release from feelings of belonging to national communities and lands and a release into the affective realm of the Other (here the term “Gypsy”—not actual Roma but the figure of the Cigan—is the deterritorialized, nomadic, even fantastic object of becoming par excellence). Becoming may be especially important in tambura milieus, where “race-thinking” (Arendt [1951] 2004) is perhaps unusually fraught in that Serbs and Croats often speak in kinship terms of their shared ancestry and history, a symbolism borne out in the practical signification of their commonality (e.g., recognition of physical resemblance in the absence of reliable phenotype markers of intergroup differences). Yet as Tomislav Longinović (2000) writes, musical differences nonetheless frequently stand in for (or justify assumptions of) biological distinction. Roma, on the other hand, who migrated to Europe from South Asia centuries ago, mutually construct with South Slavs a divide based upon skin color, regional/continental origin, and affective proclivities, yielding a decidedly racial discourse of difference. As my research shows, however, Roma for these reasons are often more likely subjects of becoming for South Slavs than South Slavic groups are for one another. In Croatia, I witnessed Croat and Serb tamburaši imitating one another’s performance practices humorously but never embodying them with the earnestness and feeling with which they imbued their flights into Romani modalities of playing. In Pittsburgh, a notion of common, marked East European whiteness did admit Croat-Serb becomings, but Romani music still facilitated an even higher level of affective expression and corporeal abandon. On both continents, I observed Roma musicians navigating a strategic, contextually dependent boundary between becoming-white/European and cultivating their own becoming-Roma/Cigan.

“Becoming” affords a fruitful way of navigating these affective investments ethnographically, for unlike an identity, which typically is opposed by another identity in tautological signification, a becoming may also be opposed by a nonbecoming. Engaging intensively with strains of ethnomusicology that bring ethnographic attention to musical styles and scenes saturated with affective labor and listening (e.g., Gray 2014; Tatro 2014; Hofman 2015), as well as work in affect theory, especially the positing of affect’s autonomy from signification (e.g., Massumi 1996), this book also makes a deliberate departure from them. In addition to the affective intensities highlighted in such scholarship, this book not only considers the “ordinary affects” of the “everyday” (Stewart 2007, 2) but also calls for attention to affect’s proscription, to its absences, to nonbecomings, to resistance to the dangerous affects of the musicking Other (even while attending to these affects’ simultaneous resilience).

Though her ethnographic commitment is ultimately to affective (melancholic) depths, such a departure is suggested in Denise Gill’s work on Turkish classical music. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s notion that affective relations “involve the transformation of others into objects of feeling” (2004, 11), Gill argues that emotions “differentiate the boundary between the ‘I’ and other objects in our social worlds” (2017, 16). Paralleling her focus not on what melancholy “is” but rather on what it “is for,” I argue that sometimes such a culturally situated feeling is for avoiding (though not ignoring). This avoidance is just as central to differentiating boundaries: between oneself and an other who is perceived to embody that feeling, between oneself and an Otherness that is embodied feeling.

Sara Ahmed has more recently turned from the “I” to the collective “we” to consider diversity work and connections across such boundaries. She frames their challenges as a wall against diversity (“the feeling of coming up against something that does not move”) and a will that either “allows [diversity] to accumulate positive affective value” and “encourages people to do something” or else “is made out of sediment: what has settled and accumulated over time” (2012, 26, 67, 129). In the latter case, institutionalized resistance to including Others (racialized, affective, etc.) does not require individual actors to make the wall “into an object of will. No individual has to block an action that is not continuous with what has already been [collectively, institutionally] willed” (129). The feelings and intentionality undergirding a collective will for the status quo form a habit of continuation that needs no utterance or deliberate willing until “a decision is made that is discontinuous with the institutional will”; the “gap between the signs of will (the [discursive] yes or will to diversity) and institutional will (the no or the wall [internalized, affective block] to diversity) is noticeable only when one attempts to cross a limit” (129). Thus race-thinking also has a basis in feeling that is not coterminous with its ideological underpinnings.

This incongruence of feeling and thinking comes to a head at the crossing of a threshold. The “racial contract” regarding the social place of whiteness and diversity reveals itself most clearly in contestations of values and “the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage” (and other emotions) with respect to the disparate societal lots of racially differentiated groups (Mills 1997, 101). It is the tension between the collective, social will (particularly its affective dimensions) and individual agency of crossing limits that this book examines, emphasizing the boundaries of appropriate musical feeling, comportment, and technique—and how musicians (especially musical Others) expose these limits by crossing them.

Thus Playing It Dangerously examines musical affect as a cultural resource rather than essence—as an important but often overlooked instrument that individuals cultivate (block in aggregation) or stave off (block in delimitation) in order to jar larger social assemblages out of affective habitus that they perceive to be dangerous (in either a positive or a deleterious sense). Affect plays a critical role within what sociologist Ann Swidler, in retheorizing culture from the standpoint of strategy rather than values, called a “‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (1986, 273). Like discourse, affect as a cultural “tool” is subject to constraint and strategy as well as to excess and abandon. Approaching music’s relationship to race, nation, danger, and intimacy in diverse contexts within postwar Croatia and its neighboring and diasporic enclaves, this book argues that musical affect’s power and primacy lie in its flexibility: its alternate mobilization and denial in the conflicts, reconciliations, and becomings through which musical selves and societies emerge.

POSITIONALITIES AND THE ALTERITY OF REPRESENTATION

I myself felt and witnessed such conflicts, reconciliations, and becomings as I researched tambura music’s social and geographical movement between 2007 and 2015. My longest periods of intensive research were during the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 academic years, which I spent, respectively, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among the Steel City’s Croatian, Romani, and Serbian enclaves, and in the Croatian cities of Osijek and Slavonski Brod (I completed additional fieldwork in subsequent years and in nearby countries, including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, and Serbia). The physical dangers of the 1990s conflicts, except for landmines remaining untriggered in a few rural areas, had largely faded by 2007 and were not directly a part of what I experienced in any of these countries, whose communities were exceedingly warm and generous in their hospitality. Simultaneously, I was continually impressed by two matters relating to my own racialized and ethnicized profile: (1) the territorializing effects of my presence in Croatia and elsewhere when I failed to confirm my interlocutors’ expressed assumptions that I was one of “theirs” from the diaspora who had come to study “our” music; and (2) the lasting effects of the years of war (1991–1995) on the diverse ways in which my interlocutors figured and felt me as a territorialized and racialized, or race-thought, being—as white, as a Scot, as an American, as an Australian, and so forth.

That I was born in Australia and that I had grown up largely in the United States, countries where large Southeast European communities maintain what literary scholar Svetlana Boym calls “diasporic intimacy” (2001, 253), informed in constantly shifting ways a number of important research modalities. These ranged from my reception into the tutelage of Jerry Grcevich and my mobility as his student and friend within musical circles in Europe, to my being invited to serve as the beginning tambura instructor for the Slavonian Tambura Society “Pajo Kolarić” in 2009 and 2010, to the coaching I received from Damir and musicians of various backgrounds on how to appreciate and feel the dangerous playing of Grcevich and Kosovec as well as “my own” musical heritage and the tambura styles of other specific peoples and territories. My surprising lack of familial connection to tambura music and Southeast Europe, as well as the fact that I had connections to both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches while being a practitioner of neither, facilitated to a certain extent my movement between different groups.

At times this cultural and religious distance seemed even to amplify the status that I held as a researcher funded by American institutions, for I was perceived as having come from a country of great economic wealth, musical variety, and global ignorance, and all rather improbably “because of the sound of the tamburica,” as one Osijek newspaper put it (Sekol 2010; my translation). That appreciation for tambura music’s sonic dimensions and an interest in its embeddedness in contemporary urban geography had attracted me against all odds seemed constantly to intrigue my tamburaši interlocutors. To an extent this was due to differing connotations of my professed field of ethnomusicology; many of my interlocutors expected that, as an ethnomusicologist, I had come to learn local folkloric knowledge that Croatian scholars had written up and/or that folklore ensembles had preserved in their arrangements (both written and performed), but the project that I outlined instead was, in the words of one tamburaš, “closer to sociology.” This pointed to another difference in my scholarly interest from that of many of my interlocutors, however: my expressed aim was to trace tambura music’s role and the instrument’s usage in particular in the geography of my research and in relations among diverse populations. I took interest in individual and group claims to the instrument and to particular music traditions as belonging to and representative of specific ethnic groups, but also strove to identify and offer an ethnographic platform for diverse perspectives within our lived local realities (which individual narratives of tradition sometimes left out). This work intensified as I came to recognize the importance of affect and other nondiscursive tambura relations. I have usually framed my study as examining the tambura’s role in the local area (“here,” as I would tell my interlocutors). Both in the research and in this ethnography I am ethically committed to representing the passions, generosity, desires, and challenges of people occupying distinct (and sometimes opposed) ethnic/racialized, gendered, religious, and socioeconomic positionalities.

Responding to this ethical challenge has required not just a careful representation of alterity but also a deliberate alterity of representation. My relationships with musicians and audiences were diverse and invariably affected by our “reciprocal witnessing” (MacMillen 2015) of differing degrees and dimensions of commonality and otherness. The landscape of the music that is “here” (in Osijek, in Pittsburgh, etc.), as my research bore out and as minority perspectives in particular demanded be recognized, sometimes conflicted with the narratives that other interlocutors asked me to communicate from my perceived position as an outsider who was gaining both the authority and the access needed to represent my field sites in print (see chapter 3). I have worked extensively with Croat, Rom, and Serb musicians in each of my main field sites, and also to a more limited extent with people of other ethnoreligious (typically Muslim Bosniak or Catholic Hungarian) communities. In postwar Croatia, tambura music is an arena in which these three ethnic groups rarely perform together, and while my moving among different circles has been possible and ethnographically fruitful, it has not universally been encouraged or well received.

In this ethnography, I prioritize a balance between representing tambura discourses narrated from different ethnic positionalities and mediating data gleaned from alternative sites as I examine the broader material geography (affective, sonic, and spatial) that connects musicians and audiences of diverse backgrounds. Such an analytical move, though by no means unilateral or permanent, aims at making overt representations Other, alter, even subaltern to the material realities that so often channel them in lived experience (but that so often evade the representation-oriented, hegemonic hermeneutics of both musicians and scholars). While the interest of many Croatian Serb and Roma minorities in representing tambura music’s role singularly within their own bounded ethnic traditions paralleled that of numerous Croat counterparts, many minorities also demonstrated a vested interest in a project that would focus ethnographic attention on their contributions to the diversity of tambura music in Croatia. My research engaged with some individuals whose politics of identifying as Croats could not support this vision of Croatia’s tambura landscape, but I was encouraged by the number who did support it. This book examines the discursive tropes in which ethnic (typically racialized) positionalities have become entrenched, as well as the potential of affective strategies and counterdiscourses to block them and advance the alternative, progressive postwar politics of reconciliation that many of my interlocutors have been promoting.

Beyond race and ethnicity, however, it was the dimensions of me as an individual that were unsurprising—and perhaps least challenging—that were often most important to my integration into tambura scenes. Like most tamburaši, I was a white, male musician with enough time and economic resources (albeit paid in advance as research funding rather than received as compensation for performance) to dedicate ample amounts of my attention to the trade and to the jovial, often reckless carryings-on of the bećar (“bachelor” or “rake”) lifestyle associated with playing dangerously and with tamburanje more generally. However salient, these aspects of my selfhood often went unspoken and registered most prominently in the affective exchanges and bonds in which musicians included me. These constituted some of the most important field experiences of my project.

HISTORY, MATERIALITY, AND SPACE

If, as I argue, it is necessary to consider the limits to the autonomy of such affect and to the saturation of musical feeling, it also became clear through my interactions and communications with musicians that a study of this nature could too easily veer dangerously in the opposite direction, examining solely the roles of ideology and discourse, as though these, too, were autonomous. Studies of music’s role in the structures and physical events of Croatian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Blažeković 1998; Majer-Bobetko 1998; March 2013), particularly during and since the war following Croatia’s 1991 secession from Yugoslavia (Bonifačić 1998; Pettan 1998; Ceribašić 2000; Baker 2010), have largely focused on the power of songs and musicians to articulate specific nationalist ideas, narratives, discourses, rhetorics, and systems of thinking. In this they engage a large body of ethnomusicological literature concerned with the ideological constitution and discursive construction of nations around the globe (Turino 2000; Wade 2000; Askew 2002; Radano 2003; Bohlman 2004; Largey 2006; Brinner 2009; Kotnik 2010; McDonald 2013). This book similarly takes discourse and ideology seriously, analyzing how expressed conceptualizations of race, danger, and intimacy have guided performance practices undertaken in the name of nations and states.

Within such integral elements of immaterial nationalist culture, however, loom very concrete, material consequences for citizens. They must constantly negotiate ideology as they confront the repression of state apparatuses (Althusser 1971, 142) and also deal with the procedures by which “the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and canalized [in order] to subdue the powers and dangers of discourse, to evade its heavy and threatening materiality” (Foucault 1984, 10–11). To acknowledge that such materiality nonetheless undergirds ideologies and discourses requires, first and foremost, a recognition of their constitution in affective, embodied perception. As Tim Ingold has argued, “any attempt to separate out the discourse surrounding vision” or “any other sensory modality” from “the actual practices of looking, watching, and seeing is unsustainable. […] For what is discourse, if not a narrative interweaving of experience born of practical, perceptual activity?” (2000, 286).

This acknowledgment requires, second, an appreciation for ideologies’ and discourses’ mutually constitutive relationship with physical space. Rather than taking national territory as a given material dimension whose assumedly limited and static nature implicitly justifies focusing on the deconstruction of dynamic nationalist discourses and ideologies, this book follows musicians’ (and my own ethnographic) mobility across bounded territories. It examines how physical movement in space and within/between musical bodies variously produces, shapes, delimits, and subverts material experiences and discursive understandings of the nation in flux. Interrogating a priori assumptions by both academics and nationalists about immaterial culture’s rule over physical action, it situates narratives of musical nation-building, discourses on dangerous racial aesthetics, and ideologies of gendered and religious power in the material bases of sonic affect and intimate musical spatialization (Krims 2007). The latter are in turn shaped by narratives, discourses, and ideologies, but significantly, they operate also at the level of desire, motivating the transnationalisms, transracialisms, and other transgressions that characterize the paradoxically centripetal pull of playing it dangerously. Thus the analyses that follow comprise a study of intimacy—of national intimates—rather than an examination of the machinations of musical nationalism in the context of a particular folk and its state.

The book’s chapters focus primarily on the transnational engendering of and threats to such intimacy since the outbreak of war in 1991, a period that I examine ethnographically and through histories of the recent past researched through interviews and in archives. Tambura music is not the only medium of these intimacies, and the book also considers how competing genres have eclipsed tambura music in Croatia over the past two decades. These genres reveal what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has called “cultural intimacy” within the tambura’s persistent yet ambivalent mobilization as a national instrument but also a source of “external embarrassment” (1997, 3). Nor is tambura music alone within such complex webs of signification and feeling; since Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the less violent but politically and economically turbulent changes of late socialism and postsocialism elsewhere in Southeast Europe, musical performance practices ranging from Bulgarian folk orchestras (Buchanan 2006) to Serbian turbo-folk (Rasmussen 2007) to Croatian rock bands (Baker 2010) have emerged as important sites of ambivalent engagement with state nationalism and majority identity politics. In focusing on affect within and beyond the ubiquitous yet ambiguous role that music has played in this region’s politics (as in others’), I offer new perspectives on the conflicting attachments to nation, state, and bureaucracy that are particularly common during regime change.

MUSIC AND DANGER

Ethnomusicologists have often celebrated music for opposing danger and for its ability to comfort during periods of uncertainty. Alan Lomax claimed that “the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work” (1959, 29). When scholars have, conversely, considered “the danger of music” (Taruskin 2008, 168), they have typically situated it within the reactionary ideologies of oppressive regimes. They highlight musicians’ resistance to authoritative measures, ranging from “suspicion” and “control” among Western Christian powers (168), to censorship of popular styles in countries such as the Soviet Union (Cushman 1995; Yurchak 2005) and Iran (Hemmasi 2011), to outright bans on anything considered “music” under regimes such as the Taliban (Baily [2001] 2003). Even scholars who illuminate music’s role in physical violence typically read this as misappropriation and extreme manipulation of an otherwise potentially soothing art (Cusick 2013).

This book also calls for serious attention to music’s capacities for an affect of danger that is coded positively within its artistic aesthetic. I argue that feelings of risk and excitement are also primary effects of music and that these may in fact register most intensely during times of relative comfort and security. This is so in part because the aesthetic and affective dimensions of danger often work beyond the sort of territorializing representation of the home that Lomax cites; they constitute part of what Deleuze and Guattari indeed identify as music’s “power of deterritorialization” ([1980] 1987, 309). This power, which Gary Tomlinson glosses as distinguishing musicking from the “refrain” (e.g., birdsong, a national anthem, “a frozen territoriality”; 2016, 167), lies in the fact that “the indexicality of the refrain, its alliance with territoriality, is seen to be subject […] to the transformations of the assemblage”; thus in deterritorialization “the effect of the refrain-as-actual […] is unmade by musicking-as-virtual” (168).

Yet the affect and aesthetic of musical danger may also enter in before territoriality. Their power is not restricted to unmaking the territorial claims of song; rather, musical deterritorialization links forward to the reterritorialization of the refrain (“voices may be reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes” or on other coordinates: racial, national, etc.; Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 308). Deleuze and Guattari state that music, in comparison to flags, “seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more intense and much more collective, [which] explains the collective fascination exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the ‘fascist’ danger […]: music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss” (333). The abyss itself is dangerous, but music’s initial danger lies in its draw, in deterritorializing drives and desires before they are reterritorialized on a land as the object of military strategy.

This danger is simply the promise of change, of becoming. In tambura music, it is the allure of improvisatory freedom, the potential to push beyond the strictures of known refrains and traditional ways of performing; the abyss (both aesthetic and social) into which dangerous players risk falling is complete melodic and rhythmic chaos, “riding the brink of chaos,” in Grcevich’s words. Or, in Tomlinson’s words, musicking “affirms the becoming and change immanent in all repetition and signification” (2016, 168). Importantly, danger and affirmation require meta-affective and meta-significatory levels of awareness: systems of feeling and signifying on affects and significations. It is at these levels that affective block operates by affording a strategic ordering of stimuli and initial processing. While eliminating neither affective nor representational understandings (these are often dynamically dialectic, and the experienced salience of one is part of the internalization of the other), it variously privileges one or the other in ways that allow musickers (musicians, audience members, performance facilitators, etc.; see Small 1998) to make sense of and respond to forms of danger coded as positive or negative and often felt to be both simultaneously.

RACE, NATION, AND AFFECTIVE BLOCK

This book focuses on questions of danger and intimacy in experiences of nation and territory. It thereby traces the varying emergence, solidification, or weakening of social relations through actual sentiments (not just symbols) of closeness and the racialized desires and fears that often accompany them. In examining less the politics of identity than the affect of becoming, the book builds on recent scholarship that criticizes the reifying (Waterman 2002) and racializing (Gelbart 2010) effects of studying a people from the perspective of an assumed authenticity of identity (Jackson 2005) articulated in music. It joins other music studies (Yurchak 2005; Cimini 2010; Kielian-Gilbert 2010; Atanasovski 2015) in eschewing interpreting race and ethnicity as dualistic (subject-object) representations, performances, or imitations of identities by an agent and focuses instead on minoritarian becoming. Such a pursuit, while recognizing national imaginaries, nonetheless moves beyond them to situate racialized desires and anxieties in the intimate materialities of spatial and affective relations that music enables.

Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano have written that music, “as a key signifier of difference […]—in its wonder, in its transcendence, in its affective danger—historically conjures racial meaning” (2000, 1). Yet its “danger,” I argue, lies in its very capacity, through the speed and slowness of becoming, to unmoor its signifiers from ossified, representational narratives and ideologies. Thus, as Bohlman and Radano also suggest, “‘race’ defines not a fixity, but a signification saturated with profound cultural meaning and whose discursive instability heightens its affective power” (5). Within such instability “heavy and threatening materiality” (Foucault 1984, 11) weighs upon its moorings to signification, meaning, and rationality and opens them to the influence of feeling.

Lila Ellen Gray hints at affect’s relationship to discourse in a footnote to her study of fado’s affective politics: “Theorists of affect differ in […] the degree to which they mark affect as non-discursive, as ‘embodied,’ as an ‘intensity,’” but musical studies can perhaps most effectively “use affect here in co-constitutive relation to the discursive” (2014, 245n16). Drawing on the diverse theoretical work on affect of scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), Kathleen Stewart (2007), Lauren Berlant (2008), and Brian Massumi (2010), I argue for a similar relationship between the discursive and the affective as co-delimiting. I demonstrate affect’s partial assimilability to signification, particularly as the latter operates in discourse and other linguistic processes (and thus against affect’s complete autonomy). Yet I also argue for affect’s partial inassimilability, for its blocking (in aggregation) outside of the planes of conscious thought and of referential qualifications of emotion, for a remainder in which dangerous playing registers in a less-than-coded block of scary-exciting feeling. Eschewing affect theorists’ attraction to music “because they think it accommodates their vague ideas of intensities unfettered by sign, meaning, or agency” (Tomlinson 2016, 166), I examine the very fettering that mutually transpires between musical and linguistic signs and the affects that attach to them. Simultaneously, I consider the limits of this mooring and an agency for a resilience of feeling beyond representation.

Tomlinson criticizes Brian Massumi’s early and influential essay on the “autonomy of affect” (1996) for pointing to affect’s separation from systems of representation by “substituting a local precinct of signification for the whole of it; for his idea of conventionalized difference pertains only to the Peircean symbol, not to semiosis in general” (Tomlinson 2016, 151). Massumi, too, has more recently called for “a logic of mutual inclusion” that could situate affect theory alongside other paradigms on a continuum of logics, albeit with important cuts in its continuity (2015). I present a similar logic of mutual inclusion, locating an ethnomusicological approach to affect between discursive work and participatory embodiment. It draws inspiration here from the “intricate interplay between discourse and practice within the sphere of performance” that Jane Sugarman locates in Prespa Albanian singing and from her theorization of the dialectical relationship between discursive objectification and experiential understandings of music, self, and gendered difference (Sugarman 1997, 30). In bringing attention to affect and its negation as forces bridging these two poles, I show that such processes not only are dialectical but also reveal a specific dynamic within the dialectic: an intensification of thought and feeling that manifests not so much a binary as a differential in their mutual continuation, a blocking of affect in the sense of both aggregation and delimitation. This blocking retains a residual, resilient intensity that aggregates beyond, and delimits, systems of representation of race and nation, but an intensity whose power lies in its secondary yet persistent interaction with other systems of signification. Put simply, even when one’s thoughts overpower a conflicting feeling, something of that feeling may remain as an attraction or aversion to danger and Otherness.

Thus affective block accounts for both aspects of this partial assimilability to conscious signification: (1) the capacity for affective responses to certain styles of tambura performance to circumvent or supersede cultural representations (e.g., these styles’ indexing to Cigani or “Croatian tradition”); and (2) the capacity for these responses to amount to something of significance (in secondary sense making, manifesting for example as a recognition of “danger”) through their distancing from overcoded meanings. Such is the duality intended in invoking the two senses of the word “block”: affect blocks, or aggregates as a block of intensity, in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use the French noun bloc (as in “a block of becoming”; [1980] 1987, 293), and it also blocks, or keeps at a remove (the related French term would be the verb bloquer).

The corollary to the dual attention to the blocking and blocking of affect called for here is the recognition of how this limits the autonomy of signification and discourse. This requires accounting for musicians’ practices, intentional or otherwise, of constraining their affective investments (e.g., in the shared intensities of racialized Others) through discursive gambits yet also of retaining a resilience (e.g., for a feeling of Otherness) that aggregates as a remainder, a strangeness that is still part of their becoming. This feeling of strangeness is an affective relation to an Other, to what Deleuze and Guattari term the “something else” with which you “make your organism enter into composition” in becoming ([1980] 1987, 274). Thus this is not a neatly symmetrical corollary; at stake here is the blocking of discourse in the sense of bloquer (how it blocks/is blocked by affect) but not the additional blocking of discourse in the sense of bloc (see figure I.1, upper right cell). That is, the additional block (the aggregation) is not of discourse but again of affect—hence the term affective block.

In other words, affective block is a notion of how intensities aggregate in the processes of becoming, one that also accounts for the dialectic dynamics between affect and discourse when musicians’ feelings conflict with their thoughts. In their contradictory differences, affects and discourses can be excessive rather than purely oppositional, generating feelings of Otherness to varying intensities when affect blocks or is blocked by discourse. This is my primary premise: that blocking in aggregation is simultaneous and complementary to blocking in delimitation, and thus that people can be affected residually even when their discursive strategies effectively flatten or forestall undesirably intense reactions to musical performance. Such discursive blocks to affect (lower left cell of figure I.1) and residual accumulation (upper left cell) occur, for example, when musicians use humor to prevent socially dangerous indulgences in racially improper depths of musical enjoyment. Equally important are instances in which these strategies fail: when a block of affect (upper left cell) comes in as a blockage against strategically mobilized discourse (lower right cell) and accrues as the intensity proper to its negation (such as when musicians’ progressive rhetoric of inclusion falls to contradictory discourses of racial difference due to the intervention of feelings of Otherness embodied in musical performance). It is easy to recognize the importance of strong feelings when they arise in contexts of musical abandon, and this book also follows previous scholarship in exploring what happens when affective and discursive responses align (without the negation of either). My aim, however, is to demonstrate that affective restraint, whether realized or merely attempted, is just as central to the interplay of discourse and feeling in music. That such restraint moves people in other ways makes it especially worthy of ethnographic and affect theoretical attention.

FIGURE I.1 The blocking of affect and discourse

The two directions of the dynamic of blocking detailed in the bottom cells of figure I.1 speak to the social usefulness of affective manipulation and map more or less neatly onto Deleuze and Guattari’s and Massumi’s different conceptions of the potential for representation in becoming. The former’s notion that “double becoming” (or becoming-animal) is “affect in itself, […] and represents nothing” suggests the autonomy from higher-level meaning systems of the lower right cell ([1980] 1987, 259). Massumi, meanwhile, has theorized a possible alternative, an intermediary between absolute null affect and double becoming that he calls “limitative becoming”; this happens when “one of the terms is an abstract identity and the body in question must curtail its potentials in order to fit into the grid,” a process suggestive of the affective restraint and residual redirection of the lower left cell of the figure (1987, 94). Thus affective block explains the commonly residual, but differently aggregated, affects of double and limitative becoming. It demonstrates how musicians’ strategic imposition or subversion of discursive and other significations comes to bear on residual feelings of Otherness in their affective labor.

It is in the residual intensities, in their welling beyond representation (a relation of the symbol, or thirdness, in the Peircean schema), but also in affect’s secondary entrance into iconic or indexical signification beyond its primary and forceful physical impact, that intimacy comes into being. Intimacy is not a closeness built solely on positive feelings, though this is certainly a part of it (in much of the former Yugoslavia, getting along with someone is parsed as “being good” [biti dobar] with one another). It is also about the sharing of threats and apprehensions, of strange affects. Intimacy, as colleagues of mine and I have argued, “is itself already a kind of violence, a touching that makes definite demands of the touched in its very tenderness” (MacMillen, Steingo, and Stirr 2011). The co-delimitation of discursive and affective responses to musical style embeds this violence in a plane of rich significatory and embodied capacities for dealing with social and physical dangers. Approaching this co-delimitation at three levels of discursive scale, in sections devoted respectively to narrative, discourse, and ideology, I examine the intimate, assimilating work that musical affect performs on rational(izing) understanding in the name of race and nation. I demonstrate, ultimately, how dialectical dynamics of co-delimitation between discursive and affective responses to differences in musical style privilege understandings of tambura players as heroic Croatian men, even as the music engenders diverse ethnic and gendered becomings.

DEPTH IN THE SHALLOWS: TAMBURA MUSIC’S PAST IN THE “SOUTH SLAVIC” LANDS

The tambura has been caught up in struggles for territory, security, danger, and national becoming in Southeast Europe for centuries, though that period has been relatively shallow in comparison to the deeper history of the Slavs’ habitation in the region since their arrival in the early Middle Ages. In order to contextualize the book’s case studies and the broader claims that I make in this introduction, I offer a brief history of tambura music’s spread as an ensemble tradition in Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia.⁸ A central premise of this book holds that feeling intimately Croatian and affectively transgressing certain racialized ideals often supersede (block) official narratives and discourses, and I next examine the music’s more recent history as a spatializing and nationalizing force countering official Yugoslav rhetoric as Croatia pursued independence and its own sovereign public sphere. This was the time when Kosovec was just learning to play; when Grcevich was just making his mark on the transnational tambura scene; and when Croatia, as these musicians’ nominal homeland but also a constituent republic of Yugoslavia, was a territory whose national status many intensely desired and even sensed, but only a few would risk constructing apart from the Yugoslav ideal, whether physically or figuratively.

For several centuries, tambura chordophone-type instruments moved throughout Southeast Europe with Ottoman forces during their occupation of the region. The solo tambura (which took a wide variety of shapes and names) became common throughout much of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia by the eighteenth century. Research on the early years of the tambura’s diversification into a family of instruments and on its combination in ensemble settings typically cites the small orchestra that the musician Pajo Kolarić founded in Osijek in 1847 as the first documented tambura ensemble (March 1983). Josip Andrić, however, has argued that groups performing on multiple tamburas have existed since the late eighteenth century among the Bunjevci (a group of Catholic Slavs who generally identify as Croats and live predominantly in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina).⁹ According to Andrić, the Bunjevci combined the previously solo instruments in ensembles that they may have modeled after, and intended as a local folklore alternative to, the Hungarian Romani violin and cimbalom bands then popular in the area (Andrić 1958, 13).

Such tambura ensembles were particularly effective at promoting local culture and language in the nineteenth-century nationalist Illyrian movement, which sought to assert Slavic identity (specifically of the local, Catholic Slavs) in the face of Austro-Hungarian cultural and political domination in the middle of the nineteenth century (March 1983, 106). Tambura music’s connections to dangerous, nationalist transgressions of multinational sovereignty date back at least to this period, and Pajo Kolarić, an agitator within the movement, was imprisoned by the Hungarians in 1849 for his actions in support of the Croatian revolutionary Ban Josip Jelačić. Franjo Kuhač, a music ethnologist and childhood admirer of the older Kolarić, would later write that the tambura orchestra leader and other tamburaši “helped a great deal to fire up the Slavonians to support Ban Jelačić and our national politics” (1877, 81; translated in March 2013, 55).

Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to The Invention of Tradition (1983) demonstrates amply that practices taken as a culture’s connection to the ancient past are often fully modern in being recently introduced, constructed, and woven into national narratives, and that this “historic past into which the new tradition is inserted need not be lengthy” (Hobsbawm 1983, 2). Incorporating an Ottoman instrument, paralleling (and perhaps modeled after) Romani bands, and consciously deployed for nationalist purposes in the nineteenth century, the tambura orchestra was clearly one of those “‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted” (1). In Croatia, however, the deliberate invention of the tambura tradition was well recognized by tamburaši in the nineteenth century, as it is now, and its lack of insertion into a national narrative predating the Illyrian movement has in no way diminished the earnestness with which musicians assert their nation’s historical claim to the instrument. As I argue throughout this book, there is more at work in the invention, acceptance, and mobilization of such a musical tradition than the strategic insertion of a national emblem into histories whose shallowness is obscured in their embedding in spoken and written words. That such politicized mobilization of the music in Croatian media in the 1990s (and in earlier periods of Croatian national organizing) could proceed so quickly and effectively without completely obscuring inherent contradictions in its symbolism suggests that the tambura’s role as a Croatian national tradition relies as much on affective responses as on discursive rationalizations: tambura music is Croatian because playing and listening to it feel Croatian (while feeling Cigan, for instance, transpires through a different set of musical relations). In the current day, however, the emphasis on the emergent affects of race and ethnicity (of “becoming”) over their discursive constructions also situates the tambura’s impact in experiences of the nation that are less concretely bounded than those of ethnic identification and national signification, a fact that opens tamburanje to manifold transgressions.

Initially, tambura musicians were less concerned with local ethnic distinctions than with opposing Austria-Hungary, and the signification of difference and the affective intensities of shared becomings were neatly aligned in the tasks of building solidarity on the fringes of the empire. Official imperial suppression seemingly only aided the music’s significatory and affective appeal to Pan-Slavists and Illyrianists. Even after Austro-Hungarian rule put an end to the Illyrian movement, amateur tambura ensembles continued to spread to other Croatian urban centers such as Zagreb; throughout towns and villages in present-day Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina; and by the late nineteenth century to places such as New Zealand, Australia, and North and South America, where many tambura musicians sought to escape poverty and/or political oppression (March 1983, 120–121).

By the time the first Yugoslav state was founded at the end of World War I, diverse amateur, professional, and semiprofessional ensembles throughout the region and abroad were using various combinations of common tambura instruments. These ranged from small, usually round-bodied, lead prim tamburas (aka bisernica, or simply tamburica), to hourglass-shaped secondary melody tamburas (e.g., the čelović, the čelo, and the basprim, aka brač), to harmony tamburas (the kontra, aka bugarija), and finally to the largest, berda (aka bas), which resembles a double bass in appearance and function.¹⁰ A functional tambura group almost always featured a minimum of berda, kontra, basprim, and one other melodic instrument, but many ensembles had one, two, or three additional tamburas. Some bands incorporated violin and/or accordion into their lineups, although this was less common in the East Croatian region of Slavonia, where many Croat patrons associated these instruments with Roma from Vojvodina and with Serbian musical practice rather than with Croatian national identity (see chapter 3 and Pettan 1998, 16–18). Musicians to this day use plectra for all tambura types and, with the exception of berda and kontra players, typically play with tremolo all note values longer than an eighth note.

In the socialist Yugoslav state founded after World War II, tambura ensembles operated in a variety of private and public contexts. Amateur and professional groups performed at private wedding events and at taverns across much of the country (with the greatest concentration in the area triangulated between Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade/Novi Sad). Official town and city orchestras performed folk, classical, “old-city,” and international light popular music. Folklore ensembles also formed as parts of the amateur Kulturno-Umjetnička Društva (cultural-artistic societies; hereafter KUD) that the socialist government established throughout Yugoslavia to promote the folk traditions of its many nations.¹¹ Alongside older tambura schools founded before the adoption of socialism, in 1954 the Slavonsko Tamburaško Društvo “Pajo Kolarić” (Slavonian Tambura Society “Pajo Kolarić”; hereafter STD “Pajo Kolarić” or “Pajo Kolarić”) commenced its educating of young musicians in Osijek, the largest city in Croatia’s easternmost region of Slavonia. These KUDs and schools trained many of the musicians who have performed professionally in state folklore ensembles, such as Lado in Zagreb and Kolo in Belgrade, and in the radio tambura orchestras of Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb. In promoting the musical cultures of the many Yugoslav peoples to their publics, these ensembles’ members traversed much of Yugoslavia’s territory and interacted and performed for and with diverse ethnic groups.

In this manner, the ensembles in theory realized the ideal of bratstvo i jedinstvo (fraternity and unity) promoted by the Yugoslav state. Yet such staged representations of state ideology and socialist narratives of the Yugoslav federation did not always translate into actual intimacies between or even within the many nations, nationalities, and ethnic groups¹² that contributed the repertoire and members of folklore ensembles, especially following periods of nationalist (re)awakening in the early 1970s and 1980s. Tony Shay notes that even in the early socialist period, Croatian groups in particular, such as Lado, navigated internal tensions arising over members’ relationship to the Communist state, from forced dismissals of those whose familial ties or musical tastes suggested sympathies with the World War II Croatian nationalist Ustaša movement to performers’ defection while touring Western Europe (2002, 117). As Ljerka Rasmussen writes in her work on newly composed folk music, the socialist period “presents us with both the high points of the quest for ‘multiculturalism’ and the failure to sustain it by the class-based, meta-ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’” (2002, xxviii).

American tambura players had minimal contact with ensembles in Europe for decades, but in 1950 the Duquesne University Tamburitzans led by Walter Kolar made their first trip to perform in Yugoslavia “at the behest of the [US] State Department to make closer ties with [Yugoslav dictator Marshall Josip Broz] ‘Tito’ and his brand of communism when he broke ties with Stalin” (Kolar 2009). Although their pan-Yugoslav and -American repertoire suited both countries’ ideals for cultural ambassadorship, what resulted was a long-lasting relationship of international tutelage. Concerned about the Tamburitzans’ inauthentic, hybridized performances, Yugoslav folklorists emphasized perfecting distinct nations’, nationalities’, and ethnic groups’ repertoires (Kolar 2009). Although this was in keeping with the Yugoslav ideal for multinational diversity, it was these nations, nationalities, and ethnic groups, rather than the socialist ideal of antinationalist unity, that would ultimately draw the affective investments and transnational projects—risky because of their nationalist bent—of Yugoslav and diasporic tambura performance institutions in socialism’s final decade.

TRANSNATIONAL TAMBURA PERFORMANCE, 1979–1989

A North American Tour

Especially since the late 1970s, the Socialist Republic of Croatia’s ensembles have traveled to the United States and Canada under the auspices of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America (CFU; an insurance and fraternal organization) and the Matica iseljenika Hrvatske (MIH; the “parent body of emigrants from Croatia,” often translated as the Croatian Heritage Foundation). Located in Croatia, the MIH emphasized Croatian ethnicity, culture, language, and transnational connections.¹³ Vanja Vranjican, MIH’s president through the mid-1980s, wrote of its collaborations with the CFU: “Hosting folklore ensembles and sending our own into emigrant milieus is only part […]. Occupying an important place in this collaboration is help with Croatian language study, textbook printing, organizing courses in our country and the U.S.A.” (quoted in Šovagović 1981, 6; my translation). These programs fostered a transnational “fraternal union” of Croats rather than “fraternity and unity” between diverse peoples living across the officially multinational socialist state. Its projects abroad suggest that the MIH accomplished more than “the promotion of the socialist self-management identity of the Yugoslav years” that Francesco Ragazzi attributes to what he calls “an uncritical, ignored organ of the established power” (2013, 68). Admittedly, the MIH did curtail its domestic operations following the 1971 Croatian Spring’s suppression, in which MIH leaders such as future Croatian president Franjo Tuđman were arrested for their roles in this movement for political and cultural autonomy (Ramet 2006, 235).

In 1979 the MIH and CFU organized a North American tour for three Osijek acts: “Pajo Kolarić”; the popular singer Krunoslav Slabinac “Kićo”; and Slabinac’s backing tambura band, Slavonski Bećari (Slavonian Bachelors), which he had formed with lead prim tambura player Antun Nikolić “Tuca” and which included Rudolf Ergotić (an artistic director at “Pajo Kolarić”). “Pajo Kolarić’s” women’s folk choir Šokadija (Land of the Šokci [Eastern Croats]) went, too, and programs prioritized the region’s Croatian music. Their membership and directorship also included Serbs, however. The orchestra’s tour guide noted that “Pajo Kolarić” “equally well performs concert compositions, old-city songs and pieces of the rich folkloric heritage of Slavonia, as well as of the other nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia” (Marija Vukelić, quoted in Šovagović 1981, 11; my translation). Yet journalist Đuro Šovagović describes a much narrower focus in his travelogue. Coinciding with the CFU’s eighty-fifth anniversary and geographically distant from official Yugoslav stages, the performances celebrated the Slavonian music, Croatian culture, and transnational contact promoted by the CFU and MIH (23). Šovagović’s invitation to document this contact reflects a developing interest in narrating tambura music’s travels among Croatian populations, a discursive endeavor whose deep affective power I continue to trace in chapter 1.

Šovagović’s celebration of Croatian (specifically, Slavonian) musical activity in a 1981 Yugoslavian text evidences the relaxing of attitudes and policies regarding musical nationalism following Tito’s death in 1980. Also in 1981, tambura singer Vera Svoboda released her Marian songs album Queen of the Croats, Pray for Us on the official Croatia-based label Jugoton. This album marked increasing openness to Croatian nationalism¹⁴ and Catholicism, which were principally antithetical to the multinational and atheistic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (where their representation in official media had rarely passed censorship under Tito). It set the stage for the production of additional Catholic tambura albums such as Slavonski Bećari’s Croatian Christmas Carols (1982) and influenced the proliferation of even more recordings (see Ceribašić 2000) and tambura Masses a decade later.

The North American hosts of the 1979 tour mostly descended from Croats who had left Austria-Hungary before its disintegration in World War I and had played no part in the Yugoslav project. These ancestors’ strategies for deploying tambura music to solidify ethnic identity in the face of oppression from Austrian and Hungarian culture (see March 2013, 40–54) also served them well in resisting musical and linguistic assimilation in North America (113–114). Some even mobilized tambura performance as Croatian resistance to midcentury Yugoslav assimilationist pressures from Belgrade. Ante Beljo, who would later fund Franjo Tuđman and become his party’s “propaganda chief” (Perica 2001, 58–59), wrote about how his Sudbury community resisted “Austrian rule,” then interwar Yugoslavia, and finally postwar North American Yugoslav clubs, which “discouraged the formation of Croatian organizations” (Beljo 1983, 71). In the 1930s, he recalled, when Sudbury was seeking a tambura and Croatian language instructor, the “Yugo-regime tried to infiltrate the Croatian communities with their own men. The Sudbury community succeeded to avoid such a ‘teacher’” (85).

North American Croatian organizations responded to Yugoslavian unity differently. Both the CFU headquarters and the Tamburitzans (at Duquesne University until 2016) are in Pittsburgh, and their Croatian directors differed for several decades over the latter’s multinational program.¹⁵ Among the biggest supporters of the 1979 tour, Croatian communities in Pittsburgh also welcomed non-Croat ensembles from Yugoslavia in the 1980s, such as that of famous Rom prim tambura virtuoso Janika Balaž. Peter Kosovec (2008) enthusiastically recalled his father bringing Balaž to their home near Detroit during his (non-CFU) tour. The CFU prioritized nationally conscious ensembles, for which interaction with North American Croats was particularly desirable, if also potentially dangerous for their standing in Yugoslavia.

The affective impact of the ceremonial celebration of relations among the CFU, MIH, musicians, and audience was emphasized on the 1979 tour, which opened with a concert in Brantford, Ontario, and with gift exchanges between “friends” (Šovagović 1981, 23). Osijek’s musicians, Šovagović writes,

act like they still can’t believe their eyes that this before them in the full auditorium is no longer that domestic audience from Beli Manastir and Osijek […]. But this, too, is a world that has felt the real value of their musicking¹⁶ on tamburas, and when Kićo lit up the Slavonian songs with the “Bećari,” the auditorium pounded from hand[clap]s in the rhythm that the tamburaši were giving. (23; my translation and emphasis)

Here musical feeling involved not only conscious musical valuation but also bodily experiences of clapped rhythms, reverberating space, and musical ignition. Moving Croatian American audiences to intense affect (embodied feeling) was already a primary concern in Croatian nationalist discourse and helped to naturalize its tenets through somatic experience. In Šovagović’s description the Osijek travelers also reveled in influencing audience members’ own tambura performance practice. Croatian American folklorist Richard March notes from firsthand experience that “the 1979 tour made Kičo’s [sic] Slavonian songs and the Slavonski Bećari’s tight, transparent music all the rage. Rabid fans drove hundreds of miles from concert to concert to see the show again and again [and] eagerly snatched up” his “records and cassettes” (2013, 205). These releases soon became staple sonic vehicles for Croatian tamburaši’s affective labor throughout North America.

For their part, Osijek performers particularly valued the homestays. Vesna, a future STD “Pajo Kolarić” secretary, went with Šokadija in 1979; she recalled fondly to me how enthusiasts and performers in the two countries had connected during visits with midwestern Croatian families, including her relatives.¹⁷ These homestays reinforced tambura music’s expressive and affective power for celebrating family and homeland across varying degrees of temporal, cultural, and territorial separation.

New Tambura Relations and Projects in the 1980s

Ensemble tours between North America and Socialist Croatia also engendered new transnational familial relations, contributing significantly to the mobilization of national sentiment within and beyond Croatia’s borders. The CFU instituted regular North American tours by professional male Croatian tamburaši, many of whom wed Croatian American women. In 1986, for example, Slavonski Bećari invited Miroslav Škoro, then a little-known rock singer-cum-comedian, to tour North America with the band. Škoro met Croatian American Kim Ann Luzaich in Pittsburgh and soon wedded and joined her there.

Škoro’s relocation to start a family, while separating him physically from close tamburaši associates Slavonski Bećari (one of whom, Branko Helajz, had been kum [“best man”] at the wedding), ultimately advanced his tambura career. Shortly after he returned to the United States in 1989, Škoro met Jerry Grcevich, who had grown up playing with his father, his uncle, and his father’s Cokeburg Junior Tamburitzan ensemble. Already an established, virtuosic tambura recording artist, Grcevich suggested that they collaborate. The result was that “I started writing songs, and Jerry started composing, and after some time we had an entire album” (Škoro 2010, 71; my translation). The song “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” (Don’t touch my plain) would have a lasting influence on tambura music in Croatia upon its release in 1992, eventually making Škoro and Grcevich popular icons as the genre flourished in the newly independent republic.

The tamburaši who first moved thousands to tears with that song were not associated with Grcevich or Škoro, however, but another band that toured for the CFU in the 1980s. In 1992 Zlatni Dukati (Golden Ducats) rerecorded and released the title track from Grcevich’s and Škoro’s album. About the different versions, Škoro notes:

“Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” came into existence in 1989, in late fall when the sky and I were both crying. The sky for the waning summer and year, and I for everything¹⁸ that I left in the plain. […] Vlado Smiljanić changed its name [from I Will Return …]. [W]hen [Zlatni Dukati manager] Josip Ivanković heard it, he immediately recorded the famous video with Zlatni Dukati in which the late [actor] Fabijan Šovagović lets a tear fall for his wounded Slavonia and this is all mixed with scenes from Schmidt’s great films “Đuka Begović” and “Sokol ga nije volio.” (2010, 195; my translation)

The latter film (Sokol did not love him) depicts World War II struggles over Slavonia by Yugoslav Partisans and Croatia’s Nazi-aligned Ustaša party. Furthermore, the song’s “wartime relevance was reinforced by a video with Škoro performing it around an army campfire” (Baker 2010, 26). Zlatni Dukati, and later Škoro, turned what was “originally a typical song about emigrants’ nostalgia” (27) into a “teleological narrative of collective displacement and ethnic defiance” during Eastern Slavonia’s occupation (26). This realized anew the song’s promise of return: Dukati delivered the sentiments of displacement and longing from the diaspora to its newly autonomous country’s people and lands, where the song relayed a further promise of return from war to peace (and from refuges to occupied lands) and suggested a narrative for this promise’s fulfillment.

This was not Zlatni Dukati’s first transplantation of Croatian American sentiments. On the 1988 CFU tour “was born the idea for recording the album of patriotic songs ‘Croatian songbook,’ which would contribute to popularizing the ensemble and tambura music in general, […] to liberating the national spirit as well as to developing and establishing democratic relations in the then Socialist Republic of Croatia” (Zlatni Dukati 2014; my translation; also cited in March 2013, 223).

Some songs released on the 1989 cassette had been popular in World War II Ustaša campaigns. Although the songs predate World War II, and the “leader of the ensemble modified the lyrics in a way to exclude direct associations with the Ustashas” (Pettan 1998, 12), their patriotic content was potentially problematic in multiethnic Yugoslavia. Rumors quickly spread about a plot by Communist Jugoton leadership to pull the album, and “the affair made tamburica music a politicized product by depicting it as a Croatian value under threat from an expansionist Serbia which was operating through Yugoslav federal structures” (Baker 2010, 60). The democratic relations that the group later noted helping to establish involved partnering with the Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (Croatian Democratic Party, hereafter HDZ), a decidedly Croat-oriented party headed by historian and former general and MIH leader Dr. Franjo Tuđman. The party aimed to liberate not just the national spirit but also the nation from Yugoslavia, and it hired Zlatni Dukati to capitalize on rising nationalist fervor for its successful 1990 election campaigns (Bonifačić 1998). The elections put the HDZ in the driver’s seat of Croatia’s machine of secession and war the following year, and the band would continue to work for Tuđman, Croatia’s first president, throughout the 1990s.

Thus Zlatni Dukati, along with STD “Pajo Kolarić,” Slavonski Bećari, Miroslav Škoro, and Jerry Grcevich, at times played integral roles not only in building relations between countries but also in erecting new national barriers. While not all Croats shared the HDZ’s sentiments about nationalist organizing, the feeling for the nation (as a territorializing people) that musicians mobilized transnationally proved to be a significant force in reshaping and centering intimate social networks through Croatia’s territory. Transgressing the admittedly weakened official Yugoslav ideals of “fraternity and unity” and fostering through such risky performances a “fraternal union” with Croats abroad, musicians made accessing these intimate foreign spaces commonly imaginable, even to those who did not (yet) seek them.

The 1990s, however, also brought something not commonly imaginable in the previous decade: the physical violence and danger that escalated between the Yugoslav and Croatian armies and various paramilitary forces. As Jerry Grcevich notes, one could “feel” the tensions between different ethnic groups by the late 1980s, and playing the wrong nation’s song in the wrong venue was a risk with repercussions (typically verbal abuse) that he experienced firsthand (Grcevich 2012). However, the force of musical danger, if intensely affective, only rarely threatened lasting physical harm of the nature that musicians would face during the war. I detail the latter more thoroughly in chapter 1 but consider it important to examine here briefly the Yugoslav conflicts’ impact on ensembles within the territories and borders of the nascent nation-state. Tambura music’s affective facilitation and textual narrativization of the reestablishment of transnational ties with a variety of foreign enclaves test the limits of the concept of diaspora. I suggest here the intellectual merits to extricating from this broad analytic a set of displacements, returns, and intimacies that are sometimes lost in both academic and lay conceptions of dispersion from a homeland.

CROATIA AND ITS INTIMATES: SOVEREIGNTY AND THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF MUSIC SCENES

That nation-states forged from disintegrating republics and empires are messy affairs, always more complex and heterogeneous than their pretensions to homogeneity suggest, is neither novel nor surprising. Purity is an absolute ideal, while the forging of a nation involves not only juxtaposition with external Others but also internal identifications and becomings that are of necessity incomplete (and deterritorialized as much as reterritorialized).¹⁹ As James Ferguson demonstrates, however, analysts’ “national frame of reference” still oversimplifies such states’ structures and societies by assuming (economic) sovereignty and circumscription of heterogeneity within state borders (2006, 64). What an ethnography of a recent nation-state’s emergence can contribute to contemporary studies of territoriality and sovereignty, then, is an understanding of the aesthetic and affective attachments to external territories (including those whose most visible connections fall outside of economic relations) that bolster a state’s independence yet also thereby limit its sovereignty’s territorial boundedness. These attachments comprise a series of intimacies that stand not in opposition to danger but rather as its counterparts. They do not so much compensate for as absorb the threats (small and large, projected and experienced, felt and symbolized) of domestic heterogeneity and of borders’ inability to bound all the people and territories that the “nation” would claim.

States deal with such threats in diverse but almost always incomplete ways. Often noted of nation-states forged in the twentieth century are ethnically homogenizing population exchanges with neighboring countries, but these typically bring states new cultural (if not ethnic) diversity and new foreign territorial attachments. Anthropologist Jasna Čapo Žmegač writes that Croat wartime refugees from Srijem, Serbia, who exchanged property with Croatian Serbs saw the tambura as “a [longtime] marker of the Croatian identity of the Croats from Srijem” and compared “with irony [its inclusion] in the list of Croatian symbols in Croatia only in the 1990s” ([2002] 2007, 107). Croatian Croats working at Serbian institutions such as Novi Sad’s Radio Tambura Orchestra also returned suddenly to Croatia, where they significantly influenced the emerging neotraditional tambura scene (Benić 2010). Despite their shared ethnicity, dissatisfaction was common among both the displaced and those meant to welcome them, and these migrations were marked by great trauma, even as they jointly fostered the tambura’s adoption nationwide and later networked with Serbia’s remaining Croatian enclaves.

Other tambura musicians displaced during the Yugoslavian wars resettled among long-established expatriate communities in more distant countries such as Austria and the United States. In Austrian and Hungarian Burgenland towns, South Slavic enclaves had survived since moving north twelve generations before to flee Ottoman forces and join Austria-Hungary in fighting them. In cases such as Parndorf (Pandrof in Croatian), Austria, communities that received Yugoslav war refugees had already had strong tambura traditions in place since the 1930s and had long interacted with music professionals in Yugoslavia (Schedl 2004, 39). The wars significantly affected expatriate communities, too, disrupting patterns of musical interaction with Yugoslavia and sending new waves of tambura musicians and audiences into the midst of older diasporas. However, the musicians’ long involvement in Yugoslav politics—through visits in which they fed separatist or federalist rhetoric, acted as political and cultural ambassadors for their countries of citizenship, and financially supported movements such as Croatian independence (Hockenos 2003, 84–85)—was almost completely reduced to sending moral and financial support. Fluent in the Croatian language and connected in their former hometowns, members of the new diaspora often led efforts to reconnect with communities in the newly established Republic of Croatia after the war. Tamburaši played a key role in reestablishing such intimate contacts following the amplification of physical distance through the militarization of Croatia’s borders. Rising stars such as Škoro and fellow Osijek singer/tamburaš Vjekoslav Dimter, who lived in Pittsburgh during the war, wrote some of their most successful patriotic songs in North America and subsequently helped to establish Grcevich as a much-sought-after performer in Croatia. Richard March (2013, 213) encapsulates these transatlantic tambura networks’ communal strengths with the phrase “My Little (Global) Village,” an adaptation of a Vjekoslav Dimter song (played by his and Kosovec’s Pennsylvania band Otrov at the 2003 festival in Požega, Croatia), and their reach does indeed span far more than the United States and Croatia. In 1993 Škoro, for instance, became general consul for the large Croatian refugee community in Pécs, Hungary. Many of the public tambura concerts now held in Croatia and within these diasporic communities have developed out of contacts forged or maintained by recent immigrants, and their experiences of war and emigration shaped these connections.

The historical depth and continuity of emigration from Croatia to its various diasporic communities differs tremendously; more distant continents received immigrants intensively but recently in comparison to closer territories. Other foreign Croat enclaves consider themselves not diasporas but simply the casualties of Southeast Europe’s balkanization. Croats in Hungarian Baranya (a region continuous with Croatian Baranja) have been national minorities for generations, relating to their perceived ethnic homeland from outside Croatia’s border but feeling very much in their own territory. Others in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia have a much shorter history as foreign nationals in the Croatian lands and feel perhaps even more strongly that their cities should be part of what some nationalists envision as “Greater Croatia.” Yugoslavia’s disintegration added not just more borders but also more kinds of border crossings, informed by different histories. It “deterritorialize[d]” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 269) more fully the lives and livelihoods of many tamburaši across varied, rhizomatic assemblages (263) of dispersion and settlement, even as it reterritorialized their tambura practices upon the states of Croatia, Serbia, and so forth.

The use of “diaspora” to designate a people displaced from a nominal homeland far predates the modern nation-state²⁰ but has played an important role in theories of “long-distance nationalism” as they pertain to the broader relevance of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1998, 1983). As the nation-state has yielded some of its structuring capacity to processes of globalization in many parts of the world, scholars of migration have embraced more complex ideas of the relationship between displacement and place in studies of decentered diasporas (e.g., Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1997; Stephen 2007). The decentering trend is not irreversible, however, and music has frequently afforded an effective means of “claiming diaspora” within immigrant communities that formerly embraced assimilationist ideologies and rejected their “homelands” as premodern and traditional (Zheng 2010). Moreover, “balkanization” has frequently recentered discourses on nation and displacement for peoples either in diaspora or territorially excluded from new nominal “homelands.” Independent Macedonia, for example, became a more relevant homeland for Romani musician émigrés than their South Asian point of origin (India) or even their birth country (Yugoslavia) (Silverman 2012, 40). Displacement and attempts to reconnect through a central territory—particularly one surrounded by “foreign” lands imaginable within the “greater” national cartography—foster identification and commonality among peoples separated by more diverse degrees of time and space than “diaspora” connotes.

I employ the phrase “Croatia and its intimates” to account for the wide range of (musical) communities within and outside Croatia’s borders that relate to the Republic of Croatia as a national center (see MacMillen 2011a). These are not all diasporic communities, nor does the entire Croatian diaspora enjoy the same sort of intimate connections with musicians in Croatia as do the Parndorf and Pittsburgh tamburaši mentioned previously. To focus exclusively on the Croatian diaspora would ignore the broader array of displacements affecting the human geography of Croatian communities’ wartime and postwar transnational networks and the tambura music and other practices that bolster them.²¹

Since the mid-1990s, moreover, many scholars have questioned the “promiscuous” use of “diaspora,” protesting that it stands for too broad an array of migrations and displacements (Tölölyan 1996, 8). Silverman warns of three pitfalls: “essentializing diasporas by attaching them to particular places of origin,” “equating all diasporic subjects merely because they are related to a posited homeland,” and “diluting the concept so much as to equate it with all migration” (2012, 40). As Hariz Halilovich has shown, furthermore, many residents and recent emigrants of former Yugoslav republics reject “diaspora” due to its connotations of permanence, distance, and successful ethnic cleansing (of home districts) (2013, 120). Given the plurality and “trans-locality” (133) of migrations represented in most Croatian communities outside of Southeast Europe and their diverse practices of visiting and essentializing the “homeland,” I find it especially important to eschew utilizing, and thereby broadening, “diaspora.” I use “intimates” throughout this book to refer to communities rooted in localities yet continuously building and performing affective attachments to the homeland and, through it, to one another. Particularly through musical endeavors within and on behalf of “their” nominal homeland, Croatia’s intimates share in the physical, affective, ideological, and musical constitution of this state’s core territory and culture. The concept of “national intimates” accounts for an equalization of investment (though not of the mobilization of power) in this homeland’s music, people, and affective capacities across a continuum of displacements not encompassed by “diaspora.”

Music and National Intimates

Croatia’s intimates’ participation in the country’s cultural and political affairs also demonstrates more than the familiarity or nostalgic longing for the “old country” typical of many diasporas. Independent Croatia and its intimates keep their connections current through varied means of reciprocal influence and support in political campaigns, insurance networks, religious missions, accessing higher education, tourism, and tambura music (as did the CFU, the MIH, and affiliated ensembles before the war). While Croatia’s territory centers these networks, foreign communities function as powerful secondary nodes of attraction and dispersion, maintaining relations with one another (often with reference to Croatia rather than via its nuclear pull). Reverence for Peter Kosovec’s and Jerry Grcevich’s dangerous performance among musicians in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary depends on appreciatively upholding (and cautiously transgressing) tambura music as a Croatian tradition but not in most cases on contact with Croatian American tamburaši within Croatian territory. Shared traditions, affective investments, and personal relationships connecting Croatia and its intimates are facilitated largely by recognition of common heritage that transcends territorial emplacement.

Such geographically dispersed nationalism can be found globally in many transnational musical cultures. As Jane Sugarman shows, the diasporic middle class played an essential role in constructing nineteenth-century Albania’s national culture, providing the ideological scaffolding for Albanian musical nationalism in present-day Macedonia (1999, 444). Amnon Shiloah similarly demonstrates the importance of the Jewish diaspora’s artistic intelligentsia and of Jewish communities in nearby countries for constructing an Israeli folk music and dance repertoire (1992, 217–218). Christopher Waterman (1990) and Thomas Turino (2000) identify comparable trends within and beyond the borders of Nigeria and Zimbabwe, respectively.²² Tambura musicians’ international nationalist networks are not solely diasporic but are also recognizably transnational and cosmopolitan, contributing to reifications of the nation-state that come into focus across varying gradations of proximity: affective, geographical, temporal, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic.

Contemporary nationalisms owe much of their complexity to migrations and societal changes during the fall of imperial and colonial governing structures. In stable periods, they succeeded in subjecting and organizing populations into diversely mixed societies; Rogers Brubaker argues that subsequently, during imperial dissolution into nation-states, the “unmixing of peoples” was particularly tumultuous and formative (1995). This certainly was true of post–Austro-Hungarian Croatia and post-Ottoman Albania and Israel. Čapo Žmegač extends Brubaker’s observation to multinational republican (Yugoslav and Soviet) dissolutions and resultant “ethnic unmixing of hitherto mixed, multiethnic societies” ([2002] 2007, 27).

Yet the teleology of unmixing mixed societies once again assumes the ontological certainty of the nation, overlooking those who do not hold a (single) national frame of reference, including antinationalists, ethnically mixed individuals, and “nationless peoples.” For the latter, such as Roma, it is possible to trace, in Philip Bohlman’s words, “the alternative historical paths articulated by their music, which are no less political and crucial to the history of European nationalism if indeed they lie beyond the borders fixed by those with the political power and nationalist motivation” (2004, 213). Croatia still has both “nationless” and “nationed” minority communities and still avails itself of Croat minorities in other states. Furthermore, Croats’ affective relations to such groups and to one another are not static identifications but ever-emergent “minoritarian” becomings (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 291) whose musical flux and embodiments extend back nearly two centuries (MacMillen 2013). “National intimates” encapsulates complexities of nationally charged transnational connections that persist despite governmental, nationalistic, and even scholarly tendencies to reduce these networks to ethnically homogeneous homelands with geographically disparate diasporas.

Tambura music remains a diverse practice and site of contact across racial, ethnic/religious, and geopolitical divides. In playing dangerously, Serbian, Romani, and other non-Croat musicians have greatly impacted tambura music within Croatia, its intimates, and the greater international scene. A closely related study might well consider “Serbia and its intimates” as an overlapping and equally significant, albeit differently structured, zone of tambura performance. Professional and amateur Serb musicians have upheld the tambura as their own folkloric and national tradition in both the socialist and postsocialist periods. The few Serbian tambura ensembles active in Croatia in the 2000s entered the public folklore sphere cautiously (see chapter 3) but participated regularly in semipublic events for Serbs outside of Serbia that celebrate tambura music for rooting them in their territories of residence (Prosvjeta 2010, 3–5). In such cases, Serbia often constituted an “empty” center for its intimates, who solidify Serbian connections outside of—rather than with—their nominal homeland, where the tambura has never achieved true national symbolic status.²³ Yet Croatia, too, remains merely a noncentral locus for music and networking to Serb performers there. In my fieldwork, Croatian ethnicity has surfaced as the single prominent precipitating factor for the intense intimacy examined here between tambura bands and autonomous Croatia.

Intimate Communities

In employing “intimate,” I avail myself of the noun’s connotation of a close personal friend as a metaphor or metonym that stands for a supportive, closely connected foreign community. In addition, I invoke its many adjectival nuances, expanding the concept’s resonance beyond a set of concrete actors to an array of processes and becomings. These communities are intimate with Croatia and its citizens in several respects: in sharing personal relationships; in recognizing closeness through mutual influence; and even through sexual relationships, as young men and women continue to find spouses and raise families in Croatian communities beyond their birth countries.

“Intimates” as an analytic also invokes recent scholarship theorizing these various sorts of intimacy in the close ties of people with shared investments and obligations, as well as at levels beyond personal relationships. Especially important here is Lauren Berlant’s examination of the “tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations” that people bring to intimate relationships (1998, 287). Although these tacit understandings often propagate “optimism” about the way things should be, Berlant notes that intimacy “is also formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (288; emphasis added). The war that accompanied Croatia’s split with Yugoslavia simultaneously assured its status as an autonomous center and threatened its accessibility to Croat communities outside of its borders; the sense of connection that formed or intensified across the new borders between these communities is key to their designation as Croatia’s intimates.

The sense of threat that Croats and other peoples experienced, particularly in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, is also key for understanding the intense feeling that musicians invest through dangerous performance in reestablishing their presence in occupied territories and formerly ostracized church buildings, refostering ties with communities and cultural and religious leaders beyond their state borders, and eliciting from their audiences an affective investment in a national becoming. As Martin Stokes argues in his work on Turkish popular music, postcolonial republics, “amongst which Turkey might be ambiguously counted”—as might post-Ottoman, post-Habsburg, and post-Yugoslav Croatia—have “deployed a sentimental language of affection and intimacy in the forging of independent national identities. This independence would often prove tenuous, provoking retrenchments into fantasies of racial purity and the (always threatened) authenticity of national cultural heritage” (2010, 30). Following Berlant, I might add that sentimental musical performance that effectively locates such a racially pure and independent nation draws its affective capacity from dangers to the very sonic world it seeks to create.

Moving from questions of threat to the realities of loss, Svetlana Boym refers to a “diasporic intimacy” that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but is constituted by it (2001, 253). Spanning gaps of physical displacement and cultural estrangement, such intimacy “is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging” (253). I qualify this only by suggesting that such longing and intimacy may also characterize peoples separated by processes other than migration. National intimates such as Croatia’s share an intimacy constituted through defamiliarization, dispersion, and separation from their second (symbolically primary) home, whether that separation results from resettlement or from the erection of national borders. This “intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection—no less deep, yet aware of its transience” (252), whether borne across histories of emigration or within homes that, though not lost, are now in the nominal homeland of another nation.

In his work on “dark intimacy” in Southeastern Europe, Alexander Kiossev notes that connection and identification “take place in an unstable field, where various identity models are in competition; […] such conditions could create a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety [or could afford] individuals more opportunities and more ‘free space’ for maneuvering” (2002, 178). Some Croats undoubtedly took advantage of separation, exploring alternative or plural models; maneuvering within freer spaces of identification accessible beyond Croatia’s borders; and aligning themselves with minority, regional, and broader European organizations. Others, however, readopted models of Croatian national identification from the 1980s, reestablishing physical contact with communities inside Croatia’s borders. These latter individuals are largely those who, working with their contacts in Croatia, have kept or made their own communities intimates of the young country.

As I argue elsewhere, however, such “connections are imbricated with conditions of significant economic inequality” (MacMillen 2011a, 107). Croatians’ experiences of domestic visitation and foreign concert sponsorship by relatively wealthy diasporic intimates feed narratives of Croatia’s geographical and developmental emplacement in between economically still weaker (former Yugoslav) and more robust (Western Europe/North America) countries (107). Moving beyond simplistic national frames to material relations that cause such inequalities, we can recognize that

while the creation of a sovereign ethnic homeland fed the demand for patriotic music that initially enabled the rise of many tamburaši to celebrity status and commercial success in Croatia, it also eventually fed into constructions both of Croatia’s “domestic” problems […] and of foreign enclaves […] as distant, independent sites for sidestepping Croatia’s economic policies and bureaucratic institutions. (107)

Intimacy, especially engendered across or within displacements, is neither utopian (as quickly proffered instances of familial, sexual, and spiritual intimacy might suggest) nor “solely a private matter,” for “intimacy can be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory or estranged by a critique” (Boym 2001, 253). Thus there also operates within these networks a codependent intimacy with the state’s embellishments and estrangements. This “cultural intimacy” internalizes not only national ambivalence over tambura bands but also tamburaši’s own “rueful self-recognition” of their complicity with gray economic practices that they see as a sign of the state’s inability or unwillingness to match “Western” developments (Herzfeld 1997, 4; MacMillen 2011a, 108).

Music and Public Intimacies

“Intimacy” in music typically conjures up the sights and sounds of physically proximate social or sexual interaction. Such interaction does pervade the musical lives and actions that I examine, yet the intimacies at play here do not merely elide distance; they are constituted through experiences of separation, danger, and even violence. Analyzing how musicians and audiences foster such “dark” relations of closeness at local, regional, and transnational levels, I contribute to a growing body of literature that posits music’s claim to intimate experience as persistently enabled through its mediations across physical and cultural spaces that connect but also separate people.

Byron Dueck argues that public space “occup[ies] a middle ground between publicity and intimacy” for Manitoba’s First Nations (2013, 8). While contrasting intimacies (“engagements between known and knowable persons”) with imaginaries (“acts of publication and performance oriented to an imagined public”), he notes that public space may afford an inclusive “civil twilight” in which strangers easily recruit one another from the “imagined public” into intimate “face-to-face engagement” (7–8). Essential to this capacity for intimacy and to its efficacy in pursuing meaningful musical interaction is an “orientation to a public of strangers” (5), which characterizes both First Nations’ indigenous imaginaries and nation-states’ “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983).

In Michelle Bigenho’s work on Bolivian music in Japan, intimacies depend upon far greater spatial and cultural separation. Bigenho’s “intimate distance” emerges through “desire across [geographical and national] boundaries” and maintains a “conceptual tension [in] experiences through which one feels like and unlike others” (2012, 25). Thus diverse nonnatives employ racialized imaginaries of shared genetic heritage but paradoxically do not identify with contemporary natives: a “move of both intimacy and distance […] made through the complicated historical hubris of race and indigeneity” (138).²⁴

I situate musical intimacy’s spatialization betwixt and between the structures of closeness and distance that these studies model. On the one hand, this book considers how music bolsters intimacy within a community imagined singularly (within rather than spanning national and racial boundaries) but beyond the territorial bounds of the nation-state, on a geographic scale approaching that of Bigenho’s study. On the other hand, it analyzes a Croatian public space in which social imaginaries overlap with musical intimacies in ways that unexpectedly make porous the boundaries of race and gender that musicians mobilize from the country’s intimates. It thus joins Barry Shank’s examination of how such “boundaries of an intimate public are often charged with affective intensity, where different values or ways of being that can’t be ignored can spark a struggle between the ordinary and the unjust” (2014, 49). Roma are the objects of an unjust, essentializing discourse (sometimes self-perpetuated) of hereditary musicality. Their perceived ability to play dangerously solicits intimate distancing as Croatian musicians aspire to this skill as a potential source of national pride, yet channel its affective capacities toward affirming rather than destabilizing national intimacies and insular values. Roma, Serbs, and additional musical Others, such as African Americans in Pittsburgh, variously enjoy these musical intimacies, perceivably endanger them through territorializing presence, and elicit desire within Croatian communities for transgressing racialized musical sensibilities. Music’s claims on intimacy as interior affect, public sentiment, and (trans)national relation are bound to its enticing transgressions: “the danger of music,” the “suspicion” and “control” that it provokes among authorities, and the resistance to oppression that musicians have mobilized in the circum-Mediterranean for centuries (Taruskin 2008, 168).

SCALES OF SPACE, STRUCTURES OF ANALYSIS

This book situates affect’s interactions with systems of meaning—narrative, discourse, and ideology—by dedicating pairs of chapters to each of three corresponding geographical scales of intimate spatialization. It takes up the scalar analytics of Lila Ellen Gray, who notes of fado that a “sentimentalizing aesthetic” and representations of place “echo a geopolitical strategy of scale” through which the state produces a “cartography of both the enormous and the miniature, where social and geo-spatial structures of intimacy and interiority (of neighborhood, of family, of faith) symbolically st[an]d in for the expansive reach of the nation and the imperial, corporate, totalitarian state” (2014, 113). Expanding the scope of ethnographic research to scales well beyond the state, this book similarly examines the structuring of musical intimacy, social danger, and racializing affect within and through the nation-state in three interconnected scales of spatialization: the transnational and diasporic, the regional and urban, and the proximate space of ritual and bodily contact. The progressive contraction from “enormous” to “miniature” geography (and from more elaborate to more ingrained forms of meaning into which musical affect transgresses) foregrounds important histories of tambura’s transnational movement at the book’s outset. It also deliberately cuts across the grain of standard analytic narratives of intimacy as a quality of local, face-to-face interaction that may then spiral outward into larger spaces. Instead I posit intimacy as intrinsically spatialized and spatializing at multiple levels of scale and examine its role in small and large ensembles, thereby representing the range of ensemble types while also considering how intimacy accrues and is mobilized within different scales of human organization.

This introduction and the following chapter elaborate the history of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” and related city and professional ensembles and examine the work of musical and affective responses to danger in generating and blocking narratives of race and mobility since the Yugoslav-Croatian conflicts. Chapter 1 focuses on “Pajo Kolarić’s” youth orchestras, tracing further their musical travels into militarized and demilitarized zones and abroad after the outbreak of war in 1991. Connecting wartime concerns over neighborhood, family, and faith to both emergent narratives of national awakening and affective experiences of danger, the chapter takes up affective block in its less disruptive sense of tambura ensembles generating new blocks of becoming (affectively shoring up the public disavowal of Yugoslav identification). It also begins to examine affective block in its second instance: the curtailing of certain counternarratives via the intensities of musicking in sites of racialized fear and danger as ensembles (re) connected Croatia’s intimates to the country’s core territory.

Two subsequent chapters address the capacity for affective responses, in turn, to be blocked through strategic or incidental discursive maneuvers. They examine music as a spatializing and socializing force (Krims 2007) that brings diverse populations into contested territories and racialized sentiments at the level of urban centers (Pittsburgh and Osijek) and the regional territorial assemblages in which these cities’ tamburaši most often perform (the American Rust Belt and Eastern Croatia). These assemblages are neither geographically static nor culturally monolithic, despite discourses of racial difference that suggest otherwise. In order to demonstrate these discourses’ spatializing power over and simultaneous susceptibility to material processes of physical urban relation and the tactility of tambura technique, these chapters examine discursive responses to the sensational knowledge (Hahn 2007) of racialized becoming. Chapter 2 analyzes Pittsburgh’s semiprofessional bands in relation to local Croatian Homes’ junior tamburitzans ensembles and to professional musicians from the former Yugoslavia. Taking up questions of sincere feeling, it examines bands’ staging of jokes and humorous musico-textual translations as an anti-affective strategy. It shows how this block to affect privileges meanings of racial difference but also produces residual feelings of Otherness, shoring up whiteness as a form of limitative minoritarian becoming in the face of intimate contact and even conflict among Croatian, Serbian, Romani, and African American residents. In contrast, chapter 3 examines limitations of discursive strategies in staving off such feelings. Turning to Roma bands in Croatia and how they delimit practices among Croat bands and the orchestras and folklore ensembles with which they train, it argues that bands and orchestras that play dangerously risk transgressing a postwar Croatian aesthetic for the musically “clean” and adopting the “dirty” technique of Romani musicians. The inaccessibility of this feat both blocks (delimits) affective states that Croatian musicians might otherwise hold in common with racialized others and blocks (delimits) discursive counters to constructs of Roma as nonthreatening nomads and of Serbian presence as a dangerous incursion on East Croatian territory.

Two final chapters consider ideologies of belonging and intimacy and their co-delimitation of physical human relations as felt and embodied in the space and time of musical ritual. They build upon previous chapters by addressing tensions that emerge within racialized groups (thus narrowing the scope) but that concretize around distinctions of gender and religion, which themselves often intersect with race-thinking and -feeling. They thus bring into focus the internalization of power structures that at times contradict dominant orders of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating new possibilities for blocking chauvinistic ideologies in delimitation through socially, intercorporeally, and even supersensorially distributed affect. Turning to the all-women band Garavuše and to both male and female fans of male (semi)professional groups, chapter 4 examines the particular gendered relations of (semi)professional bands²⁵ and their audiences. It demonstrates how physical blocks (of both affect and assembled human bodies) can successfully mobilize to counter restrictive ideologies, arguing that performances have their own structures of power that draw on racialized dynamics of performative interaction. These structures simultaneously threaten musical intimacy with a block of intense aggression and build affectively on the intimate nature of threat itself. Chapter 5 returns to questions of faith introduced in chapter 1, analyzing supposedly fixed hierarchies among the officiators of Catholic-oriented tambura services (typically priests), the mostly adult orchestras/folklore ensembles that perform for them, and those in attendance. It also returns to affect and meaning’s cogenerative dialectic, examining how the slippage and potential blockage between sensorial and ideological understandings of space allow musical worshippers a flexibility to move beyond structures of architecture and dogma. The chapter thus delineates the ways in which hierarchies are jeopardized or reinforced through musical performance, the affective intensity of which often relies on a para-Christian metaphysics of space and energy and on participants’ mutual physical constitution of Croatia as a racially musicked nation and core territory.