Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Editor-in-Chief
Zoran Milutinovi, University College London
Editorial Board
Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University
Alex Drace-Francis, University of Amsterdam
Jasna Dragovi-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London
Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin
Advisory Board
Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich
Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University
Radmila Gorup, Columbia University
Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh
Robert Hodel, Hamburg University
Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University
Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary, University of London
Maria Todorova, University of Illinois
Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University
VOLUME 8
By
Jim Samson
LEIDENBOSTON
2013
Cover Illustration: The bridge on the Drina at Viegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Samson, Jim.
Music in the Balkans / by Jim Samson.
pages cm. (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-25037-6 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-90-04-25038-3 (e-book)
1.MusicBalkan PeninsulaHistory and criticism.I.Title.
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Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1
PART ONE
BALKAN GEOGRAPHIES
1Exodus......................................................................................................... 13
Sarajevo: Little Jerusalem ................................................................. 13
Two Peninsulas: The Sephardic Diaspora ................................... 17
Singing the Community: Music of the Sephardim ................... 21
Opening Out: Themes and Developments .................................. 28
2Ecologies..................................................................................................... 35
Music and Place................................................................................... 35
Ringed by Mountains: The Oa Country...................................... 40
On the Voice: The Dinaric Alps and Other Mountains........... 44
Deep in umadija ................................................................................ 51
3Displacements .......................................................................................... 58
Investing in Place ................................................................................ 58
Migrations: Serbs in a Habsburg World ....................................... 63
Trading Places: Greece and Anatolia ............................................ 69
Tallava Rules: Kosovars in Macedonia ......................................... 75
4Ecumenes ................................................................................................... 80
In the Minority .................................................................................... 80
All Together in Vojvodina ................................................................ 83
Orchestrating Thrace ......................................................................... 91
PART TWO
HISTORICAL LAYERS
8Infrastructures........................................................................................ 189
Littoral Balkans: Venice and the Adriatic ................................. 189
Mitteleuropa: The Reach of the Habsburgs .............................. 196
Reciprocities: Modernising the Peripheries ............................. 202
The Principalities and Beyond ..................................................... 208
PART THREE
MUSIC IN TRANSITION
PART FOUR
EASTERN EUROPE
PART FIVE
GLOBAL BALKANS
Part I
Part II
*Maps 14 are from Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox, The Palgrave Concise His-
torical Atlas of the Balkans. New York: Macmillan, 2001. Reproduced with permission from
Palgrave Macmillan.
Map 1.The Ottoman Balkans in the mid-16th century
Map 2.The Military Border in the 17th and 18th centuries
Map 3.The Balkan states in the 1880s
Map 4.The Balkan states after World War II
Danube R.
Bratislava
Vienna
AU S T R I A Budapest
Iai
Kishinev
Ioannina Larissa
GREECE
TURKEY
Athens
Patras
Tripolis
MILES
0 50 100 150 200
1The five states or former states at the heart of this narrative are Albania, Bulgaria,
Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia, exactly the territories covered by Barbara Jelavich in her
history of the region (Jelavich 1983).
4 introduction
Jim Samson
London and Nafplio 2013
PART ONE
BALKAN GEOGRAPHIES
12.The Croatian Musical Institute, Zagreb, exterior and central staircase
(photographs Damil Kalogjera).
Courtesy of the Croatian Musical Institute.
3.Gaida player Paschalis Kitsikoudis from the village of Patagi, Evros in
Western Thrace. Singer Stratis Laboudis from the village of Poimenikon, Evros
(photograph Haris Sarris).
4.Cham Albanians dancing before the opening of the Folklore Festival Oda
Dibrane in Peshkope, Northern Albania in 1999 (photograph Ardian Ahmedaja).
5.National Folklore Festival in Gjirokastr, Albania in 2004. Male dance from
Kor (photograph Ardian Ahmedaja).
67.Tekoto dance from Macedonia, performed by Tanec, the National Folksong
and Folkdance Ensemble of Macedonia.
Courtesy of Tanec.
89.The Theatre of San Giacomo in Corfu. Exterior and stage. Watercolours by
M. Pieris.
Courtesy of the Music Museum Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros of the
Corfu Philharmonic Society.
CHAPTER ONE
EXODUS
If you stroll around Sarajevo today you will see a modern, feisty European
capital. You may need to remind yourself that this was a city under siege
in the 1990s, and that many of its inhabitants carry vivid memories of
what is usually just called the war. For some, the memories are no doubt
suppressed. Even where events are less strident, our memory sometimes
prefers to leapfrog the more immediate past. It seeks a safer territory.
Unlike Mostar to the west or the Drina valley villages to the east, now in
Republika Srpska, Sarajevo retains relatively few physical scars from the
war. What has been destroyed is being destroyed is the toleration of
difference, for no Balkan city had been as multinational, multireligious
and multicultural as Sarajevo. Present-day divisions are palpable, and they
remind us that the rebuilding of tolerance, here as elsewhere in South
East Europe, will be a daunting task. The memory of co-existence haunts
the city. As for the violence, this is now encased in commemorative sym-
bols; it is rendered into history.
The Dayton accord held in check some of those same ethnonational
energies that had triggered an earlier war, when Gavrilo Princip stamped
Sarajevo indelibly on the history books. Again there are symbols, book-
marking the infamous date: 28 June 1914.1 Princips target was an Arch-
duke, but a dynasty fell: more than that, an entire dynastic system. And
the dynasties are inscribed in Sarajevos urban landscape. As you stroll
down Ferhadija, now a pedestrian walkway thronged with shoppers, the
Habsburg scenery at the upper end yields to the Ottoman old town, with
its medresa and bezistan, a tourist trap for sure, but still charming. History
is peeled back in layers as you walk. You will pass the Catholic cathedral,
and you may glimpse the spire of the Franciscan church and monastery
across the river Miljacka, all built after the Habsburg occupation of 1878.
You will walk within a block or two of the Saborna Crkva, the new Ortho-
dox Church on Trg Osloboenja [Liberation Square]. You might then make
1Snel 2004.
14 chapter one
part Jewish secular musical life was unaffected by the tight bureaucratic
control exercised by the new administration over music.5 As an oral cul-
ture, predominantly amateur and without dedicated performance venues,
it was exempt from the license system that crippled other forms of music-
making. But it did reap the benefits of the new programmes of education
introduced by the Habsburgs and of the cultural awareness that flowed
from them. And it responded to a developing cultural nationalism among
the Sephardim, a response to the Habsburgs, but even more a response to
the Ashkenazim who accompanied them, and who established their own
community in the city.6 With the change of administration the Sephardim
got themselves organised, establishing formal structures of identity,
through which they might articulate a new sense of self and history.
Hence the appearance of institutions such as the charitable founda-
tion La Benevolencia in 1892, and the short-lived Judeo-Spanish magazine
La Alborado, founded by the Bulgarian reformer Abraham Kapon in 1900.
And hence too the first steps in an identity-defining collection of oral
culture, in line with nationalist movements more generally at that time.
Sephardic folk ballads in particular began to be collected just before the
turn of the century, partly under the auspices of La Benevolencia. And
as so often in such movements, the motives of the collectors were part
political and part conservationist. Outsiders were the prime movers.
They included the 1893 notations of the Czech ethnologist Ludvk Kuba,
stimulated largely by the activities of the recently established Zemaljksi
muzej,7 the 1898 Leo Wiener collections published in North America,8 the
pioneering romanicist studies of Angel Pulido Fernndez9 and Ramon
Menndez Pidal,10 and the 1911 collections of Manuel Manrique de Lara, a
key figure in the conservation of Sephardic oral cultures. La Benevolencia
also supported the activities of the choral and tamburica society La Gloria,
which featured on the historic recordings made in Sarajevo in 1907 by
Felix Hampe for Deutsche Grammophon. These are among the earliest
recordings of Sephardic music, and happily copies are extant, rendering
the private voice public and permanent.11
5Risto Pekka Pennanen has discussed this bureaucracy based on researches in the
Zemaljska Vlada Sarajevo [Provincial Government Archive]. See Pennanen 2005.
6Freidenreich 1977.
7Milojkovi-Djuri 2002, 149.
8Wiener 1903.
9Fernndez 1992 and 1993.
10Pidal 1958; Armistead 1978.
11 Pennanen 2003 and 2007.
16 chapter one
12These were requested from readers, and in principle one was published with each
issue. Several ballads from Jevrejski glas are included in Armistead and Silverman 1971.
13Nezirovi 1992, 56.
14Maulen-Berlowitz 1995.
exodus 17
15The expulsion edict of 1492 followed the re-establishment of the Inquisition in Spain
in 1480, itself indicative of a marked deterioration in the relations between Jews and
Christians.
16The Marranos were converted New Christians who aimed to reconvert to Judaism
at the earliest possible date. An extensive practice of crypto-Judaism thus developed in
Portgual. See Mea and Steinhardt 1999.
17The term Sephardic has in recent years been applied more generally to more-or-less
all Jews who do not have an Ashkenazi European background. See Sola Pool, Patai and
Cardozo 1960, 5 for speculation on the reasons for this.
18 chapter one
18The culture of Moroccan Jews retained even closer links to Spain than their Balkan
counterparts. See de Quirs 1972, 334; also Shiloah 1992, 193.
19Benbassa and Rodrigue 1993, xvii. The path was cleared for the Sephardim in part by
the wealth and commercial acumen of Donna Gracia, so-called Queen of the Jews.
20Rhodes became an important centre after the defeat of the Knights of St. John.
21 Frejdenberg 1999.
22The Sublime Porte was the name given to the Divan or Court of the Ottoman
Empire.
exodus 19
Ottoman Empire in the early eighteenth century: Every pacha has his Jew,
who is his homme daffaires.23
They were of further strategic importance to the larger proselytis-
ing goal of the Ottomans. If the Catholic West chose to reject its Jewish
populations, then the Sultan would welcome them, and would use them
to best advantage, not least to create a balance of power with Christian
populations, for in practice the Jews often occupied a precarious social
interstratum.24 Above all, they were people of the book. For the Ottomans,
religion was at least in theory the motor driving the conquests, where
war (the gathering of the hosts) was literally a season of the year;25 and
it was also the main basis on which they structured dependent peoples,
through a so-called millet system that existed in varying degrees of for-
malisation, with the Jewish millet less centralised and less hierarchically
structured than its Orthodox Christian counterpart.
From the start the empire had been accepting of difference even as
it was protective of hierarchy.26 As part of their contract with the Otto-
man authorities, Christian and Jewish communities were not just free to
practise their own religions; they were ceded a substantial measure of
self-government, even down to matters of jurisprudence. For the Sephardic
Jews this devolution enabled continuity and some measure of stability.
And in return for these freedoms and for Ottoman protection, they paid a
special tax, and were required to organise the collection of that and other
taxes within their community. Of course the supremacy of Islam was never
in question.27 Like Orthodox Christians, the Jews remained subordinate
in all major respects to the Sublime Porte,28 and that meant in practice
to a ruling class of officials, soldiers and administrators. Throughout the
33Spanish scholars, notably Menndez Pidal, have focused on Iberian origins, though
mainly through the study of texts rather than music. The major scholarship to emerge
from this school is to be found in the publications of Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H.
Silverman. See Armistead and Silverman 1970, 1981 and 1986. Arguments for the Spanish
roots of the music are made in Galant 1932 and elsewhere.
34See the discussion of this problem in Shiloah 1992, 189196.
35Strunck 1977, 5567. For a general discussion of this problem, see Shiloah 1992,
3738.
36Seroussi 2001.
37See the early essay by David Aaron de Sola and Aguilar Emanuel (De Sola and
Emanuel 1857). The most comprehensive anthology is Levy 196480.
22 chapter one
even argued for the proximity of Sephardic cantillation not just to medieval
Hispanic practices but also to much earlier Jewish traditions.38 Yet what-
ever the continuities, processes of acculturation were rife. If we home in
on religious music around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, at which point certain concrete things can be studied, and even heard,
it is clear that the practice at that time was heavily influenced by Ottoman
traditions of classical and Mevlev music. Whether cantillation constitutes
music is, of course, as much of a question for Jewish as for Islamic tradi-
tions.39 Accompanied song was unambiguously music, but chanting was
understood not as music but as saying, reading or learning. Its function
was to enhance the text, and especially so in the Sephardic service, where
the Hazan was less a cantor in the developed Ashkenazic sense than a
traditional reader and leader, intoning the chants with meticulous atten-
tion to correct pronunciation and clear enunciation.
Music or not, Sephardic cantillation followed a system of Biblical
Accents (teamim) that was common to all Jewish liturgy, indicating not
just emphasis and punctuation but mode and, in a very general way,
melodic pattern.40 This was a form of neumatic notation, and the prac-
tice it signified was an ancient one, a particular variant of a more general
Middle Eastern or eastern Mediterranean musical culture.41 The modal
basis of the music had become fundamental, and it was preserved in a tra-
ditional form in the Sephardic liturgy, where the saying of prayers would
be adapted to the mode appropriate to each Sabbath, feast day or fast day.
The Spanish (pre-expulsion) Jews were also responsible for some of the
great Arab-influenced hymns (piyyutim) that enriched particular services
in the Middle Ages.42 And since the piyyutim were meant to be sung, in
the familiar understanding of that term, they ensured that music, not just
heightened recitation, took its place in the service. Musical qualities were
38A.Z. Idelsohn, whose ideological bias is apparent, has shown how widely separated
practices have retained the same readings (Idelsohn 1948, 39). He contrasts this with more
developmental Ashkenazi traditions.
39Following the destruction of the Second Temple music was proscribed in the syna-
gogue, and all musical instruments were, in theory, out of bounds.
40This was formalised in the so-called Tiberian system of the ninth century. See
Idelsohn 1948.
41 It was Robert Lachmann who re-directed Jewish music studies from the quest for
continuities within a single tradition towards a more contextual approach across Middle
Eastern musical cultures; see Lachmann 1978. Yet we are cautioned by Peter Jeffery against
too easy an acceptance of cross-cultural analogies (Jeffery 1992, 2).
42Key figures were the great poet and Neo-Platonist philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol,
and the Toledan doctor and poet Yehuda Halevi.
exodus 23
43Shiloah refers to the practice of Moshe Vital, a Sephardic cantor of Jerusalem who
was born in Izmir and studied with Isaac Algazi in Rhodes (Shiloah 1992, 701).
44Najara 1587. In this Diwan (Songster), the tunes are ordered by maqm, and the
poems sung to a mixture of Ladino and Hebrew. Idelsohn points out that Hatikvah, a
hymn whose melody was thought to have developed from older Sephardic Hallel and Tal
tunes, may in fact be derived from the Moldovian-Romanian folk song Carul su boi [Cart
and Oxen] (Idelsohn 1948, 3768).
45These demanded hymns for Baqqashot (supplication) gatherings at midnight and for
the early risers or watchmen of the morning.
24 chapter one
by the Sabbath and the events of the Jewish year, together with count-
less paraliturgical songs associated with the life cycle: parida (childbirth),
asuar (display of dowry items), bodas (weddings) and so on. Such ritual
songs were often described as coplas, a genre that appears to have devel-
oped largely within the Ottoman Empire; it was not identical to the secu-
lar Spanish genre so labelled. Written mainly in Ladino, coplas formed
part of the traditional or popular music of the Sephardim, and they lead
us to our final category, Ottoman-influenced secular repertories, which
included narrative romances and love songs or topical songs (canciones),
invariably performed by women, whose role in public life was restricted.
Whether sacred or secular, the poetic forms and some of the texts of
these traditional Sephardic songs and the surviving repertory is exclu-
sively vocal can often be traced back to Hispanic origins, no doubt
because for the texts, though not for the music, there emerged a sta-
bilising written tradition in the form of song collections (romanceros,
cancioneros).46 Indeed, as indicated earlier, there has been some impres-
sively detailed philological study of selected song texts from this wider
repertory, comparing extant sources for the songs, many collected in
North America, unpicking their multiple linguistic elements, and dem-
onstrating archaisms of language that have now disappeared from Spain
and Portugal.
Classifying Sephardic songs is in the end a treacherous exercise. For one
thing, the separation of sacred and secular is less straightforward than the
above summary suggests; narrative romances and even canciones often
have sacred or semi-sacred themes. And for another, there was a splinter-
ing of Sephardic traditional song into several distinct pathways, for exam-
ple Italian (Venice and then Livorno), Ottoman-area, and Moroccan.47 Not
only were titles differently understood across these separate traditions;
they were used somewhat permissively within each of them. Nonethe-
less, some general distinctions can be drawn. The Sephardic romance is
conventionally a narrative poem traceable to, though greatly reducing in
scale, the Hispanic epic ballad, with which it shares the poetic structure
of assonant couplets of two eight-syllable lines. The Ottoman-area tradi-
tion retained this structure, but here the term romanza tends to embrace
46For a discussion of musical survivals from Spain, see Katz 1992. Katz critiques simi-
lar attempts to relate peninsular and Sephardic repertories in Etzion and Weich-Shahak
1988.
47According to Shiloah, the early eighteenth century was the point at which Ottoman-
area and Moroccan musical traditions parted company (Shiloah 1992).
exodus 25
lyric as well as narrative poems, while the subject matter of the narrative
poetry often refers to relatively recent Ottoman or Balkan history. More
common than romanzas are canciones (or canticas), shorter strophic folk
poems on any number of different topics from daily life, but very often on
themes of love.48 And finally there are coplas, which usually highlight spe-
cifically Jewish themes, though in certain cases this term has been used
generically to cover almost any kind of Judeo-Spanish song.
What of the music, sacred and secular? Musicologists such as Judith
Etzion, Susana Weich-Shahak and Israel Katz have indeed demonstrated
Hispanic survivals. But it seems that from as early as the Diwan of Israel
Najara the piyyutim at least would often have been based on makam-s
(strictly makamlar, plural of the Turkish makam; cf. Arabic maqm/
maqmt), and would have employed a performance style characteristic
of Ottoman music.49 Of other repertory, it is likely that the romanzas and
coplas would also have adopted Middle Eastern musical idioms at an early
stage, even where the texts were explicitly Hispanic. This is supported by
ethnographic evidence,50 and also by the more concrete evidence that
became available in the early twentieth century, when collectors first
began to transcribe the music of the songs as well as their texts.
We have already encountered some key figures here (above all de Lara,
who in 1911 and 1915 collected both tunes and texts from the Balkans and
North Africa), but a major collector from a later generation was Alberto
Hemsi (18981975). Hemsi began collecting in Asia Minor in 1920, then in
Rhodes (19241927), and later (intermittently) in Alexandria and Salonica.51
His arrangements of Sephardic melodies for voice and piano exhibit
what he himself called a triple process of reproduction, reconstruction
and re-creation,52 and they contextualise the traditional melodies in a
highly specific, Spanish-influenced manner. However, these arrangements
represent only a small fraction of his total song collection. His larger
enterprise was truly ethnological, involving the preservation of the texts
and many of the melodies of Ottoman-area Sephardic song, some of it
of ancient lineage, but much of it more recent. He set the compass read-
ing for later mid-century collections, by Leon Algazi (18901971), Moshe
Attias, and Isaac Levy, all of which extended the purview of Sephardic
songs to embrace other than Ottoman-area traditions.53
From the transcriptions of these collectors, from documented accounts
of performances, and of course from the earliest sound recordings, some
picture of performance practices in the Balkans begins to emerge, at least
for the later stages of the Sephardic diaspora. In a pioneering study, Israel
Katz attempted to bring some realism to this issue by stressing the influ-
ence of Middle Eastern music, including the music of Sufi confraternities
in Turkey (the ilhi-s, or devotional hymns, associated with Sufism were
especially influential in Albania and Bosnia, where Islam gained a firm
foothold).54 In doing so, he was reinforcing a message that had already
been articulated in Alberto Hemsis commentaries. And the same message
is underlined when we turn to early twentieth-century compositions and
performances by leading Jewish musicians, several of whom were promi-
nent in Ottoman classical music; they included composers such as emtov
ikar (18401920) and Ishak Varon Efendi (18841962), singers such as the
eminent Haim Yapaci Efendi, and the Algazi family, of whom Isaac ben
Solomon Algazi (18821964) has left a recorded legacy.55 The recordings
by Samuel Benaroya of songs associated with the Maftirim choir in Edirne
in eastern Thrace also open a window to this world.56 And then, to add
further ballast to the argument that the sound world of Ottoman-area
Sephardic song was indeed a Middle Eastern one, we have the valuable
fieldwork of Pamela Dorn on the music of Turkish Jewry.57
Something of this sound world is recaptured in the work of those
present-day recording artists who choose to perform Sephardic music
using an oriental voice production,58 the makam-s of Turkish music (at
least as a trace presence), and an accompaniment of instruments such as
the ney (oblique reed flute), kann (plucked zither), frame drum, and saz
(Turkish long-necked lute). However, this is only one option among sev-
eral in a market whose extent and eclecticism bear witness to the revival
of interest in Judeo-Spanish song in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries. Some artists have acknowledged through their performance
style the similarities between Sephardic and other popular repertories
from the Balkans, notably Bosnian sevdalinkas and Bulgarian and Greek
urban songs.59 Some prefer to bolster the medieval Hispanic association
either through the use of early instruments, or by introducing flamenco
idioms (notably Yasmin Levy), all suggestive of nostalgia as a studied proj-
ect, or as Svetlana Boym has argued a symptom, of our age.60 Then again,
some have created a Mediterranean tinge, linking the Sephardic repertory
to traditional music from Italy, Sardinia and southern France. Others have
opted for the pure folksong manner, minimally accompanied if at all,
which was generic to folksong revivals everywhere in the late twentieth
century, while yet others have combined the Sephardic ballad style with
contemporary popular idioms. The point is that Judeo-Spanish song is
now literally in revival. It has moved to the public concert and the record-
ing studio, and has little contact with the traditional ritual practices of a
living Sephardic-Jewish culture.
Since World War II such a culture has barely existed in the Balkans,
except in small isolated pockets, notably in Bulgaria.61 Sephardic cul-
ture had already been dealt a major blow by the demise of the Ottoman
system, whose innate conservatism had proved an ideal context for the
preservation of traditional beliefs and customs, but with the Holocaust it
was all but extinguished. Where liturgical music is concerned, the effect
of this destruction of Balkan Jewish culture was to sharpen the division
between an eastern Sephardic tradition, referring now to Turkey and the
Near East, and the Sephardim of Western Europe. And as Edwin Seroussi
has pointed out, the centre of gravity of this eastern tradition has now
moved to Jerusalem following the migrations to Israel; Seroussi refers to
a Jerusalem-Sephardi style, which absorbed many elements of an earlier
Ottoman-area practice.62 However, the situation seems rather different
with Judeo-Spanish song. Increasingly this was marketed as a species of
world music, with a relatively free exchange of idioms across the several
59Kaufman 1964.
60Boym 2001.
61 Cichon 2006.
62Seroussi 2001.
28 chapter one
It is possible to tease out some larger issues from this brief account of
Sephardic music in the Balkans. They are issues that will emerge as the-
matic to my account of music in the region generally, so it will be worth
some attempt at exposition here. One concerns the power of place. In
practice, history and geography are constantly in dialogue in our discus-
sions of music, but history has tended to have the upper hand, provid-
ing musicologists with the basic conceptual models, as well as many of
the specific tools, of their trade. Recently this has been changing, per-
haps a measure of the smudging of boundaries between musicology and
ethnomusicology.
We noted two hypothetical narratives about the Sephardic exodus, one
depicting a transplanted Sepharad and the other a process of accultura-
tion within the Ottoman ecumene. These are narratives of place. At the
root of the first narrative lies the assumption that everyone has a proper
place; we may not be there (we may be displaced), but we should be,
so we define our identity by constructing our proper place in our pres-
ent place, which is tantamount to constructing the past in the present.63
Music can facilitate this. Of its nature it can be a ritual of remembrance,
haunting the landscape, like a mythological Echo. At the root of the sec-
ond narrative is the assumption that we are creatures of the places we
inhabit, shaped more by our present than our imagined past. As the Arab
proverb has it: People resemble their times more than they resemble their
fathers.64 Here music might enchant rather than haunt the landscape,
67Guzelimian 2005.
68Where Sephardic cantillation is concerned, there are naturally synergies with chant
studies in general, and especially with the debates about oral and written transmission
conducted by Leo Treitler, Kenneth Levy, Peter Jeffery and others. See, among many other
texts, Tokumaru and Yamaguchi (eds.) 1986.
exodus 31
72Tito Maiorescu used the phrase forms without substance (Boia 2001, 86). See the
discussion in chapter 9.
73Radomir Konstantinovi sets up the opposition of provincial mind and cosmopoli-
tan reason in his Filozofia palanke [Philosophy of Provincialism]. Quoted in Bjeli and
Savi (eds.) 2002, 13. Peter Burke has discussed the related collision of elitist and popular
cultures, albeit in a rather different way, in Burke 1978.
74Jezernik 2004.
75Goldsworthy 1998; Norris 1999; Wolff 2001.
exodus 33
76Dahlhaus 1983. The literal meaning of kairos is the right time for action, correct pro-
portion, fitness, or due measure.
77On transitional states, see Schwartz-Salant and Stein (eds.) 1993. This is part of a
wider literature whose orientation is psycho-analytical, but whose findings create reso-
nances for cultural history.
78Attridge 2004; Alain Badiou 1988 and 2006.
79There are related discussions of rupture and re-articulation in Kristevas thought. See
Chanter and Ponowska-Ziarek (eds.) 2005.
80For a discussion of the practice as a category, see MacIntyre 1981. Elsewhere (Samson
2002, chapter 1), I have addressed the relationship between practices (which have their
own setting, history, tradition, values, ideals and ethos) and institutions, which are usually
structured in terms of power and status.
34 chapter one
out the key transformative events, even to the point of identifying an ori-
gin and a telos. Again it is tempting to transfer such ideas to the larger
Balkan canvas. Recent political history in this region might be understood
as an event series that has been directly interventionist in music history,
impinging on the beliefs, options and actions of musicians, and transform-
ing their understanding of their practice. We can actually take that further
if we choose to follow Alain Badiou. For him, events are prerequisites for
subjectivity. We cannot really have a subject without them.
It is rather hard to see how we can find an accommodation between
these two approaches. We seem to be forced to choose between very dif-
ferent ways of punctuating history. The kairos and the event (the point of
perfection and the transformative moment) are after all very differently
placed in any given historical sequence. At this point, we might turn to
Jacques Derrida for yet another perspective. Derrida warns us against
just this kind of reductionism, against the excesses of what I will later
describe as an either-or mentality. Nor is he solely a deconstructive voice.
By unravelling the complex hinterland to events,81 he offers us a possible
way to reconcile our two historiographical perspectives. He achieves this
by embedding events within mini-histories their hidden and intertwin-
ing backgrounds and by viewing them as simultaneously reactive and
proactive.
This approach is sympathetic to the ambiguities of little stories, which
have a way of constantly taking detours from the simple characterisa-
tions of grand narratives. Much of what follows might well be classified
as little stories: about art music, church music, popular music and tradi-
tional music. Of course they are really big stories. They are just not much
reported. But they only really come into their own, and reveal some-
thing of the world that engendered them, when we set them alongside
counterpoint them against the grand narratives that have shaped our
broader understanding of that world. Much of this book seeks to do
just that.
81Derrida 1994.
CHAPTER TWO
ECOLOGIES
from its sensory experience.4 Another way of saying the same thing, or
something like it, would be to argue that civilised society lost some of its
capacity for the social memory that is imbued in place, even as it devel-
oped an enthusiasm for the writing of history (or, as Jeffrey Olick has sug-
gested, as it confronted too much history), so that this conjunction has
had to be rediscovered, or reclaimed.5 Memory, in this reasoning, drained
away from the charismatic centres, with their rootless urban elites. Yet it
remained, and to some extent still remains, fundamental to the experi-
ence of more traditional rural societies, where there is little interest in
the writing of history.6
The novelist Ivo Andri wonderfully illustrated this convergence of
the provincial place and the longevity of memory in The Bridge on the
Drina.7 The story-telling episode during the Viegrad flood is telling in this
respect, and it includes an evocative account of the historically associative
power of epic song sung by a Montenegrin with gusle, and by extension of
music generally.8 As to periphery, Andris novel reminds us throughout
that for the Balkans this has been all but a defining term. The competitive
cultural nationalisms of the nineteenth century may have drawn some
territories from the peripheries of Europe closer to its cultural centre,
but they pushed others, and especially in the Balkans, yet further away.
Memory selectively invoked, it need hardly be added is long in the
Balkans.
The Bridge on the Drina tells us how place may be carved out of space
through a process of marking and naming. More than that, it illustrates
how a place can become a structure within which subjectivities are negoti-
ated and renegotiated across time, in this case several centuries. Through-
out the novel we witness ever-changing interactions between subjects and
their environment, as deeply embedded responses to a real physical place,
with its landmarks of memory, are brought into conjunction with the
more immediate stimuli that the place may provide at any given time.
4Casey 1997.
5Olick 2007.
6On this, see Lowenthal 1985; also Maria Todorovas introduction in Todorova 2004.
For more theoretical discussions of the relationship between history and memory, see
Samuel 1994, and the introduction to Hodgkin and Radstone 2003.
7Andri 2003a. The translation of cuprija as bridge is hardly adequate. The original
incorporates the idea of a meeting-place, reinforcing the privilege of place.
8Story-telling is built into the structure of some of Andris writing, notably in the
novella The Damned Yard, described by Celia Hawkesworth as a story about story-telling
in the introduction to her translation. See Andri 2003b.
ecologies 37
12Models of cultural geography developed by Peter H. Nash and George O. Carney are
useful in examining the signifying conventions of music in this way. See in particular Nash
and Carney 1996.
13Aubert 2007, 1.
14In Erikson 1969, it is argued that the mapping of individual to collective identities is
defining of a culture.
ecologies 39
musical practices and musical forms, have yielded some of their secrets to
the patient observation of ethnologists.
Let us journey to the extreme edge of the region covered by this book.
There is a corner of Maramure in northern Transylvania known as ara
Oaului [Oa Country], comprising in all some thirty-six villages and their
environs. The geographical isolation of this region, ringed as it is by moun-
tains, has ensured that older layers of music-making have survived here
rather longer than elsewhere in Romania the impingement of modernity,
the effects of emigration, and the folklorisation promoted by the Commu-
nist regime.19 Jacques Bout first visited the region briefly in 1969, return-
ing in 1979, and again with two other researchers in the 1990s. The foci of
his fieldwork on all three occasions were the so-called Sunday dance, in
which voice and violin are ever-present, the musical system underlying
the characteristic genres of Oa, especially as represented by the ubiqui-
tous dan, and the complex ceremonial dimensions of social events, nota-
bly, but not exclusively, weddings.
In the course of their 1990s research, now published as a book,20 the
three scholars worked to find answers to some of the intractable questions
already posed by Bout during his earlier visits. We travel with them on a
voyage of discovery, as they first acquire a vocabulary, and then test out
its possible, distinctly contested, meanings. First in line is the enigmatic
dan, a term (literally dance) whose use by informants seems permissive,
at least initially; then there is pont, a component (melodic segment) of
dan, it seems, but again with definitions that seem to vary from musi-
cian to musician, and with meanings derived from dance as well as from
music; and likewise with the third key term, figur. We work through the
various stages of clarification with the authors, until they arrive first at a
more-or-less satisfactory definition of pont, and then at a general scheme
for dan.
This research uncovers certain universals in improvisation, while at
the same time documenting the uniqueness of a musical culture that has
21 Thomas Hylland Eriksen reminds us that indigeneity is a far from neutral term in
anthroplogy. See Eriksen 1993, 1314. Notions of authenticity are often closely linked to
indigeneity, and especially in studies of traditional music; see Johnson 2000; also Bigenho
2002.
22Several of the detailed segmentations in this book seem permissive; conversely, the
spectographic notations run the risk of tautology.
42 chapter two
23There is also a more private tradition of song and flute playing within the culture,
suited to indoor performance.
24I am referring here to the traditional region of Maramure, since the name is now
often applied to a rather wider region stretching beyond the mountains.
25Brediceanu 1957; Bartk 1913. On Brediceanus hostility to Bartk, see Blaa 2002,
and in the same issue an extensive discussion of rival Hungarian and Romanian views of
Transylvania in music.
ecologies 43
In his film Gluvi barut [Silent Gunpowder], set in the Bosnian moun-
tains during World War II, Bato Cengi conveys something of the deso-
late beauty of the Dinaric Alps, which run southwards in parallel to the
Adriatic coastline and then stretch eastwards into Bosnia and Herze-
govina, Montenegro and part of Serbia. The specificity of place, captured
so evocatively in this film, is enhanced by a musical score from Goran
Bregovi, best known for his association with the rock band Bijelo dugme
[White Button], and for his subsequent work with the film director Emir
Kustorica.32 Bregovi achieves this distinctive sound world by drawing on,
and processing in various ways, an ancient layer of vocal music found
in these regions, of which ganga associated with several traditional
mountain communities, including the people once known as Morlachs in
Western Hercegovina, Central Bosnia and Imotska Krajina is probably
the most familiar genre.33
31 Bartk noted these affinities, and they are further discussed in Alexandru 1980, 67.
32Bijelo dugme was the most famous of the bands that made up Sarajevos thriving
popular music scene in the pre-war years. See chapter 19 for further discussion.
33For a detailed study, see Petrovi 1977. Ganga is a rather specific genre in which solo
voice and a group of between three and five singers alternate, with texts semi-improvised
and based on units of one couplet of two ten-syllable verses.
ecologies 45
34This is the case, for instance, in traditional singing na glas in the Tetovo region of
northern Macedonia.
35Fulanovi-oi 2003.
36The vowel sound used for non-semantic syllables varies according to certain local
traditions.
37Rexhep Munishi has written interestingly about this (Munishi 1987).
46 chapter two
Mountains are the salient physical fact about the Balkan peninsula.
Mountains come first is the apt quotation (from Fernand Braudel) that
introduces the first chapter of Mark Mazowers concise but nicely crafted
monograph on the region.38 The Dinaric Alps extend southwards until
they become the Albanian Alps and then the Greek Pindus and Taigetus
ranges. To the east they branch off into the Rhodope and Balkan moun-
tains. So it is not surprising that in many different guises these ancient
forms of group singing survived and among vanishing populations of
older singers, still survive across mountainous regions of the peninsula
as a whole. Depending on the region the repertories might be mono-
phonic, heterophonic or polyphonic.39 In certain areas (parts of western
Macedonia in Greece, for example), the melodic structures of monophonic
songs indicates a probable earlier polyphonic practice, now lost, demon-
strating that the borders of the polyphonic tradition have been far from
stable. Conversely, in some existing polyphonic practices (north Pindus,
for example) ornaments within the melodic style, such as the mid-phrase
leaping seventh, seem to have taken their origins from the distinctive
vocal cries (a kind of yodelling) that are common to many ancient forms
of group singing.
Although related genres of ritual and occupational group singing were
once to be found in traditional cultures over much of South East Europe, they
were divided by certain cultural boundaries that no doubt had an ancient
provenance. Identifying the distinctive families of group singing created by
these boundaries has occupied a number of scholars. There have been
attempts to weld some of these idioms to an exclusively Slavonic cul-
ture.40 And there have been suggestions by some specialists of links with
much older cultures, referring to the Hellenic traditions of north Pindus,
to the Illyrian idioms of Albania and the Dinaric Alps, and to a rather dif-
ferent, independent Thracian tradition in Bulgaria and western Thrace.41
One might even propose correspondences between Dinaric idioms and
Alpine traditions further north, notably those of the Austrian Juchzer. This
38Mazower 2000.
39Iso-polyphony may have developed from the heterophonic practices that commonly
emerge from group singing. At least within the Hellenic tradition, speculation about this
might return us to the worded melody of classical antiquity, marked by the association
between accent and a rising interval (notably the fourth), providing two points of orienta-
tion around which melodic ideas might cluster. My thoughts on this come mainly from
discussion with Athena Katsanevaki.
40Rice 2004, 21.
41 See the discussion in Nitsiakos and Mantzos 2003.
ecologies 47
is the more striking in that all these repertories stand in sharp contrast
to those of Maramure and ara Oaului, reminding us that the Transyl-
vanian and Carpathian mountains are separated from the Northeastern
Serbian and Dinaric Alps by a cultural as well as a physical fault line (the
Danube is the physical border, with the most dramatic point of separation
the gorge known as the Iron Gates).42
It is not realistic to generalise about such a wide range of traditions.
In particular, the Dinaric styles including north (Geg) Albanian are
significantly different from the distinctive polyphonic repertories found
among Vlach-, Albanian- and Greek-speaking communities further south
in Epirus. Nor have analytical approaches to these separate traditions
been at all uniform. Compare the complementary insights yielded by
the very different approaches of Ankica Petrovi in her study of ganga
in Dinaric regions and of Athena Katsenevaki in her analysis of the tonal
basis of music from north Pindus.43 The former demonstrates how a lim-
ited repertory of basic and compound melodic patterns made up of any-
thing between one and five notes can be subject to endless permutation
and variation, with melodic diversity closely linked to particular locali-
ties. In contrast, the latter proceeds reductively, revealing that archetypes
of either hemitonic or anhemitonic pentatonic sequences underlie the
melodic prolixity of traditional repertories in this part of northern Greece;
indeed the whole region of Epirus, including what is now south Albania,
has been described as a kind of pentatonic zone.
The polyphonic music of Epirus has long been recognised as singular
(the Albanian variety is one of the listed masterpieces of UNESCOs so-
called oral and intangible heritage of mankind).44 It is a true polyphony,
in the sense that each part has a distinctive role and function: one lead-
ing, one cutting, and others providing and elaborating the drone (the
ison), and is very much sui generis. Nonetheless it is not an entirely unified
tradition. There are certain differences, for example, between Albanian
and Farseriot Vlach versions on one hand and Greek and Koutsovlach
versions on the other. In brief, the Albanian traditions often have a dis-
tinctive rhythmicised ison and a significantly different underlying pitch
42This gorge, once right on the old Turkish frontier, is now the site of a major hydro-
electric dam.
43Petrovi 1977. Katsenevaki 1998.
44At the meeting of the relevant committee in Abu Dhabi in 2009 reservations were
expressed about the rationale of this scheme, not least because classifications are by
nation.
48 chapter two
The (untranslatable) term voice here is significant, and its use may
help us gain some understanding not just of the particular case, but of the
relationship between functionality and the aesthetic in this music more
generally. In some parts of former Yugoslavia, singing na glas [literally
on the voice or to the voice] is the term used to describe this older layer
of song, distinguishing it from a newer type of singing na bas [on or to the
bass], where the norm of consonance is the third and the cadence is on a
fifth, or alternatively from epic song, as performed by guslars.46 But more
crucially it refers to melodic patterns (voices) created within a given
tonal structure and strictly determined by the conventions of the rite or
occupation, as also (secondarily) by the place of performance, the specific
ritual or occupational function, and the status of the performer. Hence
Lazarian voice, but also wedding voice, bee-keepers voice, travellers
voice, kolede voice (from the round dance or kolo), and so on.
Traditionally, the voice here was inseparable from the rite, occasion,
place or role it was indeed defined by such categories and it was thus
regarded as one important way to preserve ritual meanings across the
centuries. For it should be stressed that these melodic types are almost
certainly of ancient origin, and were probably associated originally with
nomadic, tribal societies. It is only in a very limited sense that we can
speak of an audience or a listener for such performances, if indeed per-
formances is the mot juste. The voice was integral to the rite, so that any
threat to the integrity of the rite was also a challenge to the authenticity of
the voice. Within this constraint, there could be considerable freedom as
to the aesthetic manifestation of the voice. The melodic type or formula,
in other words, could be given life in numerous different ways, depending
on place, time, person or situation, while the underlying meaning would
remain the same.
Like other forms of ritual activity, singing na glas provided a framework
for the expressive life of its participating community. Such frameworks
functioned as a protection against the destabilising and potentially dis-
ruptive effects of individual expression. To express it in Lacanian terms,
they protected against the pre-rational, pre-symbolic Imaginary, or per-
haps more relevantly still, against the Kristevan Semiotic; they by no
means denied such expression, but rather channelled it, and socialised it.
46The voice in this terminology has several connotations. It can refer to outdoors
singing (iz glasa [from the throat]); it can identify a ritual or function; and it can refer to
a mode. I am grateful to Velika Stojkova Serafimovska, who discussed these points with
me at length.
50 chapter two
Put more simply, life in the mountains was hard, and this ancient form
of singing was one way to make it easier; it was that rather more than an
entertainment in any conventional sense of the term.
There is a more general point here. Ritual forms are established to sup-
ply order. They create a temporal and physical space within which various
kinds of affective experience, including the more extreme affective states
associated with, for example, bereavement, might be socially sanctioned.
However personal a lament may be, writes Gail Holst-Warhaft, it is sung
in company; other women pick up phrases from the first lamenter and
incorporate them into their own song.47 In this way ritual forms preserve,
or act as surrogates for, what Kristeva and Lacan call the Symbolic register,
whose role is to regulate: to bring order and rationality to the chaos of our
lives. At the same time they act as a necessary bulwark against what Lacan
calls the Real, those ineffable (sublime or brutalising) manifestations of
the world whose intrusions on the Symbolic are no less threatening than
the Semiotic (or Imaginary). Rituals, in other words, protect the Symbolic
Order from both the Semiotic and the Real. And while they are cultur-
ally specific, they are also cross-cultural, since the Semiotic and the Real
are universals of human experience. The voice in ancient Dinaric singing
might thus be regarded as an embodiment of the Symbolic Order.
Compare this with more recent lyric (rhymed) songs which form no
less a part of mountain traditions in the Balkans, but are without ritual
significance. Here the individuated message the particular text, speak-
ing mainly of love, in countless romances is aesthetically encoded by
the performers; it is embodied in the melody which carries it and whose
memorability is essential to its communication. Here one can indeed
speak of an audience, of a performance, of a product as well as a process.
Aesthetic values are foregrounded from the start; the song has an identifi-
able tune rather than a melodic formula. This presents us with an intrigu-
ing paradox, for although they are by definition more individuated, less
a vehicle for collective expression, non-ritual songs have been preserved
more consistently and have allowed for much less fundamental musical
change than ritual songs. Their identity is linked to their aesthetic prop-
erties, and that allows them some capacity to transcend a local ecology.
Hence the functionality may change freely (is the song to be performed
by women, men, or both? Is it to be sung outdoors, indoors, or either? Is
it to be part of a private or a public occasion? Is it a traditional rendition
or a modern revival?), but too much change to the melody itself will result
in a loss of recognition.
The non-ritual song, in short, can survive the incursions of modernity,
and can maintain its identity in often dramatically changed conditions.
This throws into relief the fate of singing on the voice in recent years.
Since World War II it has all but disappeared as a living tradition, though
genres such as ganga were reformulated for new urban environments for a
time in the 1970s, and the idiom is preserved today in carefully researched
performances and recordings by some leading secondary ensembles,
designed above all for the folk festival and even for the mass media (at
the time of writing Croatia is submitting such a repertory to UNESCO
for inclusion in the oral and intangible heritage of humanity). The real
point here is that singing na glas was so intimately linked to an outdoor
ritual life and to a traditional mountain ecology that it could survive the
destruction of that life and ecology only as an echo or an obituary.
Deep in umadija
Travelling to the north and south of Belgrade, you enter two different
Serbias. As you journey northwards into Vojvodina, you approach cen-
tral Europe, physically and culturally. Apart from the mountainous region
Fruka Gora, home to a cluster of Orthodox monasteries, the landscape
flattens out, until eventually it reaches the Pannonian plains. The urban
geography also changes, as Austro-Hungarian Baroque begins to replace
Byzantine-Slavonic in some towns. And (noticeably) the ethnicities
become more diverse, for along with the Banat, of which it was once a
part, Vojvodina can claim to be one of the most multi-cultural provinces
in the region. In contrast, as you travel southwards from Belgrade, you
enter a world of forests, wooded hills, and rolling contours, with Rudnik
mountain in Grua standing at the centre. You have a sense that you
are probing deeper into the Balkans. You are in umadija, the heart of
Servia,48 where the early nineteenth-century insurrection began. This is
the land of Karaorevi, whose memory is revered in this region, and
whose tomb and home can be visited in Topola, one-time capital of the
newly liberated territories.
In umadija you are mainly among Serbs, though settlers from Dinaric
Herzegovina are also found there, as are communities of (Serbian) Roma,
with their marvellous gift a gift that amounts to genius for playing
stringed instruments.49 The sense of history in this region, strikingly cap-
tured in travel literature by Alphonse de Lamartine, and in a later period
by Edith Durham and David Footman, is palpable.50 It has fed too into
fiction, notably in Lawrence Durrell.51 Yet although this territory is indeed
the Serbian heartland, it has never been isolated in the manner of the
mountain regions discussed earlier. On the contrary, it was constantly
traversed, as over the centuries the Serbian people made their way across
it, travelling northward in recurring cycles of migration either from the
Dinaric regions or from the Kosovo-Metohija basin. These migrations left
visible traces on umadija, but they were no threat to its strong sense of
identity, a genius loci stemming from shared ethnicity, shared history, and
shared experience.
This is not to say that umadija is, or ever was, uniform in culture.
Partly because of its centrality within Serbia, and within the Balkans as
a whole, its traditional music has registered influences from the different
worlds that surround it. You can almost draw a line through the prov-
ince separating east and west, with the western flank belonging to the
peripheries of Dinaric culture. In some of the villages of western umadija
ancient Dinaric singing was familiar until relatively recently, and it is still
remembered by an older generation today. Yet here we find a softer ver-
sion of the tradition, not just in terms of voice production, but in the privi-
leging of unison-heterophonic over multi-voiced singing, though even in
unison singing there is a clear division between lead singer and support-
ing voices. It is also worth noting that ritual songs are less common in
this region than in the Dinaric Alps, mainly because it is a land of cattle
breeding rather than shepherding.
In the eastern part of the province the music responds to a rather dif-
ferent musical world, the world of eastern Serbia, bordering on Bulgaria.
But again these influences are processed, their livelier features, especially
in the rhythmic domain, moderated. And as a result the musical idiom is
again rendered distinctly umadijan. As for the central and northern ter-
ritories, if there is (or was) a single prevalent idiom of traditional music it
49Ibid., 210.
50See the discussion in Goldsworthy 1998, 168.
51 Durrell 1957.
ecologies 53
52Devi 1997. The phenomenon is also described, but without the term hybrid, in
Golemovi 1984. See also Golemovis articles in Novy Zvuk, vols. 8 and 9.
53Miljkovi 1986.
54Jovanovi 2002. The Grua collection is based on material recorded by Radmila
Petrovi and later by Jovanovi herself, and is published as Petrovi 2003.
54 chapter two
Thus, Dinaric peoples are in the majority in western Jasenica, for example,
but this is not reflected in the distribution of musical styles.
Aside from current research by Jovanovi, there has been fieldwork
done by Dragoslav Devi and Dimitrije Golemovi in the 1970s and again
in the early 1990s in the neighbouring Takovo district, situated just to the
west of Grua. This region, like upper Jasenica, was populated in the main
by Dinaric settlers from Montenegro and Herzegovina, and while it devel-
oped a singular repertory of entertainment music and some unique stylis-
tic features, its music and music-making can easily be related to practices
both in upper Jasenica and in central umadija, notably through the famil-
iar division between singing na glas and na bas. Devi and Golemovi
provide some intriguing information on the older layer of singing in the
Takovo district, notably on related groups of wedding and harvesting
songs, on verse forms, and on the manner in which informants distinguish
the voices. But they also describe a rich tradition of instrumental music,
mainly designed for village dancing.55
Here we are in the territory of the umadijan kolo, in all its many forms,
originally accompanied by svirala [short pipe], frula [flute], dvojnice [dou-
ble flute] or (often home-made) clarinet.56 The bagpipe was also used of
course, especially for semi-professional performances at special occasions
such as weddings, fairs and public ceremonies, but following World War II
it was gradually replaced by the accordion, and in the 1960s it was an
accordion-dominated ensemble that became associated with a distinctive,
trans-regional, folk idiom (often performed by Roma) that became famil-
iar and widely popular not just through wedding traditions but through
folk festivals such as Gua, at least in its early days.57 Subsequently, the
Takovo district went the way of the rest of Serbia and the wider region
generally, as older ensembles made way for electronically amplified instru-
ments: for the world of the electric guitar, the drum kit and in due course
the synthesizer.
In umadija today even the commercial folk idioms of the 1960s struggle
to survive, while the more traditional idioms have all but disappeared. It
is mainly through ensembles such as Tipoplastika and Moba that they are
preserved, though some younger groups are now following suit (the folk
festival in Topola, now almost 40 years old, is of key importance here).
Among an older generation one can find people who were once active
as semi-professional musicians and whose memories of the old songs are
invaluable to researchers.58 Occasionally the results can be surprising. In
autumn 2006, five men who had performed together as a group several
years previously gathered in a school in Svetli, a small village just south
east of Topola.59 They performed an extensive repertory of songs, exclu-
sively na bas in style. The singing was strong, especially from Dragan Jefti,
the lead singer. After the recordings and interviews they made way for
three women from the same village, and at this point the music changed
course completely. These women had not sung together for many years,
and there were predictable self-deprecatory noises at the beginning of the
session. But when the singing started, it was unambiguously in the ancient
na glas idiom, and in several instances it employed that umadijan hybrid
of na glas and na bas styles, marking the place. It was a world apart from
the singing of the men.
This blatant gender divide is not unique to umadija. Sokol Shupo has
noted something similar in Albanian villages, and Athena Katsanevaki in
the Pindus region. And much earlier Bartk observed that women pre-
served an ancient stratum of song because they were bound to the home
and had relatively few opportunities for external contacts. That it extends
well beyond the Balkans is also clear from writings by Amnon Shiloah.60
Several scholars of music in South East Europe have been exercised by
questions of gender, and with good reason. Within many of the more tra-
ditional rural communities women played distinctly subordinate social
roles, and were confined largely to the private sphere. This extended to
making music, for mens and womens songs were treated as distinct and
separate, and there was a widespread presumption that while women
would participate freely in ritual singing (not playing), they would not be
involved in public performances. It was in the post-World War II years,
particularly under state socialism, that this began to change. The stag-
ing and public representation of traditional music and dance was official
Communist policy, and women increasingly played their part in so-called
village gatherings and folk ensembles. As Ana Hofman has pointed out in
58One such is Tomislav uri, now living in Natalinci, and the founder and leader of
the ensemble itoito, which was active in Saranova, near Topola, in the 1970s and 1980s.
59This fieldwork took place on 5 November 2006.
60Shiloah 1995, 159.
56 chapter two
her studies of women singers in the Niko Polje region of Serbia, this had
major repercussions. This might seem an unlikely setting for a case study
in cultural capital, and Hofman does not use the term. But she does dem-
onstrate that performance was an empowering force for women, a subtle
mode of negotiation between old and new female roles.61
Returning to umadija, we might note that although traditional singing
was the product of a particular ecology a predominantly mono-ethnic
region where musical markers of ethnic identity were strong enough to
absorb the movement of peoples and the impingements of neighbouring
cultures it has begun to take on new meanings more recently. There is
renewed interest in umadijan traditional music in certain circles today,
and there are sustained attempts to recover it, not least because it can be
read rather easily as an assertion of ethnic identity against the homogenis-
ing tendencies of the modern nation state.62 The idea that these reperto-
ries have survived for centuries gives them a powerful emotional charge
as cultural representations of strength and stability. It goes without saying
that there is an element of idealisation here, nostalgia for the pastoral, for
a world that might have been rather than one that ever was. This quest
for a mythic world of conservative values, where older moral and social
orders are preserved, is of course common in folk revivals, and Serbia is
no exception. Lying behind it is perhaps a fear of change, a rejection of
the contemporary world and the commercialism that it embodies, and
an impulse to replace that world with one that is lyrical and stable, even
unchanging, one in which identities are fixed and established values are
maintained.
Traditions are invented in folk music as well as art music, and even
present-day collectors are prone to idealise the traditional life of a rural
peasantry; in a word, to reify the concept of traditional culture, and to
present it as somehow free of internal contradictions. Suraiya Faroqhi has
commented on this, and in the process she has usefully problematised
the terms high culture, popular culture and folk culture, suggesting that
it may not be entirely helpful to separate them cleanly.63 Context is all,
of course. Interviews with the men from Svetli revealed a specific set of
61 Hofman 2010; see also Hofman and Markovi 2005. One fascinating instance of gen-
der roles and music was the phenomenon of sworn virgins in North Albania. Dressing as
men, and acquiring mens rights, they were able to perform on musical instruments. For
an introduction, see Young 2000.
62On this, see Jovanovi 2005.
63Faroqhi 2005.
ecologies 57
values, where a strong competitive rivalry with other folk groups loomed
large, where appearances in the city (Belgrade) were eagerly sought, and
where failure to secure a television performance some time earlier was
not just a misfortune but carried with it a real sense of grievance, accom-
panied by a plethora of explanations, that has clearly come to dominate
much of their conversation. There was, in short, a hard-edged realism in
these discussions that is somewhat at odds with the idealism of the reviv-
alists. Their music was in its own way and within its own sphere no less
commercial than that of the pop groups.
CHAPTER THREE
DISPLACEMENTS
Investing in Place
Displacements occur when people argue over a place, having first invested it
with ideological meaning, whether religious, ethnonational, or both. More
often than not, those displaced are not those who made the investment.
In Balkan history, religious affiliation invariably preceded national affilia-
tion, but in some circles, and especially from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, there was a tendency for the one to map closely on to the other;
some commentators have referred to ethno-religious communities.1 In
this respect even the later stages of our Sephardic story were not entirely
typical, for Jewish places were widely dispersed, and largely indifferent to
the ethnonational divisions that shaped and responded to Balkan geogra-
phies. On another level, of course, Jews were the very embodiment of dis-
placement, and they bequeathed to European nationalism such resonant
ideas as the Holy Land and the chosen people.
The potency of these associations can be demonstrated by turning for
a moment to the later history of Yugoslavia. Here the intertwining of reli-
gion and nationalism was fundamental to the myth-making that accom-
panied strengthening aspirations to separate nationhood by the dominant
republics.2 Thus, in the later years of the federal state, the celebrations
and symbols associated with Titos brotherhood and unity were all but
crowded out by the ever more insistent public presence of the major reli-
gions, their ceremonies, congresses and festivals freighted with collective
national memories, and empowered to construct national landscapes.3
The conflation of religious and national symbols here was transparently
designed to create the illusion of a stable social and intellectual order, a
utopian ideal that might stand in sharp contrast to the dissolving struc-
tures associated with existing social realities at the time.
1 Bringa 1993.
2Roudometof 2001.
3Perica 2002, especially 89108.
displacements 59
The music of the Serbian Orthodox liturgy had long embodied national
values,4 and in the later Tito years it worked to keep those values alive
and assertive in the face of official opposition.5 Thus the crescendo of Ser-
bian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s was punctuated by a sequence
of public commemorations in which the church marked the place, and
music ennobled it, cementing the bond between social space and sym-
bolic power.6 One starting point might be the services accompanying
the public transfer of Tsar Duans relics to the church of Saint Marko in
Belgrade in May 1968, an explicit association of the faith and the nation
that drew openly on medieval precedent.7 The momentum was sustained
by the Jubilee celebrating 750 years of ecclesiastical independence (1969),
held jointly in Belgrade and ia, and in the mid 1970s by jubilees mark-
ing the centenary of the Herzegovina uprising, the 800th anniversary of
Saint Sava, and the 375th anniversary of the Orthodox monastery Gomirje
in Croatia.8
Then in the eighties, following the death of Tito, there ensued the
consecration of the massive, and still unfinished, church of Saint Sava in
Belgrade (1985), a new programme of church and monastery building, and
a whole series of pilgrimages and festivals, including a year-long tour of
the relics of Prince Lazar, associated with the 600th anniversary of the
battle of Kosovo (1389), the defining event in Serbias image of itself and
of its history.9 In all of this the symbolism of place, especially associated
with the Kosovo myth (Kosovo as sacred place, in Eliades sense,10 as
well as heroic battle site), was strengthened by a potent convergence of
three very different kinds of music: Serbian Orthodox chant, epic songs
about the Kosovo myth, and a new wave of popular music on Kosovan
themes, including YU-Grupas Kosovski bouri, recounting a famous leg-
end of the battle, Lutajua Srcas Jemifija, about the fourteenth-century
Serbian nun and poetess, and Idolis Odbrana i poslednji dana [Apologies
4The Patriarchate of Pe was authorised by the Porte in 1557, and although Ohrid
Greek-dominated, it increasingly took on the character of a national church (Banac
1984, 64).
5Ramet 2005.
6Bourdieu 1989.
7Duan was the greatest of the Nemanji kings, and following his death in 1355 the
medieval Serbian empire disintegrated.
8The preparations for the Gomirje event, including renovation of the monastery, wit-
nessed an unusual degree of cooperation between Serbs and Croats.
9As Tim Judah remarks, the battle was more significant for the legends it spawned
than for its strategic importance (Judah 1997, 27).
10Eliade 1961.
60 chapter three
and Last Days], which invoked Kosovo to the combined strains of rock
beat and Orthodox chant.11
The Catholic Church in Croatia maintained a safer distance from such
explicit political agendas. Yet, as Vjekoslav Perica has demonstrated, it too
had a nationalist agenda in the later years of Yugoslavia. It was epitomised
in the revival of the Marian cult as a powerful national symbol, enacted in
the seventies through a series of commemorations, congresses and festi-
vals similar to those in neighbouring Serbia.12 Like Serbia, moreover, Croa-
tia had its sacred places, notably Marija Bistrica, the shrine that served as
the site for many of the major mass gatherings sponsored by the Church,
and (from 1981) Meugorje in Herzegovina, home of the much trumpeted
Marian apparitions, and subsequently an important, if much exploited
and manipulated, pilgrimage centre.13
Once again music was important as a means of detaching these sacred
spaces from their amorphous (profane) surroundings, and then imbuing
them with ideological significance by juxtaposing iconic representations
of the Church and the nation. Thus, the mass singing of Marian hymns
alongside the Croatian national anthem in Marija Bistrica at the Interna-
tional Marian Congress of 1971 was potently symbolic, and the same con-
junction was repeated on numerous occasions during the so-called Great
Novena, a nine-year Jubilee (19751984) that explicitly followed Polish
precedent. On such occasions ceremony and spectacle served as clarion
calls of separatism, with Catholicism clearly identified as an integral ele-
ment of Croatian nationality. Meugorje, meanwhile, soon attracted a
whole repertory of Marian songs for the pilgrims, now widely available
on cassette and CD.
The investment of sacred places with national meanings in this way
turns them into sites of conflict. The circle of stones (Eliade) surround-
ing them, compacting their myths and symbols, also serves to exclude the
world beyond; it functions, in short, as an analogue for a national border
or would-be border. This was the fate of both the Kosovan holy places
and of Meugorje. They became twin foci in the war of the churches,
which both paralleled and catalysed the war of the nations. Churches,
remarked Edith Durham, long before these events, are the most powerful
political engines in the Balkan Peninsula.14 In both cases a third faith was
implicated, and this time a faith that (from 1968 onwards) was officially
designated an ethnic nation, an illogicality with Ottoman roots but here
stemming from more immediate Serbian and Croatian designs on Bosnia
and Herzegovina. The Muslims of Bosnia were less politicised than their
Orthodox and Catholic neighbours, and they remained pro-Federation
until the late 1980s, when ethnonationalist agendas from Serbia and Croa-
tia forced both a response and a mobilisation.15
In due course the Muslims marked their own places and from 1990
onwards began to muster their own cultural propaganda, including the
restoration of pilgrimages (these days increasingly folk-touristic) to the
Muslim shrine of Ajvatovica in western Bosnia to commemorate the leg-
endary story of Allah splitting the rock that blocked a key spring at Prusac.
This was helped by a revival of Sufism in Yugoslavia, after many years
of suppression by the official Islamic Community. Sufism soon became a
powerful force engaged in the defence of the Muslim community against
the nationalist agendas of Bosnias neighbours, and since music played an
important role within certain Sufi orders, it was harnessed to the political
cause. In the mid nineties, in the aftermath of the Bosnian war, the music
of Islam was made available to mass culture in a blatant assertion of Bos-
nian national identity, not least through the appropriation the making
public of private devotional genres such as the ilahija.
What do such musical commemorations of place tell us? Even this brief
sketch is enough to indicate how politics, myth, history and religion are
all implicated in territory, with imaginative culture in a strong supporting
role. My synopsis of commemorative events in Yugoslavia illustrates how
musical, like visual, symbolism can play a key role in associating a cultural
landscape with a collective sense of loss and remembrance. The tendency
of such symbolism, as of ritual generally, is toward fixity of meaning. A
place becomes associated with clearly defined sets of values and these
lend it meaning and privilege. And if a place is privileged in this way,
people will claim it, fight over it, and close it off from others. In the Bal-
kans place has been fiercely contested in recent years. There have been
sustained attempts to use the institutions and resources of both church
and state to give authority to particular meanings and concepts associated
with place, and at the same time to prevent competing meanings from
being articulated. It is this essentialisation of place that leads in the end
to displacement.16
The key point about displacement is that two existing worlds establish
a dialogue. The dialogue may take many forms an absent culture may be
studiously preserved or inadvertently caricatured (through idealisation);
a host culture may be a source of creative transformation or an object
of facile imitation but it remains a dialogue, an awareness of simulta-
neous dimensions, as Edward Said expressed it.17 Svetlana Boym used a
more graphic cinematic metaphor, referring to a superimposition of two
images home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.
And she elaborates: The moment we try to force it into a single image,
it breaks the frame or burns the surface.18 Nuances abound in all of this.
Identity is a quest that is always open, says Claudio Magris, and he goes
on to argue that an obsessive defence of origins is as much a form of slav-
ery as willing submission to displacement.19
In articulating these nuances, the world of imaginative culture has the
advantage that it can mediate between individual and collective experi-
ences of displacement, and can thus help reconnect the Semiotic and the
Symbolic (Kristeva).20 Kristeva reminds us that the division and separa-
tion involved in displacement may well tap into much deeper psychic
realms in the lives of individuals.21 Mediation between the individual
and the collective can be a thought-out strategy of narrative fiction,
as in Milo Crnjanskis novel Seobe [Migrations],22 or more recently in
Dubravka Ugreis account of exile, The Ministry of Pain.23 But equally,
and perhaps especially through the medium of music, mediation can
result from the preconscious expression of shared experiences and intu-
itions, resisting easy rationalisation. Through music, more tellingly than
through explicit articulations, the Kristevan Semiotic can break through
the symbolic barrier of language, and perhaps reawaken the tragic
24Noel Malcolms doubts about the details of this story, and especially about the role of
the Patriarch, are not shared by native historians. In any case, as effective history the story
carries a powerful symbolic weight, even today. See Malcolm 1998, chapter 8.
25There had been northward migrations since the beginning of the fourteenth century,
stemming from the Dinaric region and from Kosovo. Some Kosovan migrants crossed into
Romania and Transylvania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with later implica-
tions for the traditional musics of Vlach populations in eastern Serbia, when they returned
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thereby hangs a quite different tale of
displacement.
26For a discussion of music in the Military Border, see Kos 1998a.
27Here I appropriate Andris description of the plight of the Turkish political prisoner
in his novella The Damned Yard (Andri 2003b).
64 chapter three
fellow members of the Orthodox millet were far from harmonious, they
established especially through the migrations close connections with
Russia, a more distant Orthodox place. In some quarters this amounted
to the kind of mystical Russophilia (shared with Bulgaria) that is perfectly
captured by Vuk Isakovi, the central character in Crnjanskis Seobe: Just
as my sweet Orthodoxy did reside forever within my mother, so shall it
reside forever within me and those who come after me. Our Russia is also
sweet. I pray to God the Creator to show me the way there.
The ideology of modern Serbian nationalism was forged from the mix
of influences at work on the border Serbs, as they are often called. As Tat-
jana Markovi has noted, one of the key attributes of Serbian intellectual
history in general is that its driving forces have often been communities
of Serbs living beyond the national frontiers in Buda, Prague, and above
all Vienna rather than those in the homeland.28 The Serbs were divided
between two empires, and in this respect we might argue that there are
two Serbias even today; almost every election provides ample evidence
of the division between a pan-European strand in Serbian culture and a
more traditional rural Serbia, proud of its Byzantine-Slavic roots. It was
the Habsburg Serbs who played a key role in modernising the Serbian
language and culture, and in constructing the canonic narratives of the
national history. Removed from the original homeland, which was exten-
sively settled by Albanians and Turks, they were open to intellectual
influences both from Catholic Austria and from Orthodox Russia. Yet far
from weakening their sense of Serbian identity, these contrasted influ-
ences contributed to a strengthening sense of (anti-Ottoman) nationhood
among the migr communities.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, formative notions of pop-
ular sovereignty and of civic, essentially secular, nationalism gradually
migrated eastwards to the border Serbs, confirming them in their quest
for independence: for a modern nation. At the same time a more holistic
model of the nation made its way from Russia, collectivistic and ethnic
rather than individualistic and political in character, and closely linked to
the Orthodox Church, which came to acquire powerful symbolic values.
When we combine these two waves of influence, we see that it was indeed
a volatile alloy that was fused in the collective psyche of the border Serbs.
Once again the individual dilemmas of exile are perfectly captured by
Crnjanskis novel, where the action intercuts between two locations (the
28Markovi 2005.
displacements 65
distant Habsburg wars and historic Zemun, the last frontier of the Habs-
burg empire), and where the central character has to make his choice
between a committed Orthodoxy and an expedient Catholicism (How
could a non-Catholic serve a Catholic Empress?).
But the novel also hints at a divorce between ideology and social reality
among the border Serbs. Their nationalism, it seems to suggest, thrived
on myth and dream: the myth of a glorious past, the dream of a glorious
future.29 In the aftermath of the migrations, it was the Habsburg Serbs,
rather than those in the older heartlands, who carried the torch for Serbia;
indeed it is no exaggeration to claim that Sremski Karlovci became the
centre of Serbian culture. And it was in the Habsburg cities that Serbian
writers would later cultivate that rhetoric of history we associate with
nineteenth-century romantic nationalisms more generally, especially in
Eastern Europe: the waves of heritage gathering, the struggles for language
rights in education and the public domain, all based on notions of lin-
guistic and ethnic homogeneity that developed in Europe following the
Enlightenment.
But that is to leap ahead. At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the Military Border was a locus for negotiation between conflict-
ing Austrian, Russian and Ottoman interests. It was also a meeting-point of
cultures, and although under Habsburg control following the defeat of the
Turks in 1699, it still exhibited pronounced Ottoman cultural influences.30
On arrival in the Habsburg lands, then, the Serbian immigrants would have
confronted a variety of musics, of which popular military or military-style
repertories, clearly marked by Ottoman traditions and often performed
by Roma, were among the most prominent.31 Such repertories, crucial
to the Ottomans because of the strategically useful association of mili-
tary power with culture, would have been stylistically eclectic, blending
Austro-German and Ottoman elements, and since Serb musicians formed
part of the border troops, they would certainly have performed them. It
should be noted, though, that the migrations coincided with a period of
transition to a military music of more obviously western character, where
29The two brothers, soldier and merchant respectively, represent particular archetypes
of the Serb at home and in exile.
30The Treaty of Sremski Karlovci [Carlowitz] in 1699 formalised the success of the Habs-
burgs in driving the Ottomans out of Hungary and (in the main) south of the Danube.
31 The musical idioms associated with Ottoman Janissary bands [mehterhna] had a
well-documented influence on European styles, though the subject is a complex one, not
just in relation to the origins and specificity of the Janissary music itself, but also in respect
of the alaturca style. This will be discussed briefly in Chapter 7.
66 chapter three
32See the discussion in Kos 1998a, including an account of changes in costumes and
instrumentarium.
33Tomaevi 1997.
34Tomaevi 1996. Belgrade was also taken by the Austrians briefly in 1688 (with disas-
trous consequences for the Jews of the city) before being recaptured in 1690.
displacements 67
of allegory that explicitly linked the medieval Serbian empire with possi-
bilities for contemporary cultural renewal. Kozainski also inadvertently
provided a footnote to Serbian music history. The music of the three songs
for Tragedokomedija has not survived, but the melody of one of them was
transmitted orally, and more than a century later it was sung to one of
the father figures of Serbian art music, Kornelije Stankovi (183165), who
arranged it both as a solo song and as a set of piano variations.35
The importance of the Slavonic-Latin School and the centrality of
Sremski Karlovci can only be grasped when we turn to the second area
of influence on the border Serbs. Like the founder of the School, Suvorov,
Kozainski was a teacher from the Ukraine, and had been sent to Sremski
Karlovci along with other Ukrainians by the Russian authorities at the
request of the Serbian Metropolitan Mojsej Petrovi. The background to
this was the relative autonomy reluctantly granted by the Habsburgs to the
Serbian Orthodox church within the military border region, with Sremski
Karlovci as the seat of an independent archbishopric for the Orthodox
population. It was partly to defend that restoration of autonomy that links
with religious centres in Kiev were strengthened, and such links were in
turn a strategic support for Russias growing territorial ambitions in the
Balkans.36 During the eighteenth century Russian money, liturgical books
and teachers were all made available to the border Serbs, and scholarships
for study in Russia were offered, leading among other things to a major
shift in orientation in the literary language.37
A community of interest developed around Orthodoxy, and where
music was concerned this played a part in transforming the chant, as
the polyphonic, usually three-part, idiom associated especially with the
Kievan Mohyla Academy infiltrated Serbian practice. The so-called Kar-
lovac chant that developed in Sremski Karlovci (Dimitrije Krsti was a
key figure), and was also largely practiced in Belgrade, was of some sig-
nificance, helping to drive a wedge between Greek and Serbian traditions
and preparing the way for the later notations and polyphonic settings of
35The song appears in Book II of Stankovis collection of Serbian Folk Songs, published
in Vienna in 1863. For a discussion of early traditions of folksong collection in Serbia, see
Djuri-Klajn 1971.
36Danica Petrovi discusses these links in relation to a specific Russian manuscript
(Petrovi 1985).
37For a discussion of the politics of language in the region, see Part One of Skendi
1980.
68 chapter three
38Some sense of this tradition can be gleaned from the recording of the Nuns
of Ljobostinja in Kosovo made in 1963, and presented by Arsenjije Jovanovi on the
WERGO CD SM 1619 2.
39See Milin 2000.
40For a general account of transculturation, see Pratt 1992.
41 It has even been suggested (Tomaevi 1997) that through the genre of the Christ-
mas ritual known as Vertep, which included musical numbers, this crossroads of cultures,
involving church, school and folklore traditions, was semi-formalised.
42Note too how Crnjanski has the sweet viols of the soire followed by Vuk and his
friends singing to the gusle at the top of their lungs (Tsernianski 1994, 93).
43Vesna Peno has looked at this question, and at the rather chaotic state of the practice,
by way of church magazines and newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Her paper Pojaka praksa u srpskim crkvama u vreme Stevana Stojanovia
Mokranjca is unpublished at the time of writing.
displacements 69
due course enabling exchanges between the Military Border and Serbia
proper. Crudely put, goods were transferred in one direction and ideas in
the other. The ideas proved the more durable. They prepared the way for
political change, for language reform, for the development of a national
literature, and in general for the embrace of a European elite culture,
including a modern, increasingly professional, and nationally orientated
musical life that would culminate in both the creative and the prosyletis-
ing achievements of Stankovi, Mokranjac, and their successors.44
The practice of ethnic cleansing is ages old. Only the term is recent. Wit-
ness the exchange of populations contrived by the governments of Turkey
and Greece in 1923 as a consensual political resolution to their recent hos-
tilities, and sponsored by the international community at the Lausanne
Conference.45 True, it was religion rather than ethnicity that controlled
the exchange, a legacy of the millet system that bequeathed to later gov-
ernments even to this day very real legal difficulties in their treatment
of respective minorities. But the outcome in any event was a massive
influx of Christians from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, and a rather
more modest traffic of Muslims in the opposite direction. As Bruce Clark
has pointed out, the whole process was awash with anomalies.46
The exchange formalised developments that had been under way for
some time. We can track them right back to the policies of a newly inde-
pendent Greek state, asserting its Christian identity, but there was an
accelerating momentum in the years leading up to Lausanne. The Bal-
kan wars of 191213, the events of the First World War, including the anti-
Ottoman Entente, and the Greco-Turkish hostilities of 191922 all led
to expulsions in both directions, and frequently in a context of alarm-
ing brutality.47 Clarks semi-ethnographic study bears witness not just to
the complexity of the exchange, but to the complexity of the response it
44Czech musicians played a prominent role in this process in the nineteenth century.
See Perii 1969 and Tomaevi 2006.
45A record of the Lausanne conference was published as Lausanne Conference on
Near Eastern Affairs 19221923: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace (London:
H.M. Stationery Office, 1923).
46Clark 2006. See also Hirschon 1989 and 1993.
47Exchanges between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919 and between eastern and western
Thrace in 1922 anticipated Lausanne.
70 chapter three
55Milton 2008.
72 chapter three
56Black Sea repertories were extensively studied by Kurt Reinhard. See Reinhard 1966,
especially p. 11, on the migration to Greece; also the anthology of texts: Reinhard and Rein-
hard 1968. The question of Georgian polyphony is explored in Nadel 1933, Schneider 1940
and Tsurtsumia and Jordania 2003.
57Excellent examples of this repertory are found in the LP recording Musik der Pontos-
Greichen (Musikethnologische Abteilung Museum fr Vlerkunde Berlin: MC-05/2). See
also the 1930 recording digitised as Songs of Pontos by the Melpo Merlier Music Folklore
Archive.
displacements 73
of rebetika could only be claimed for the nation if it cleaned up its act, in
a word if it were purged of corrupting oriental associations.
In post-war years rebetika had a further incarnation with a more popu-
lar appeal in the hands of Vassilis Tsitsanis and associates such as the
singer Sotiria Bellou. The centre of gravity shifted at this time follow-
ing the occupation and during the Civil War from Athens to (Greek)
Macedonia. And it was here, in the post-Civil War years, that the tradition
was further Europeanised. Paradoxically, this allowed the oriental idiom
to resurface as a specific sub-genre in the late 1950s, its atmosphere of
exoticism and fantasy often reinforced by the familiar tsifteteli rhythm.
This idiom found its ideal exponent in Stelios Kazantzidis, whose vocal
delivery represented something of a return to the world of the earlier kafe
aman traditions, though with a resonance from later nightclub idioms.59
The background to this revival was a more general, politically sanc-
tioned, investment in rebetika through the post-war nationalist mass
media of radio and commercial film. This continued through the Civil
War, and its propaganda value was such that it had a defining effect on
public taste, allowing rebetika to replace other kinds of traditional music
as a model of Greekness in music. Following the Civil War the pendu-
lum swung once more towards Europe, as rebetika acquired a new status,
and even an accommodation to bourgeois taste. In particular, the style
informed highly influential popular art songs associated with Manos
Hadjidakis, and in a rather different way with Mikis Theodorakis. This is
a development to which I will return in later chapters, but it should be
remarked here that the ambivalent term popular art song (more literally,
artistic popular song) points to interesting questions of strategic hybrid-
ity in its address to different taste publics within Greek society. Popular
art songs are not rebetika, but they would not have been possible without
rebetika.
In the late sixties popular art songs, at least in the hands of Theodorakis,
were transformed into protest music, and they functioned as a symbol of
resistance against the Junta when the composer was in exile. In the politi-
cal environment of that time they increasingly came to represent a Greek
national style in music, partly assuming the role formerly assigned to itself
by Kalomiriss national school of art music. It seems likely too that appro-
priations such as these encouraged the revival of original rebetika that
became such a marked feature in the late 1970s, following the collapse of
59Holst 1975.
displacements 75
the Junta, and promoted in part by the Costas Ferris film of 1983 about
Marika Ninou. From this period onwards the revival was associated with
an increase in the archiving of early performances of rebetika, as also with
the return to prominence of some of the older singers. Already here we
may note a central irony. Composers such as Hadjidakis and Theodorakis
played a major part in preparing the way for the rebetika revival. But one
effect of that revival was the cultivation of a discourse of authenticity that
distinguished true rebetika from the music based on them.
Alongside the development of popular art songs, a more orientalised
popular music idiom (an oriental surge) was cultivated in 1980s, associ-
ated with a re-negotiation of identities by youth culture. This was a wider
Balkan rather than a specifically Greek phenomenon,60 but in Greece it
invoked particular connotations, a nostalgia for Asia Minor, and a long-
ing to reconnect that did not exclude dialogues with Turkey (it was given
more cultivated expression in the urban musical movement known in
some quarters as paradhosiaka).61 This oriental idiom came in the wake of
a blatant rejection of the bouzouki by modern Greek youth, and a parallel
engagement with western pop-rock. But in truth it represented a kind of
third way, enabling some measure of separation both from tourist stereo-
types of Greek popular music and from western fashions. It was at once
modern and enticingly different, and its popularity in recent years is sug-
gestive of the idea that things might be expressed through popular music
that cannot be expressed through official channels (there are comparable
developments in other forms of mass culture, including TV Soaps). After
all, the reconnection is not just with Anatolia, but also with a shared Otto-
man inheritance. In Kristevan terms, music here speaks the unspeakable.
It articulates a pre-verbal Semiotic at odds with public discourse, and one
that is inseparably linked to our sense of place.
60Rasmussen 1996.
61 Kallimopoulou 2006.
76 chapter three
the Balkan Wars (191213) Bulgaria was the principal loser, though it did
secure Pirin Macedonia.62 Greece acquired the Aegean littoral, including
Salonika, and this has remained a stable border until today, while Vardar
Macedonia went to Serbia, or rather was subsumed by the first Yugoslavia,
and eventually became a constituent republic of the Communist state.
The present-day nation state of Macedonia (originally known as FYROM)
resulted from the secession of that republic from Yugoslavia in 1991, hard
on the heels of Slovenia and Croatia.
Native Macedonians have been anxious to assert a specific ethnic iden-
tity other than the more generalised South Slavic roots that might distin-
guish them from Greek Macedonians.63 Yet because of its geographical
position this territory had long been traversed by many peoples and
settled by several nationalities. It had been right at the centre of medieval
Bulgarian and Serbian empires, and was later heavily populated by Turks.
Among the most prominent of its inhabitants were Albanians (often
described as Turks, meaning Muslims), who had been a stable presence
in this region, as in present-day Greek Epirus, since antiquity. So it was
hardly to be wondered at that irredentist ambitions in Tirana should have
embraced western Macedonia as well as Kosovo. What would have been
harder to predict was the influx of Kosovar Albanians at the very end of
the twentieth century.
The story of Kosovo in 1999 has been told many times. There have been
histories, not always impartial (Noel Malcolm), first-hand reports by jour-
nalists (Janine di Giovanni), and accounts that lie somewhere in between
(James Pettifer).64 There have also been sober and thoughtful, but com-
mitted, analyses by Balkan historians (Maria Todorova).65 In brief, the
borders imposed on a newly independent Albania by the Great Powers
following the Balkan Wars left Kosovo harnessed to Serbia, but with a
majority Albanian population, predominantly Muslim, seeking indepen-
dence, and a Serbian minority who ascribed iconic historical and religious
significance to a province which they regarded as the heartland of Old
Serbia. Subsequently Kosovo was incorporated within the first Yugosla-
via, and it was then assigned the constitutional status of an autonomous
Serbian province (in 1963) in the second Yugoslavia. In 1989, under the
62Bulgaria acquired new Macedonian territories following the First Balkan War, but
lost them after the Second War.
63Roudometof 2002.
64Malcolm 2002; di Giovanni 2004; Pettifer 2005.
65Todorova 2000.
displacements 77
66The Albanian majority use the term Kosova (rather than Kosovo) to describe the
independent state.
67Tallava is not of course the only genre associated with the Kosovar Albanians. Other
repertories have been examined by Alma Bejtullahu, with a special focus on the changing
roles of female performers in a time of war (Bejtullahu 2006).
78 chapter three
same quest motivated the eclectic approach to repertoire in the 1980s and
1990s.68 What is undoubtedly true is that the mounting ethnic tensions
of those decades created something of a tight rope for the Roma, who
traditionally made no claim on territory. And it may well have been their
attempt to preserve this traditional ethos that led them to cultivate tal-
lava, an Albanian-language genre that developed out of a particular style
of female music,69 but was transformed into a highly distinctive, oriental-
sounding popular music idiom.
So what exactly is tallava? It is minimalist in idiom, with a single
repetitive rhythm applied to very simple, largely unchanging, harmonies
in a manner akin to some disco idioms. Over this background the soloist
improvises (and for very long periods) in a distinctly oriental, nasal-toned
manner, but with a melismatic idiom that is often more akin to Indian
than to Arabic traditions; it should be noted here that Indian film music
had played something of a symbolic role for Kosovo Roma, partly as a way
of connecting to perceived origins. The genre is associated above all with
the Ashkalije (Albanian-speaking Roma from Kosovo, said to have origi-
nated in Palestine), and it is performed mainly at weddings, with impro-
vised lyrics directed to the particular occasion, and peppered with topical
references. As a music that remained entirely separate from the political
agendas of partisan groups in Kosovo, tallava marked out a unique ter-
ritory for the Ashkalije. At the heart of the genre was always the union
of improvisation and virtuosity that has long been associated with Rom
music-making (as formulated for elite publics in Liszts book),70 and it is
entirely in keeping with this that certain star performers have emerged as
iconic figures among Albanian and Rom populations.
Pettan reminds us that for a time after 1999 Rom musical activities
were badly affected. But in diaspora, and especially in Macedonia, tal-
lava lives on today. Carol Silverman has pointed out that even under
socialism Roma in Macedonia suffered much less discrimination than
in neighbouring Bulgaria, and that they were accordingly able to play a
more visible role in musical life.71 Nonetheless, as a low-status music, even
today, tallava seldom has access to official cultural channels. It is of course
frequently played on Rom radio and television stations, but mainly it is
68Pettan 1996a. Pettan has elaborated on these ideas in numerous publications, and in
his video Kosovo Through the Eyes of Local Rom (Gypsy) Musicians (Krko, 1999).
69Pettan 1996c.
70Liszt 1859.
71 Silverman 1996.
displacements 79
72See the Cultural Cornerstones CD The Shutka Music Project: Heartsongs from the
Gypsies of Shutka Macedonia.
CHAPTER FOUR
ECUMENES
In the Minority
In addressing some of the issues that arise when societies, nations and
even civilisations come into contact, practitioners of world history have
identified two broad approaches. The first examines the units that inter-
act, while the second examines the field of their interaction, described by
Ross Dunn as an interactive zone, and by William McNeill as an ecumene.1
How might we transfer these two approaches to the study of world music
today? The first would be concerned with individual, musically articulated,
identities the music of a particular community, ethnic or social group,
or indeed religion and would recognise that such identities are subject
either to transformation or defiant preservation as they come into con-
tact. The second would consider an ecumene, well tuned to our present
global age but by no means unique to this age. Ecumenes have their own
developing histories, but it is arguably not necessary to invoke history at
all (and thus to interpret plurality as somehow postmodern) in order to
envisage them. We might think of them rather synchronically, imagining
systemic fields of interactive musical idioms sharing a single space.
The relevance of these approaches to the study of world music seems
uncontroversial, but they have a less obvious purchase on music from a
single geographical territory such as the Balkans. All the same, I think
they might help us address issues of cultural identity in this region. If
we understand the Balkans primarily as Ottoman presence and legacy in
South East Europe, the second approach seems especially pertinent.2 Otto-
man governance, tolerant of faiths and ethnicities, embodied or promoted
the characteristic qualities associated with an ecumene. Co-existence and
diversity (though not equality) were central to the political philosophy
of the empire, and this influenced its cultural world. The effects were
evident in musical life, not least in the Balkans, where the commerce
1 McNeill 1998.
2See Maria Todorova on the difference between legacy and tradition (Todorova
1995).
ecumenes 81
between styles was both fluid and dynamic. Thus the Balkans as a whole
might be viewed as a working model of a musical ecumene. And within
the wider region there are particular territories that invite this ascription
in their own right, places that are defined musically by the interplay of
co-existing styles. At risk of labouring the point, I will review the sites
already discussed, positioning them within the continuum defined by our
two approaches.
The traditional music of Oa can be placed at one end of the spectrum,
with relatively little interactivity or change. As the product of a particular
ecology, the music here helped define the place. That of Radovi has also
been relatively stable, but we noted that an ethnic shift resulting from
the migration patterns of the Shopi led to significant changes in style.
Again, the first approach is the more helpful, tracking the development
of a communitys music, and noting its transformation as it comes into
contact with alternative cultures. The first approach might also be applied
to the music of the umadijan villages, and perhaps even to the music of
Sephardim in Sarajevo. However, in the latter case there is a difference.
Musical repertories may have marked Sephardic identities, but in no sense
did they define a place more generally. If we want to define Sarajevo musi-
cally, we need our second approach. And this goes for the sites associated
with our case studies of displacement too. If our focus is on the places
involved the Military Border in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
the towns and villages of Asia Minor and the Greek mainland in the early
twentieth, or Macedonia in the early twenty-first it will be diversity and
interactivity that prove to be defining.
It would be misleading to suggest that such interactive zones are neu-
tral territories in which the different idioms have equal weight. As its
etymology suggests, the term ecumene suggests not just a plurality of
cultures, but the interactive field that results from the impact of external
elements on a home or dominant culture.3 Characteristically, ecumenes
are sites of peaceful co-existence, but the various elements nevertheless
exist in a power relationship, determined either by an inherited socio-
political framework or by some disruption to existing structures, nota-
bly through diaspora and migration flows. Ethnicity has been one of
the principal categories by means of which such interactions of peoples
and their music have been understood. Yet although debates about so-
called ethnic groups became increasingly prevalent from around the mid
3The word comes from the Greek noun oikos (home) and the verb meni (to live).
82 chapter four
be one of social liminality.7 They are, in Hommi Bhabhas words, the dif-
ference within.8 Music in these circumstances can function as a means
of consolidating identities in adversity; in short it can carry the minor-
ity culture by affirming its traditions, and giving voice to its interests.
Alternatively, given that musicians often possess what Pierre Bourdieu
calls cultural capital, it can serve as one means of gaining access to social
spaces inhabited mainly by the majority culture.9 In the first case study I
will revisit Vojvodina, broadening out beyond Serbian history to embrace
music in this region more generally. In the second I will revisit the ter-
ritory of the population exchange, but this time narrowing the range of
that territory to focus on the villages of Western Thrace. And as part of
both case studies I will return to the Roma, who have always played, and
continue to play, a key role in Balkan music.
In one respect the tension between our two approaches played out his-
torically as a tension between ethnicity and territory. This tension was
characteristic of emerging nationalisms in the Balkans. We can find it
already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the quest for a
greater Greece, a rebuilding of Byzantium that would incorporate Greek
populations in Asia Minor; indeed Greek concepts of nationhood are still
governed more by ethnos than by territory. And it surfaced more recently
in Serbian ambitions to embrace minority Serb populations in Croatia and
Bosnia within a greater Serbia, with the aim of establishing a Serb corridor
across three states, and likewise in the irredentist ambitions of Albania.
The Serbian example returns us to the Habsburg Military Frontier. As
we noted earlier, the territory of present-day Vojvodina played a key role
in the modernisation of Serbian culture. But as a heavily colonised region
bordering Hungary and Romania, and as a natural victim of shifting impe-
rial ambitions, it was home to many different ethnic groups, and in con-
stantly changing configurations, depending on the ruling power at any
given time. Its role in the 184849 revolution was symptomatic, as the
Serbs (the largest ethnic group) rebelled against the Hungarian authori-
ties, and joined with the Habsburgs in crushing the revolution, even
10Vojvodina was part of the historical region of the Banat, which was divided between
Romania and Yugoslavia in 1918.
ecumenes 85
11I am grateful to Nice Fracile for sending me his unpublished paper, Changes of Style
and Repertory in the Instrumental Music of Serbs, Wallachians and Romanians in Serbia,
read at an ICTM Study Group in Innsbruck, May 1723, 2000.
86 chapter four
12Fracile 1995.
13Fracile 2003.
ecumenes 87
14Fracile 1996. According to Fracile, the dactyloid form of the rhythm 7/16 (3+2+2) is
especially characteristic of the Romanians in Vojvodina.
15Hristov 1913; Stoin, 1927. Fracile demonstrates that Bartks transcriptions of the music
of Yugoslav Romanians on occasion miss these asymmetrical rhythms (Fracile 1996).
16Briloiu 1967.
17See, among other writings (including informative cd liner notes), Swets 1997.
18It is often noted that they are represented in the theoretical writings of Aristoxenus
(Fracile 1996), but this is a complex question, treated in some detail in Katsanevaki 1998.
88 chapter four
ethnic boundaries are not always so clear-cut. Even today Roma will often
regard themselves as Romanian principally on linguistic grounds. But in
any case it has long been the practice of Rom musicians to adopt and
then to personalise the idioms and genres associated with the majority
nationality in a region, and in that sense the Roma have greatly enriched
Romanian instrumental traditions in Vojvodina across many generations,
as performers at village dances, wedding parties, and similar events. It is
clear that in many of Bartks early recordings from these communities
Romanian really meant Romanian Rom; indeed, as Fracile points out,
the notes on Bartks own transcriptions tell us as much.22
During the last half century there have been sustained attempts to
make some order in the wealth of music associated with the Vojvodina
Roma. In the 1950s, for example, the composer Ern Kirly instigated col-
lecting programmes, and the results of his research have been classified
and published according to four major ethnic groups in the province:
Vlach, Serb, Hungarian and Romanian.23 We may note too that in recent
years Rom musicians have themselves made a contribution to some of the
ethnomusicological initiatives carried out in the province, not least the
attempt by Radio Novi Sad to preserve as much as possible of the cultural
heritage of the Vojvodina Romanians, including field research centred on
the traditional instruments and their repertories. Such enterprises, where
Roma are representing other ethnic groups, underline the central diffi-
culty facing all students of Rom music-making, and not just in Vojvodina.
How far do Rom identities carve out a singular stylistic space, as opposed
to inhabiting established spaces in unique and distinctive ways?
In the last few decades the boundaries between traditional group-
ings in Vojvodina, once clearly separated out, have been freely crossed.
Fracile has documented some of the early stages of such crossovers, not-
ing fusions of Hungarian violin repertories and Serbian brass band music,
together with newly composed folk music that draws together the idioms
of Wallachian-Romanian and Serbian gaida traditions. He outlines quite
specific instances of melodic and rhythmic cross-fertilisation in these case
studies.24 But actually the dialogues and fusions increasingly responsive
to institutional change, and especially to the invasion of public space by
traditional music extend far beyond such examples. The star performer,
22Fracile 1996.
23Kovalcsik 1992.
24Fracile 2004.
90 chapter four
Orchestrating Thrace
25For an anthology of the music (some of it in asymmetrical rhythms), and with a use-
ful introduction, see Moraitis 2002. The Music Folklore Archive in Athens has also released
a double CD including Arvanitic songs from Florina, Konitsa and Oresteiada.
92 chapter four
church and nation that has been so crucial to a sense of Greek identity,
partly explaining why the only officially recognised minority in Greece is
not ethnic but religious.
The acknowledgement of the Muslim minority, and the rights accorded
it, have their origins in the Lausanne exchange. The relevant point is that
there were significant exemptions built into the Lausanne Treaty, affect-
ing the Orthodox Greek community in Istanbul, home of the Patriarchate,
and the Muslim communities in northern Greece. And it is for this rea-
son that significant Muslim populations constituted principally of Turks,
Pomaks (Slavic-speaking Muslims) and Roma are to be found primarily
in western Thrace, just as other Slavophone minorities are found in Greek
Macedonia.26 These northern lands were of course the last to be incorpo-
rated within the Greek nation state.27
The historical territory of Thrace exerts a particular fascination as
the easternmost edge of Europe, the point at which Europe might be
said truly to begin. This region was a victim of ethnonational disputes
as the Ottoman empire began to disintegrate, resulting in two popula-
tion exchanges that predated Lausanne between Greece and Bulgaria
in 1919, and between Greece and Turkey in 1922 and in the subsequent
allocation of Western Thrace to Greece, Eastern Thrace to Turkey and
Northern Thrace (roughly the Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia) to
Bulgaria. My focus here will be on Western Thrace, but there remains a
strong sense of Thracian regional identity in Bulgaria, and to some extent
in Turkey too. In other words, there are aspects of Thracian culture that
have survived the imposition of national borders.28 Conversely, ethnic
differentiations are registered within this generic Thracian culture, and
these are apparent not only between the different provinces but between
majority and minority populations within each of them.
Where music is concerned, then, we can identify in Western Thrace
elements of a more general Thracian culture, while at the same time not-
ing singularities belonging to the Turkish, Pomak and Rom minorities.
These minorities, Muslim in the main, are to be found in all three prefec-
tures of Western Thrace, adding up to more than 40% of the population
26Danforth 2001.
27For a discussion of hierarchies within the minority groups in particular localities,
see Papakostas 2008.
28Thrace has legendary associations with music, through the myths of Orpheus. Tour-
ist brochures in Bulgaria lay claim to Orpheus and to the mythical birthplace of music,
while at the same time Thrace has been widely considered to be the musical heartland
of Greece.
ecumenes 93
in Xanthi and Rhodopi, and around 10% in Evros.29 But such statistics can
give a misleading picture of ethnicity and culture. For one thing, there are
numerous additional ethnic groups (they include Pontic, Arvanite, Arme-
nian, Gagauz, and Sarakatsan populations); and for another, individuals
may and do choose to move between groups for strategic or pragmatic
advantage, or simply because the pattern of their lives precludes any
straightforward mapping of their cultural onto their ethnic identities. In
keeping with this, very different tastes in music are displayed right across
the region, ranging from Turkish popular music to wedding music genres
associated with Bulgaria. In other words, it would be an oversimplification
to assign genres to ethnic groups in a straightforward way.
Music and dance in Western Thrace has been subject to canonising
processes of a kind found elsewhere in Greece, in that a pan-Thracian
repertory, suitable for presentation at festivals and promotion by so-called
cultural associations, has worked to appropriate and absorb the diversity
of idioms belonging to neighbouring and minority cultures. This is part
of a much wider synthesising and classicising impulse, and it is epito-
mised in the construction of the zonaradikos as the characteristic dance
of Thrace. The ideological charge here may not have been as strong as
in Communist Eastern Europe, but we can note the same redesigning of
traditional practices and the same accommodation of these practices to
new taste publics, with the aim of reinforcing a collective identity that
is profiled against alterities of place and time (the neighbouring Muslim
village; the Ottoman tyranny).
Motivations are not always as political as this suggests. The teaching
of traditional dance in cultural associations of necessity imposes some
canonising tendencies, even to the extent that on returning from peri-
ods of working abroad, people effectively re-learn dances they knew as
children, but in more uniform, standardised forms. The relation between
then and now is indeed complex in this area. Folk ensembles belong in
essence to the world of modernity, for example, but it is much too simplis-
tic to see them as entirely oppositional in values to an older layer of fast-
disappearing traditional music-making. Miranda Terzopoulou has argued
cogently to the contrary, suggesting that there is real reciprocity here, as
supra-local forms feed back to rural communities and generate new ritual
practices based on the commonalities of historical memory.30
29Prior to the exchange of minorities, when this whole region had only just emerged
from Ottoman rule, Greeks made up only 20% of the total population of Western Thrace.
30Terzopoulou 1999.
94 chapter four
31 A key figure here was Melpo Merlier, who founded the Music Folklore Archives in
Athens, and who recorded Thracian musicians in 1930. These recordings, together with
the findings of other collectors, were drawn together by Polydoros Papachristodoulou and
Pantelis Kavakopoulos into a series of radio programmes Thracian Folk Melodies (195356),
and in subsequent years Kavakopoulos continued to collect and publish folk songs from
the region. The most recent research in the area is part of the research programme Thrace
sponsored by the Friends of Music Society under the leadership of Lambros Liavas. One
major publication resulting from the programme is Liavas 1999.
32In addition to the Friends of Music programme, there are several relevant publica-
tions, including Brandl 1996, and Hoerburger 1976. Some work on Pomak villages has been
undertaken by Nikos Kokkas, who has published several texts on the Pomaks and has also
produced cds of Pomak musicians.
33Fermor 1966, 19. Fermor also describes a wedding at Sikarayia including a klephtic
song about the War of Independence leader, Kolokotrones. This description nicely cap-
tures the contrast between the slow klephtic ballad style and the Rom band that follows.
ecumenes 95
34See Tsibiridou 2004 for a discussion of the subject positions of the Pomaks. There is
a Rhodopi culture with regional variants that cuts across the various ethnic and religious
groups. At the same time there is an attempt on the part of some Pomaks to preserve
their separate culture, and an attempt by others to conceal it and merge with the major-
ity culture. The gender issues are related to the nervousness of Muslim women to perform
publicly. One young amateur singer told me that she felt obliged to change her name when
she recorded a cd of Pomak songs in 1995.
35The instrument has been modernised in recent decades.
96 chapter four
36For a detailed study of the anthropology of this ritual, see Kondos 2000, and for a
wider perspective, see Danforth 1989. See also Neikova 2000. The ceremony did give rise to
two major projects of classical music, one Greek, the other Bulgarian. They are the Anas-
tenaria tryptych by Iannis Xenakis, from which Metastaseis was extracted to form the first
work of his maturity, and the ballet Nestinarka [The Fire-Dancer] by Marin Goleminov.
37These and other Thracian dances, which are usually inseparable from the vocal rep-
ertory, are also preserved in diasporic societies. The US-based Orpheus newsletter gives
some insight into such diasporic activities.
38Every year there is a major gaida festival in the Bulgarian Rhodopes. One Pomak
musician and instrument maker from Cimmeria, Ferat Ali Afendi, indicated to me that he
now models his gaidas on the Bulgarian instrument.
ecumenes 97
39Rombou-Levidi 1999.
40Fermor 1966, 54.
41 Kavouras 1999.
42Ferat Ali Afendi described his own introduction to music to me in just these terms.
98 chapter four
of the Roma, the oldest and largest single minority in Greece, with par-
ticular concentrations in Macedonia and Thrace. Despite being awarded
Greek citizenship in the 1970s, the Roma have never been assimilated by
Greek society, living in mahala-s at the edges of the cities or in separate
Romani villages such as Anthi and Flambouro south of Serres, or Alan
Kuju in Komotini.43 Nor has their distinctiveness been readily tolerated.
Indeed sustained practices, and even policies, of discrimination have led
in some quarters to the rejection of their Rom identity not just by indi-
viduals (compare the Pomaks) but by whole communities, such as that
of Ifaistos [Kalkanza] in Komotini, in favour of the descriptor Muslim or
Turk. In other cases, the ethnic confusion is a familiar one, in that Roma
who do not speak any Romany dialect are inclined to describe them-
selves as Turks, though they may not be recognised as such in Turkey
and are widely regarded as yiftoi [gypsies] by the non-Rom populations
in Thrace.
As elsewhere in the wider region, the Roma of Thrace are associated
with music-making of a semi-professional kind, including performances
with the zournas-daouli (zurla-tapan or shawm-drum) ensemble compris-
ing two zournas-s and large frame drum (in some cases the karamouza
replaces the zournas). While this ensemble is found in various forms in
many traditional cultures, it derives here from Middle Eastern traditions,
and until recently it was widespread across northern Greece, Macedo-
nia (where the instrument is known as zurla),44 South West Bulgaria
(where it is zurna),45 and Albania. It is still a living tradition among
Roma exclusively performed by men, and passed down from genera-
tion to generation in the Xanthi and Rhodope prefectures of western
Thrace, as also in Greek Macedonia and South West Bulgaria (Pirin Mace-
donia). As to the daouli: Thrace is the beat of a drum, writes Patrick Leigh
Fermor.46
43In addition to Turkish and Greek Roma, there is a branch known as the Athinganoi,
whose religion combines the Muslim faith with elements of paganism. The marginality of
Rom communities, and at the same time the dedication of certain teachers and priests
devoted to improving their conditions, was apparent to me when I visited a Rom mahala
on the outskirts of Thessaloniki.
44For a fascinating ethnographic study of Rom musicians in Greek Macedonia, see
Keil and Keil 2002.
45On south west Bulgaria, see Peycheva and Dimov 2002. This book contains interest-
ing accounts of the zurna in folklore texts and in travellers writings.
46Fermor 1966, 227.
ecumenes 99
47Brandl 1996, and Hoerburger 1976. The association between the shawm-drum duo
and Muslim communities is not confined to Greece; see Pettan 1996a.
48Keil and Keil 2002, 267.
100 chapter four
CENTRES
5In major Serbian cities, influences came from Vojvodina. The song Sve to mene
okruava of 1793 by Dositej Obradovi (a writer from Vojvodina who was influential in
spreading Enlightenment thought in Serbia) is characteristic, with the melody written
down by Josif lezinger (17901870), and later, in a different version, by Isidor Baji (1878
1915), while one of the best-known of all made famous not least through a popular set of
piano variations by Kornelije Stankovi (183165) is to se bore misli moje, whose text
was by Prince Mihailo Obrenovi.
104 chapter five
Serbia and Montenegro were left in the federal state, and Montenegro
gained its full independence from this rump Yugoslavia as late as 2006.
Following the Ottoman conquest, depopulation, and an inflow of Vlachs,
modern Montenegro emerged in the early eighteenth century under a
Petrovi-Njego theocracy based in the old capital of Cetinje.6 It gained
formal recognition in 1878. As one of the few regions in South East Europe
to have held the Ottomans at bay, Montenegro was widely regarded, and
regarded itself, as a warrior nation that embodied neo-medieval quali-
ties of heroism, stoicism, and rugged independence, qualities that were
an easy prey to romantic myth-making. As a result it became a hunting
ground for writers, including librettists, from elsewhere in Europe, with
impetus from the sonnet by Tennyson.7 At the same time it responded
to nineteenth-century national myth-making by fostering and nurturing
its own sense of an heroic past, mainly through the ancient genre of epic
song accompanied by gusle, in which the famous deeds of heroes such as
Marko Kraljevi of Prilep are recounted. 8
A musical map of Montenegro and surrounding territories might well
begin with this genre, one of the oldest in the Balkans. It has become well-
known to literary scholars through the work of Milman Parry and Albert
Lord, who followed Matija Murko in using this living tradition of epic to
cast light on the Homeric genre. They are of the same diamond dust, the
same seed, says the Great Lady in the second of Kadares Three Kosovo
Elegies, comparing the tales of the Balkan minstrels to the Greek tales.9
Indeed Kadares intriguing novel The File on H (a reference to Homer)
was itself directly inspired by Parry and Lord. This thesis proved influen-
tial not only in Classical scholarship, but in studies of epic more gener-
ally, including canonic works of Old and Middle English.10 In a nutshell,
Parry and Lord were oralists, who were keen to downplay any sense of a
monumental author, and who preferred to understand the Homeric epics
6Despite its rich cultural heritage, Cetinje today has a neglected feel. With its impos-
ing monastery and other public buildings in a village-like context, it strengthens the sense
of Montenegro as the most Ruritania-like of all the modern Balkan states.
7See Wilkinson 1848, i, 5334, for a characteristic presentation of this romanticised
view of Montenegro. A more comic portrait was drawn by Franz Lehr, who used Monte-
negro as his model for Pontevedro in The Merry Widow.
8Strictly speaking these songs come from adjacent Herzegovina. See Fisher 1990 for an
account of the Marko songs that compares written texts with the oral tradition. See also
Wilkinson 1848, i, 4401, where it is clear that the genre in 1848 was much as it is today;
also Trevor 1913, 60.
9Kadare 2000, 70.
10For an introduction to some of this work, see Foley 1981.
centres 105
11 See Lord 1965, and especially chapter 3. Note here too the link with Judeo-Spanish
ballads in Maulen-Berlowitz, 1995.
12Hardie 1992, 1.
13Hale 1998.
106 chapter five
14The best-known poem by Beirovi is the epic The Battle at Mojkovac, based on the
World War I battle at which the Montenegrins inflicted heavy casualties on the Austro-
Hungarian army.
15For a discussion of Bosnian epics, see olakovi 2007.
16Wilton 2004. Also Boskovi 2004.
17See the splendid description of epic singing in Durham 1904, 2078.
18There is an evocative account of a gypsy performing with gusle at a Turkish home in
Herzegovina in Wilkinson 1848, ii, 445.
19Danica Laji-Mihajlovi, an ethnomusicologist at the Serbian Academy of Sciences
and Arts, has researched changing performance practices within this tradition.
centres 107
On a different level were the village musics that could be found all
over the country, including genres we have already encountered. Ganga
is one such, and although its sound world is at some remove from that of
epic song, it too relies on formulaic improvisation based on a very limited
pitch range. There is some overlap in the geographical spread of these
two Dinaric-centred genres, but whereas we can track the epic tradition
eastwards to embrace Serbia, ganga ranged rather to the north, where it
maintained a strong presence in the land of the Morlachs, in western
Herzegovina, Imotska Krajina and the Dalmatian Zagora (in the Croatian
Dinaric alps). Then again, we might turn our gaze to the savage border-
land to the south of the country (the land of the blood feuds and the
Kanun of Lek), where we would encounter a different idiom, associated
with Albanian Catholic villages such as Zatrijeba and Gusinje. Much of
this music is preserved today in the work of contemporary ensembles like
Besa,20 and it includes wedding songs and dances (the ubiquitous kolo),
together with pastoral genres performed on fyelli [floyera]. Predictably, it
is similar in style to music from northern (Geg) Albania, of which these
villages were once a part. And like the other traditional musics of Monte-
negro, it follows a pattern that we have already encountered elsewhere.
As long as the villages remained relatively isolated, their music was both
unique to the specific locality and at the same time united with music
springing from similar ecologies much further afield. Then, as village and
town increasingly interacted, we find a remorseless ironing-out of such
local styles to contribute to the more standardised idiom of the festival
and the CD.21
The southern and eastern borders of Montenegro were in fact contested,
especially before and after World War I, when there were tricky negotia-
tions about Albanian independence and about the status of the Sandak
centred on Bijelo Polje. All these territories remained under Turkish rule
until the Balkan wars of 191213. Even Podgorica, the present capital, was
occupied by the Turks as a garrison town in 1474 and only transferred to
Montenegro in 1878, at which point it had a mere handful of Montene-
grin inhabitants.22 The Turkish legacy here was both direct and indirect,
and in some cases it resulted in fascinating shifts of meaning. In addition
20The Albanian word besa, roughly translatable as oath, is drawn from the law of
Lek.
21 The traditional sound of Montenegro is widely marketed on CD today.
22Part of Titos strategy in confirming the republic status of Montenegro was to weaken
the hegemonic tendencies of Serbia and Croatia.
108 chapter five
I have used the term tradition rather freely in this brief guided tour of
Montenegro. It has been invoked largely on geo-cultural grounds, refer-
ring to the transmission the handing over (Latin: tradere) of musi-
cal traits that are distinctive to certain communities in certain segments
of the country. Such segmentation is hardly an exact science. We are
speaking of very roughly defined regions with which particular cultural
characteristics have been loosely identified. But the key point is that
each of them points beyond the political state to suggest affinities with
much wider geo-cultural areas that share something of the same char-
acteristics. As we begin to identify these larger cultural areas we may be
tempted to give a clearer focus to them, in a word to speak of traditions:
traditions of epic song that reach deep into the heartlands of the central
and eastern Balkans; of strident village musics shared with neighbouring
Albania; of peasant singing na glas that gives expression to the distinc-
tive mountain culture of the Dinaric alps; of tamburica ensembles that
point to the Illyrianism associated with towns and cities in the western
Balkans; of urban songs and dances that look right across the Balkans to
ars, for whom the Ottoman era was often regarded as a kind of dark ages,
even a suspension of history. Within a modernist discourse that separates
out progress and degeneracy, such music was located on the wrong side
of the divide. On the right side was European art music. This, after all, was
not only the most highly valued and prestigious music to infiltrate the
Balkans; it was widely regarded (including by the Ottomans) as a potent
symbol of social status and progressive values.
Where Montenegro was concerned this infiltration was hardly extensive,
but it occurred nonetheless, and on several fronts. In the first place a har-
monised Orthodox chant on the Serbian model was practiced in Cetinje,
following the partial devolution of jurisdiction from Pe to Sremski Kar-
lovci. Njego was a familiar figure in Sremski Karlovci, given that for much
of the nineteenth century the monastery and the royal court were closely
allied in a formal theocracy (as it happens, a separate Montenegrin Ortho-
dox church was created much later in 1993). At the same time theatrical
productions of plays by ore Proti, including singing parts, coincided
with the momentous arrival of a piano in Cetinje,37 while the demands
of international ceremonial and diplomatic protocol led to the formation
of a first military band in 1871, followed by a second in Podgorica in
1899 under the leadership of Frantiek-Franjo Vimer and Robert Tolinger,
though it too moved to Cetinje in 1892.
The band was an ambitious venture, functioning as a music school for
around forty youths (Ludvk Kuba recalls staying in the Podgorica school
in 1892), and in 1899 it engendered a separate string orchestra.38 There
were other developments along these lines, including choral societies in
both towns (Branka in Podgorica; Njego in Cetinje). And there was also
an important tradition of formal music-making associated with Kotor
and its environs, somewhat analogous to that found in the more presti-
gious Ragusa [Dubrovnik] just along the coast. This was mainly Venetian-
inspired, but there was some influence from Austro-Hungarian circles too,
especially following 1815. In the main, it consisted of bands and amateur
societies, but there were occasional visits from Italian opera troupes, for
these regularly toured the Adriatic coast as well as visiting the Italian-
influenced Ionian Islands to the south.
37It is widely thought that the first piano arrived in Montenegro with Princess Darinka,
when she came from Trieste to marry Danilo I.
38Kuba 1996. For an account of the second band, see Ivanovi 2001.
114 chapter five
East West
On the eve of World War I, the travel writer Roy Trevor published a short
book on Montenegro.41 Travel books on this region were not uncom-
mon at the time, and like many of them Trevors is an odd mix of acute
observation, idealisation and prejudice, similar in its descriptions to the
account by John Gardner Wilkinson more than sixty years earlier. The
basic story is an admiring one, depicting a warrior kingdom peopled by
scrupulously honest, fearless heroes, currently governed (in 1913) by a scru-
pulously honest, fearless King. Yet the book identifies certain downsides
to the legendary heroism of the Montenegrins. The infamous vendettas or
blood feuds a practice shared with neighbouring Albanians (described
42Hasluck 1954; Durham 1985 (1909), Kadare 1990. In theory at least, the law of Lek
accorded some degree of privilege to women within what is by any standards a patristic
society. It is intriguing that Albania has proved attractive to independent women travellers
(Allcock and Young 1991).
43Huntington 1993. Adam Kuper points out that Huntingtons reading was memorably
anticipated by T.S. Eliot. Antagonistic religions, according to Eliot, means antagonistic
cultures; and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled (Kuper 2006).
centres 117
Ottoman Empire colonised much of South East Europe physically, and for
a long period, its direct narrative contribution to the way the Balkans are
seen and imagined by outsiders is negligible.44
In general, Goldsworthy is a little too ready to impose on the Balkans
a Saidian model of cultural imperialism that meets the case in some par-
ticulars but not in others.45 Yet even if her approach relies too heavily on
polarising East and West, it has the merit of exposing starkly the question
of subject position: of a European Balkans, an Ottoman Balkans, and a
Balkan Balkans. None of these are stable categories indeed the reifica-
tion of the first is a problem with Goldsworthys book and there is no
shortage of fissures leading from one to the other. Nonetheless, there may
be some value in presenting them reductively at this point. The qualifica-
tions will appear soon enough.
How did the Balkans look from Western Europe? This question has
generated an extensive literature, and it will be dealt with quickly here.
It begs another question. Where, and what, is Europe? Which is Europes
true mass?, asks Kadares Great Lady. More than a name, and more than a
place, Europe is above all an idea, and one that gained focus in Enlighten-
ment thought and the historiography that emerged from it.46 As an entity,
Europes borders were historically fluid and with considerable slippage
between geo-political and geo-cultural description; it lacks in truth clearly
marked physical frontiers. Pedigreed histories of the idea describe a slow
process of holistic self-definition to a liberal agenda, proceeding alongside
a gradual rise in status to global hegemon.47 In this narrative, the Byzan-
tine Empire was the crucial protective shield that enabled the process
to occur,48 while the self-definition itself is presumed to have proceeded
hand-in-hand with the definition of an oriental other. At a late stage of
this narrative, the Balkans, which in the seventeenth century was still
widely perceived to be part of the East, was appropriated by Europe, but
problematised within it. If it really was a part of Europe, it was an alien,
44Goldsworthy 1998, x.
45Said 1978. For an appraisal of the orientalism debate, see chapter 1 of MacKenzie
1995.
46Leyser 1992. The seventeenth century was arguably the crucial period of European
self-definition, the point at which its distinctiveness from other cultures and civilisations
(based on a neo-Hellenic ideal stemming from the Renaissance) was affirmed.
47For an interesting angle on evolving definitions of Europe, see Stoianovich 1994. See
also Le Goff 2005.
48This point is well made by Judith Herrin in several publications. See, for example,
Herrin 2007.
118 chapter five
49Morin 1987.
50This is not the place to elaborate such thoughts, but it is certainly tempting to look
at redefinitions of civilisation that are emerging in the new Europe, in which the tradi-
centres 119
carrefour to music can only be hinted at here. We can trace it way back
to the transalpine origins of Gregorian chant, the beginnings of a long
process of mutual interaction and accommodation between northern
and southern European styles and practices, at least as significant as any
later East-West dialogues. And we can demonstrate that in subsequent
periods peripheries not only served as stylistic feeders to central musical
traditions, but were themselves subject to radical reevaluation and even
reconstitution with the rise of a nationalist ideology.
It is reasonable to ask a less familiar question. How did the Balkans look
from the Asian rather than the European side of the Aegean? How exactly
did the Ottomans view the Balkans?51 This question needs more sustained
consideration at this stage. There has been a recent spate of publications
on Occidentalism, and this literature, which is mainly about how the
Rest views the West, is distinctly relevant to our question. However,
I will argue at the very end of this book that so-called Balkanism cannot
be aligned with Occidentalism in a straightforward way, any more than
it can be aligned with more familiar orientalist discourses. For now I will
simply remark that the Ottoman perspective on Europe was anything but
stable. It oscillated from engagement to withdrawal and back again: from
a position that was antithetical to Europe to one that was sympathetic to
Europe, from fierce rejection to studied emulation.
In principle, the values of the Ottoman Empire remained largely unme-
diated by those inter-dynastic, essentially cosmopolitan, agendas of ratio-
nalism and liberalism, modernity and progress, that increasingly defined
Europe following the religious wars. For the Ottomans the ostensible goal
and duty was to extend the domain of peace, which they did on behalf
of Islam with a war machine that in its heyday was second to none in
efficiency and ruthlessness, and with sustained policies of repopulation.
And within this domain there was a tolerance of faiths and nations that
contrasted with the proselytising and controlling mechanisms associated
with the later European empires. This was the dubiously labelled Pax
Ottomanicus. It bore little resemblance to modern European nationalisms,
but was if anything closer to the social technologies of imperial Rome,
where qualities of Romanity were not dependent on ethnicity but were
disbursed to the conquered under certain conditions.
Aside from the security they offered, the Ottomans did little for subject
territories; infidels were taxed more heavily than Muslims, and there were
other constraints on their activities. Indeed this was part and parcel of the
philosophy. They left surprisingly little in the form of a durable material
culture, while at the same time they expected and demanded that their
basic needs especially while engaged in military campaigns would be
met by subject peoples. All the same, government was exercised for the
most part with a light hand, for the only major obligation was to preserve
order in the expanding domain of peace. Indeed the linking factor in the
Ottoman conduct of war and peace was precisely the primacy of order,
and the singular combination of elegance, rigour and ruthlessness with
which order was achieved and maintained. It held for the bureaucracy of
war, for the complex mechanism of rewards and penalties, for the millet
system of government, for the symbolism of public life that extended from
the courts of the Palace down to the ordering of public processions and
even to the dress codes that identified peoples and their religions, and for
the institutions of arts and learning.52
The empire operated by way of various kinds of contract established
between the Sublime Porte and native elites (religious in the main),
many of which retained their legislative authority under Ottoman rule. It
encouraged but did not usually enforce conversion to Islam, but in cer-
tain parts of the Balkans, notably Bosnia, the Sandak and Albania, mass
conversion did indeed take place. Its self-image was one of medieval cer-
tainties, defined against the simplest of alterities: anything outside the
domain of peace was the domain of war. Its hierarchies were rigid, but
it was relatively non-discriminatory, finding stability in its diversity, and
harnessing the multiple, regionally distinctive, talents of its subjects to the
service of the centre.
Thus the Ottoman view of the Balkans, whose core territories were
known by them as Rumelia, was both inclusive and appreciative, not
least because this region was a major source of wealth and power. With
its complex history, it not only differed in important respects from the
eastern territories; it was itself internally diversified, anything but a single
entity. For the Ottomans this was its strength. They were in no need of a
foil to help shape some emergent identity; that is abundantly clear from
the Ottoman mentality so skillfully filtered by Robert Dankoff through the
52Dankoff 2004, 8593. Histories of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath include
Shaw 1976 and Shaw and Shaw 1977, Kinross 1977, Goodwin 1998, and Wheatcroft 1993.
centres 121
53Ibid.
54This is discussed at length in one of Blent Aksoys essays in Aksoy 2008.
122 chapter five
Ottoman. The tradition then maintained its vitality in part through con-
stant infusions from peripheral cultures.55
Famously, of course, the empire declined, even as Western Europe
flourished. Modernisation may have been an economic necessity, but the
underlying structures could not easily be changed, and there is some irony
in the fact that the Tanzimat reforms served only to hasten the end. In
their nineteenth-century dialogues with the Great Powers the Ottomans
increasingly borrowed European discourses, including those ethnonational
discourses that were already shaping the thinking of Balkan elites. Even
as the forces of nationalism overwhelmed the empire, educated sectors
of Ottoman society were looking to Europe, aspiring not just to European
values, but to European fashions. The empire was increasingly sidelined,
its structures and values widely regarded as old-fashioned, indeed its very
survival dependent on mutual antagonisms among the Great Powers. By
the time we reach modern Turkey, Atatrk was outperforming anyone
in Europe in his contempt for the Ottomans, though he retained a reluc-
tant affection for their art and music (indeed, modern Turkeys need to
absorb its Ottoman legacy is a resonant topic in itself). The world of cul-
ture reflected these changes, but not in a straightforward way, for peoples
lives take time to register political change, and cultural continuities often
play a compensatory role.
Three points might be noted. First, the music of heterodox Islam was
forced underground in Turkey in the late 1920s, and the Sufi tekke-s closed.
Significantly, music continued in the tekke-s of the Balkans, however,
though these were more often part of the Bektai and other orders than
the Mevlev, with which Ottoman art music has been closely associated.
Second, Ottoman popular music music caf traditions in the eastern
Balkans, and various hybrid genres in the western Balkans continued
to thrive after the collapse of the empire, so that in this respect the Otto-
man legacy remained active. And third, the music of the western classical
tradition, already high-status in parts of the western Balkans, increasingly
permeated Turkey itself, a process that had begun in the nineteenth cen-
tury but accelerated in the early twentieth.
Finally, and again briefly, how did the Balkans look from the Balkans?
It is an impossibly generalised question, even in relation to those com-
munities of social and intellectual elites who might have thought to ask it.
Implicated in the question is another: how did the world beyond look
from the Balkans? Ivo Andri, in The Days of the Consuls, conveys some-
thing of the stoic hostility with which silent Bosnia viewed the meddlers
from without, whether they were Turks or Franks.56 However, the irony
is that attempts to celebrate our own, as distinct from a foreign, culture
drew heavily on premises bequeathed from without. We are back to the
opening propositions of this chapter. At times it really does seem that this
region is for ever fated to enter history on the back of other histories, as
a kind of adjunct to, or alternatively in resistance to, Central Europe or
the Ottomans.
With the demise of the empire, the tendency was to block out the Otto-
man years completely and then to replace Balkan identities with national
identities. For historiography, including the historiography of culture, the
result was a series of discrete ethnonational histories. Our own became
synonymous with the nation. There were interesting, but unsustained,
attempts to invert some of these categories, as in the Zenitist movement
in literature and art, whose founder Ljubomir Mici demanded a bal-
kanisation of Europe. But the more serious part of this enterprise was, as
Miodrag Maticki argues, precisely an attempt to overcome the opposition
between our own and foreign.57 More to the point, in our present age,
with Occidentalism on the critical agenda, it has been possible for critical
theorists from the Balkans to investigate this topic afresh. Rather than
making do with the Balkans in the gaze of others, we can now make
room for a Balkan-instigated concept, now indeed a major publication,
Balkan as Metaphor.58
56Andri 2003c.
57Maticki 2006.
58Bjeli and Savi 2002.
PART TWO
HISTORICAL LAYERS
10.Christmas celebrations in Topola, umadija, pre World War II. The men pre-
pare to collect ritual oak branches. Traditionally the priests and the families burn
the branches on Christmas Eve to invoke sunlight and heat for the coming year.
Courtesy of the Archive of the Foundation of King Peter I Karaorevi,
Topola.
11.A photograph of the Serbian composer Ljubica Mari (19092003) taken in 1933.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
12.Iconic performance of Mozarts Requiem amongst the ruins of the National
Library in Sarajevo. Sarajevo Philharmonic, Sarajevo Cathedral Choir. Conduc-
tor Zubin Mehta, Soloists Jos Carreras, Ruggero Raimondi, Cecilia Gasdia, Ildiko
Komlosi. 19 June 1994.
Courtesy of the Sarajevo Philharmonic.
13.Folk music group from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with performers on zurna,
drum, accordion. Teanj, Bosnia and Herzegovina. mid-20th century.
Courtesy of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
14.Markos Vamvakaris and his Piraeas ensemble, Athens, 1968.
Courtesy of the Musical Folklore Archives of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies,
Athens.
15.A photograph of the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris (18831962) from the
late 1950s.
Courtesy of the Manolis Kalomiris Society Archive.
A MAKAM-ECHOS CULTURE
Grand Narratives
From the perspective of what we now call Western Europe, there were
two neighbouring Easts prior to the Balkan Wars. Islam carried the
East with it into Central and South West Europe, with historically fluid
boundaries as political fortunes ebbed and flowed. Christianity created a
further East, and in this case the geography was more clear-cut. The Bal-
kans remains to this day the heartland of Orthodoxy.1 There was no love
lost between Ottoman and Orthodox cultures. But the divide between
them was widened by Balkan nationalist agendas. These agendas effaced
from collective memory any elements of co-existence that had prevailed
in Ottoman South East Europe, for there were certain natural alliances
between Ottomans and Orthodox Christians, based on a shared antipathy
to the Latin, Catholic world and to emergent Enlightenment values; in the
early days of the empire Greeks and Turks lived cheek by jowl.2 But all
those areas of communion between the two worlds were suppressed by
the alignment of Orthodoxy to nationalist causes. And to understand this
process, we must turn first to Greece.
Inconveniently, at least for some cultural historians, Greece is an inte-
gral part of the Balkan peninsula. Even the most adventurous metaphori-
cal reading of the Balkans cannot quite ignore this basic geography. The
difficulty lies in accommodating the geography within pedigreed historical
narratives both of Western and of Southeastern Europe. There is a narra-
tive of Greece and the West, where Greece is viewed as seminal to Euro-
pean self-awareness, and is widely regarded as symbolically privileged,
ancestral to, and formative of, our core values. The eastern context for
ancient Greek culture is played down in favour of an idealised uniqueness
that can be claimed by the West.3 Greece becomes an oasis of civilisation
4Herzfeld 1987.
5A widely-read presentation of this narrative is Kaplan 1993 (there is also a genre of
semi-autobiographical travel literature of this kind in the Balkans; see Winchester 1999).
In contrast, Glenny 1999 assigns due blame and credit to the Great Powers.
6The prototype for such histories is Paparrigopoulos 1925.
7Sahlins 1983.
8Eric Hobsbawm argues that the destruction of the social mechanisms that link ones
contemporary experience to that of earlier generations is under threat in todays world
(Hobsbawm 1995, 3).
a makam-echos culture 135
recognise today may or may not have predated the Ottoman Empire; so
far as I am aware, there can be no certainty either way.13 But in any case,
rather than lining up Greece and the West in opposition to Ottoman tra-
ditions, one might speak of an older, more general culture of the eastern
Mediterranean and Middle East, a culture of which Greece was a part.
A related narrative of music history describes ancient Greek traditions
as formative not only of European music, but also of Ottoman music. It
proposes continuity between ancient Greek traditions and Byzantine rep-
ertories, which were in their turn the immediate ancestors of Ottoman art
music. It further notes that the music theory of the ancient Greeks was
transmitted in large part through Arab-language scholarship, by which
route it reached both medieval Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans then neatly closed the circle by transferring these ideas
back to modern Greece. As presented here, the narrative is reductive to
the point of caricature, but even this brief outline is enough to indicate
how the singularity of Greece is again emphasised.
The continuity narrative was widely adopted by Greek musicologists,
notably Constantinos Psakhos,14 but its influence has been more perva-
sive than this. It is certainly striking that distinguished articles on ancient
Greece and on Byzantine chant in the New Grove Dictionary contextualise
their topics more-or-less exclusively in relation to western music. Thus
the reception of Greek theory in the West is discussed in some detail, but
synergies with Persian and Arab theory are largely ignored. Likewise, par-
allels between Byzantine and Gregorian chant are discussed, but there is
little hint that Byzantine echoi might have any connection whatever with
Arab maqm-s or Ottoman makam-s.15 Only in a separate article on echos,
first published in the 1980 edition, is there a hint that some such con-
nection might exist. It has also been suggested, writes Milo Velimirovi,
that the concept of Echos strongly resembles the Arabic Maqm in its use
of formulaic patterns. Such points need further study before the formula-
tion of principles common to both musical cultures can be attempted.16
Already in his pioneering studies of Arab music, Henry George Farmer
separated out the independent systems of Arab, Persian and Byzantine
musical cultures, and later scholars have further differentiated them.17 But
the differences are articulated mainly in Books of music theory, whose
relationship to praxes was by no means one of straightforward congru-
ence. Whatever the differences in scales, modes and rhythms, interactiv-
ity between Arab and Persian traditions is a matter of historical record;
indeed many of the theorists were themselves of Persian extraction, even
if Arabic was the unifying language. Suffice it to say that historians of Near
and Middle Eastern music commonly refer to the development of medieval
pan-Islamic musical practices, covering an extensive geographical range,
in the terms of a single Great Tradition, linked with varying degrees of
specificity to the music practiced in ancient oriental civilisations.18
It has been less conventional to associate Byzantine sacred repertories
(and we may include here the music for Christian rites in Georgia, Arme-
nia and Syria, and even Egypt and Ethiopia) with this Great Tradition.
The tendency has been to make a clean separation between Islamic and
Christian musical cultures. Naturally there is a solid basis for this separa-
tion; it would be surprising if the spread of Christianity had not resulted in
distinctive and specialised repertories. But within the complex and com-
peting musical rites associated with the Christian Church in Syria, influ-
ences from Persian and Arabic traditions are now widely acknowledged,19
just as in Islamic Damascus, in the time of the Umayyads and even more
under the Abbasids, we know that musicians played and sang Byzantine,
as well as Arab and Persian, music.
In his Ichos und Makam, published in 1994, Ioannis Zannos reinforces
and generalises this point, drawing on medieval sources to establish that
Byzantium contributed to the lingua franca of the Great Tradition.20 The
orientalised Hellenism of Byzantium, in other words, was of distinct rele-
vance to Arab and Persian musicians (men such as Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahn
studied Byzantine repertories), just as in a later period Ottoman art music
proved to be important for post-Byzantine Orthodox traditions. Greek
musicians from Asia Minor were very familiar with makam. They treated
Ottoman art music as a secular counterpart to church music: witness the
existence of Ottoman works in Byzantine notation, church compositions
17Farmer 2001 (1929). See also Farhat 1990 and Feldman 1996.
18Shiloah 1995.
19For suggestive similarities, homophonies [and] processes of toponymic assimilation
between the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds, see Balivet 2004. See also Balivet 1999 and
Jeffery 1992.
20Zannos 1994.
138 chapter six
with explicit references to secular music in their titles, and lists made by
Greek (Phanariot) musicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies detailing the relation between echoi and makam-s.21 Such reciproc-
ity within a cosmopolitan culture makes for a more convincing historical
description than accounts of a straightforward genealogical descent from
ancient Greece via Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire.22
Before introducing two repertories that have reverberated across the
Balkans, it will be worth commenting on yet another grand narrative of
music history, by no means confined to the Balkans. According to this
narrative, music history describes a progression from simple to complex
forms. It may be explained in evolutionary terms (a kind of aesthetic
Darwinism) or in the terms of an increasing rationalisation of resources
(as described by Max Weber), and it may and in earlier times almost
always did include some linkage to ideas of aesthetic value. Decon-
structing this narrative is hardly a challenge. We need go little further
than the acknowledgement that there are different qualities of complex-
ity, and that it is risky to generalise criteria drawn from a single musical
culture.23 Yet the covert influence of this thinking lingers on, not least in
the tendency to equate oral traditions with simplicity and written tradi-
tions with complexity.
Leo Treitler warns us against separating these categories too cleanly,
arguing that we need to break down the oral/literate dichotomy and to
make explicit the tacit assumptions of the paradigm of literacy wherever
they operate.24 Thus the products of literate traditions, usually associ-
ated with composers, works and complexity, still depend heavily on oral
transmission, and on a body of performative insight that is largely unwrit-
ten. And conversely, the fact that a composition does not exist in notated
form, but lives rather in the minds of performers, does not disqualify it
as a work, and as complex. There are resonances here not only for art
music from several cultures outside the West, but also for so-called folk
music. Leaving aside the intervention of the collectors (who often had
their own agendas, political and otherwise), we may note with Alan Mer-
riam that items of culture do not simply appear out of nowhere; there
must be contributions from specific individuals, whether these contribu-
tions can or cannot be pinpointed after the fact of composition.25
Treitlers paradigm of literacy may also refer to the perils of a retro-
spective fallacy, where we read back from techniques and principles asso-
ciated with a European notated tradition (at what is taken to be a defining
stage of its development) to earlier forms of that tradition, including and
this is Treitlers particular interest church chant. The classification of
chant in relation to other musical repertories requires careful handling.
Peter Jeffery has drawn our attention to the tripartite classification pro-
posed by Johannes de Grocheo around the year 1300, roughly translatable
as folk, church and art.26 It is clear from Jefferys account, moreover,
that Grocheo classified repertories not just in terms of genres, forms and
materials but in relation to the use made of them. This surprisingly mod-
ern, Chartier-like criterion of social utility, can lead to interesting inver-
sions of categories such as elite and popular, allowing for the different
meanings such terms carried back then.27
Then or now, it is clear that neither folk music nor art music can be
regarded as entirely stable categories.28 The intriguing aspect of Grocheos
classification, however, is his separation of church music, meaning Gre-
gorian chant, from both of these. Chant, in other words, occupied for
Grocheo a kind of middle ground between folk music and art music, both
of whose exponents have tended to make claims on it. This tripartition
carries considerable conviction. Church chant is not, of course, an evolu-
tionary stage taking us from one category to the other. Nor need there be a
hierarchy of value. Rather we might think in terms of layers, each unfold-
ing separately but often in close mutual dialogue. And finally, we should
note that although Grocheos model refers to music in Western Europe
(the chant is Gregorian), it is no less applicable to Orthodox repertories
in the Balkans.
I will shortly move directly to church music and art music, the second
and third of Grocheos layers. But it will be worth offering a brief comment
here on the first layer, comprising those traditional repertories that have
29Among numerous organological studies from the region one might cite Alexandru
1956; Atanasov 1977; Anoyanakis 1979; Sokoli and Miso 1991; Pejovi 2005. Detailed investi-
gations into the instruments of the Byzantine era are documented in Maliaris 2007.
a makam-echos culture 141
Byzantine Reflections
Since relevant notations did not appear until close to the end of the first
millennium, and diastematic notations later still, our knowledge of the
sacred music of early Christian communities cannot be certain knowl-
edge. Nonetheless, the hypotheses entertained by chant scholars are per-
suasive and evidence-based, even if the evidence is indirect. It seems likely
that the chant developed by communities in the eastern Roman Empire
for the recitation of liturgical texts, especially the psalter, drew eclecti-
cally from a wide range of traditional (including sacred) repertories from
the Middle East. Early forms of Aramaic-Syriac Christian music, together
with Jewish domestic rituals, may well have been influential in the forma-
tion of this chant. It developed in rural often desert monastic settings
as well as in the cathedrals and churches of the cities, and its centres of
gravity shifted over a period from Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria to
Constantinople.
Exactly when and where the oktoechos modal system crystallised and
how this system relates to earlier forms of the chant remain subject to
32Jeffery 2000.
33See Raasted 1985 on the formulaic basis of composition within these traditions.
144 chapter six
profile, eventually developing into the unique znamenny chant, but the
southern Slavonic chants remained fairly close to their Byzantine coun-
terparts. And although they were of course separated off from the sacred
music of the western Balkans, Croatia in particular for the divided
church was a marker of wider political and cultural divisions there was
almost certainly (as Svetlana Kujumdziewa suggests)34 a more open cul-
ture between east and west in the medieval period than conventional
wisdom would have it.
Even so, in the aftermath of empire, bridges to western culture and
these included early moves to harmonisation on the part of eastern
chant were undoubtedly damaged, arguably leaving the music of Ortho-
dox Christianity more open to influences from a surrounding Ottoman
culture. Although the old Irmologion all but disappeared after 1453, most
of the Byzantine hymnals remained in use. But they were supplemented
by new compositions, and they were subject to increasingly melismatic
improvisational practices that no doubt registered Ottoman influence
(Romanian scholars trace this influence to the late seventeenth century
in relation to their own psaltic chants).35 All the same, the tradition of
Orthodox music preserved its main defining characteristics during the
Tourkokratia through the faith and through the church. These two catego-
ries were not synonymous. There was a tension between them, and that
tension was heightened by the new political realities of a post-Byzantine
world.
The faith signals the Orthodox ideal of a universal kingdom of the
spirit. The archetypal Hesychast [from Hesychia: inner silence] will be
in the world but not of it, and will be informed by an intense spiritual-
ity, suspicious of reason and promoting transcendence through asceticism
and withdrawal. This ideal, increasingly at odds with a western Reforma-
tion and Enlightenment culture, was embodied in the monasteries, where
it had initially developed as a reaction against the politicisation of the
Church. It was the monasteries that kept Byzantine culture alive under
the Ottomans and preserved its musical heritage both in liturgical prac-
tice and through manuscript conservation. And since the faith invests in a
universal truth, the musical tradition supporting it should ideally remain
constant. One should not exaggerate this. Just as monastic and conventual
traditions were not all about withdrawal (the medieval establishments
34Kujumdziewa 2002.
35Ciobanu 1976, i, 10.
a makam-echos culture 145
were among the prototypes of the modern town), so their music was not
unresponsive to wider contexts. But in principle it remained free from
the fickle dictates of contemporary styles. The monasteries of Mount
Athos stood for this Hesychast ideal in its purest form, and here national
variants of the chant were largely subordinated to a central Byzantine
tradition.36
Music history did not, of course, stand still. After the Fall of Constanti-
nople there was a decline of the written tradition, placing greater weight
on oral transmission and depriving chant scholars of information on an
evolving musical practice for a good century and a half. But towards the
end of the sixteenth century something began to move. Inter alia, the
modal practice changed, and although the chromatic system as such is
not of Ottoman origin, it is likely that some of the microtonal elements in
the echoi were indebted to Ottoman traditions. Along with these changes,
and perhaps responding somewhat to the powerful counter example of
Latin polyphony, a new and highly elaborate repertory of kalophonic
(ornate, melismatic) and composer-centred chant began to take shape,
culminating in a large production of manuscripts from the second half of
the seventeenth century onwards. The notational system for this reper-
tory was by no means precise, and as a result there was a wide diversity
of practice even within the same community. Indeed it was partly the
confusion caused by this, together with the influence of Enlightenment
thought, that led to the reforms of the so-called three teachers at the turn
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But before addressing that, we
should consider wider political questions.
As we move into the eighteenth century it becomes ever harder to
isolate church music from politics. Our gaze shifts from the faith to the
church, to the earthly politics of institutions, and that includes the catalytic
role played by Orthodoxy in empire- and nation-building programmes.
With these programmes, Orthodoxy, far from unifying the eastern Bal-
kans, became an agent of its division into nation states. Under Ottoman
rule the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople was assigned full jurisdic-
tion over the Orthodox millet, but its aspiration to control the entire East-
ern Church was thwarted by the ambitions of the Bulgarians and Serbs
to regain their autonomous churches. Against this background, church
music lent support to movements that increasingly assumed the aspect
36Hasluck 1924. For a modern study, looking inter alia at aspects of tradition, moder-
nity and Europe, see Lind 2012.
146 chapter six
medieval literary tradition, were abolished at this time, leaving the way
clear for the forces of Greek nationhood. In the aftermath of the War of
Independence, an autonomous Greek church sponsored ambitious and
proselytising political and cultural programmes. So it is not surprising that
debates about the chant, common in the press of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, were caught up in debates about the nation.
Post-Chrysanthine chant, itself distinguishable from older traditions,
had already been appropriated for the nation, though a more detailed
survey would do justice to a range of distinguishable regional traditions
(Smyrnean chant would be one). Increasingly the issue at the heart of the
debate was harmony.
There had been an incipient polyphonic practice prior to the Fall of
Constantinople, but this was stymied by the collapse of the empire. Later,
polyphonic settings made their way from the Greek diaspora in Europe
(especially Vienna), first to Crete, which was occupied by the Venetians
until the Ottoman annexation in the 1690s, then to the Ionian Islands,
where many Cretans took refuge and which belonged largely to the sphere
of Italian culture, and eventually to the Greek mainland.40 The Cretan
practice was really an oral tradition of harmonised chant that extended
back to at least the seventeenth century, and included a unique modal
system related to old Byzantine echoi. Something of this Cretan prac-
tice was also adopted in the Ionian Islands, though an independent poly-
phonic practice may have predated the Cretan presence there. In any case
the islands developed their own specificities, including (in Zakynthos)
mixed monophonic-polyphonic chants, and a specific form of three-voice
harmony. There were, in other words, various kinds of folk polyphony
in the island practices, often closely related to secular traditional music.
But nothing is straightforward in attempts to summarise these tradi-
tions. It seems, for example, that more established westernised versions
of the chant, associated with settings by Ioannis Sakellarides (18531938),
were also known in the Ionian Islands from the late nineteenth century
onwards.
On the Greek mainland, there was yet another model for the devel-
opment of a polyphonic practice. It was partly due to the demands of
Russian-born Queen Olga that Russian influences were registered in the
royal palace. Orthodox Russia was read by the Greeks in two quite dif-
ferent ways: on one hand as an important eastern bulwark against the
40Panagiotakis 1990.
148 chapter six
41Filipoulos 1997.
a makam-echos culture 149
need to preserve the chant from corruption from east as well as west, a
point that exercised Sakellarides in particular, but not only him; in 1881
Patriarch Joachim III established a committee to systematise church
music, cleansing it of every foreign element,42 and in the 1890s com-
plaints about the nasal singing coming from the East were commonplace.
Third they were about origins: familiar constructions of the nation bridg-
ing ancient Greece and Byzantium. And fourth they were about musical
integrity. How should one harmonise the intervals of the Byzantine echoi
within a western rational system?
As the argument rolled on, the issue of national character moved centre
stage, though again this could be presented in very different ways. Should
the purity of the chant, and of the national character, be preserved from
foreign elements? Or should musical progress be embraced as a welcome
sign of national progress, of the Europeanisation of Greece? And tied into
this debate was the ancillary issue of a developing competition between
Athens (rapidly expanding from not much more than a small town in the
early nineteenth century) and Constantinople for the place of the true
capital of Hellenism. This, then, was the tightrope walked by Byzantine
chant. Both western polyphony and eastern music, depending on the cir-
cumstances, might be renounced or embraced for the preservation of this
fictitious balance. What started as a musical debate very quickly became
an essential part of a cultural debate whose motivation was the formation
of a Greek national identity.
The gathering support for polyphonic music as the century turned was
part of the increasingly influential belief that Greece should represent a
kind of model synthesis of East and West. As noted earlier, a key figure in
this musically was Ioannis Sakellarides, who occupied key teaching posi-
tions in Athens and was thus in a position to proselytise for his wester-
nised settings of the chant.43 But in the end the tide turned, and polyphony
was not to be the way forward for church music. Interestingly it is only
through the Greek diaspora to North America that the Sakellarides tradi-
tion lives on today. Harmonisation was not abandoned, of course. One
leading composer of art music, Emilios Riadis (18801935), an important
42Romanou 2006a. Romanous main concern in this article is with the fascinating
organs constructed in the 1880s and again in the 1920s (by Constantinos Psakhos) with
tunings designed for Byzantine Echoi.
43A separate issue was the translation of harmonised church music to the concert plat-
form, something much developed in Serbia and Bulgaria, but also cultivated in Greece. As
Katy Romanou points out (Romanou 2006a), there was a larger issue here about building
a national school on the foundations of Greek-Byzantine music.
150 chapter six
Ottoman Canons
44Boym 2001.
a makam-echos culture 151
45Just what can be meant by Turkish folk music, and its relation to Turkism, is dis-
cussed in Stokes 1992, 2049.
152 chapter six
these western areas were touched only tangentially by the imperial pres-
ence; rules were imposed, but there was relatively little contact with either
the officials or the cultural practices of the ruling dynasty, other than the
local Pasha. Ottoman musical influences were not significant here. What
really distinguished the isolated villages of the western Balkans musically
were their highly distinctive, largely autonomous repertories. The more
geographically isolated the region, the more singular the music.
The deepest cultural marks left by the Ottoman presence were to be
found rather in urban centres. Musically, the most widely acknowledged
influence until the early nineteenth century was that of the mehter bands
of the Janissary Corps (originally recruited through the devirme system),46
mainly because they were stylised by European composers in the famil-
iar alaturca idiom.47 Much has been written about these appropriations,
principally within a Saidian discourse of Orientalism, and in some cases
this has resulted in subtle reflections on the penalties, as well as the con-
viction, carried by Saids thesis, and in ways that carry wider messages for
musicology.48 There have also been easy assumptions about organology,
and especially about the influence of the mehterhne not just on Euro-
pean military bands, but on town and theatre bands, and on the emergent
symphony orchestra. It may be that some of these assumptions need to
be revisited. What is not in question, however, is the impact of the bands,
of which there were many scattered across the empire, with Roma promi-
nent in the ranks.
It is well attested in the writings of European travellers that during mili-
tary campaigns in the Balkans over several centuries (until the dissolution
in 1826 of the increasingly self-promotional and mutinous Janissary Corps,
at which point the military bands were Europeanised) this was a powerful
agent and symbol of war,49 though the mehter bands played a ceremonial
role in civilian life too.50 At the heart of the band was the ks [the rulers
46The forced recruitment of Christian youth for the military was a feature of the Otto-
man system in its early history, and one that could bring very real advantages to the youth
in question.
47See Popescu-Judetz 1996. Chapter 2 is entitled Mehter as an Act of Power and
Performance.
48Windschuttle 1999; Irwin 2006. Both authors argue that Said oversimplifies the
motives of Orientalist scholarship by aligning them with political (imperialist) agendas.
For a discussion of musical resonances, see Head 2000. Mary Hunter has suggested that
the alaturca topic was only used in Western art music while the Ottoman Empire still
constituted a threat, whether imagined or actual (Hunter 1998).
49For a description, see Dankoff 1990, 235.
50Ibid., 271. See also Dankoff 2004.
a makam-echos culture 153
orders, more often classical in the Mevlev order. But in general the power
of music, provided there is an appropriate attunement (sam [literally,
listening as distinct from hearing]), is enlisted in support of meditation
and ecstasy, the two principal routes to effective communication with
God. Some of the most interesting metaphysical reflections on music are
to be found within the orbit of Sufi mysticism, and here Ottoman theorists
were heavily indebted to the Arab Systematists. Saf al-Dn was translated
into Turkish already in the fifteenth century by Abdlkadir Marag, and
as Popescu-Judetz points out, the Abdlkadir dynasty of theorists, and
indeed Turkish theorists generally in the fifteenth century, advanced inde-
pendent theory only tentatively and always with reference to validating
figures such as Saf al-Dn and Al-Frb.52
Categories such as the Ottoman mutlak (soundless) and mukayyad
(sounding), as employed by Abdlkadir in particular, can only really be
understood in relation to that earlier tradition, and in particular to Sufi
authors such as the twelfth-thirteenth century Andalusian Ibn Arab. The
sense is that sounding (rather than soundless) sam, the lowest stratum
of which corresponds very roughly to a Boethian musica instrumentalis, is
a stepping-stone to an inner hearing that is eventually free of music alto-
gether. At the same time, Ottoman theorists made some effort to bridge
the gap between such theories of listening and theories of creativity, not
least by stressing the Neo-Platonist orientation in some Arab writings
(again Ibn Arab), where considerable privilege is attached to human
creativity, allowing its capacity to transform objects (through himma [the
power of the heart]) into symbols of the divine, rather than simply rep-
resent them as part of a Platonic degenerative sequence. In other words,
divine creativity is perceived to be at work here in and through the human
imagination.53
Within the orbit of Sufism, there was a close relationship between such
speculative theory and the zikr [dhikr] the naming of God or remem-
brance of God rituals of the dervishes, through which union with God
was sought. This is especially intense in the case of the sem ritual, part of
the mukaabele ceremony associated with the Mevlev (Sunni) order, com-
monly found in the tekke-s [lodges or monasteries] of Anatolia and else-
where.54 Several Mevlev lodges (mevlevihne) were virtually schools of
music and poetry at the very least they were important meeting-places
for musicians and poets and the repertories composed for their rituals
fed into what is usually described as Ottoman classical music.55 Indeed
the musical traditions of the Mevlev order, centred on the multi-part
yn-s composed for the ritual, were closely related to those of classical
music, with the yn very roughly comparable to the classical fasil. It is no
surprise, then, that many of the leading Ottoman composers were them-
selves Mevlevs.
Following the conquest, Istanbul was the centre of Ottoman music, and
of Islamic music generally. The royal court, the intellectual and artistic
hub of the empire, was the leading patron, in that professional musicians
and instrument makers received a court salary, and music was taught
institutionally at the Enderun, the imperial school.56 But the tradition
was eventually widespread across the elite cultures of the empire, culti-
vated not least through the at homes of private teachers (mekhne-s).
All the same, it was some time before a truly distinctive Ottoman reper-
tory emerged historically. With no clearly defined tradition to inherit, the
Ottomans drew eclectically on existing styles, ranging from well-estab-
lished Persian traditions (it is worth remembering that the literate elite
were largely Persian speaking) to music from Ajerbazan, Armenia and
the Anatolian provinces, and the Byzantine Empire. The precise nature
of the transition from a pre-Ottoman Great Tradition to a distinctively
Ottoman music remains hazy, but there are concrete sources, and they
include notations as well as treatises. The transmission of key concepts in
the transition is often attributed to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theo-
rists such as Yusuf bin Nizameddin and eyd. Major sixteenth-century
figures were the Crimean ruler, Gazi Giray Han (15541607), a poet and
composer of instrumental pieces, Hatib Zkir Hasan Efendi (1545?1622),
who composed mainly religious music, and the Sufi master Aziz Mahmud
Hdy (15411628).
Scholars seem to be in agreement about dating the early stages in
the crystallising of a singular Ottoman style obvious markers of which
included the adoption of Turkish texts, development of new musical forms,
changes in instrumentarium, and redefinitions of makam-s and usl-s to
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Murad IV was a leading
patron of this era, supporting the traveller-musician Evliy elebi, as well
55Signell 2006.
56The Enderun was replaced by a more western-orientated school under Mahmud II.
156 chapter six
as composers such as Miskal Solakzde (d. 1658), Ama Kadr (d. 1650),
Yusuf Dede (d. 1670), Koca Osman Efendi (d. 1665), Kek Dervi Mustafa
Dede (d. 1683) and the Azeri etar Murad Aa (d. 1673). Mehmed VI also
supported music, and during his reign there were notable composers such
as Hafz Post (d. 1693) and Tazde Receb elebi (d. 1690), as well as
the Polish-born theorist Ali Ufk Bey [Wojciech Bobowski] (161075), who
produced historically important staff notations in his Mecmua-i Saz Sz
[Instrumental and Vocal Collection].
At that point, so it is argued, there almost certainly began an extended
period of consolidation, and in general detailed historical source materi-
als are exiguous after Ali Ufk Bey. There is a hiatus in the theoretical
record until the early eighteenth century, at which point the famous nota-
tions and treatise by Prince Demetrius Cantemir (16731723) initiated a
self-consciously new approach, set up in a kind of dialectical relation to
the old.57 The result, according to Popescu-Judetz, was a new theory of
Turkish music independent from Arab and Persian musical influence.58
What Cantemir really achieved was a special notational convention for
Ottoman music, differentiating it from antecedent Persian music, and his
notations effectively documented the tradition up to that point. As with
other such notations, they were a way of collecting and recording the
music, and were not intended as scores for performance.
That Cantemir was Moldavian was symptomatic of the tendency of the
tradition to draw widely on the provinces and on non-Turkish ethnici-
ties, including Phanariot Greeks, who were influential in Moldavia and
Wallachia, as also Jews and Armenians; there was constant immigration,
willing and otherwise, to Istanbul. Following Cantemir, further major
changes took place within the tradition. In the first place there was a pro-
liferation of new makam-s as well as some changes to the structures of
existing ones and a notable tendency towards compound makam-s; and
partly as a result of these changes the standard two-octave scale on which
the Great Tradition is based, was extended. In addition, there were fur-
ther alterations to the usl system of rhythmic cycles; there were changes
to the instrumentarium; and there were new compositional forms, includ-
ing the small-scale ark, and the development of the four-hne [section]
perev. Through all of this the extended classical or semi-classical fasil,
with its fixed sequence of vocal and instrumental forms dominated by the
tanbr and the ney (as described in the early eighteenth century by both
Cantemir and Fonton), remained the fundamental schema for concert
music performed at the meclis [reunion].59
It was suggested in chapter 5 that at the very period in which the socio-
political system was weakening at the centre (broadly speaking from the
beginning of the eighteenth century) Ottoman high culture entered its
most creative phase, and that this rising curve, together with continu-
ing processes of transformation, seems to have continued into the early
nineteenth century. This was the era of Selim III, the most famous of
the Sultan-musicians, during whose reign and at whose behest another
notational system Hamparsum Notation, based on the Khaz script of
the ancient Armenian Church was developed. Among the many lead-
ing nineteenth-century composers were Ismail Dede, the classicists Zeka
Dede (d. 1897) and Tanbr Ali Efendi (d. 1890), and the innovators Hac
Arif Bey (d. 1885) and Tanbr Cemil Bey (d. 1916), associated with the
so-called Romantic School.60 According to Walter Feldman, even those
versions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century perev-s (an instrumental
movement that forms part of the fasil, following the introductory and
improvisatory taksm) that can be found in nineteenth-century sources
took on all the aspects of nineteenth-century compositions.61
The term composition here is used advisedly. That improvisation was
an important component of the Ottoman classical tradition in no way
detracted from the centrality of composition, whether or not the results
were deposited in print. Pieces were often designated first by usl, then
by makam and form, and finally by composer. As a result, we encoun-
ter this music today as a tradition of canonic works transmitted across
the generations from master to pupil (the so-called mek [lessons] sys-
tem). They were composed in the main between the eighteenth and the
early twentieth centuries, at which point, with the establishment of the
Turkish nation state, the tradition was suppressed for ideological reasons.
Ottoman classical music as performed today is, in other words, a recogn-
isable corpus within a defined historical period. And as such it was sum-
marised and re-theorised in relation to the Systematists as a kind of
post hoc rationalisation by the early twentieth-century theorists Rauf
Yetka, Suphi Ezgi and Sadettin Arel.62 It is by way of the so-called Arel-
Ezgi system, based on trichordal, tetrachordal and pentachordal genera,
that it is taught in Turkey today, following the rehabilitation of this music
in the 1980s.
While Ottoman classical music was associated initially with the royal
court, it soon established institutionalised performance traditions not
only in the tekke-s but also in the wealthy homes of Istanbul, and in major
Ottoman cities such as Bursa, Edirne, Izmir and Salonika. Yet subtle and
tricky questions arise, beyond the scope of this exposition, as to the sty-
listic borders of the tradition. What were its synergies with Turkic makam
traditions in Central Asia, for example? What were the links between Sufi
repertories in the Ottoman Empire and the music of neighbouring Safa-
vid Mevlevs? How far did the conventions of classical music percolate
through to less elite genres, or indeed itself draw sustenance from those
genres? How do we classify genres of popular dance and processional
music, or of light music and caf music, that were performed not only
by the numerous professional musicians of Istanbul (organised in guilds
and featuring prominently in all public festivities), but also by travelling
ensembles made up of Turkish Roma? These repertories too were based
on the makam-s and usl-s of classical music. Indeed for Ottoman theo-
rists they were often understood as a less complex and formalised species
of this classical music. The key distinction was that folk music was local,
whereas classical music was empire-wide.63
In any event the later nineteenth century witnessed significant changes.
The old complex forms lost ground to simpler lyric forms, and they were
also threatened by pronounced westernising tendencies that had been
instigated with the Tanzimat. There was a quest for simplicity (for some
Turkish musicologists that equates to a process of degeneration) in the
declining years of the empire, with smaller lyric forms such as the vocal
ark replacing the more sophisticated improvised gazel. There were com-
parable changes in instrumental music, as the old fasil performances were
replaced by simpler, more popular genres, including shorter versions of
perev-s (a development pioneered by Tanbr Cemil Bey). In the early
twentieth century the less sophisticated genres of Ottoman music, includ-
ing domestic repertory (ilhi-s and secular ballads), semi-classical music,
62The clearest exposition of this is found in Signell 1977. This includes an account of
the seminal article by Rauf Yetka.
63See Faroqhi 2005, for a discussion of this distinction within the Ottoman world.
a makam-echos culture 159
and the popular music associated with the music caf were to be found
everywhere in the core Ottoman territories, not least those European ter-
ritories that had been substantially Islamised.
At the same time, western (alafranca) styles of popular music (and
for the social elites western classical music too) increasingly permeated
the soundscape of the empire. In short, just as an insistent oriental voice
lingered on in the Western Balkans, in the heartland of Europe (and it
has not fallen silent), so western traditions increasingly colonised the
core Ottoman lands of Asia Minor. In some places notably some of
the Aegean islands, and in particular Lesbos musical traditions liter-
ally fused together elements of Asia Minor traditions and western popular
music. But these are instances of a much more general condition. The ter-
ritory of South East Europe is located precisely at the crossroads of these
two musical worlds. The Balkans is a place of transit.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EASTERN RECESSIONS
Allahu Ekber
It was a journey from the Adriatic coast to the mountainous interior that
first attracted me to this part of Europe in the late 1960s. Armed with a
short introduction in the series The Modern World a (then) plausibly
optimistic account of Yugoslavia by A.W. Palmer, still in my possession
I left the resorts and headed inland.1 The towns and villages of Bosnia
and Herzegovina made an indelible impression. There were the mosques
and minarets, but even more there was the ezn, the call of the mezzin,
not quite as in Istanbul, but still a perennial passport to a mythical east
and a mythical past for the western observer. Even today, with the sound
of Islam a familiar part of metropolitan environments, it feels strange to
encounter it in rural settings within Europe. Whether they are music or
not, adhn and tadjwd became part of an Arab-language soundscape in
South East Europe with the early Ottoman advances, and they remain so
to this day in those parts of the Balkans that retain numerically significant
Muslim populations.
Islamisation was facilitated by a policy of steady colonisation, with
Turkish settlements established along the major routes through Thrace,
Bulgaria and historical Macedonia. The initial settlers were Ottoman
officials and their retinues, together with soldiers. There was also some
agricultural settlement, as Anatolian nomads transferred stockbreeding
traditions to the eastern Balkans, and dervishes were translated from
ghazi warriors into timar-holders. But most of the settlement was urban.
Very often it would be the tekke that helped establish or further develop
urban communities, paving the way first to market place and then to
town, and allowing the dervishes to play a key role in the guilds or esnaf-s
of an increasingly oriental urban culture. Mark Mazower gives statistics
for Muslim populations in eastern Balkan towns for 1530 as follows: Lar-
issa 90%, Serres 61%, Monastir 75%, Skopje 75%, and Sofia 60%.2
1 Palmer 1964.
2Mazower 2005, 36.
eastern recessions 161
In this way, the music of Islam entered the Balkans, partly transplant-
ing Anatolian traditions to Balkan soil, but partly allowing the Balkans to
participate in the formative stages of Ottoman traditions. The most prom-
inent sites of music-making in these early stages of the conquest were the
tekke-s. These Sufi lodges were significant in bedding down the Ottoman
presence in the Balkans, not least because they met the social as well as
the spiritual needs of local populations, and proselytised to people of all
faiths and ethnicities.3 They were established in tandem with the Otto-
man advances, and usually with official sanction, either in existing Chris-
tian buildings, in private houses, or in newly-built foundations, and they
undoubtedly helped Islam to penetrate local cultures, while at the same
time preserving its voice in adaptation to local languages.
Not only did music and dance play a role in the rituals of Sufi tarikat-s
[brotherhoods]; the formation of an Ottoman classical music tradition was
closely associated with the Mevlev order in particular (Mevlev rituals
foregrounded the reed-flute [ney], accompanied by kdm [kettle drums]
and zil [cymbals] right across the Middle East). In general the Mevlevs
were from the higher social classes and the urban intelligentsia; they were
men of the pen. They often had wealthy backing, and their educational
programmes in music and literature carried prestige. However, they were
less influential in the Balkans than in Anatolia, and were mainly confined
to educated circles in the cities. This may partly account for the fact that
Ottoman classical music remained the preserve of a small, elitist, and
mainly Turkish, society in the major urban centres of the Ottoman ter-
ritories in Europe.
It was familiar in some of the major towns of the eastern and southern
Balkans, but was never really adopted by Islamic society in Bosnia, despite
a Mevlev presence in Sarajevo.4 The key point here is that Bosnia was not
settled extensively. Indeed its Islamisation over a period of more than a
century begs a clear explanation. Noel Malcolm attributes it mainly to
the fractious competition between Catholic and Orthodox churches, as
opposed to a single, strong national church, as in Serbia or Bulgaria.5 But
arguably the strong Catholic background in Bosnia was a more telling fac-
tor, since for Catholics, as Ines Aeri points out, there was a major loss
3Michael Balivet argues that the most original phenomenon in the diffusion of Islam
in the Balkans is the essential role played by the dervishes (Balivet 1999).
4An impressive study of Islamisation in Bosnia is Aeri 2004. See also Hickok 1997
and Adanir 2002.
5Malcolm 1994.
162 chapter seven
6Aeri 2004.
7The Bektai shaykhs are known as Babas.
8Hasluck 1929. The map of Bektai distribution in Albania at the end of Volume 2 is
instructive.
9I retain Bektai for convenience, though Albanians would have Bektashi. There is
an exquisite shrine at Kruja, near Durres, associated with the Bektai saint Sari Saltik, but
in recent years the Bektais have struggled to reassert themselves in Albania following the
rescinding of Enver Hoxhas ban on religion.
eastern recessions 163
are fascinating precisely because they are undertaken from the Ottoman
perspective. In addition to providing evidence of the extensive Ottoman-
Muslim infrastructure in the region, including detailed, if unreliable,
listings of the mosques, han-s, medresa-s, hammam-s [bathhouses] and
tekke-s he encountered in his journey through Kosovo, northern Albania
and Montenegro, he speaks with delightful condescension about the cus-
toms of the Christian raya, in a neat inversion of the usual perspective of
Balkan travel literature.
elebis enumerations of the tekke-s in the Balkans are often second-
hand and widely thought to be over-estimates, but they are a valuable
reference point, and there is really nothing comparable until the anthro-
pological studies of the early twentieth century. He was himself a singer,
serving at various times as both Imam and Mezzin, and elsewhere in
his book of travels he is specific about musical practices at the homes
and courts of local dignitaries, listing the many types of song sung by the
Abdal Khan of Bitlis in eastern Anatolia, for example, together with the
extensive range of musical instruments in his collection.14 There is less
specificity about music in his accounts of Balkan travels, but the Book
does include some descriptions of local music and dance in Albania. They
include a memory of the dancing following a wedding party in Zharovina,
together with a description of mourning rituals in Gjirokastr. There are
also references to love songs he heard in Elbasan, and descriptions of the
Roma who were employed in the mehter bands.15
Even so, and despite an extensive account of the activities and writ-
ings of the Bektais, there is little about religious music in elebis writ-
ings, beyond a mention of the teaching of Koran melodies at a medresa
in Berat. In any case, soon after he traversed the length and breadth of
the empire, the Ottoman state distanced itself from the Sufi orders, in
a so-called anti-Dervish movement whose turn to piety and orthodoxy
resulted in intensified policies of Islamisation in the late seventeenth cen-
tury. The movement was not sustained, but it may partly explain why
subsequent accounts of Muslim music in the Balkans, from the early eigh-
teenth century onwards, tended to come from western rather than Otto-
man sources (a more obvious reason, of course, was the waning power of
the Ottomans following the Treaty of Karlowitz).
John Gardner Wilkinson, and a generation later Arthur Evans, whose trav-
elogue was based on a walking tour of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1875, the
very year of the historic uprising in those territories.21
The list of such travellers is extensive. Very striking is the prominence
of women, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22
Vesna Goldsworthy has written with insight about such women, includ-
ing Edith Durham.23 Durhams agendas were those of the Victorian age,
but she was influential, including politically. Her observations of local life
and customs, especially in Montenegro and Albania, extended to music.
In describing the music at a post-supper gathering in Skreli, Albania, she
contrasted the unequally tempered scale of Albanian traditional music
with the modern European scale, and described the vocal style as follows:
the words are incredibly drawn out over long minor turns and ups and
downs that few English throats could imitate. To the uninitiated it seems
to begin nowhere and leave off anywhere, until, after a few weeks, the
ear, accustomed as it were to a new language, recognises both tune and
rhythm, and airs that at first seemed all alike become distinct.24 (Compare
Edward Lear, for whom the Albanians make a feeble buzzing or humming
over their tinkling guitars, like dejected flies in a window-pane.)25
Elsewhere Durham described the long-drawn, melancholy cry of
funeral laments in Ni in Serbia,26 ballad singing to the accompaniment
of the tambura in Prokletije, where the singers lean fingers [plucked]
strange trills and wonderful shakes from the slim, tinkling instrument,27
as also gypsy bands in Devich, epic songs in Montenegro and even the rau-
cous wailing voices heard in the Catholic Cathedral in Scutari (Shkodr).28
For the most part her emphasis was firmly on traditional village music
of Albania and Montenegro, and she undertook some pioneering record-
ings of epic songs as early as the first decade of the twentieth century,
producing some of the earliest recordings of Albanian music still extant.29
In general, where Muslim musical practices are described, they are con-
gealed into a representation of alterity, epitomised in Durhams descrip-
tion of the long-drawn oriental yowl that means music at a Muslim Rom
wedding.30
Alongside such travel literature there had always been a body of more
scholarly writing, but this gained new impetus following the system-
atisation of academic disciplines that took place in the late nineteenth
century. Even as Durham was writing up her travels, Frederick Hasluck
was embarking on a more dispassionate scholarly study of sacred sites
in the region. Haslucks contribution to the sociology of religion under
the Ottomans was of pioneering significance. In particular, his descrip-
tions form a valuable counterweight to the travellers tales, if anything
swerving towards the kind of positivistic listing that we find in some of
elebis writings more than two centuries earlier. Indeed his systematic
enumeration of sacred sites in the early twentieth century provides us
with a fascinating comparator for elebis listings, but now undertaken
from the perspective of European scholarship.
Predictably, the comparison reveals a decline in Islamic foundations
overall, but also intriguing continuities, where lodges, sanctuaries and rit-
uals survived the centuries, and in the case of the Albanian Bektai [Bek-
tashi] a notable numerical increase, not least because the sect was closely
associated with the Albanian national movement. Haslucks agenda was
at some remove from that of Durham in every respect, and for that matter
from the agenda of Durhams arch rival Rebecca West.31 Thematic to his
work were the reciprocal interactions of Islam and Christianity in the Bal-
kans (and Anatolia), and accordingly he documented the transferences
between sacred places, a phenomenon widely recognised informally,
including by Durham.32 Music, indeed imaginative culture in general, was
never part of his programme, but by describing systematically the infra-
structure of sacred life in the region, he provided a valuable context for
the ethnographic researches of present-day scholars into music and Islam
in the Balkans.
extant recordings made by Paul Traeger in 1903. These latter are available on the CD Dis-
covering Albania, produced by the Ulysses Foundation, Tirana in 2012.
30Durham 1904, 245.
31 Wests epic account of Yugoslavia in the 1930s (West 1977) has overshadowed the very
different contributions of Durham. Haslucks redoubtable widow Margaret Hasluck also
spent several years in Albania and made her own contribution to the literature produced
by women travellers. See Goldsworthy 1998 and the essay in Allcock and Young 1991.
32Hasluck 1924. Again this is conveyed in fictional form in de Bernires 2004.
168 chapter seven
33This is no more than a sketch; it does not, for example, extend into Greece. For a
useful account of the legacy in Crete, see Williams 2003.
eastern recessions 169
Yet in other parts of Macedonia the tradition of the tekke the Halvetije
order in particular is in serious decline, not least due to a crisis of leader-
ship caused by population shifts. The social and cultural role of the insti-
tution has dwindled to insignificance compared to Ottoman times, with
many of the lodges either closed altogether or turned into museums. Yet
the surviving tekke-s still provide some continuity with a vital tradition of
music-making that was once widespread across Anatolia and the eastern
Balkans. Overall, then, the story in Macedonia is one of decline or liber-
alisation, punctuated by intermittent attempts at reform. But in another
sense traditional forms of Sufi music have found new incarnations far
beyond the tekke on world music platforms. This story, again one that is
not confined to Macedonia, is for a later chapter.
Turkish communities in Bulgaria present a very different profile. They
exist only in the east of the country, and although they number almost a
million they retain some traces of a ghetto mentality; there were pogroms
in the 1980s. Margaritova Rumiana researches communities in the villages
around Kuirdzhali in southeastern Bulgaria, where there are substantial
populations of heterodox Muslims, mainly following Alevi traditions.34
From her interviews with older people it is clear that for many years the
tradition, centred on the saz, remained defiantly conservative (in a man-
ner very often characteristic of traditions displaced from their spiritual
home), and was largely unaffected by surrounding Bulgarian traditions.
This is in marked contrast to the increasing permissiveness encountered
in Macedonia. Moreover, although in very recent years the practice has
begun to change, the impetus for change has come not from Bulgaria but
from Turkey, with which the villagers maintain close contacts. The ten-
dency has been to open up the Islamic rituals to a wider public domain,
a belated response to similar developments in Turkey, and one that tends
to detach the music from ritual, and to give it something of an autonomy
character.
As we move further from the Ottoman court, to the remote edge of the
Islamic world of the Middle East, musical dependencies become rather
less apparent, particularly in the realm of secular vocal music. Among
Bektai [Bektashi] circles in Albania a secular tradition of oriental love
poetry (akin to Bosnian sevdalinka) developed at an early stage, with the
Albanian language written in Arabic script. When sung, these ashiki songs
fused oriental idioms with native traditional music, again as in Bosnia, and
this fusion was also a feature of the ilhi-s that were performed not just in
tekke-s but in domestic contexts. It seems, however, that as we enter the
world of the zikr rituals such elements of local colour recede somewhat,
making space for wider Sufi practices. This emerges not least from Bahtir
Shehollis vivid and highly specific (stage by stage) evocation of the cer-
emony of Hashure in the Masjid of Helvets of Rahovec (Kosovo).35 The
intense spirituality associated with this ritual its fervour and its calm
comes over clearly in Shehollis account. It is a very long way from the
commercialised presentations of zikr rituals that are now a commonplace,
and it is striking how closely the description accords with recordings of
similar rituals in Bosnia.36
Immediate location may well be a factor in this. Ankica Petrovi tells us
that in the more remote mountainous territories of southern Bosnia even
the Koranic chanting and the call to prayer are influenced by local styles.37
In contrast, the urban centres and the more accessible rural settings of the
northern plains were more thoroughly orientalised, both in the music of
the mosque and in the ceremonies of the tekke [tekija]. Yet even here, the
institutions took on a particular character, at some remove from more
central Ottoman traditions. The Sufi orders in Sarajevo exhibited a mark-
edly syncretic character, with shared practices and cross affiliation, not
least because the orders came under considerable pressure following pro-
scriptions from the Bosnian Islamic community from 1952 onwards.38 This
situation eased in the early 1980s, but the syncretic character of the rituals
remained in place. Risto Pekka Pennanen recorded the state of play in
the Sarajevo tekije in the late 1980s and 1990s, pointing to the close links
between the Nakibendi and Mevlev orders, led by the same sheik, meet-
ing in the same tekija, and perfoming the zikr in similar ways.39 Today,
35Sheholli 2006. It is worth persevering with the atrocious translation in this publica-
tion, as it offers us an intriguing glimpse into a world of non-commercialised Sufi music-
making and its effects on participants.
36See, for example, the CD Sufi Chanting from Sarajevo (Archives Internationales de
Musique Populaire).
37Petrovi 1988. Petrovi has also collaborated with David Levin in the 1993 CD Music
from an Endangered Minority: Bosnian Muslim Music (Washington DC: Smithsonian Folk-
ways Records). See also Barali-Materne 1983.
38All tekke-s were officially closed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1952 following these
proscriptions.
39Pennanen 1993 and 1994. For a comment on the Mevlev order in Sarajevo during
Ottoman times, see Zubovi 2001.
eastern recessions 171
40Barali-Materne 2003.
41 This was possibly built by the Janissary Kodja Mirrat Sinan, who built over 80
mosques including the famous Selim II Mosque in Edirne.
172 chapter seven
Europe.42 Further to the west and to the north, Catholic Europe likewise
rapidly effaced the Turkish inheritance: in Osijek in Slavonia, for instance,
and even in Pcs and Buda in Hungary, though there is still a Bektai
shrine in the Hungarian capital today. These are all cities in which a once-
pervasive Ottoman culture has left relatively few visible traces today,
though all of them continue to host minority Islamic communities. As a
result we have to exercise historical imagination to register that they were
once homes to a thriving and dynamic Muslim culture.
A brief return visit to Serbia will make the point. As in Bulgaria,
canonic narratives of Serbian general history have been so focused on
the emergent nation that the Ottoman centuries tend to be presented
as an extended (and aberrant) parenthesis in the story. David Norris has
remarked on how comprehensively the Ottoman legacy was erased archi-
tecturally in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: Such was transfor-
mation that even those Westerners who did not hide their disdain for the
Balkans could not help but comment favourably on what Belgrade had
become.43 But it is worth remembering that Belgrade was once a Turkish
city, and that there are still traces of a lingering Ottoman influence. The
Bajrakli Mosque, built in the second half of the seventeenth century, may
be the only surviving mosque in the city today, but at one point there
were many, as there were of course in Ni (the surviving mosque there
is of some historic importance). There is interesting archival material
at the Bajrakli Mosque, as at several of the historic mosques in Serbia.44
But little of it helps us with music. The transience of music is part of its
joy it disappears into the ether, and leaves only vestigial traces in mate-
rial culture and part of its frustration.
It is the more frustrating when we move yet further from the impe-
rial centre to Vojvodina. The Ottoman Empire took control of this region
(not yet so named) following the Battle of Mohcs of 1526 and the fall
of Banat in 1552, though the territory was still ruled by Serbian Despots
acting as Hungarian vassals. During Ottoman rule, most of the inhabit-
ants of Vojvodina were Serbs. But the cities were populated with Mus-
lims, and for more than a century and a half, before the Habsburg Empire
took control with the treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718),
the territory was divided into the Sandaks of Srem and Segedin, and the
Elayet of Temevar [Timooara], a Turkish province existing in Banat after
1552. So before the end of Ottoman rule dramatically changed the demo-
graphic character of the region there would have been a prominent layer
of Islamic cultural and religious forms in the towns.
Information about this is all but impossible to find, so comprehen-
sively was the Ottoman presence effaced. Musicologists do refer to the
mehterhne, but this is the only genre of Turkish music in Vojvodina on
which anything is ever written, no doubt because it was absorbed by
western culture. Naturally it is hard to say much in the absence of con-
crete sources. But we can at least allow our knowledge of the practices in
mosques, minarets and tekke-s elsewhere in the Balkans to stimulate the
imagination. There will have been local particularities, as there were (and
are) in Bosnia, and very likely the proximity to central Europe will have
been registered musically. But there will also have been the commonali-
ties imposed by the rituals of the faith. The ezn will have sounded in this
remote corner of the Ottoman Empire, before it became Austrian, then
Austro-Hungarian, and then Serbian; the Mevlid will have been sung there
too, and the sem performed.
Coffee Break
Beyond the mosques and the tekke-s, and right across the Ottoman-
controlled Balkans, an oriental secular music was performed in a variety
of settings. During the heyday of the empire, the most prestigious ven-
ues were the courts of the viziers and pashas, but in some contexts these
sites were matched by the feudal estates of native aristocracies, notably
the Romanian boyars ruling under Turkish authority. Even with the emer-
gence of newly independent Balkan nations in the nineteenth century ori-
ental music was not immediately deposed, and for a time it still found a
role in official ceremonies. Serbia is a case in point. When Prince Milo
Obrenovi became ruler of the (semi-)autonomous province in 182930,
a Turkish military band from the old regime remained in place. And even
when Milos westernising policies were instigated in 1831, they did not
immediately oust the influential band leader Mustafa, as several travellers
to Serbia at the time testified.45
taraf-s of the world music scene. Villages such as Clejani, just south of
Bucharest, became famous, and are still famous, for muzica lutreasc.47
Muzica lutreasc synthesised Turkish makam-s and performance
styles, European chordal harmony and appropriations of the melodic and
rhythmic patterns of Romanian traditional music. It was the latter ingre-
dient that provided the main distinguishing element, differentiating the
lutar ensembles from other urban popular music. Some of the Romanian
repertory was trans-regional, and known by all, including ritual wedding
music, epic songs (cntece btrneti), and traditional ballads. But there
were also songs and dance melodies drawn from specific regions, to be
used as and when the occasion demanded, as well as versions of Greek
and Turkish popular music. Somehow it all coalesced into a clearly defined
style, associated with the solo dancing of the hor igneasc [gypsy hora],
and with the popular oriental womens song-dance known as manea, com-
plete with tsifteteli rhythm. By the late nineteenth century it had become
customary to perform the repertory as suites of pieces according to con-
text and demand. It was a high-prestige popular culture, and some of the
performers became legendary figures. In listing several of these, Marian
Lupascu is anxious to stress that they were not exclusively Roma.48
Among the principal urban venues for the lutari were restaurants, and
more particularly coffee houses, in the larger cities of Romania. The cof-
fee house was an institution all over the Ottoman-occupied Balkans. It
was already installed there before it conquered Western Europe in the
eighteenth century, and when the Turks receded it remained one of their
lasting legacies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coffee
houses of basically oriental design (with rugs scattered on the floor and
benches with cushions around the edges of the room) were to be found
in the major towns and cities of the Balkans. They were often owned by
Jews, and were frequented exclusively by men. Characteristically they
were sites of leisure and studied inactivity of a kind frequently caricatured
as oriental, but they were also used as popular venues for political and
religious debate.
They were often organised according to ethnic group or religious affili-
ation, and in this respect a legacy can still be found today in the eastern
Balkans. In the towns of Western Thrace, Christian Roma will congregate
in one caf, while Muslim Roma can be found in another, and Pomaks
47Ciobanu 1969.
48Lupascu 2006.
176 chapter seven
their alienation from the status quo that invested the Rom women with a
special kind of power, enabling them to tap into the subversive potential
of female sexuality in male-dominated societies.
Undoubtedly there are potent gender issues here, and they resonate
right across the social and familial practices of the eastern Mediterranean.54
Mark Mazower tells again the familiar story of the young Roza Eskenazi,
the Jewish singer who later became one of the great exponents of rebetika.55
His account reminds us that Jewish women too were alienated from the
status quo, and it is no doubt significant that the Sephardic women sing-
ers and dancers (taadera-s) of Salonica were much in demand in the
kafe aman; indeed Eskenazi started her career as a dancer in just this way.
They were, moreover, part of a broader Jewish component in the multi-
national musical life of Salonica, a kind of public counterpart to some of
the Sephardic practices discussed in chapter 1. Before the famous Caf
Mazlum was burned in the Great Fire of 1917, Abraham Karakas Efendi
sang amanedes there before going on to lead the chant in the synagogue.
Later, in the 1920s, Maestro Sadik was hardly less famous, singing in
Ladino, as well as in Greek, Turkish and Arabic. In general, Mazowers
book offers us a vivid depiction of the musical world associated with the
smoke-filled cafs, the tavernas, the bars and the night clubs of this great
multi-cultural city, many of them sited in the red light districts and all
with broadly similar repertory. This was the world of the kafe aman.
We encountered the term kafe aman in chapter 3. Originally Turkish,
the music caf had a long history in Istanbul, but it came into its own and
was much more widely disseminated in the second half of the nineteenth
and the early years of the twentieth centuries. It was not a monolithic
institution there were various species of music caf, each with particular
clienteles but very broadly it hosted repertories based on the Ottoman
fasil ensemble, consisting mainly of instruments such as tanbr, kann
or santr, tambourine, tarabuka [darbuka], violin (or kemne) and klar-
net. In Macedonia, Thrace and Bulgaria these ensembles were known as
algija, from the Turkish algi, meaning simply instrumental group. This
should not be confused with the more recent Bulgarian pop-folk genre
chalga, though, as Dimitrina Kaufman and Claire Levy have separately
pointed out, other genres such as wedding music and ethno-jazz in Bul-
garia took algija as a starting-point.56
It was above all in the Turkish-dominated towns of Bulgaria and Mace-
donia that algija was instituted in the nineteenth century. The ensembles
were associated initially with the entertainments particular to different
town guilds and their saints, but they quickly took on a much wider role
in weddings, fairs, dances and cafs. The Macedonian algija, linked espe-
cially with Roma and Jews, acquired its own character, differentiated from
Turkish prototypes by the incorporation of Balkan as well as Turkish rep-
ertory. It was in the nature of algija that it blended cultures in this way,
drawing on the rural music of Macedonia as well as urban popular reper-
tory. The old town tradition of algija was really an urban popular music
associated especially with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, and it was familiar in all the major towns of the Ottoman Balkans,
albeit not always under this name. In Albanian towns, for example, the
ensembles were known as saze. Like algija, saze represented anything
but a unified tradition. The most famous ensembles were from Permeti
in the south, with an entirely different character and instrumentation
from the distinctive, makam-based saze of Shkodr in the north. Even
in those towns in the western Balkans where the Turks had already been
expelled and political independence achieved, traditions of oriental urban
music survived.
Labels were used loosely and often interchangeably. Thus, in and
around Vranje, in that corner of southeastern Serbia geographically and
culturally closest to Bulgaria, the term sevdalinka was occasionally used to
describe characteristically oriental love songs, a particular genre of gradske
pjesme associated especially with Bosnia. In much the same way, the term
algija was used to describe the corresponding instrumental ensemble of
the Vranje region, and it was even extended to cover similar ensembles
in Belgrade. The Dardaneli coffee house, a cultural centre and meeting
place, had a resident algija right up to 1912, at which point the build-
ing was demolished. Once again the spread of these ensembles and their
music right across the Ottoman Balkans was due partly to the Roma, who
were to be found wherever there was music, and who kept pace with the
rapidly changing idioms of urban popular music, from the fasil ensemble,
to guitar and accordion, and eventually to synthesizer.
57The distinctive feature here is the repetition of the phrase aman-aman [mercy, mercy],
in part as a means of filling out the syllable count. Fermor refers to the aman interjections
in the context of klephtic singing by the Sarakatsans in Thrace (Fermor 1966, 17).
58Durham 1904, 318.
180 chapter seven
Turning West
59Katsanevaki 2006.
eastern recessions 181
in the central square with its open garden, and of course at the coffee
houses (known as yal-kafen) and taverns. Samuel Baud-Bovy caught the
residual traces of this tradition, noting that the surviving songs about Ali
Pasha resembled the urban songs of Istanbul, and also of Moldavia and
Wallachia. He also remarked that, as sung in Janina, the songs were close
to what he labelled the Thracian amanes.60
In other words, the picture we have of music in Janina is one that fore-
grounds urban song, and musical life in general, of a distinctly oriental
character, in which Jewish coplas, Turkish ilhi-s and Greek stihoplakia
(light songs in rhyming couplets) coexisted and interpenetrated. How-
ever, the intriguing aspect of Katsanevakis research is her detailed study
of the spread of these urban songs by way of trade and military routes
to small urban islands within the local provincial musical idiom of the
area.61 The picture was clearly a differentiated one, allowing for the coex-
istence in some settlements of traditional ritual songs and urban songs,
while in other settlements especially close to what she calls cultural
poles the traditional songs were themselves urbanised by means of
Ottoman influence.
Katsanevakis work on the Janina vilayet qualifies but does not con-
tradict the basic proposition that until the incursions of modernity there
was a rather clear differentiation between orientalised urban and indig-
enous rural musical styles in this part of South East Europe. What it really
does is to make specific the fine grid of urban centres that are nested
within the larger regional map, and also to reveal significant areas of inter-
penetration between city, town and townlet. Defining a relation between
these urban traditions and surrounding indigenous musics is another
question again, and a complex one, invoking the conventional categories
of folk music and popular music. It seems necessary to explore this ter-
rain a little, and to do so I will take a brief excursion into traditional music,
a category that would later be relegated one might say downgraded to
folk music, in Greece more generally. Following that I will return to Epi-
rus, where present-day political borders are exactly that: present-day.
The rural-urban divide partly maps onto a folk-popular divide in Greece,
and that in its turn partly maps onto different vocal styles and different
instrument sets (for example, lira, laouto and gaida or tsabouna, often
60Baud-Bovy 1984, 6263; Baud-Bovy 1958, 12225. See the reference in Katsenevaki
2006, 290.
61 Ibid., 291.
182 chapter seven
62Politiss major collection was Selections from the Songs of the Greek People (1914). The
ideological roots of Greek folklore collection have been discussed at length, notably by
Michael Herzfeld.
63Roderick Beaton uses the term demotic tradition (Beaton 1980, 23).
64This is a complex issue whose bibliography has been discussed in detail by Katsane-
vaki (Katsanevaki 1998).
65See Chianis 1967 for an account of the synergies between Albanian and Greek ver-
sions of the tsamikos, which is regarded as a national dance by both nations (likewise the
syrtos is shared with Pirin Bulgaria). For general studies of Greek dance, see Petrides 1994
and Hunt 1996.
eastern recessions 183
Greece, whether of the mainland or the islands. Not only are traditional
music and dance invariably shaped more by regional and social than by
national impulses; we also need to factor in the transforming effects of
three very powerful external poles of attraction. First, there is Asia Minor,
influencing the eastern mainland, the northern Aegean islands (Lesbos
in particular), and also parts of Macedonia and Thrace. Second, there is
the western Mediterranean, drawing the music of the Ionian Islands and
the littoral Peloponnese in particular towards an Italian sphere of influ-
ence. And third, this time looking north, there is the Slavonic Balkans, cre-
ating musical continuities between northern Greece and Bulgaria, as also
between the Pindus mountain range and the Albanian and Dinaric Alps.
This returns us to north Pindus. We may assume that during the reign
of Ali Pasha there existed some form of the ritual songs associated with
pastoral communities in Epirus. As noted in chapter 2, the extraordinary
polyphony of Greek Epirus is in fact closely linked to rural music in south-
ern (Lab) Albania, for until the demise of the Ottomans Epirus embraced
this region too. (There was no clear political dividing-line between Albania
and Greece until the settlement following the Balkan Wars, and that set-
tlement left difficult minority issues that remain active even today, espe-
cially in relation to the Chams.)66 In truth, Epirotic polyphony whether
north Greek or south Albanian presents us with a truly indigenous
music, and it is a music that has remained almost entirely untouched by
orientalised urban idioms.
Much less autonomous were the traditions of Klephtic ballads (kleftika
tragoudhia), strongly represented in northern Greece. These melismatic
songs were usually written in an unrhymed so-called vers politique of fif-
teen syllables, possibly derived from Byzantine epics, and were charac-
teristically performed in free rhythm, albeit at times with hidden metre.
They thematised long years of warfare with the Turks by the klephts
brigands and freedom fighters of the mountains, around whom a very
particular culture developed, a culture also associated with a popular
improvised klarino repertory, and with heroic varieties of the traditional
tsamikos dance. One of the most famous of the klephtic ballad cycles, the
Saga of Suli, concerned Ali Pasha directly, describing his treacherous con-
quest of the fortress of Suli, having reneged on his promise to spare the
lives of its defenders, and telling of the subsequent suicide of a group of
women and children who supposedly hurled themselves from a cliff by
and Albanian songs.73 In the 1950s there were major collections made by
Erich and Doris Stockmann and in the 1960s by A.L. Lloyd, who estab-
lished links between Albanian and Bosnian epics.74 The historical epics
and kng kreshniksh are associated with the Gegs in northern Albania
and southern Kosovo, and they are still sung today, notably in Rugova in
Kosovo, to the accompaniment of either ifteli or lahuta. The main point
for now is that the Albanian epics establish continuities both with the
(Greek) south, and the (Montenegrin) north.75
From Montenegro, we might continue further north to Senj, one of the
oldest towns on the Croatian coastline and the heartland of the Uskoks,
who were situated on the outside of Ottoman-controlled land. The legend-
ary exploits of the Uskoks, especially their defense of the Military Frontier
and the Dalmatian coast against the Turks, constitute the subject matter
of yet another great cycle of epic songs (including The Death of Ivo and The
Captivity of Jankovi Stojan), a world of coastal oral poetry that is clearly
distinguishable in verse, style and content from the inland epics.76 Artis-
tic evocations of these epics were also common, as in Razgovor ugodni
naroda slovinskoga [Agreeable Discourse of the Slavic People] by Andrija
Kai Mioi, the subject of a detailed analytical commentary, including
a comparison with the Albanian epic Lahuta e Malcs by Gjergj Fishta, in
an essay by Stavros Skendi.77
A more specialised look at these epics would reveal an interweav-
ing of motifs and subject-matters across languages and faiths. It would
take us into details of metrics, motives and plots, as well as into disputes
about origins, borrowings and typologies. It would compare not just the
fifteen- with the more common ten-syllable verse form, but the stylistics
of northern with those of the southern traditions.78 But the main issue
73Lord 1965, xv. An agreement now exists between Harvard University and the
Prishtina Institute of Albanology to publish the Albanian epics recorded by Lord after
Parrys death.
74See his notes on the 1966 LP, The Music of Albania. For a more detailed study of
the Bosnian epics, notably those collected by Luka Marjanovi and Kosta Hrmann, see
olakovi 2007.
75See the various comparative studies in Skendi 1980, including the identification of
common themes and contrasted metres. One feature of Skendis work that was unusual at
the time was his inclusion of Greece alongside the Slavonic Balkans in studies of language
and folklore.
76See Bracewell 1992, 92. Also Bokovi-Stulli 1999.
77Skendi 1980, 10120.
78See, for example, Stolz 1969.
eastern recessions 187
for present purposes is that the Klephtic ballads, kng kreshniksh and
Slavic epics stand as monuments to the preservation of an oral culture
in the Balkans. In this respect the importance of the Ottomans was less that
they provided the thematic focus for a culture of dissent and resistance,
than that the nature of their administration created major disincentives
for the development of those forms of literary culture that grew out of
Christian traditions. They established, in other words, ideal conditions for
the preservation of oral cultures long after these had disappeared from
other parts of Europe.
The epics represented one archetype of indigeneity in the mountain
ranges and seaboard from north Pindus to northern Croatia. An older
layer of ritual songs presents us with another. But, more broadly, we might
include within this oral culture the many site-specific dances, pageants
and ceremonies that celebrated the resistance all the way along this route.
Here, in a Croatian littoral that was prey to conflicting Turkish, Venetian
and Habsburg ambitions from the fifteenth century onwards, such ritu-
als marked out a frontier of sorts, a symbolic break on the reach of the
East, effectively an Antemurale Christianitatis in at least this part of the
Balkans. What confronted the East was of course the West, which had
a strong historical presence all along the Adriatic littoral. The Croats who
settled there had befriended but were not subject to Byzantium, but they
remained with the Western church following the schism. Latin was the
principal language of the church, of course, but the Croats cultivated a
vernacular form of the Roman rite using the Glagolitic script, and for
many years rival Slavonic (Glagolitic) and Latin liturgies were a source
of conflict.
Glagolitic chant represented, then, another strand of oral culture in the
western Balkans. There are historical data, but no musical notations, so
that what we know about the music is based on a few nineteenth-century
transcriptions, and on the researches of scholars such as Jerko Bezi and
Gorana Doliner.79 By collecting recordings from the dioceses of Krk, Senj,
Zadar and ibenik, Bezi demonstrated the sheer diversity of this ancient
and very rich tradition of singing. The earliest available recordings date
back to 1910, but there was an intensive period of collecting in the early
1950s, and fieldwork and analysis continues to this day; Gorana Doliner,
for example, has presented a detailed analysis of a corpus of melodies
collected by the nun Lujza Kozinovi over an entire church year. On the
evidence of the recordings, we can say that this tradition embraced many
distinctive, locally defined styles, ranging from Gregorian- and Byzantine-
influenced monody to two-voice polyphonic or heterophonic idioms that
bear a close relation to regional folksongs. Glagolitic chant functioned as
a mode of traditional Slavic culture out there on the littoral. And as such,
it coexisted with, and brushed up against, an Italianate culture that sig-
nalled the Mediterranean rather than the Balkans.
CHAPTER EIGHT
INFRASTRUCTURES
The header littoral Balkans begs some questions. It reminds us that Bal-
kans, like Orient, is a culturally contested term. For Jovan Cviji, as for
Fernand Braudel, the Adriatic littoral was part of the Balkans. It existed
in a symbiotic relation to its mountainous hinterland so that they formed
contrasted parts of a cultural, as well as a geographical, whole.1 Yet, as
Bojan Baskar points out, this has not been a widely-held local view.2 For
cultural geographers such as Guido Miglia, the narrow strip of the eastern
Adriatic coastline, which was never secured by the Ottomans, belongs not
to the Balkans but to the Mediterranean.3 But that too is a culturally con-
tested term. Defined by Braudel and others as a culture area character-
ised by a topos of diversity within unity, the Mediterranean has come to
be understood more in symbolic or cultural than in strictly geographical
terms; indeed the quality of mediterraneit has been subject to appropria-
tions of various kinds, not least by Italian fascism. Mediterranean, then,
might join Balkans and Mitteleuropa as a term with resonance.4
Where Dalmatia is concerned, it connotes the Italianate culture of the
towns, open to the sea and cosmopolitan in character, together with an
everyday culture (cuisine, architecture, interior design, lifestyle, music)
that is removed from the colder, darker Dinaric interior (the contrast is
spelt out by Andri in Days of the Consuls). Within Dalmatia, the Istrian
peninsula is sometimes singled out as distinctive: more culturally and eth-
nically mixed, a kind of Mediterranean in microcosm, with a tendency for
(urban, maritime) Italians to cluster along the coast, and (rural) Croats
or Slovenians to favour the inland territories.5 These are stereotypes,
of course. But the key point is that a Mediterranean culture has been a
reality for many inhabitants of Dalmatia and Istria. One might indeed
go further, and suggest that the Croatian lands extend the notion of in-
betweeness that will be developed in this book, in that they mediate cul-
turally between the Mediterranean and Mitteleuropa.
For much of its history this coastal region was subject to the Venetian
Republic, and for several centuries there was an extended war of attrition
fought along the whole of the littoral, as the Ottomans pushed forward
and harassed the Venetians in all their Adriatic and Aegean territories.6
It was a relationship of mutual dependency (mercantile and cultural
exchanges between them began at an early stage), but on the coastal strip
it was Venice that held the upper hand in cultural terms, and the legacy
proved to be a lasting one.
It was not, however, without challenge. In later years, as both the Otto-
man and the Venetian empires declined, the Habsburgs exerted a more
pronounced cultural influence. They had long been a ruling presence
in the Slovenian parts of Istria, and they controlled much of northern
Croatia. But following 1815, in the wake of Napoleons Illyrian adventures,
the Habsburgs acquired the bulk of the Adriatic coastal provinces, and
much of their hinterland too. It is unnecessary to spell out the constantly
shifting political fortunes. The bigger picture is one of conflicting Vene-
tian, Turkish and Austrian (or Hungarian) interests until the late nine-
teenth century, at which point developing nationalist aspirations in both
Croatia and Slovenia came into conflict with the Habsburgs, and in
northern Dalmatia and Istria at least with the irredentism of a newly
unified Italy.
There is no neutrality in scholarship. Today this region is Croatian, and
prior to that it was Yugoslav. But the national perspective can function
as a distorting lens through which we look back at events, practices and
materials. And it has functioned in this way in Croatian music historiogra-
phy, with national labels assigned to composers and repertories as though
present-day political borders had a permanent meaning. It is instructive
to set Croatian accounts of renaissance-baroque music in Dalmatia along-
side Italian-based accounts. The Croatian scholar Josip Andreis wrote
a detailed history of Croatian music, and one that has benefited from
6For a period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Venetian
empire embraced much of the Peloponnese peninsula (Byzantine Morea).
infrastructures 191
7Andreis 1982.
8This is a recurrent theme. See also Tuksar 1998a.
9Cavallini 1990; cf. Stipevi 1992.
192 chapter eight
Dubrovniks Golden Age as a City State on the Italian model, with gen-
eral assembly, senate and cabinet, lasted from the mid fourteenth century
to the major earthquake of 1667. Its achievements in music are less widely
recognised than those in architecture and literature. But research by
Miho Demovi, Stanislav Tuksar and others in the Historical Archives,
the Dubrovnik Museum, the Cathedral Archives and the Franciscan Mon-
astery library indicates that there was a flourishing musical life, and that
music was considered an important component of a general education.10
It is noteworthy that the Accademia dei Concordi hosted discussions on
the role of music, associated especially with the neo-Aristotelian philoso-
pher and statesman Nikola Vitov Gueti (15491610) and the mathemati-
cian and poet Miho Monaldi (15401592).
As an independent City State, Dubrovnik maintained a Capella (a resi-
dent band) for ceremonial occasions, and details of the musicians and
their instruments are extant from the late fourteenth century.11 In addi-
tion, concerts were promoted by the Duke and the city fathers (organ
music, madrigals, lute-songs); there was popular music performed by
professional musicians to accompany dances; there were processions and
carnival festivities associated with the Feast of St. Blaise; and there was
a wealth of music at the Cathedral, the Dominican and Franciscan mon-
asteries and the Church of St. Blaise. Croatian-language theatre was also
developed, with music playing a prominent role in pastorals, tragedies
(usually translations from the Greek), mystery plays and melodramas.
Opera appeared surprisingly early. A translation of Ottavia Rinuccinis
Euridice was published in 1617, and a performance of the first native opera,
Junije Palmotis Atalanta with music by Lambert Courtoys the younger,
was given in 1629.
A good deal is known about individual composers in old Dubrovnik,
and especially about the French family Courtoys, of which the composer
of Atalanta was a younger-generation member. But very little indigenous
music has survived from this period, partly due to the destruction of
Cathedral and other archives by the earthquake. In contrast, there is a
corpus of extant music from the cities further north on the Dalmatian lit-
toral and from the islands. It was associated mainly with the churches and
monasteries (codices date from the eleventh century), but in the sixteenth
10See, for example, Demovi 1981. Also Tuksar 1994, and the last chapter of Tuksar
1980a. For the archival materials, see Blaekovi 1988.
11 Demovi 1981, 37595. A legacy of the processional role of the Capella is present in
todays cultural tourism.
infrastructures 193
12Grgi 1990.
13Stipevi 1982.
14For details of the major collections, see Tuksar 1992.
194 chapter eight
15See the discussion in Plamenac 1998 (Plamenac was a pioneering figure in the study
of Dalmatian repertories of the renaissance and baroque periods). A facsimile edition of
the Sacrae cantiones was published by Ennio Stipevi (Stipevi 1998).
16Buji 1993, 141622. See also Plamenac 1998.
infrastructures 195
17For a discussion of Slovenian musical life, including the role of the Academia Philhar-
monicorum (established in 1701), see the relevant parts of Cvetko 1981.
18Majer-Bobetko 1997.
19On 11 September 1789, he committed suicide, after it seems succumbing to a form of
mental illness. For biographical data on the family generally, see Demovi 1983.
196 chapter eight
output, including some of the earliest Croatian piano music. Closely asso-
ciated with both Luka and Antun Sorkoevi was the composer Julije
Bajamonti (17441800). He was pre-eminent among the Split circle of
composers, though he also spent a few years at Hvar and was a frequent
visitor to Dubrovnik at a time when there appears to have been grow-
ing reciprocity between the major cities on the littoral.20 A formidable
and versatile intellectual, Bajamonti composed in all the principal genres,
vocal and instrumental, and in an idiom that bridges baroque and early
classical.
Bajamontis biography testifies to the continuing importance of Split as
a cultural centre. It is clear from a study by Danica Boic-Buani that
it was hardly less active than Dubrovnik in community music-making,
and that in addition to the well-documented activities centred on the
Cathedral, there were regular visits from Venetian troupes, and perfor-
mances of esteemed contemporary music by local musicians.21 Moreover,
the wide range of music found in private collections signals the impor-
tance of music in domestic gatherings, and the catholicity of local tastes.
Indeed the sheer wealth of archival material in Split may have distorted
our picture of musical life on the littoral. Zadar was also a major centre,
and there were comparable activities in the other cities, and on the main
islands. Yet for all its vitality, cultural life in eighteenth-century Dalmatia
was cultivated in the shadow of a declining empire. The heyday of Venice
had long since passed. Her cultural glories outlived her political prestige,
but the loss of political power during the eighteenth century took its toll
on music not only in Venice itself but in her residual subject territories.
Well before the end of the republic in 1797, Habsburg and south German
influences had begun to encroach on the littoral. From that point on they
came to dominate it.
interlude may have been of short duration (180613), but it was of key
significance. Whatever their views of the annexation itself, Croatian intel-
lectuals were brought into direct contact with the politics of liberalism
and nationalism, and this encounter with modern thought proved deci-
sive for the cultivation of a nineteenth-century Yugoslav ideal. In the
shorter term, the French annexation served to reforge the fragile links that
had previously existed between Dalmatia and northern Croatia. With the
defeat of Napoleon, a shared Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy strengthened
this sense of a common Dalmatian-Croatian culture, despite attempts to
keep the two provinces apart politically (Dalmatia was ruled directly from
Vienna rather than administered by the Croatian parliament [the Sabor]
in tandem with Hungary).
This was reflected in the structures of musical life. Some infrastruc-
tures were common to the two provinces long before the nineteenth cen-
tury, mainly through the church. A monastic culture that extended back
to medieval times was one unifying factor, and it provided a continuity
underlying both political change and cultural renovation. Moreover, the
church continued to play a key role in musical life right through the eigh-
teenth century. Partly this was due to the social instabilities of these Croa-
tian territories. The church could maintain its cultural influence, in other
words, precisely because the vacuum created by a steadily weakening aris-
tocracy was not adequately filled by the kinds of bourgeois structures that
had developed elsewhere in Europe.
Of special significance was the Jesuit order. Jesuit colleges, offering a
broadly liberal, humanist education, were established in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Dubrovnik, Rijeka, Varadin and Osijek (in the
northern towns they helped promote a developing kajkavian literature).22
And if we extend the geographical trajectory, we link up with our ear-
lier discussion of a Jesuit presence in Vojvodina. The theatrical activities
described there were also found in Croatia, as were the public processions
and festivities. So it follows that the suppression of the order in 1773, in
a context of developing anti-clericalism, had important consequences for
cultural life as a whole, right up to its restoration in 1814. Among other
22Kajkavian is the dialect spoken in northern Croatia, as distinct from akavian (the
coastal dialect) and tokavian (the more widely-spoken dialect that became the basis of
the written and spoken language that used to be known as Serbo-Croat). Since Croa-
tia has been an independent state, Kajkavian, which has connections with Slovenian, has
been actively cultivated as a means of distinguishing Croatian from Serbian.
198 chapter eight
other parts of the Habsburg empire. The territory most resistant to this
modernisation was the Military Frontier, which remained under direct
rule from Vienna until 1881, when it was returned to native (mainly Croa-
tian) administrations. Some elements of western culture were established
there through the Jesuit orders (until 1773) and the Franciscan monaster-
ies, but of their very nature the Frontier towns were not conducive to the
development of a bourgeois culture.
Music-making contexts in these Habsburg territories could be public or
private, professional or amateur, native or foreign. Likewise, repertories
could be sacred or secular, elite or popular, conservative or modern. It is
initially tempting to line up the contexts and the repertories in matching
columns, but in reality the categories would constantly cross. Quite apart
from the mix of religions and ethnicities that was endemic to the whole
of this region, social class boundaries remained fluid on the periphery of
the empire. This was partly because there had been no real landed aris-
tocracy under the Ottomans, and only a weak bourgeoisie, so that even
under subsequent Habsburg rule, aristocracies were effectively planted,
while middle-class values on a Western model struggled to gain a secure
footing. If we add to this the endless wars, the frequent changes of politi-
cal administration, and the numerous instabilities as to demography and
settlement caused by continued migrations, we can see why structures
were far from stable, and also why it is hard to generalise about what
particular repertories might have represented in terms of social or confes-
sional groupings.
What we can say is that the transformation from a patronal to a bour-
geois musical life effectively from court to city institutions took place
more slowly on this southern frontier of the empire than in the capitals
of central Europe. In northern Croatia in the late eighteenth century
there was a professional musical life in private aristocratic settings, well
networked to the major cultural capitals. Many of the wealthiest fami-
lies in Hrvatsko Zagorje and Slavonia had been effectively transplanted
there by the Habsburgs and given parcels of land in return for military
service against the Turks. Such families were favoured by the Austrians,
and several of their courts became centres of a thriving ceremonial cul-
ture. They imported baroque archictecture to the region (whole quarters
of Osijek were transformed in appearance, for instance), as well as artists
of international reputation. By the late eighteenth century, families such
as the Hilleprand-Prandaus in Valpovo and the Pejaevis in Virovitica,
Naice and Osijek had establishments well capable of maintaining their
own Kapellen and bringing in their own composers.
200 chapter eight
24Peri 2002.
infrastructures 201
25I am grateful to Nada Bezi for her help, and for showing me the unpublished
diary of the Society prepared by Anton Gogla in 1927 (Hrvatski glazbeni zavod 18271927).
See also Miklaui-eran 2001. Canonic tendencies can be traced from the mid century
onwards (Ivan Zajc dominated at this time), and in the early twentieth century there were
ambitious operatic ventures undertaken by students at the National Theatre. By the 1920s
a modernist canon was well represented.
26Later this would become a full-scale conservatoire. See H. Pettan 1978.
27See aban 1982.
202 chapter eight
28Blaekovi 1985.
29Andreis 1971.
infrastructures 203
32There had been other initiatives prior to this in different areas of musical life. For
example, Gyrgy Arnold, regens chori in Szabadka (now Subotica), wrote church music,
Hungarian dances and operas (Kemny Simon, 1826), published a Yugoslav songbook and
wrote a music encyclopedia.
33It would be impossible here to do justice to the growth of the choral society move-
ment in Serbia; another of considerable importance was the Obili Choral Society, founded
in 1884.
infrastructures 205
34Markovi 2005.
35A fuller account of Serbian musical life would include the Belgrade Military Orches-
tra, established in 1899, which in due course became the Orchestra of the Kings Guard
(1903).
36Note the rather different resonance of todays revisionist term Central Europe,
which emerged partly as a rejoinder to the Eastern Europe imposed by the Cold War.
37This region was ceded to the Habsburgs in 1718.
206 chapter eight
Transylvania was united with Hungary under Habsburg rule soon after
the recapture of Buda from the Turks. As a result, the ruling aristocratic
class promoted Hungarian (or Saxon German) rather than Austrian cul-
ture, though the peasant population was largely Romanian. There is evi-
dence of a developed musical life stretching back to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, including church music traditions that reflected
the competing faiths of this region, as well as organ and lute repertories.
Music was cultivated at the monastery schools and at the courts of princes
and governors, and it reached a high point in the achievements of Ioan
Cianu (162987). The Codex Caioni, compiled between 1652 and 1671,
is a compendium of arrangements of sacred and popular music, and it
was followed by the equally important Cantionale Catholicum (1678), an
anthology of religious songs. In general Cianus library was testimony to
the sophistication of musical taste in cultivated circles in the seventeenth
century.
Then, in the eighteenth century, an aristocratic musical culture began
to gain momentum in Transylvania, culminating in the activities of courts
and bishoprics such as Nagyvrad [Oradea], where both Michael Haydn
and Dittersdorf worked for a time. There were also the modest begin-
nings of an urban musical culture, notably in the capital Kolozsvr, and
in German towns like Kronstadt [Braov] and Hermannstadt [Sibiu],
where due partly to the Jesuits concert series, music schools and ama-
teur chamber music associations were established to promote a classical
repertory. By 1814, musical life was sufficiently robust for two consecu-
tive issues of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung to be dedicated to music in
Transylvania.38
Most important of all, Hungarian musical theatre was cultivated. A key
stage of this history was the institutionalisation of Hungarian opera at the
National Theatre, founded in Kolozsvr in 1821. From there troupes regu-
larly visited the other major cities of Transylvania, and even on occasion
the cities of Wallachia. And it was for Kolozsvr that the then conductor
at the National Theatre, Jzsef Ruzitska (17751823), a Slovak by birth,
wrote the music for what would become an influential Singspiel, Bla
futsa [Blas escape], performed just a year after the theatre opened, in
1822. Despite its slight musical content, this work had much the same sym-
bolic significance for Hungarian vernacular opera as had Jan Stefanis Cud
39The reading rooms also promoted besede or besjede [public meetings, often with
music] in all these territories. See Vucinich 1978.
208 chapter eight
Luka (1905) and Sarajevo (1908), partly under the auspices of the Serbian
national society, Prosvjeta, established in the 1902.40
The foundation of the Zemaljski muzej [Provincial Museum] in Sara-
jevo in 1888 was of some significance, not least because it attracted the
distinguished ethnologist Ludvk Kuba to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where
he undertook a major programme of collecting. Indeed, as elsewhere in
the wider region, Czech musicians played a key role in developing musical
life generally. The foundations were laid, then, but it was really only in the
post-war context of the first Yugoslavia that the essential components of a
formal musical culture were properly instituted: the District Music School
in 1920, the National Theatre in Sarajevo (with its own orchestra and an
archive of programmes) in 1921, and the Philharmonic Society in 1923.41
40These national societies were established as a reaction against the Habsburgs. There
was a similar Croatian society, Napredak, in Mostar, and a Muslim society, Gajret, in Sara-
jevo. For an account of their activities, see Milojkovi-Djuri 2002, 15679. On Gajret, see
Pinjo 2006.
41 Romani 2002.
infrastructures 209
We will pass over these territories now, and take a short crossing to the
Ionian Islands, where the story was very different.
These islands made up yet another corner of the former Venetian
empire, though synergies between Greek refugees from Chios, Cyprus
and Crete and a native Ionian aristocracy helped preserve the Greek lan-
guage and its culture. This, combined with the influence of the Orthodox
Church, ensured a measure of independence from the dominant Italian
culture. When the islands emerged from Napoleonic rule they fell into
British rather than Habsburg hands, and it was as a British protectorate
that they developed a modern musical culture in the nineteenth century,
initially in Corfu (a prime mover was Frederick North, Earl of Guildford,
founder of the Ionian Academy),42 but soon reaching to the other islands,
and in due course to mainland Greece.
Two institutions were of special importance in the musical life of Corfu.
One was the San Giacomo theatre, which was established in the early
eighteenth century, and functioned mainly as an opera house from the
late eighteenth century onwards. Its repertory was largely Italian, but it
was for this theatre that Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros (17951872),
father of the so-called Ionian School of composers,43 wrote the arias and
cantatas, one in the Greek language, that might be counted as among the
first significant works of modern Greek art music, unless we return to a
truncated medieval-renaissance culture associated with Crete and Cyprus.
The first opera given at San Giocomo by a Greek composer, though to
an Italian libretto, was Franciskos Domeneginis Markos Botsaris. But the
theatre would be the venue for operas and cantatas composed by sev-
eral generations of later Ionian composers, as well as for their songs and
instrumental music, until it closed in 1890 to make way for the Municipal
Theatre of Corfu.
Mantzaros was also a major player in the history of the second major
institution, the Corfu Philharmonic Society, founded in 1840 in part to
provide band musicians for the St. Spiridion processions, which had pre-
viously been accompanied by the Venetian garrison band. As so often
with such societies, the Corfu Philharmonic depended heavily on pri-
vate sponsorship, but it soon developed its own educational programme,
directed partly at wind musicians playing in the local bands. There was
also tuition in voice, piano and strings, and in rudimentary theory, for
42For an insight into this institution and its history, see Henderson 1988.
43An excellent introduction to music in the Ionian Islands is Kardamis 2007.
210 chapter eight
44Romanou 2009c.
45I am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for sharing his extensive knowledge of these tradi-
tions with me.
46Baroutas 1992.
infrastructures 211
In the last quarter of the century music of distinction emerged from the
Ionian tradition. But a combustible blend of ideology and personal rivalry
did it irreparable damage, beginning with the appointment of Georgios
Nazos to the Directorship of the Athens Conservatory in 1891. This will be
discussed more fully in chapter 10, but in keeping with a Germanisation
of culture that grew ever more pronounced after 1889,47 Nazos dismissed
all artists who had Italianate leanings and background. There was more
to the modernisation of teaching than this, of course. It involved a shift
from pedagogy grounded in the Greek-Byzantine tradition to a Western
training modeled on the German Hochschulen. Following a second round
of campaigns against the Ionian school, this time orchestrated by Manolis
Kalomiris (18831962), the trajectory of Greek music changed in a defini-
tive way. It is no doubt significant that Kalomiris came from neither the
Ionian Islands nor the Greek mainland, but from Smyrna in Asia Minor.
And his initial training in Smyrna and in Constantinople is a further
reminder that western music was alive and well among the Greek com-
munities of Asia Minor.
To tell that story, we need to turn to the second, eastern flank sweep-
ing around the central Balkans, resuming our southeastward journey from
Transylvania. Greater Transylvania, embracing the Banat and Maramure,
is today one of the three major constituent provinces of Romania. The
other historical lands of Romania, Wallachia and Moldavia, had long been
Ottoman client states ruled by their own princes and later by Phanariot
hospodars,48 but as usual attempts to draw clean boundaries between
Habsburg and Ottoman domains meet with complications. Oltenia in
western Wallachia came under Habsburg control for a brief period in the
eighteenth century, for example, while Bukovina in northern Moldavia
(the monastic archipelago)49 remained Habsburg until 1918. In general,
as we move eastward from Transylvania we also move away from the
sphere of influence of Mitteleuropa, registering a stronger Balkan presence
in Wallachia, and elements of Polish-Russian culture in Moldavia.
The origin of the Romanian people and their language is contentious.
Lucian Boia summarises one argument succinctly by referring to three
47One factor that played into this was the wedding of crown prince Constantine to the
princess Sophia of Hohenzollern (Leotsakos 2004a, 50).
48These two Romanian provinces became Principalities as early as the thirteenth
century.
49Pascu 1999.
212 chapter eight
50Boia 2001, 41. Others have argued that the Romanians originated as Latin-speaking
Vlachs, who migrated into present-day Romania after the late ninth century (Hupchick
and Cox 2001, Map 4).
51 The Phanariots (from Phanar [Fener], the main Greek area of Constantinople, where
the Patriarchate is located) were a prestigious and moneyed group, a kind of aristocracy
of often western-educated merchants, and they were assigned key administrative posts
within the Ottoman Empire.
52Sulzer 1781. See Plemmenos 2006.
53Plemmenos 2003.
infrastructures 213
abortive, but they prepared the ground nonetheless for the more sustained
War of Independence. This effectively marked the end of Phanariot rule
(and the decline of Greek influence) in the Principalities, allowing native
aristocracies to emerge again as a ruling class, basically conservative but
now newly susceptible to western influence. The window to the West was
opened yet wider, moreover, when the Russians defeated the Turks a few
years later, in 182829, and Ottoman protection of the Principalities was
replaced by Russian.
Developing commercial links also created cultural ties, and it became
common for the sons of intellectual and social elites in the Principalities
to seek an education in major European capitals, from where they trans-
ported modern thinking and occasionally modern cultural forms to the
feudal estates. Some of the Phanariot rulers had already begun to model
their salons on those of western cultural capitals. But a more crucial aspect
of nineteenth-century modernisation was the rediscovery by the Roma-
nian intelligentsia of their (presumed ancient) Latinity, at the very time
when they were developing a stronger sense of nationhood. Undoubtedly
it was this that persuaded the Romanians of cultural affinities between
themselves and more distant Latin lands, and to define their own emerg-
ing national identities by way of such affinities.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was limited previous history of
Romanian-French cultural exchange, but from the 1830s onwards Bucha-
rest developed an enduring, and largely unrequited, love affair with Paris.
If Temeswar was a little Vienna, then Bucharest could be a little Paris;
increasingly it described itself as such, and it went on to develop archi-
tectural, artistic and literary fashions commensurate to the description.54
The everyday culture of the boyars and their circles (cuisine, dress, inte-
rior design, mores, and structures of sociability) was also in accord with
this self perception, and even the native language increasingly registered
Francophile tendencies. As a result, the entire surface layer of Romanian
urban culture was transformed from an oriental to a West European one.
Greek lost its place as the language of high culture, the Romanian lan-
guage was written in Latin script, and the urban landscape was Europe-
anised. The astonishing thing here was the speed of the transformation.
Within a generation the swerve towards Europe was all but complete, and
that included the infrastructures of musical life in Iai and Bucharest.
54Reportedly, one response to the description in France was Thank God Paris is not a
large Bucharest (Jezernik 2006, 26).
214 chapter eight
55Windows to the Latin, Catholic West were by way of Transylvania, and then Hungary
and Poland. The Romanian population of Transylvania is predominantly Greek Catholic.
56In the library of the George Enescu Academy in Iai there is a manuscript in the
vernacular dating from 1610, but without musical notation.
infrastructures 215
57Maiorescu also wrote on music, including Wagner; see Cosma 1976, 539.
58Cosma 1974.
59The troupe directed by Eduard Kreibig began its activities in Bucharest in 1830, while
that of Theodor Mller was engaged in Timioara in 1831 and Bucharest in 1833.
216 chapter eight
and was astute enough to perform, inter alia, variations on local Molda-
vian melodies; he gave concerts in Bucharest six years later).60
The growing influence of Russia, following the occupation in 1829, was
beneficial to formal culture, and it was then that military bands of the
modern type replaced the mehterhne, performing operatic potpourris,
marches and dances; they were introduced to Iai in 1830 and to Bucharest
in 1832. Then, in 1833, a Philharmonic Society was instituted in Bucharest,
with Ion Heliade Rdulescu as the prime mover. It organised amateur
concerts and produced Singspiele, but from 1835 onwards it also offered
formal instruction in its music school under the direction of Ion Andrei
Wachmann (190763). In 1834 the Russian occupation formally ended,
but from this point until the end of the Crimean War the Principalities
were under Russian protection and enjoyed greater autonomy. This was
reflected in the accelerating institutionalisation of musical life. 1836 wit-
nessed the establishment of a proto-Conservatory in Iai (it lasted three
years), the singing association Chorul cntreilor in Bucharest, and the
professional journal Gazeta Teatrului Naional, to give just a few examples.
This was in line with the early stages in the development of a bourgeois
musical culture all over Europe. It registered the growing penetration of
bourgeois (merchant) circles by western musical culture, and that included
the ubiquity of piano playing among the daughters of the wealthy.61
In the aftermath of 1848, these activities took on a more professional
aspect, and this was even more marked with the newfound status of a
united Romania (de facto in 1859, de jure in 1862). Thus, in 1860 a School
of Music and Declamation was founded in Iai with the support of the
ruler Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and in 1864 it became a Conservatory under
Gheorghe Burada. In the same year the music school of the Philharmonic
Society in Bucharest became a Conservatory, on the initiative of Alexandru
Flechtenmacher, who became its first director (he had already established a
Philharmonic Society in Craiova). Likewise the relatively informal concerte
spirituale made room for the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society, which
gave its inaugural concert under Eduard Wachmann (18361908) in 1866.62
60Breazul 1970. Traditional melodies presented by Romberg are given in Ciobanu 1978,
556.
61 The co-existence of two cultures is neatly epitomised by a description of the musi-
cian Dionysios Fotino, who settled in Romania around 1800, and who was an expert at
playing the tambura and kemne, but who also played the piano (Ciobanu 1978, 18).
62Its later venue, the Ateneul Romn, has become an architectural emblem of
Bucharest.
infrastructures 217
63Faroqhi 2005.
infrastructures 219
the capital (Rossini and even Verdi were given, as well as Gaetano Doni-
zetti), and Western concerts were established. And from this point the
alaturka alafranka distinction became a familiar one in debates about
music, with the latter acquiring socially elitist, fashionable connotations
that were partly fed by the descriptions of European capitals emanating
from Ottoman ambassadors and the merchant class.64
Predictably, there were those who deplored the demotion of Ottoman
music, so that even at the highest level there could be a seesaw of enthusi-
asm between the two categories. Under Sultan Abdlmecid, for example, a
new opera house was built (completed in 1859) staffed entirely by Turkish
artists; then under his successor Abdlaziz, who reigned from 1861, west-
ern music more-or-less ground to a halt; and finally, with Abdlhamit II
(from 1876), there was a renewal of European-orientated activity. Non-
Muslim communities in Asia Minor also had their alaturka alafranka
debates, bearing on popular music in the case of Jews and Armenians, but
including classical traditions in the case of Greeks (Smyrna was one of the
most cosmopolitan cities anywhere in the region in the late nineteenth
century).65 In short, Western music was a presence in Asia Minor. But it
was really only in the post-Ottoman years that extensive institutions for
its teaching and performance were established. Under the sway of influ-
ential ideologues such as Ziya Gkalp, who saw the musical future in a
synthesis of rural folk [halk] music and Western art music, Kemal Atatrk
suppressed his own fondness for Ottoman classical music in the interests
of a modern Turkish nation state.
64For a discussion of how Ottoman writers adopted the Western alaturka term in the
nineteenth century, and other things besides, see OConnell 2005.
65Milton 2008.
CHAPTER NINE
NATIONS
Let us return to two cases where music acts as a bridge between different
worlds. The editors of the second edition of Albert Lords book The Singer
of Tales remind us that the tradition of South Slavic epic songs recorded
by Parry and Lord was essentially the same for both Christian and Mus-
lim communities.1 Only the viewpoint of the texts (the ethnic identity of
hero and villain, to quote Ronelle Alexander)2 was different, symbolised
by the antithetical but oddly similar Prince Marko and Alija erelez. We
may ask if there really was a divide to be bridged. The practice of sung
oral poetry in the South Slavic lands was of considerable antiquity and its
integrity as a genre was not influenced by the precise content, as distinct
from the metrical form, of the poetry. The language of the narration was
the same for Christian and Muslim singers; the performance sites were
also the same; and so too were the basic lifestyles of the guslars and their
physical and cultural contexts.3 That some of the South Slav populations
converted to the Muslim faith only assumed ideological significance for
the epic tradition when it was appropriated for nationalist propaganda
in the nineteenth century. And this held more for the appropriating
community essentially an intelligentsia than for the practitioners. It
was the intervention of political ideology, and in due course of practical
politics, that transformed religion into a mark of alterity, and Muslims
into minorities.4
In our second case the divide is linguistic rather than religious. Here we
return to music of Grecophone and Vlachophone communities in Epirus.
Again we have two communities who shared the same space, memo-
ries, occupations, customs and traditions. And whether Greek-speaking
or Vlach-speaking (or for that matter Albanian-speaking), they inherited
1 Lord 1965.
2Alexander 1985, 274.
3But see Lord 1965, 16.
4As Mark Mazower points out, religion was a principal mode of self-labelling right up
to the twentieth century (Mazower 2000).
nations 221
5Katsenevaki 1998.
6For a discussion of Greek and Albanian claims on Epirotic polyphony, see Nitsiakos
and Mantzos 2003.
7Conversi 2007, 18.
8For a discussion, see zkirimli and Sofos 2008, 611.
9Yack 1996.
10Greenfeld 1996, 169 and 176.
222 chapter nine
11 Smith 2007, 327. See also Ichijo and Uzelac 2005, 119.
12Gellner 1983.
13Greenfeld 1996.
14For a discussion of different approaches to nationalism, see Smith 1999, 13.
nations 223
15Tsiovas 2003, 5.
16The idea of self-sacrificing warfare for the patrie as a mark of nationalism is
discussed in Hutchinson 2007.
17Fleming 2008, 29.
224 chapter nine
the womens songs, there are tales of Duan, of Lazar and the medieval
kingdom, of the Battle of Kosovo, of the anomalous Marko Kraljevi of
Prilep,20 and of the long years of Turkish occupation.
We may add here Njegos verse play Gorski vijenac [The Mountain
Wreath] (1847). Even more than Vuks collections, this work transformed
oral poetry into high (written) literature, while at the same time contrib-
uting to what Ivo ani has called the folklore matrix.21 Njego effectively
used the deseterac as the means to articulate a proselytising nationalism, a
defiant call to arms in the name of Kosovo. This influential text, regarded
by Andrew Baruch Wachtel as a classic case study in the canonising of
Yugoslav culture,22 continues to resonate in the national imagination,
and not always to the good. Turks were vilified in the Njego play, but its
harshest words were reserved for Slavic Muslims. Reading Gorski vijenac,
it is not hard to see why a line came to be firmly drawn between Christian
and Muslim epics, ruthlessly subordinating their musical and poetic com-
monalities to a nationalist ideology.
In this way the guslar was assigned major significance for the new
nationalism, and the rhythm of the deseterac became an element of Ser-
bian identity.23 No doubt this was facilitated by the rather specific rela-
tion between words and music that is characteristic of all long-established
traditions of oral poetry. Such was the symbiosis of words and music that,
according to Lord, some singers were either unable to dictate songs with-
out the gusle, or if they did so, would build lines that were significantly dif-
ferent from the sung versions.24 (The inseparability of meaning and music
in the related Albanian lahuta tradition is dramatised by Ismail Kadare
in the second of his Three Elegies for Kosovo.)25 It seems that within the
oral tradition there was such an integral link between metre and melody
that the thought itself would be shaped by the 4 + 6 rhythmic pattern of
the deseterac and then articulated by way of ritually recurrent melodic
formulae suitable for the openings of songs, for the endlessly repeated
phrases of their main narratives, and for their endings.
20Popovi 1988.
21 ani 2007, 22.
22Wachtel 1998, 101.
23Tim Judah argues that a key document of this new nationalism was Naertanije by
the politician Ilija Garaanin (181274), a document that sets out long-term foreign policy
objectives (Judah 1997, 5661).
24Lord 1965, 26.
25Kadare 2000.
226 chapter nine
29Baud-Bovy 1958.
30Wachtel 1998, 3138.
228 chapter nine
Two Nations
31 The process began much earlier, of course, notably with Claude Fauriels 182425
collection Chants populaires de la Grce moderne. For a detailed account of the history of
archives and the collection of regional music, see Katsanevaki 2008.
32Romanou 2008. Panos Vlagopoulos presented an interesting paper on the cultural
politics of Bourgault-Ducoudray at the 2009 Biennial Euro-Mediterranean Music Confer-
ence in Cyprus, unpublished at the time of writing.
33Ibid.
nations 229
nation. We have here the necessary context for repeated Serbian reflec-
tions on Kosovo and the medieval kingdom, on Hilandar, and on the lin-
eage of language. We have too the framework for endless debates about
Greek ancestry, bearing in mind that the double-descended status of the
Greeks, ideally synthesised by i megali idea, could just as easily generate
a sense of divided identity.
In the second place, it was expressed through the attempts of elites,
including composers, to make symbolic capital out of the culture of the
folk. Traditional music had special richness and vitality in the pre-modern
rural communities of South East Europe, and it was read somewhat
spuriously as a collective expression of national (as opposed to social or
regional) identities, very much in the spirit of Herder. There was nothing
new in composers turning to such music. What was new from around the
mid century was the spirit in which it was deployed, as it came increas-
ingly under the sway of a nationalist ideology. Even when presented in
the form of simple transcriptions, folk and popular music was claimed
by the nation.
This kind of cultural nationalism exhibited a paradoxical condition. It
staked its claim on a respected contribution to a generalised high culture.
Yet at the same time it asserted its distinctiveness by drawing elements
of suitably sanitised rural folk culture into a synthetic national tradition.
In a sense, then, each nation displayed a variant of a single bourgeois
culture, while at the same time competitively elevating, asserting and
promoting the uniqueness of its particular variant. This project may have
been grounded in the cities, but its task was to sell the nation.34 Hence the
tension that developed between city and nation in the later nineteenth
century, mirroring the receding tension between city and court. The real
job in hand was to impose cohesion on the cultural nation and to invest
authority in it; and that in turn was presumed to foster some measure of
integration at the level of the socio-political nation. It is in this sense that
cultural nationalism sometimes acted as a seedbed for political national-
ism in the Balkan territories, though, as I will argue towards the end of
this book, this was not always the sequence.
When Josif lezinger arrived at the court of Milo Obrenovi in 1831
he laid the groundwork for Serbian art music, first in Kragujevac and
then (following the accession of Alexander Karaorevi) in Belgrade,
34For a broader view of how music spoke into nationalism and ethnonationalism, see
Bohlman 2004b.
230 chapter nine
35At this point urkovi returned to Belgrade and apparently left music behind.
nations 231
in 1858, 1859, 1862 and 1863, stand alongside his ecclesiastical music as
foundation stones for the later development of Serbian music, though
their significance is as much symbolic as artistic. Moreover, by introduc-
ing harmonised folk songs to the repertory of the Belgrade Choral Society,
Stankovi established a practice that would become emblematic of Ser-
bian music well into the twentieth century. His activities during a short
lifetime were manifold. He energised the Choral Society and founded its
preparatory choir; he proselytised for traditional and liturgical music
through his publications and performances; he gave concerts as a pianist
all over Serbia; and he laid the foundations for the first school of music in
Belgrade. In all these respects he justified his later reputation as a father
figure of Serbian music.
His achievements were consolidated and developed further by Jenko,
his successor with the Choral Society, and then by Jenkos own succes-
sor Josif Marinkovi. Marinkovi is sometimes described as the father
of Serbian romantic art song, and as this suggests he was not primarily
orientated towards folksong-based composition; in addition to the songs,
his most significant works are probably his dramatic cantatas for chorus
accompanied by piano. Nonetheless it was he who popularised the already
existing practice of grouping choral folksong arrangements into suites, or
as he termed them, kola [round dances]. He composed eleven such kola,
and they might be regarded as immediate forerunners of the important
rukoveti [garlands] by his contemporary Stevan Mokranjac. It is with these
rukoveti that Serbian music truly came of age.
From this brief summary, we can see that composers in Serbia asserted
the cultural nation through the institutions of church, theatre, and choral
society, and through the collection and adaptation of traditional music.
There are parallels in Greece, of course, but also differences. Right at the
outset, we need to confront persistent prejudices in relation to Greek
music history. I mentioned earlier the anti-Ionian campaigns of Nazos.
These were bolstered by a sustained polemic from Manolis Kalomiris,
lasting roughly between 1908 and 1912 and directed towards the establish-
ment of an influential project of national music, a project that effectively
set a new agenda for Greek music (not really to be equated with the
Germanising policies of Nazos). In brief, Kalomiris pointedly rejected
the achievements of nineteenth-century Ionian composers as derivative
of Italian models and therefore inauthentic, by which he meant insuffi-
ciently Greek.
To appreciate the bias in this position, we might compare it to dismiss-
ing Elgar as insufficiently English on the grounds that his musical style is
232 chapter nine
36Dahlhaus 1980.
37There are two versions of this hymn, the second fuller and more complex.
nations 233
38There are four operas by Ionian composers on this subject, by Domeneginis (unfin-
ished), Nikolaos Tzanis Metaxas (considered lost), Iossif Liveralis (1852, considered lost)
and Carrer (finished in 1858, premired in 1861).
39Carrers one-act Despo (1875), based on Antonios Manoussoss libretto in Greek was
originally intended as a showpiece for the students of the Athens Conservatory, though
it was rejected on the grounds that there were insufficient forces. It was performed in late
1882. I am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for information on this.
40Leotsakos 2005a.
41 On this, see Leotsakos 2004b.
234 chapter nine
settled in Milan in 1886, producing most of his operatic works there before
repatriating in 1911 to Greece. His reputation was staked not on nicely exe-
cuted Greek-language songs and operettas composed in these later years
in Greece, however, but on the major operas he composed in the 1890s and
beyond, all setting Italian libretti. Here he made a distinctive contribution
to the Italian operatic tradition in a musical idiom that has been justly
compared to Puccini. Only one of his operas, Rhea (1908), has a Greek
setting, and there are elements of Greek traditional music in the score
(just as in Le Martyre there is traditional music to represent Romania).
But musically Rhea still belongs clearly to the world of post-Verdian Ital-
ian opera. It absorbs elements of the earlier operas the couleur locale of
Medg (188388) and Flora mirabilis (1886), with its supernatural ballets,
the proto-verismo characterisation and leitmotivic structures of Le Martyre
(1894), and the psychological realism of Storia damore (1903) but it adds
an element of Straussian intensity and an overall dramatic coherence that
allows us to rate it as his highest achievement, and justifies some of the
claims made for his music by aficionados such as Leotsakos and Byron
Fidetzis. Given the stylistic orientation of Samarass music, it should not
surprise us that he fell foul of Kalomiris on his return to Greece, and at
some personal cost.
There is a patriotic thread running through the collective achieve-
ment of the Ionian composers, expressed in subject matter and in musi-
cal materials. And at a late stage of the tradition, a more self-conscious
Greek nationalism began to emerge, associated especially with Dionysios
Lavrangas (Greek Suites; Introduction and Fugue on Greek themes) and
Georgios Lambelet (18751945), whose polemic National Music appeared
in 1901. Olympia Frangou-Psychopedis depicts this as a transitional stage
between the Ionian and the National schools of Greek music,42 but in
reality the agendas of Lambelet and Kalomiris were in direct competi-
tion, and their musical styles, too, were poles apart. Both committed to
folksong as the basis for a national music, but the former envisaged an
idiom that would remain relatively free of foreign influence, cultivated
a cool, restrained approach to traditional materials, both demotic and
Byzantine, and went some way to exploring appropriate harmonisations
(his enthusiasm for the demotic even extended to jazz, though one might
question what he really understood by this). The latter sought rather a
symbiosis of folksong and modern European art music, taking inspiration
42Frangou-Psychopedis 1990.
nations 235
43For a useful discussion, see Little 2001, 9698. Little offers a comparison of writings
by Lambelet, Kalomiris and Constantinidis.
236 chapter nine
The discovery of Latinity was crucial. Not only did Latinity invade
Orthodoxy; it invited links with elite cultures in more distant Latin places,
and served to particularise, and to claim for the nation, the popular music
of the lutari. All this was grist to the nationalist mill. But so too was a
developing interest in folksong from the early nineteenth century onwards.
In 1830 Eftimiu Murgu published an anthology of folk songs in Bucharest,
and in 1834 Franois Ruzitski published in Iai his surprisingly exotic piano
transcriptions, Muzic oriental, 42 cntece i dansuri moldoveneti, valahe,
greceti i turceti. Then in 1848 Ion Andrei Wachmann completed his
four nationally specific collections, designed in part for his private piano
teaching;44 and two years after that Henri Ehrlich published in Vienna
his Arii naionale romneti.45 These performed the same functions, and
suffered from the same limitations, as nineteenth-century collections all
over Europe. Not least, it was widely felt that such collections would help
Romanian composers create a national style.
In these ways cultural nationalism prepared the ground for unifica-
tion in advance of the political reality. Unification was not universally
welcomed there was opposition from conservative forces within the
Principalities but among its advocates the union of 1600 was seized
upon, and its historical meaning was transformed utterly as a means of
validating the would-be modern nation. One of the outstandingly popu-
lar operas of the mid century essentially a Singspiel or vaudeville was
Mihai Bravul n ajunjul btliei dela Clugreni [Michael the Brave on the
Eve of the Battle of Clugreni], composed in the revolutionary year of
1848 by Ion Andrei Wachmann. Nor was this the only opera on the topic
of Mihai Viteazul, for the union of 1600 was later treated as an originary
moment in Romanian national consciousness.46
Likewise, mythology was tapped by composers, as in the opera
Meterul Manole [The master builder Manole] by Mauriciu Cohen-Lnaru
(18491928), a pupil of Bizet and Csar Franck (the story is the familiar
one where Manole must wall up his wife as a sacrifice in order to com-
plete the Curtea de Arge Monastery in Wallachia; it is known especially
through the epic poem Monastirea Argeului [The monastery on the
Arge], and we will encounter a version of it again in our discussion of
the first opera by Kalomiris).47 Meterul Manole, together with his piano
sonatas and song-cycles, earned Cohen-Lnaru a place as a leading Roma-
nian composer of the late Romantic era, though its music is simple and
frankly anachronistic. He was rivalled by Ciprian Porumbescu (185383),
by Chopins pupil Carol Mikuli (182197), whose compositions include a
Missa Romena for choirs and organ (though he spent most of his work-
ing life in Lww [Lviv]), and by Eduard Caudella (18411924), best known
today as the teacher of George Enescu. All were engaged in modest ways
in the project of building a national music.
When unification was finally achieved, it was only made possible by
Great Power politics. Such has always been the way in the Balkans. In the
case of Romania it occurred in the wake of the Crimean War of 185356.
And it was also in the aftermath of Crimea that another Balkan would-be
nation began to stir. Unlike Romania, Bulgaria lay right at the heart of
the Ottoman territories in Europe, and accordingly the kind of cultural
nationalism cultivated in Romania had little opportunity to develop until
towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of Crimea,
however, Sultan Abdlmecid I extended the reforming policies of the
Tanzimat in an attempt to stem the tide of nationalism in the Balkans.
Among other things, he called an Orthodox Church council to reorganise
the millet, and it was at this point that the Bulgarian Church Question
raised its head, as the Bulgarians, prompted by Russia, staked their claim
to an independent Church. This led to a decade of dispute between the
Bulgarians and the Greeks, culminating in the establishment in 1870 of a
Bulgarian Exarchate in Istanbul.
There were no implications for doctrine, confirming that the debate
was unambiguously about national identity. And from this point onwards,
church music in Bulgaria was vulnerable to nationalist appropriation.
There were complex demographic issues at work, as between Bulgarian
peasant populations, Greeks and gudilas (Hellenised Bulgarians).48 But in
general there was a growing sense of Bulgarian ownership of the liturgical
sources in the monasteries, including musical sources, and at the same
time there was an increasing attempt to separate the music from its Greek
parentage; the formation of the Bolgarski pevcheski tsarkoven khor [The
Bulgarian Church Choir] in 1870 had just such an aim, and the discovery
47This theme (the walled-in woman) crops up in oral culture, especially balladry, all
over the Balkans, notably in Albania and Greece. See O. Augustinos 2003.
48For a useful account of this, see Detrez 2003.
238 chapter nine
Not all aspirations were fully met at Berlin. Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria
all looked hungrily at Macedonia, while Serbian claims on Bosnia and
Herzegovina were thwarted, with well-known consequences. The efforts
of Benjamin von Kllay to keep Serbian, Montenegrin and Croatian ambi-
tions for Bosnia and Herzegovina at bay failed to stave off the impending
political crisis. Moreover, a new generation of nationalists was emerging
in Albania and Macedonia. Here too there were musical manifestations,
though some of these are read somewhat after the fact. In particular, the
Albanians began a process of territorial expansion following the Serbian
migrations. They consolidated their presence in Kosovo and Metohia, and
also western Macedonia, and by augmenting already substantial popula-
tions in these regions they created one of the key elements in what Ivo
Banac called a human garland strung around the Balkan Slavs.51 The
Albanians were not represented at the Congress of Berlin, and partly
because of that they established the League of Prizren in 1878.52 It was a
key player in the Rilindja kombtare [National Revival] associated with the
Frashri family and linked to the Bektai [Bektashi] order.
In the wake of familiar nationalist moves, Albania gained an initial
independence on the eve of World War I. But the subsequent status of
the nation was far but secure, and the nationalist imperative, grounded
in language more than anything, remained a live issue, partly because the
cultures of the north and south are so distinct. In this connection Jane
Sugarman has made a suggestive link between developments at the ends
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She refers to one major prod-
uct of the heritage gathering of the late nineteenth century, the folkloric
collection of Bleta Shqyptare [Albanian Bee], published by Thimi Mitko
in 1878. This includes chronicle songs, many of them dealing with events
in and around Janina, with accounts of Ali Pasha from both sides of the
political divide.53 She then demonstrates a link between these and songs
performed by present-day Prespa Albanian villagers, sung lartr: in full
voice, at a high pitch level, in a non-metric manner, and with dense orna-
mentation. In doing so she points to a specifically musical expression of
Albanian nationalism in the late twentieth century, and one that embraces
the radically different cultures of the north and the south. The chronology
here is telling. It emphasises that even after the Versailles settlement, the
task of nation building in this part of the Balkans was far from complete.
The unresolved issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and
Albania draw attention to the heavy price that had to be paid for all
these nation-building enterprises. Borders, which once had little mean-
ing, were now subject to dispute. The national histories constructed all
around them not only overlapped, but worked to squeeze out, margina-
lise or physically displace the various minority communities: ethnic, con-
fessional and linguistic. Such minorities characteristic components of
dissolving multinational empires typically found themselves caught up
in several national narratives simultaneously, while all the time trying to
build one of their own, and naturally looking to West European societies
for what they perceived to be successful models. In this sense displace-
ment and periphery were the invariable by-products of the rise of nation-
alism in South East Europe. And in such cases, ethnicity was not the only
marker of difference. Religion also played its part, and increasingly class
discourses, emergent in the nineteenth century, played into the national
narratives.54
Yugoslavism
language, ergo they are the same people was interpreted rather differ-
ently by the three major players.56
The Slovenes, historically subject to Germanisation, tended to group
themselves with more northerly Slavic nations within the Habsburg
Empire, notably the Czechs, and were initially lukewarm towards the idea
of South Slav unity. But in due course they came to view Yugoslavism
as a necessary tool in the struggle against domination, and in the end
they played a key role in unification. The Serbs, on the other hand, having
already achieved independence and carrying a strong historical sense of
national identity, were from the start irredentist, and driven above all by
an ideology of a Christian (Serbian) Yugoslavia. This too was premised on
the idea of a common people, but it was less about federalism than expan-
sionism, and its most concrete aim was to unite all Serbs within a single
state. Croatia, caught between Austrian and Hungarian ambitions, shared
with Slovenia the struggle for independence, and there were many who
sought a genuine federalism that would exclude the possibility of separate
states. But there were others who looked rather to a Greater Croatia by
analogy with a Greater Serbia.57
There were, in short, many shades of opinion as to what Yugoslavism
really represented. As to what Rusinow calls its core idea, this was first
promulgated by intellectual elites in the South Slav territories of the Hab-
sburg Empire. We can trace it to Ljudevit Gaj (180972) and the so-called
Illyrianist awakeners, who already in the 1830s cultivated the classic strat-
egies of nation building: the appropriation of language and culture, and
the invention of history. Language was crucial from the start, and here
the work of the Illyrianists converged with that of Vuk in Serbia. In both
cases, the impulse was to recover a national language, though in prac-
tice that invariably meant formalising particular dialects at the expense
of others. It was a help that the tokavian selected by Gaj was close to the
peasant dialect codified by Vuk, and this proximity enabled the Vienna
Conference of 1850 (a follow-up to the Prague Pan-Slav Congress of 1848)
to arrive at a standardisation of language that would come to be known
as Serbo-Croat.58
It was perhaps more difficult for Croatia to forge an independent cultural
voice than for Serbia, given that Croatia was so deeply embedded within
56Rusinow 2003.
57See Banac 1984, 7475 for the historical background to pan-Croatism.
58The rise and fall of Serbo-Croat will be briefly touched on in a later chapter. See
Greenberg 2004.
242 chapter nine
59These agendas culminated in the institution of The National Illyrian Music Society
(1839) and The First Illyrian Music Society (1840).
60Majer-Bobetko 1998, 81.
nations 243
61Alexander Bach (180667) was Minister of the Interior in the restored Habsburg
monarchy.
244 chapter nine
62Neubauer 2004.
nations 245
Croatia. Thus could nationalism draw upon the widest possible range of
sources, bending them to its will.
The other dominant figure in Croatian musical life of the later nine-
teenth century represented a radically different tendency, closer to the Illy-
rianism associated with the singing societies than to Zajcs pro-European
orientation. Franjo Kuha (18341911) was a composer, but not primarily
so. First and foremost, he was a pedagogue and a musical scholar, and
one who worked in the spirit of Bishop Strossmayers larger pan-Slav pro-
gramme (there is an extensive published correspondence between the two
men).63 His pioneering significance for the later development of musical
scholarship in the Slavonic Balkans could scarcely be exaggerated. When
he arrived in Zagreb a year after Zajc in 1871, Kuha brought with him
extensive collections of folk music from all over the South Slav territories,
transcribed during a decade of extensive travels. In this, he was of course
taking the path indicated by Herder and followed by Slavonic nationalists
elsewhere.
But Kuha was also a pioneer in the systematic classification and com-
parative analysis of folk materials, even if not all of his approaches and
findings have stood the test of time. He was a serious historian of national
traditions, and the first to argue for the presence of Croatian folk melodies
in Haydn and Beethoven, though his controversial thesis about Haydns
Croatian ethnicity, widely popularised for a time, was soon discredited.64
The main fruits of his work were the four volumes of Juno-slovjenske
narodne popievke [South Slav Folksongs], published between 1878 and
1881, and provided with simple piano accompaniments. A polemicist, who
placed his Croatian nationalism in the wider Illyrian context, Kuha made
a forceful case in his teachings and voluminous historical writings for a
Croatian or South Slavic national style based on folk music, and he was
undoubtedly a prime inspiration to the younger Yugoslav composers of
the inter-war period in the twentieth century.
In his summary of the polemic between nationalist and cosmopolitan
orientations in Zagreb at the end of the century, Stanislav Tuksar placed
Zajc and Kuha at the centres of two very different circles.65 Zajc, encircled
by numerous composers of various nationalities, stood for a conservative
nineteenth-century internationalist position. Kuha was part of a smaller
63Frankovi 1978.
64One popular study which promoted Kuhas theory was Hadow 1897.
65Tuksar 1998b.
246 chapter nine
whose 1907 lecture The Slovene People and Slovene Culture was influ-
ential) came to view solidarity with other South Slav peoples as the only
realistic way to fulfill their nationalist goals. Yet there was little in the
music of nineteenth-century Slovenian composers that betrayed any real
enthusiasm for national styles of the kind we noted in Serbia and Croatia.
Composers such as Benjamin Ipavec (18291908), Fran Gerbi (18401917)
and Anton Foerster (18731926) developed a cosmopolitan late-Romantic
idiom influenced by Brahms and Dvok, with occasional nods (as in
Risto Savins opera Lepa Vida [Lovely Vida] of 1907) towards Wagner. It
was really only in the early twentieth century, and especially during the
inter-war period in a newly independent federal state, that some Slove-
nian composers joined forces with Serbs and Croatians in the movement
known as Yugoslav moderna.
The ambivalence at the heart of the various attempts to create national
cultures were they working for narrow nationalist goals or for some form
of genuinely communal South Slav culture? also pervaded the political
sphere, with Belgrade and Zagreb in very obvious competition over the
leadership of an avowedly integralist South Slav movement. In the end
it was the larger political map that orientated the players towards some
kind of unification scheme. There was of course no logical reason that
Bulgaria should not have been included in discussions of the unification
of South Slav Christian lands. Indeed in intellectual circles it often was.
As Ljubinka Trgovevi reminds us, there were several meetings of writ-
ers and journalists from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria between
1904 and 1906, and at the Second Congress held in Sofia in August 1906
the declared aim was to work towards unification of South Slavs in the
cultural field, and that included Bulgaria.66 Likewise the Association of
South Slav Artists, Lada, included Bulgaria.
It was really the Macedonian question that drove a wedge between Bul-
garia and the rest. Despite the temporary alliance of Balkan states that
produced the First Balkan War (1912), effectively expelling the Ottomans
from Europe, Serbia and Bulgaria remained at odds over Macedonia, and
Greece too maintained its claim. The Second Balkan War (1913) resulted
in a further loss of Bulgarian territory and effectively a carving up of most
of Macedonia between Serbia and Greece, establishing borders that have
remained more-or-less intact until today. The history was involved, but
in the end the Balkan wars laid the foundation for a modern Yugoslavia,
66Trgovevi 2003.
248 chapter nine
though it could never have become a reality without the Great War. Bul-
garia found itself on the side of the Central Powers rather than the Entente
in that war, and paid a heavy price at Versailles. Serbia, on the other hand,
had entered the war on a Yugoslav prospectus, and emerged from it as the
acknowledged leader of a new South Slav State, known as the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.67 With this, the first Yugoslavia was born.
67Unification was based on the so-called Corfu Declaration of July 1917 in which the
Serbian government on Corfu and the London Yugoslav Committee called for the unifica-
tion of the South Slavs in order to preempt any attempt at unification from within the
Habsburg Empire.
CHAPTER TEN
INSPIRERS
1Helmut Loos is engaged in such a collaborative project involving Music and the City.
His published work on Central and Eastern Europe includes Loos and Mller 2005. For a
specific comment on programmes and repertories, see Loos 2008.
inspirers 251
2Arnold 1993.
252 chapter ten
3Katalini 1995.
inspirers 253
Greeks...
4White 1987, 3.
5See, for example, Chartier 1988.
6Leotsakis 2004a, 58. Highly polemical readings of music history are characteristic of
even the most recent Greek scholarship. See Tsetsos 2011.
inspirers 255
of modern Greek art music.7 They are essays in the pre-Rossinian idiom
of Italian opera associated with composers such as Cimarosa, Paisiello,
Zingarelli and Mayr. Mantzaros never became a professional musician;
indeed it was not really an option, as he was from a noble family. In a way,
this released him to become one of the inspirers. A decade after these early
compositions, he had transformed his home into a philanthropic conser-
vatory where local musicians were trained, and a little later (as noted in
chapter 8) he became a prime mover in the Philharmonic Society, itself a
monument to philanthropic agency. Nineteenth-century musical and the-
atrical institutions (including opera houses) were still funded more from
private donations than from the state.
Compositionally, Mantzaros remained locked in an idiom akin to that
of his teacher Niccol Antonio Zingarelli in Naples.8 We might expect
that of operatically conceived works. But it was no less the case when he
turned to sacred and instrumental music. His one-movement symphonies
(surviving in piano score, and written only in that form) are really Italian
sinfonias modeled on those of his mentor, while his partimenti for string
quartet adopt the neo-baroque contrapuntal methods also employed by
Zingarelli in this semi-pedagogical genre. As all of this suggests, there is
little Mantzaros that will hold the attention of international audiences
today, but he served nonetheless as a model for a later generation of
Greek composers, and as a figure of major pioneering significance.
He was one of the pyramid builders, and it was partly his inspired
teaching that made possible the subsequent flowering of Greek art music
in the nineteenth century. The climate of ideas may have been conducive,
but it needed a Mantzaros to galvanise musical life, and the trajectory he
established remained constant for a century in which Greek music was
dominated by heptanesian (Ionian) traditions. One crucial point here is
that the Italian foundations of Ionian music, and the subsequent Ionian
presence in mainland Greek music, ensured that for most of the nine-
teenth century Greece did not have extensive contacts with developments
in other European musical centres, notably in France and Germany.
Despite some attempts to argue otherwise, and a few exceptions such as
7The extant sources for these works are the autographs currently held by the Benaki
Museum in Athens. A modern critical edition appeared in 2006, published by the Hellenic
Music Research Laboratory of the Ionian University, Corfu. The most detailed study of
Mantzaros is Kardamis 2008.
8His populist, patriotic music written for local people belongs to a rather different
tradition again.
256 chapter ten
9For the transformation of repertory, see Romanou 1996. For an account of the severely
limited standards of instrumental pedagogy, see Leotsakos 2004a, 59.
inspirers 257
10Noumas was closely associated with Kostis Palamas and the demoticist movement
generally in Greek letters, a movement for which the Memoirs of Yannis Makriyannis
served as an almost cultish originary text.
258 chapter ten
11Vlagopoulos 2008.
inspirers 259
World War II and into the political instabilities of the immediate post-
war years. This will be explored more fully later, but we may note here
that, according to the testimonies of Yannis Constantinides (190384) and
Alekos Xenos (191295), the propagation of rebetika by the radio in the
aftermath of the Second World War was a response to direct interven-
tion from the ultra-conservative military forces that backed a succession
of weak governments just prior to the Civil War. Rebetika, it needs to be
recalled, were denounced not just by the right-wing Metaxas dictatorship
but also by the Communist National Liberation Front.12 And it was against
this background that the Hadjidakis lecture took place in 1949, coinciding
with the military defeat of the Left.
The effect was to validate a new, cleaned-up image of rebetika by treat-
ing them with intellectual seriousness, downplaying their lowlife conno-
tations and stressing instead the expressive power, technical skill and
emotional authenticity of musicians such as Markos Vamvakaris (190572)
and Vassilis Tsitsanis (191584). This marked the beginning of an appro-
priation of rebetika by a bourgeois public that was confirmed by Hadjida-
kiss own adaptation of well-known rebetika in his Eksi laikes zografies
[Six Portraits from Folklore] of 1951. And it was thanks to this new status
that so-called popular art songs could become associated once more with
the politics of protest. This was above all the achievement of Theodorakis
in his settings of Ritsos. His take was very different from that of Hadjida-
kis, but the combined achievement of both men was to transform this
classicised popular music into the true successor of Kalomiriss national
school, and to define for years to come the musical image of Greece in
the eyes of the world. Like Mantzaros and Kalomiris, they changed the
direction of Greek music. And for Theodorakis in particular, agency was
closely tied to propaganda.
A fourth turning-point might be briefly mentioned at this point. The
event was the formation of the Hellenic Association for Contemporary
Music (and, related to this, the Greek Section of the ISCM) in 1965, and
the powers behind it were two men sharing the name Yiannis Papaioan-
nou, one a musicologist and one a composer. Both may be justly termed
the inspirers of a whole new chapter of Greek modernist music. They
provided an alternative response to the demise of the National School,
this time at the elitist end of Vlagolopouloss second continuity. There
had been earlier ventures into musical modernism in Greece, associated
turning points, we can justifiably argue that the time was ripe for these
developments. We can show that a failed project of musical modernism
in Greece became a success story in the end primarily because of a major
change in politics. But this does not diminish the importance of agency.
Without the pioneering and tireless efforts of the Papaioannous, it is hard
to imagine that Greek music could have entered the modern age.
I will discuss here the role and importance of inspirers at the birth and
during the adolescence of two further national traditions, in Serbia and
Romania respectively. Like Greece, these nations or would-be nations built
their western culture ab initio in the nineteenth century, and again they
depended heavily on the initiatives of a small group of enablers. In Serbia
the key figure was Josif lezinger. Born in 1894 in Sombor (Vojvodina),
lezinger was a versatile musician trained in a practical way by playing in
the orchestras attached to Central European aristocratic courts, and prior
to his arrival in Kragujevac in 1831 he had already gained a reputation as
a teacher and entrepreneur, working both in abac and in Novi Sad. But it
was his pioneering work in Serbia proper, first in Kragujevac and then in
Belgrade, that jump-started a national tradition of art music. Both at the
theatre and with his Band of the Serbian Prince, lezinger had the flair,
enterprise and managerial skills necessary to meet the challenges associ-
ated with culture building. And for this reason his contribution to Serbian
culture was out of all proportion to the quality of his surviving music.
To grasp something of his pioneering significance we need some sense
of the base line for his initiatives. Just what were the conditions facing
lezinger as he set out to modernise and westernise musical practices
at the behest of Milo Obrenovi? We may turn first to the Band of the
Prince. Ostensibly there were two separate orchestras at the court, mili-
tary and theatre, but the former was really a wind band, and in prac-
tice the two groups had to join forces for any concerts involving even a
modestly ambitious repertoire. The general level of performance was low,
for there were relatively few musicians with a solid professional training.
Local performers either relied on foreign teachers, who might not stay, or
else they studied abroad, and might not return. Add to this the low quality
instruments, and the poor social status of musicians, and you gain some
impression of the major obstacles to the presentation of serious reper-
toire, let alone to the composition of demanding new works.
262 chapter ten
As to the theatre, it faced all these, and yet greater, difficulties. Of its
nature, theatre relies on entrepreneurial acumen, and in the nineteenth
century it was a site where money could be made. If anything it could
be made all the more easily where infrastructures were inadequate; the
less rigid the structures, the more room there was for opportunity. But,
as lezinger quickly discovered, the problems were daunting. First there
were the technical and administrative demands placed upon him, com-
bined with the antagonism of the drama section, which tended to view
musical fare as a distraction from serious literature. Then there were the
audiences. In the early days of the theatre these consisted mainly of clerks
and officials of the Principality, and of course the royal family. Aside from
the prevailing conservative tastes, both lezinger and his poet collabo-
rator Joakim Vuji, so-called father of Serbian theatre, were constantly
constrained by the demands of Prince Milo Obrenovi, who disliked
instrumental numbers, and insisted on hearing his favourite songs regard-
less of the content of the play.13
lezinger witnessed abrupt political changes during his lifetime: the
demise of one world, and the enabling of another. But in keeping with
other men of the theatre, he knew how best to use the institution to
transform the cultural world in accordance with changing political
imperatives. At the heart of this transformation was the triumph of the
vernacular. The theatre played a major part in that triumph, but it is per-
haps too simple to tell its story, or at least to tell it exclusively, as one of
national identities and the cultural expression of those identities. Theatre
prioritises communicative immediacy, and accordingly the ascendancy of
vernacular theatre in Serbia, as elsewhere in Europe in the nineteenth
century, was as much about the democratisation and enlargement of the
audience in other words, about accessibility and communication as it
was about nationalism. In the pragmatic world of the theatre, agendas can
seldom be monolithic. At the same time, as a prominent part of the public
sphere, the theatre was undoubtedly an ideal forum for the dissemination
of nationalist ideals.14
13As Katarina Tomaevi remarks, the audience in the first part of the century
expressed openly and aloud their dissatisfaction or approval regarding the activities on the
scene, identifying dramatic persons with people around them and seeking the very life of
the people inside the theatre. For the audience, the theatre represented a direct transposi-
tion of real life, of life itself divested of all illusions. Quoted in Milanovi 2009, 18.
14Habermas 1989.
inspirers 263
15In 2001, the National Theatre in Belgrade produced Komendijai. Medaljoni iz starih
srpskih komedija [Comedians. Medallions from Old Serbian Comedies], which included
part of Joakim Vujis play najderski kalfa [The Taylors apprentice]. lezinger had com-
posed music for this play (still in manuscript), though this amounts to little more than
sketches for his own use as conductor. Katarina Tomaovi reconstructed several of the
songs for the production. See Tomaevi 2001.
264 chapter ten
16Milanovi 2009.
17Oan-Pop 1964, 11.
inspirers 265
20Eliot 1920.
21 Brger 1984.
268 chapter ten
22Berger 2007.
23Butt 2008.
24Yack 1997.
inspirers 269
and court was not abandoned, but it was increasingly subject to individua-
tion (Laurence Dreyfus is illuminating on this in relation to Bach).25 Later,
when transferred to the public arena, that affirmative function tended to
equate either with a developing canon (a middle-class badge of identity),
with Kunstreligion (art as a kind of belief system), or with developing
ideas of the nation. But in the context of a developing culture industry,
this same process of individuation allowed each of these categories either
to provoke or to become a model of dissent, a form of culture critique or
avant-garde. An avant-garde may be at odds with the institution of art, but
it also depends on it; even iconoclasm needs structures of dissemination.
In the end, creative genius could be harnessed by any of these several
options, or any combination of them, once an institution of art had been
fully established. Each of them might be understood as the ground for a
significant music.
The point here is that what we have come to think of as great music, a
product of creative genius, is a construction that depends on much more
than exceptional talent, even if we allow the notion of talent in the first
place, and many psychologists do not. Exceptional talent, whether innate
or acquired, is ever-present in human history, whereas creative genius only
seems to appear at particular times and in particular places; the issue is
brought into very sharp focus through Harry Limes celebrated reference
to the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in Graham Greenes screenplay for the
Carol Reed film The Third Man. Creative genius, in other words, is not just
the successful projection of a strong creative personality; nor, conversely,
is it solely contingent on a particular ecology or set of agencies. There
are quite simply too many exceptions that prove the rule when we try to
analyse it in these terms.
If we are to probe the historical nature of creative genius as a perceived
category from its rise in Early Modern Europe, through its flowering in
the age of Romanticism and culmination in the Modernism of the early
twentieth century, to its decline in our own age we may note that it
depends on a convergence of exceptional talent with the kind of signifi-
cant project, uniquely defining of both its time and its place (in other
words, rooted), that is enabled by an institution of art.26 All three com-
ponents talent, project, institution are necessary constituents, and it
is only at particular times and in particular places that all three come
together. This, then, might be one reading of the background to that final
flowering of creative genius in the age of Modernism. It was given its
most single-minded formulation in the music of Schoenberg, and in the
thought of Adorno.
Schoenberg paid lip service to future significant music in C major, but
in practice he was ruthless in his dismissal of conservative repertories.
We are back to an either-or mentality, which of its very nature promotes
definite views about value and authenticity. Art in this modernist climate
should be constructed according to certain principles rather than others,
and it should remain in close agreement with the material of which it is
made; this was the Schoenbergian and Adornian view, and we can rec-
ognise in it a distinct continuity with the ideas expressed in the Weimar
debates of the 1850s. Already in those debates we have a discourse that
separates repertories into mutually exclusive and mutually defining
categories in a manner that would characterise modernist thought, and
expressed by way of a distinctly modernist rhetoric. Moreover, the catego-
ries themselves we might label them respectively modernist, classical
and commercial remind us that modernist music was from the start
understood in a relational way. One corollary of this is that attempts to
rethink modernism are also an implicit rethinking of conservatism.
How, then, do the little stories of the Balkans speak into this grand
narrative? In one respect they conform. I refer here to musical discourses
centred on nationhood and ethnicity. What really happened here is that
the music of pre-modern peasant societies became part of the idealised
past created by modernism from the mid nineteenth century onwards.
It goes without saying that the peasant societies themselves were largely
unaffected by this. An either-or mentality cannot exist where choice
does not exist, or barely exists. And that, as has often been argued, was
precisely the condition of the pre-modern rural societies of South East
Europe until well into the twentieth century. Social modernity, in other
words, arrived belatedly to these societies. Indeed it was profoundly disil-
lusioning to many Yugoslav-watchers from the west that with the advent
of modernisation, and the possibility of choice that accompanied it, the
peasant population made the wrong choices (to place it on a trivial level,
nature, an institution of art will promote those qualities that refuse to yield to contingent
explanation (Brger 1984).
inspirers 271
27Daniel Pick (Pick 1989) provides a context for this. His thesis will be discussed in the
final chapters of the book.
272 chapter ten
commentators at least, more than anything else defines this region. For
Maria Todorova, and for some other students of the cultural history of
South East Europe, transition is one of the constituent categories that can
distinguish Balkanism from Orientalism.28 At the very least, this invites us
to open up for investigation the question of transition, and to consider the
true nature of transitional states. It suggests that we should perhaps try to
give these states their due, viewing them as something more than sites of
theoretical transformation which contain elements of two worlds, though
they are that of course. We might, in other words, consider their value as
states in themselves. We might explore their ontology.
28Todorova 1997.
PART THREE
MUSIC IN TRANSITION
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MIXING IT
Discourses of Transition
1 Bhabha 1994.
2Ibid., 2.
3Ibid., 7.
4Ibid., 2.
276 chapter eleven
European values. But above all, it is marked off from Orientalism by its
character as transition: it is not quite Europe, not quite non-Europe, but
a place of crossroads, where very specific identities have been structured
and restructured on a fragile ground of liminality.
It is this quality of liminality that is stressed in another wide-ranging
study.10 Like Todorova, K.E. Fleming is keen to separate Balkanism from
Orientalism, but she argues that the liminal status of the Balkans is tanta-
mount not so much to marginality as to a sort of centrality, and not just
in the obvious geographical sense that if you are between two worlds you
are at the centre. Fleming, in other words, holds on to, and gives posi-
tive value to, Todorovas transition to the inbetween, the interstices
between worlds, histories, and continents as the ground for a unique
identity for the Balkans. It is, in her compelling reading of it, neither one
thing nor the other, but something else.
It is no doubt ironic that Fleming commits to transition just as Todo-
rova herself in recent work seems to want to release it in favour of a more
complex network of path dependencies, moving closer to the position
adopted by several of the authors in Balkan as Metaphor. These authors
resist monolithic readings of the Balkans, especially the Balkans of today,
preferring to analyse real situations in all their diversity than to identify
reductive explanatory categories. They seek, with Homi Bhabha, to do jus-
tice to the complexity, infinite variety, and multiple transitions of minori-
tarian identities on shifting sands of history and culture.
Fleming, on the other hand, is loath to ignore the active legacy of those
collective identities that have marked a division of East and West in the
past; the history, after all, is a long one, and it is rooted in empire (Holy
Roman-Byzantine; Habsburg-Ottoman), in religion (Christian-Muslim;
Catholic-Orthodox) and in political ideology (Capitalist-Communist). It
is, Fleming rightly implies, an evasion to exclude such collectivities from
the picture. They characterise what we may call a middleground level of
Balkan identities, which is what renders them distinctive to the outside
observer. For it is the profusion of possible allegiances bequeathed by
these overlapping historical dichotomies that gives this region its homo-
geneity, resulting in a unity of small differences; as Fleming puts it, dis-
course on the Balkans is one both of sameness and of difference.11 At the
same time it is these same dichotomies that help define the self-perception
10Fleming 2000.
11 Ibid., 1219.
278 chapter eleven
14Samson 1977.
280 chapter eleven
24Ibid., 81.
mixing it 285
25Ibid., 65.
26Among the CD collections of these oriental rebetika, one might cite Greek-Oriental
Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style. The Golden Years: 19111937. Folklyric
CD 7005.
286 chapter eleven
know it today from a recorded legacy that may be fairly easily consulted
by anyone interested in venturing further.
Most of the other traditions I will consider were not taken up by the
early recording industry in the manner of rebetika. Where early recordings
exist at all, they are usually the product of ethnological research and of a
more general impulse towards culture conservation. This is certainly the
case for the zurla-tapan ensemble of the Roma, which never really entered
the commercial world. As for Macedonian algija, this was partly taken up
by a later recording industry (unlike, for example, a parallel tradition of
Albanian saze), but in a reconstructed form that is often hard to separate
out from so-called Macedonian folk music. The other repertories Sep-
hardic music, muzica lutreasc and sevdalinka were more compre-
hensively appropriated by the culture industry of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, and that resulted in further transformations
both of their musical materials and of the patterns of their reception.
At the other pole we might place two zeibekiko songs, Alana Pireotissa
[Piraeus tramp woman] and Otan me vlepis na perno [When you see me
go by], recorded by Vamvakaris, where the makam-s are smoothed out
into equal temperament, and the bouzouki has a ritornello function.29 The
structure in both songs is formalised, alternating vocal stanzas (unvaried
in the first song, varied in the second) with ritornelli (regular 9/4 phrases
in the first song, irregular and progressively lengthening phrases in the
second). As to harmony, Alana Pireotissa maintains a single harmony,
dominant-quality in classical terms, for the entire song, allowing tonicisa-
tion only at the end of each ritornello and each stanza. In Otan me vlepis
na perno the pattern is more diversified, though the underlying schema
in classical terms, we might describe it as [i III V i] is consistent
across both ritornelli and stanzas.
Somewhere between these two styles we might locate two recordings
made by Roza Eskenazi, also in the 1930s. In the first, a composition by
Dimitris Semsis whose title Min orkizesai vre pseftra is usually translated
as Dont swear to me, you liar, the makam is Husseini, and the song itself
is enclosed within an improvised taximi on outi, in the extempore, orien-
tal style.30 There is also a central taximi and a rather more regular clos-
ing taximi [son taksm] on violin. The two stanzas are makam-based, and
chordal harmonies are conspicuous by their absence. In the second song,
Yati fumaro kokaini [Why I smoke cocaine], by Panayiotas Toundas, on
the other hand, we find the same negotiation between makam and dia-
tonic minor that characterised the Vamvakaris recordings. This song, a
cautionary tale, consists of two stanzas, each bi-partite, and as in the first
Vamvakaris recording the melodic structure encourages the sense of an
underlying dominant function. What greatly strengthens this function in
the Eskenazi recording is the brief appearance of a sub-dominant in each
stanza. It may not be classical harmony, but the orientation to the west is
stronger nonetheless than in Min orkizesai vre pseftra.
The story of Eskenazi, a Sephardic Jew who was born in Istanbul and
spent her early life in Salonika and Komotini before heading for the
recording studios of Athens and Piraeus, is emblematic of the intersec-
tion of Ottoman-Greek and Ottoman-Jewish musical cultures in the early
twentieth century.31 Her recorded output is mainly in the Greek language,
29Both are on The Rough Guide to Greek Music. Hellenic Records TGR 207.
30See the CD The Rebetiko Song in America Vol. 1 19201940. FM Records: The Greek
Archives 627.
31 Commonalities between Sephardic and Greek repertories are explored in Dragoumis
2007, which also demonstrates the antiquity of some of the rebetika.
mixing it 289
but she also sang in Ladino and in the 1950s she revisited Istanbul and
recorded several songs in Turkish. Borrowing across the communities in
this way was fundamental to late- and post-Ottoman music. Given the
same melody, all kinds of adaptations were possible. Changes of language
and song text could convert Ottoman-Turkish popular songs into rebetika
on one hand and Jewish copla-s on the other, just as changes of perfor-
mance site and function could transform Ottoman classical repertory into
Jewish liturgical repertory.32 Cross-cultural commonalities of this kind
are much in evidence in the vast archive of recordings made in Anatolia,
Greece and North America during the first half of the twentieth century, a
substantial corpus of them now reproduced in modern CD format.
In later dissemination, on the other hand, the repertories were sepa-
rated out in ways that reflected much wider political and cultural percep-
tions (the cataloguing in Sound Archives can be instructive). Very crudely,
the tendency was to draw a line between Turkish and Greek repertories,
and to assign the former to the East and the latter to the West. Jewish
culture was a different matter. Jews were widely regarded as a people that
dwells alone, and constituted a convenient Other not only for developing
national identities, but also for a developing European identity. The Jew-
ish expulsions from Europe in the Middle Ages (like their Muslim equiva-
lents) were primarily about religion, but they were also about perceived
ethnicity, and they tapped into a widespread and longstanding European
perception of the Jews as oriental. No less than Greek popular music,
Jewish secular music, especially of the eastern Mediterranean area, occu-
pied a world of betwixt and between.
If we were to understand that transitional world in the terms of a
forcefield, we might inspect its poles by considering two very different
approaches to a single Sephardic song. They are associated with two musi-
cians who came from the same corner of Asia Minor, in the vicinity of
Smyrna, a centre of Jewish as well as Greek culture at the turn of the
century. Tres hermenicas exists in numerous versions, collected by Man-
rique de Lara and Isaac Levy among others.33 In addition to significantly
different versions of the poetic text, there are two principal recorded mel-
odies, or tune-families, as Judith Maulen-Berlowitz describes them, and
32Pamela Dorn has discussed the association of these two in Turkey, an association
that survived westernising tendencies and was largely untouched by questions of personal
taste (Dorn 1991b).
33See also the collections made by Rina Benmayor in Los Angeles and Seattle, dis-
cussed in Benmayor 1979, 4857. Benmayor examines at length the different manifesta-
tions of the Hero and Leander myth in serious and popular literature.
290 chapter eleven
34Maulen-Berlowitz 1995.
35With the declaration of war Hemsi was enlisted in the Italian army.
36Tres hermenicas is to be found in the sixth volume of the series of ten, published as
Coplas sefardies (Hemsi 193273). Hemsis work on this volume and on volume 7 dated
from the 1960s. In his Authors Note, he discusses the extensive Jewish community of
Smyrna.
37See the reference in Hemsi 1995, 2930, along with a discussion of possible reconcili-
ations of makam-s and western polyphony (compare Erlanger 193059).
38The recording can be found on a CD produced by Susana Weich-Shahak, Cantares y
romances tradicionales sefardes de oriente Vol. 2 (Saga: KPD 10.906).
mixing it 291
39See the recordings of Sephardic music made in Istanbul in 1906, probably the earliest
recordings of this repertory. I am grateful to Joel Bresler for information on this.
40This recording, part of the Collection patrimonies musicaux des juifs de France, is
listed as SOCADISC 860109.
292 chapter eleven
Aside from the Jews, one other group has been treated as an oriental
import to Europe. The epic migrations of the Roma from northwestern
India have been tracked to around the middle of the first millennium,
after which they settled (in a limited sense of the term) in numerous
regions across the Middle East (especially Persia, as reflected in dialects
of Romani) and North Africa. They enter our story with the Ottomans
in the fourteenth century, first escaping from, and then accompanying,
Ottoman armies into Europe. A second wave of migration then followed
during the second half of the nineteenth century after the release of the
Roma in 1856 from what really amounted to centuries of enslavement
in Romania. Recent scholarship qualifies a view of the Roma as a single
people in diaspora, a view promoted above all by the eighteenth-century
scholarship of Heinrich Grellmann and subsequently much loved of
nineteenth-century racial theory. Rather it is argued by some that stig-
matisation (much more than ethnicity) has been the key determinant of
their group identity.41
However we account for it, Rom communities have consistently
maintained different values from those of the gade (non-gypsies)
against whom they define themselves. Responses to those differences
by host communities have ranged from an initial fascination with alter-
ity (nineteenth-century cultural appropriations) through persecution
(culminating in the Third Reich) to attempted assimilation (notably by
East European Communist regimes, especially in Bulgaria and Romania).
Only through music and dance have the Roma been valued, bringing atten-
dant privileges to esteemed performers, but exclusively in relation to their
professional roles (there are obvious analogies here with Black musicians
in Britain and America today). The seminal contribution of the Roma to
music history transforming, disseminating, blending and conserving
has already been noted. Yet documentation of that contribution prior to
the age of recording is exiguous. What we do have is an abundance of
testimony as to their musical prowess, and from sources as widely dis-
persed as eleventh-century Persia, Renaissance Italy, Restoration England,
eighteenth-century Russia, and the nineteenth-century Balkans.
Rather than subscribing to some mystical sense of special powers, it
is more reasonable to understand Rom virtuosity in terms akin to the
41A key revisionist text here, challenging not just Grellmann but more recent scholars
such as Angus Fraser (Fraser 1992), is Lucassen, Willems and Cottaar 1998. This confronts
some of the myths about origins, language and culture associated with the Roma; see also
Willems 1997.
mixing it 293
task-specific training associated with trades and their guilds. For the
Roma, music was an itinerant, and increasingly specialised, profession. It
was associated with particular families the children would learn several
instruments from an early age and even with particular villages, and
building, repairing and selling instruments were all part of the package
(there are very clear parallels here with the klezmorim of Eastern Europe).
Once professional ensembles began to appear in the late nineteenth and
especially the early twentieth centuries, an increasingly cosmopolitan
idiom was adopted. It is something of a paradox, then, that in Hungary
and Spain this came to be identified by some as a kind of national style.
For the more successful and well-organised musicians, it made sense to
settle in the cities, where there was a greater demand for their craft, but
even in village communities Rom musicians in the Balkans acquired a
very clear social function as the providers of ritual and entertainment
music for dances, weddings, funerals and the rest.
It is no adverse criticism to suggest that the Roma do not possess a
music of their own.42 Quite apart from the distinction drawn by some
Rom musicians between music for themselves and music for others (just
as some will de-exoticise in private the stereotyped images they subscribe
to in public), their entire ethos as entertainers has always depended on
the appropriation of what is local and therefore marketable and its
transformation in performance into something unique. As Liszt recogn-
ised at an early stage, and as we noted in chapter 4, the distinctive identity
of Rom music has less to do with repertories than with practices.43 The
Roma traditionally carried styles from A to B, and when they settled in
B they infused the surface styles of B with trace elements from A, often
resulting in a form of urbanisation, and one might say orientalisation, of
village idioms. Partly this describes a transit between East and West.44
The stages of that transit might be represented symbolically by way
of three repertories associated with the Roma. All have been discussed
in general terms, but the last of them will be given more detailed treat-
ment here. First there is the zurla-tapan ensemble, which seems to vary
little from region to region and exists today in a form that has changed
little over the years. This can be demonstrated by comparing recordings
made by Columbia Records in Turkey in the 1920s45 with ones made some
fifty years later by Wolf Dietrich in gypsy camps in Greek Macedonia
and western Thrace (Xanthi and Komotini).46 The continuity is striking,
despite the fact that the dance in the Turkish field recording is particular
to the specific locality. Moreover recordings made by Dietrich in Albania,
A.L. Lloyd in Macedonia, and more recently Lozanka Peycheva and Ven-
tsislav Dimov in Bulgaria (Pirin Macedonia), Svanibor Pettan in Kosovo,
and Ankica Petrovi in Bosnia and Herzegovina all confirm that this has
been a genre stubbornly resistant to change.47
Secondly, there is algija, an urban (old town) music associated espe-
cially with the central and eastern Balkans, and with a notable tradition in
towns such as Veles, Ohrid and Bitola. In the course of time, Macedonian
algija, whether performed by Macedonian or Rom musicians, developed
its own specific tonal dialect and expression, and with a pronounced ori-
ental influence. Dating from the second half of the nineteenth century,
it was never really a unified tradition each city in Macedonia had its
own type of algija in the past but in general it negotiated a territory
somewhere between the music associated with the Turkish fasil ensemble
and the traditional village music of the eastern Balkans. This is evidenced
above all by the prominence of many varieties of the fast (lake) circle
dance (oro) and the Rom oek. It is characteristic that algija repertory is
often couched in asymmetrical rhythms.
There are parallels between Macedonian algija and some of the instru-
mental music performed by Asia Minor Greeks in the kafe aman and
elsewhere. However, the Macedonian and Rom musicians who cultivated
algija were less shrewd than their Greek counterparts when it came to
making the most of a burgeoning recording industry. There is no Macedo-
nian equivalent to the plethora of recorded rebetika produced in the early
part of the century. Some early field recordings can be found in the sound
archive of the Folklore Institute Marko Cepenkov in Skopje, and there
are professional recordings in the archive of MRT (Macedonian Radio and
Television), dating from the mid-1940s. Unhappily there are difficulties
48See the liner notes to Swetss CD algija: Music of the Balkans and Anatolia 2 (PAN
2007CD).
49For an historical perspective on this, see Zadeja 2006. It is worth noting here that
the strong pentatonic basis of southern Albanian traditional music may well have acted
as a kind of bulwark against the incursion of the makam-based idiom found in the north
of the country. This point is made in Koo 2004.
296 chapter eleven
50Miso 2006.
51 Garfias 1981.
52Ocora C 559036. See also the last track of the LP Rumania. Traditional Folk Music
(UNESCO Musical Atlas Collection: EMI Odeon C 064 18120). For a more recent CD of
the Clejani musicians, but one that preserves traditional conventions, see Outlaws of Yore
(CD 003), recorded mainly in 1991, before they became internationally famous as the Taraf
de Haidouks.
mixing it 297
53On the track Dragoste [Love] the doina is performed by lutari. Although the metre
is regular, the recitative style is characteristic of the doina.
54Stokes 1992, 1114.
298 chapter eleven
genre until the nineteenth century, at which point there was some diver-
sification in performance practice, just as there was a widening public
for the songs, among Serbs as well as Bosnian Muslims. In addition to
unaccompanied solo singing, male choruses were used, and instrumen-
tal accompaniments began, initially with saz, but later with accordion. It
was also in the nineteenth century that serious collecting began, notably
by Ludvk Kuba and Franjo Kuha, and in the early twentieth century by
Gerhard Gesemann.55 Gesemann was among the first to address the genre
in a scholarly way, though his understanding of it as primarily a product of
the higher social classes presents a highly partial view of its origins.
In a later monograph, Vlado Miloevi suggested prototypes in so-
called flat songs [ravne piesme]), and went on to discuss the syncretic
nature of the genre (including influences from Sephardic repertories),
but he too subscribed to the values of his time and place, favouring inti-
mate, domestic songs and regarding the more heavily ornamented songs
associated with the han as degenerate.56 All this raises questions about
the specifications and limits of sevdalinka. The genre title itself (sevdah
is love or ecstasy in Turkish) belongs to relatively recent times. Tradi-
tionally these songs were known simply as Turkish songs, and this is how
they are still described in eastern Serbia. More crucially, the term sevd-
alinka has itself been broadened out in recent years to cover a wide range
of popular styles, including some newly-composed folk music, so that
its use is now permissive. Even traditional sevdalinkas are adapted these
days to contemporary tastes, through jazz fusions, classical arrangements
and electronics.
Historically, the turning point in the evolution of the genre came with
the introduction of European instruments, at which point the intimate
soundscape of voice and saz gave way to the louder and more open sound
associated with an accordion-based ensemble. It is ironic, then, that some
of the earliest extant recordings of sevdalinka, dating from 19078, are
with accordion-dominated ensemble rather than saz. However the use of
the ensemble here is very far removed from the familiar folkloric sound
world. A comparison of two performances of Kad ja podjoh na Benbau
[When I went to Benbassa], one recorded by the Trio Mustafa Suduka i
Merku in 1908 and the other by Nada Mamula and the orchestra of RTV
Sarajevo in 19845 is revealing, not just because the early recording uses
a different tune family, but because the accordion avoids conventional
chordal harmony and joins voice and clarinet in a heterophonic presenta-
tion of the melody (with harmonic thickening) over a regular pulse on
def frame drum.57 There is a space separating this performance, which
no doubt conveys something of a nineteenth-century tradition of perfor-
mance practice, from the conventional folklorism cultivated by the Radio
Sarajevo recording in the post-war years of Communist Yugoslavia.
Even the older generation of sevdah singers contributed to this kind
of folklorism, about which I will say more in chapter 19. But several of
these singers were also committed to safeguarding the tradition of per-
forming sevdalinkas with saz, complete with unequal temperament and
makam-s. The ethnomusicologist Tamara Karaa-Beljak has transcribed
performances by six such musicians over a period of some fifteen years,
including Selim Salihovi, the Rom musician Sofka Nikoli, and the diva
of the genre Emina Zeaj, the only one of the six who is still alive, and still
performing, today.58 It would be wrong to suggest that such performers
are involved in historically informed reconstructions. Rather they repre-
sent the continuation of a largely unbroken tradition, and because of this
they can offer us real insight into the transitional status of the genre. It
is not uncommon for the texts of sevdalinkas to make specific reference
to the saz, or nacre (pearl-inlaid) tambura, prompting reflections on the
reciprocral relations of voice and instrument historically. The saz would
only have been played by a man, and the later meeting-points between
its highly ornamental performance style, surrounding the key notes of the
makam with improvised embellishments, and the intimate, interior style
of womens singing undoubtedly resulted in a uniquely poetic synergy.
A perfect illustration is Emina Zeajs recording of the evocative, highly
expressive sevdalinka Il je vedro, il oblano [Is it clear, is it cloudy?]
with Mehmed Gribajevi accompanying on saz.59 Aside from its tonal
and mood-setting functions establishing the ison, defining the scale
and creating the appropriate melancholy Affekt the saz weaves a deli-
cate web of melodic tracery around the voice, conforming to the general
melodic direction (seyir) of the song, but at certain times anticipating
and at other times reacting to the inflections of the vocal line. Something
That a bridge between East and West between Asia and Europe might
assume a concrete political form was considered a realistic possibility
by many Greeks in the aftermath of World War I. The Balkan Wars had
already resulted in territorial expansion for Greece opposed incidentally
by a strengthening Communist Party and a corresponding contraction
for the Ottomans. During World War I, the promise of a further step,
allowing Greece to turn some of its Asia Minor settlements into territorial
acquisitions, was apparently dangled by the Entente Powers before the
then Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. And when the Treaty of Svres
(1920) licensed the provisional occupation of Smyrna by Greece (as well
as eastern Thrace and the islands of Tenedos and Imvros), the great idea
of Greek irredentism seemed at last within reach. Richard Clogg reminds
us that Venizeloss supporters spoke openly at the time of a Greece of the
two continents and five seas.1
A greater Greece had been a long-standing dream, but it was only when
Venizelos came to power in 1910 in the wake of the Young Turk revolu-
tion (which generally sharpened the focus of Balkan nationalisms) and the
Goudi coup of the Military League that it was placed on the political
agenda. The Venizelos ascendancy initially energised the political nation
through a twin programme of domestic reform and territorial expansion-
ism. But in due course his agenda proved divisive (the Royalists, as well
as the Communists, took a negative view of his expansionist plans), and it
was increasingly prey to the manoeuvres of Great Power politics and the
unforeseeable events of war. It ended in the catastrophe of 1922, as the
forces of Turkish nationalism destroyed Smyrna and routed the Greeks of
Asia Minor.
This was the political background to the rise of the national school of
Greek composers, so labelled by Kalomiris in his manifesto of 1908. Kalo-
miriss return to Athens from Kharkov [Kharkiv] in 1910 coincided with
traditional music was typically viewed as both analogous to, and a poten-
tial ally of, the vernacular language, and in this sense Kalomiriss vision a
Greek national school built on demotic ideals conformed.
Two genres of music were usually taken to represent Greece in this
construction, and it is typical of the anomalies of cultural nationalism
that neither was, in any exclusive sense, Greek. First, there was the post-
Byzantine repertory of sacred music shared by several cultures in the
Orthodox world, but to which Greece staked a special claim. And second,
there was Balkan-Anatolian traditional music, of which the many varieties
of Greek demotic music might be regarded as regional species. My child-
hood was haunted by our folk songs, by the melodies and rhythms of our
people, by our legends and traditions, by Byzantium, its mythical Kings
and its haunted monasteries. Along with them, by Greek poetry [....], he
remarked in old age, perhaps with a little rose tinting.6
There was a space separating both these Greek genres from the styles
and conventions of European art music. And it is for this reason that
Kalomiriss project was one of transition, albeit undertaken from the
perspective of a western-trained composer. There was no insincerity, let
alone hypocrisy, in this; it was the way of nationalist composers every-
where to reach out from their turrets of enlightenment to make contact
with ahistorical, natural communities (or alternatively atemporal, spiri-
tual communities) that were supposedly at some remove from western
rationality. But there was more to the transition in Kalomiriss case. The
double-descended identity associated with the Greeks has already been
discussed, and is indeed a commonplace of historiography and criticism.
Against this background, the agenda of the demoticist poets was in part
to reclaim something of the world view of the Romaioi, representing the
East of the Byzantines as against the West of enlightened Hellenism.
Yet, and again the ironies abound, this act of reclamation was itself
the work of western-educated intellectuals, constructing a vernacular
(demotike) in the manner of cultural nationalists everywhere. Kalomiriss
enterprise was analogous, and he fell easily into step with this demoticist
understanding of national identity. Like the poets, and in sharp contrast
to Georgios Lambelet, he wanted to release the Greeks from the burden of
their distant Hellenic tradition, a tradition whose contemporary relevance
was above all the preoccupation of Western Europe, and at the same time
to restore something of the ethos of the Romaioi to the modern nation. In
6See Kalomiris 1988, 1618 for this account of his early encounters with folksong.
join the club 305
musical style. Second there were his years as a student at the Vienna
Conservatoire (190106). These were crucial not only for acquiring basic
professional skills, but for expanding his repertorial knowledge and deep-
ening his musical understanding. It was in Vienna that he first heard Wag-
ner and the New Germans, an encounter that had consequences for his
later operas, and for his entire approach to music and the poetic.
The third context was Kharkov, where Kalomiris accepted his first
employment in 1906, and where he remained for a further four years. The
Kharkov years introduced him to the philosophy and some of the music
of the Balakirev circle, his models for the creation of a modern national
school in Greece (in particular the highly structured concert series in
Kharkov, privileging the national and the local, was revelatory). Not the
least interesting aspect of this was the sleight-of-hand with which he could
convert Russian exoticism into something closer to a Greek homeland. It
was also while in Kharkov that he began corresponding with Psycharis
and Palamas, among other demoticists, and it was here that he began his
polemical writings for Noumas. The famous concert in Athens, with its
accompanying and divisive manifesto, took place right in the middle of
the Kharkov years.
The programme included several of his early piano works. These have
an assurance, a command of mtier and a formal control that took Greek
music to a new level.9 Some of the titles evoke Chopin (ballade, noc-
turne, later prelude), and it is interesting that in the two extant pro-
grammes for concerts given by Kalomiris in Kharkov, Chopin took pride
of place.10 He would have known Chopin from his early student days, for
the music had been performed in well-off domestic circles in Greece for
some time, and following the Nazos reforms it migrated to the public
platforms.11 But while in Kharkov Kalomiris may have picked up on the
special significance Chopin held for the Balakirev circle. Interestingly, the
9This is not the place to discuss in detail matters of musical text, but it should be
noted that several of these early pieces were subject to later revision.
10In the first of these concerts he was a participant. In the second he was sole per-
former, and he gives an account in his Memoirs (Kalomiris 1988) of the agonies of nerves
he endured. It was this concert that decided Kalomiris against any thoughts of a perform-
ing career.
11 Romanou 1996. Chopin was second only to Beethoven in popularity in Athens dur-
ing these years.
join the club 307
work that is common to both Kharkov programmes is the Fantasy Op. 49,
which is often viewed in nationalist terms.12
As for his early ballades, Kalomiris, like many before him, would have
read the genre title as connoting the vernacular and the nation. Yet the
musical style is closer to Liszt than to Chopin, belonging to European high
romanticism, and only slightly inflected by native elements. That the first
of them (1905) was inspired by a poem from Victor Hugos celebrated
Les orientales might be taken as symbolic of the transition between East
and West,13 and it is fitting that aside from obvious textural affinities
with Liszt, the oriental moments here make explicit reference to Liszts
so-called gypsy scale. The second of the Ballades was a response to a
Palamas poem, while the third (1906) Mazeppa-like draws on a popu-
lar folksong about the wild ride of Death. Here the oriental material is
enclosed within the sound and fury, and in a curiously fragmentary coun-
terpoint. Later, as in the more atmospheric and poetic Second Rhapsody
of 1921, Kalomiris succeeded especially in the quiet middle section in
creating oriental constructions of a more integral character.
In his early songs, Kalomiris could assert more clearly the link between
the demoticist agenda and his own programme of musical nationalism.
For some he wrote his own texts, but he also turned to demoticists such
as Alexandros Pallis, Miltiadis Malakasis and of course Palamas. Palamass
Iambs and Anapests, a collection of poems first published in Athens in
1897 and probably encountered by Kalomiris in 1905, was the basis for a
two-part cycle for voice and orchestra, the first Sagapo [I love you] and
the second Magiovotana [Magic Herbs]. The chronology is confused here,
with Magiovotana completed before SAgapo and given its first perfor-
mance in 1914 (individual songs were composed between 1905 and 1914).
But in any case this is one of Kalomiriss most persuasive compositions,
responding to the mix of fairy-tale, oriental fable and classical myth with a
score that achieves a delicacy and restraint that are not always hallmarks
of his music.
At times it occupies a musical world not unlike that of Plleas et
Melisande. There is a similar blend of Russian and Wagnerian elements,
but the arioso is closer to aria than in the Debussy work, and the gendering
12Goldberg 2004. Even Adorno remarked that one would have to have ones ears well
plugged not to hear in Chopins F minor Fantasy a certain kind of tragically elevated tri-
umphant music speaking of how Poland has not perished and [...] that one day she will
rise again. (Adorno 1976, 174).
13Samson 2006.
308 chapter twelve
seems to leave no doubt about one aspect of the symbolism of the bridge,
though in later reception Kalomiris distanced the work somewhat from
the association with Venizelos.
He had good reason to do so. It has been suggested that the subsequent
neglect of O Protomastoras in Greece was due to the link with Venizelos
and i megali idea.14 Certainly it never matched the success of his second
opera, Dahtylidi tis manas [Mothers Ring], which was completed two
years later in 1917. The epic quality of O protomastoras is replaced here by
lyrical restraint blended with fantasy, including a fairy-tale second act in
the form of a dream. Here the dying singer, an Orphic figure represent-
ing the aspiring artist, tries to reach an unattainable mountain peak in
the company of the Mountain Nereid (in effect Erofili, his lover) who has
stolen the ring, the object of a symbolic tug-of-love between mother and
lover. Katy Romanou has written about a stylistic genealogy that takes us
from the discreet orientalism of this second act back through the incom-
plete opera Mavrianos to Rimsky-Korsakovs The Golden Cockerel.15 In
truth, the juxtaposition of a diatonic or pan-diatonic reality, grounded in
folk music, with a world of orientalised fantasy, often based on chromatic
symmetries, is fundamentally Russian.
Yet the oriental elements take on a new meaning in the context of
Dahtylidi tis manas, as a quality hovering somewhere between exoticism
and indigeneity (the traditional 5/4 dance used for the nymphs is a case in
point). Along with the greater preponderance of traditional music, asso-
ciated with ordinary people such as Sotiris, with story-telling, and with
Christmas festivities, as well as of Byzantine music (the Christmas hymn
I Parthenos Simeron), this ensures that the tone of Dahtylidi tis manas is
closer to Kalomiriss ideal of a Greek-oriental colour than anything in
O protomastoras. The real triumph of the opera lies in its art of transition.
The different musical worlds the three acts present in some ways sepa-
rate stylistic tableaux retain their semiotic distinctness, but they emerge
in the end as compatible worlds, in effect part of a single larger world. The
Leitmotiven help achieve this, but there is more to it than that.
If Dahtylidi tis manas took a step away from Wagner towards Russian
music and a more generic national style, the Levendia Symphony (1918
20) returned to a decidedly heroic tone. In common with other sym-
phonists around the edges of Europe, Kalomiris clearly felt comfortable
14See the note by Haris Politopoulos accompanying the Lyra recording of the opera.
15Romanou 2005.
310 chapter twelve
with the lofty idealism and humanism of the Beethoven archetype, easily
adopting a tone that no longer seemed available to composers in cen-
tral Europe. This is a programme symphony, dedicated to Palamas and
celebrating Greek levendia [valour or manliness] in several manifesta-
tions. In the manner of the New Germans, Kalomiris was committed to
the poetic as a shaping force in music. Elsewhere I have discussed the
tortuous reasoning in Weimar polemics by which music, an instrument
of liberation from language-based understanding, was deemed to achieve
the status of a higher poetic (superseding language) only through associa-
tion with a poetic idea.16 The goal was a new and higher unity, a fusion
of sister arts, not just in music drama but in programme symphony and
symphonic poem.
This was the Kalomiris aesthetic. He had already composed several
chamber works with a programmatic basis prior to the Levendia Sym-
phony. Indeed works without some acknowledged external source of
inspiration are few and far between. In this first symphony the quality of
levendia is portrayed through nature and character painting in the first
movement, an evocation of the dead but immortal heroes in the second,
a soldiers feast in the third, and religious devotion in the last. There are
folk-based episodes, for example in the development section of the first
movement and in the scherzo, and there is a choral Byzantine hymn to
the virgin in the finale. But in essence this is a cyclic symphony in the late-
Romantic European manner. Its affirmation will sound heroic to some,
vulgar to others.
With powerful symbolism, the symphony was given its first perfor-
mance on the occasion of the liberation of Smyrna by the Greek army
in 1920. Two years later the Venizelian dream was over, and it is hardly
surprising that the national school, as conceived by Kalomiris, took a
knock (there was a personal dimension to the tragedy for Kalomiris with
the destruction caused to his home town Smyrna, followed a year later
by the death of his son). The flow of compositions accordingly slowed in
the 1920s. He occupied himself with his many public roles at this time,
but compositionally he dealt mainly with revisions and occasional pieces.
Then, in the 1930s, major works began to appear again: orchestral songs
to poetry by the nationalist poet Sikelianos, the Symphony of the Simple
and Good People, the Preludes for Piano, Tryptych for Orchestra and Sym-
phonic Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. And from the 1940s onwards he
17Belonis 2009.
18In the preface to the piano version of the opera, quoted by Markos Tsetsos in Svolos
2004, 142.
312 chapter twelve
harmony is used more sparingly that modal and polymodal structures are
able to permeate the musical texture in a more integral way, resulting in
a sophisticated, multi-layered soundscape. One result is that we lose some
of the more accessible (stirring, colourful or seductive) moments associ-
ated with O protomastoras and Dahtylidi tis manas. But we gain in their
place a new coherence, in which the several constitutive elements of the
musical style are closely welded together. It is no exaggeration to claim
that in this work the bridge to the east stands firm. It is perhaps the clos-
est Kalomiris came to music of transition.
How we read the transition is another question. Markos Tsetsos reminds
us that for the Greeks the double threat to the City from East and West
promoted cultural isolation as a source of power.19 The relevance of this
reading to the twentieth-century catastrophe would have seemed obvious
to Kazantzakis and Kalomiris. It chimes too with our earlier observations
on church chant again an impulse to protect Greek identity from pollut-
ing influences from both directions and even with our comments on the
equivocal status of popular music. The Greek nation, in all these cultural
manifestations, found its centre of orientation in a place of in-between.
For Kalomiris, that centre absorbed a particular East and claimed it, as a
spiritual if no longer as a political property. The final words of the opera
In years to come, in times to come, they shall be ours anew! had better
be understood on these spiritual and allegorical levels. It is, we hope, the
Greek spirit embodied in the immortal Mothers, the Archangel and
the dead heroes guarding the holy Chalice, watched over by the protec-
tive Virgin, Our Lady of Constantinople that will survive, whatever the
catastrophe.
The contemporary allegory has additional layers, of course. The opera
speaks of self-seeking politicians, of a church hierarchy caught between
religious and political imperatives, of the populace as a collective victim,
and even of a commentator-seer, in the form of a firewalker (the mystical
power of the anastenarides). But the idealism is there too: in Anna, an
embodiment of self-sacrificing love whose allegorical link with the Vir-
gin is made explicit, and in Constantine himself, a Greek hero at once
traditional and modern. Kazantzakis was influenced by Nietzsche, and
it is easy to see Constantine here as an archetype of Nietzschean man,
overcoming the seductions of love to emerge strong enough for free-
dom. He is perhaps the last of the Nietzschean heroes to issue from the
19Ibid., 143.
join the club 313
22Belonis 2009.
join the club 315
23See Minos Douniass review of three chamber music concerts in Neoellinika Gram-
mata (18.3.1939), reprinted in Dounias 1963, 3435.
24Compare the two series of easy pieces by Kalomiris, 190612 and 1939 respectively.
There are also contributions to this genre by Yannis Constantinidis (44 Childrens Pieces).
It seems that Dounias was instrumental in promoting a native pedagogical music.
25The first of these suites, composed in 1948, was dedicated to Samuel Baud-Bovy, who
conducted its first performance in Geneva in 1949. For an English-language commentary
on Constantinidiss life and music, see Little 2001, 168243.
316 chapter twelve
26The production was supposed to run for six performances, but it was curtailed after
four.
27In Greece, some of the more disadvantaged refugee populations from Asia Minor
were especially susceptible to this rightward political swing.
28Romanou 2009a.
318 chapter twelve
what was really happening there. During the Metaxas years, cultural links
with Germany were strong (Frankfurt Opera performed Wagners Ring in
Athens in November 1938), and the interest shown by the regime and by
successive puppet governments in musical institutions was welcome. A
key figure was the writer Kostis Bastias, a close associate of Metaxas, and
the power behind the formation of the State Opera. Bastias was much
lauded by Kalomiris, and so too were ministers of the Reich, not least
Goebbels. It was also during the occupation that the State Orchestra was
founded, with Kalomiris conducting its first concert in February 1943, per-
forming his Triptych for Orchestra a tribute to Venizelos on the very
day that Palamass funeral prompted massive anti-Nazi demonstrations
in Athens.
In the aftermath of the war, Kalomiris was not called to account. But
the Kalomiris Archive does possess an apology prepared in advance by
the composer, in which he not only spelt out that many Greek composers
were in the same boat, but revealed all too clearly his failure to under-
stand the real motives of the Nazis in promoting his and other music from
South East Europe.29 Zoras meanwhile was taken into custody in 1945,
but released shortly after. There was little appetite for witch-hunts against
collaborators in Greece at a time when energies (partly under external
pressure) were directed towards what was perceived to be a major Com-
munist threat. In this climate, composers such as Alekos Xenos, a Com-
munist from the pre-war years and active in the wartime resistance, were
the ones in the firing line.
All this provides a context for the stylistic departures of the immediate
post-war years. Zoras himself began to look in new directions following
his Symphony of 1947, notably in three works of the early 1950s: the Con-
certino for Violin and Eleven Woodwinds, which explores sound colours
in interesting ways, and the song-cycles Instantaneous, six aphoristic and
barely tonal settings of haiku texts by Seferis, and Prosfora [Offering], a
set of laments alternating Sprechgesang and Byzantine-inspired legato
melody against sparse, often organum-like accompaniments. All three
works were performed to a mixed critical reception at the American con-
certs in Athens in 1952, of which more later. And they paved the way to a
decade of radical and interesting music by Zoras, including the song-cycles
I psihi [The Spirit] (angular vocal lines against dissonant backcloths) and
14 Cavafy Songs (freely atonal and non-metred), the Piano Sonata and the
29Ibid.
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suggests an affinity with Reger (he studied in Leipzig), and this is rein-
forced by works such as the two Chorales and Variations on Byzantine
Themes.
Yet Petridis stood apart from this world too. Partly due to its Byzan-
tine inflection, his voice remained a distinctive one in the chorus of the
national school. It is an obvious irony attaching to schools of any kind
that they are usually defined by one or two distinctive voices. The com-
posers who determine the collective category, in short, also transcend it.
The lasting importance of Kalomiris, and perhaps also of Petridis, has in
the end little to do with their allegiance to a national school whose foun-
dations were anything but firm, and everything to do with their artistic
individuality and quality. And in this respect one other composer can
stand alongside them.
The music of Emilios Riadis (18851935) may indeed be the strongest
of all, though it has come down to us in such a confused state that much
of it is only available in reconstructions. Riadis stands apart for another
reason. He was the one composer linked to the national school who hailed
from what would become the northern Greek territories. He was born into
the Greek community of Ottoman Salonica, and from an early age was
involved with the nationalist struggle there. Mark Mazower has noted that
European fashions and ethnonational tensions developed simultaneously
among the Salonican bourgeoisie in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.32 The multiple languages came to be freighted with ideology, and
the city became a focus for both religious and ethnic struggle, before it
became Greek Salonica in the wake of the Balkan Wars. The subsequent
Muslim exodus and the population exchange a decade later completed
that task (and the uprooting of the Jews from the city centre following the
Great Fire of 1917 is another part of the story).
The city, in a word, was hellenised. Already in the late nineteenth cen-
tury initiatives from the Greek community had contributed to the gradual
development of a formal musical culture. Ioannis Belonis has summarised
some of the institutions involved at the turn of the century, includ-
ing cultural societies and related educational programmes.33 The most
important was the Papafeio Orphanage, founded in 1903, but during the
second decade several private conservatories were also founded. Venize-
los, whose provisional government was established in Salonica in 1916 in
32Mazower 2005.
33Belonis 2009.
322 chapter twelve
opposition to Old Greece and the Royals, was himself supportive of these
developments, recognising the importance of raising the cultural level of
the northern territories. And we might add that following the catastrophe
the influx of refugees, traumatic as it was, brought a new potential taste
public in the form of middle-class, educated Greeks from Asia Minor.
In 1915 Riadis returned to Salonica, where he had originally studied
with Dimitrios Lalas a one-time associate of Wagner after seven years
study abroad, first in Munich (190810) and then in Paris (191015).34 He
became a professor of piano at the newly established State Conserva-
tory, but that aside, relatively little is known of his life. His erudition was
considerable an interest in oriental cultures enabled him to give lec-
tures on Chinese music, ancient Egyptian music, Japanese poetry and the
like and his credentials as a published poet were high too. It seems
that he rather promoted the aura of mystery that surrounded him, and it
may well be that his singular personality, narcissistic but deeply insecure,
not only shaped his music, but was partly responsible for the chaos of
the manuscript legacy.35 It seems possible that for Riadis an exotic vie
intrieure of mainly oriental provenance was primarily a means of distanc-
ing the immediacy of life.
That inner world was given expression in both the imagery and the
musical language of many of his songs, but it also permeated the chamber
works, whose qualities are becoming increasingly clear to us thanks to
the discoveries of Leotsakos, together with the reconstructive surgery of
Fivos Anoyanakis, Byron Fidetzis and Nikos Christodoulou.36 The prob-
lem here is that there is often no single fair copy of a work, but rather a
plethora of versions, whose chronology is not always clear.37 For Riadis, a
perfectionist and an intensely self-critical musician, composition did not
come easily.
We may begin with the songs, which were admired by Kalomiris himself,
and which occupy a very special corner of Greek art music. Even a glance
34Lalas is an intriguing figure, not least because much of his music was destroyed by
a torpedo in 1917. There are references to his words with Wagner in Cosima Wagners
diaries, notably on the relationship between ancient and modern Greeks.
35George Leotsakos presents a finely balanced and instructive essay on the composer
in Leotsakos 2005b.
36Ibid. See also the notes by Leotsakis and Byron Fidetzis on the Lyra CDs of Riadiss
music, notably Lyra CD 0718 and Lyra CD 0116.
37Much of this material has now been digitised and is available to view online at the
Lilian Voudouris Music Library of Greece at the Megaron in Athens. It includes manu-
script material related to the three string quartets and the cello sonata.
join the club 323
38In some pieces, notably his Five Dance Songs, Riadis almost approaches the Stravin-
sky of works such as Pribaoutki.
324 chapter twelve
expansive (the work lasts forty minutes) and compressed (the motivic
material is taut and economical, with accompaniments part of the
motivic substance of the music). The influence of modern French music
(Ravel) is more apparent here, but it should not be over-stressed, for it is
transformed by its contact with traditional Greek-oriental materials. Even
where the vocabulary is familiar, the syntax is new, so that we look afresh
at the conventional triad and the pedigreed accompaniment figure. There
is a unity of thematic substance that crosses the boundaries of individual
movements, but this alone cannot account for the capacity of this music
to engage us to the end. Every detail is arresting, and those points where
the idioms of traditional music emerge into the foreground the closing
sections of both the second movement and the finale are invested with
the power of an apotheosis.
music achieved a synthesis that did not hide the fractured character of
its components. In short, the modernist credentials of his music are not
really in doubt.
There is a more prosaic dimension to this. The national school was a
chimera in musical terms. Nevertheless, the Kalomiris ideal and the poli-
tics it engendered were powerfully controlling, and it was very difficult for
a Greek composer to make any impact from outside the charmed circle.
There were of course dissenting voices.40 Indeed the polemic was stri-
dent. But the arguments were mainly about opposing models of Greek-
ness, with Lambelets elegant articles in Mousika chronika proposing a
purer, un-Germanised Greek lyric idiom. With a few exceptions, what
we do not get are the polemics about the new found in Yugoslav journals
at the time. Kalomiriss nationalism was essentially a nineteenth-century
brand, remaining at some distance from the kind of Greekness identified
by the thirties generation of writers and artists, for example. But there
was in any case no doubt about where the power lay.
The classic case of the outsider was Nikos Skalkottas, who studied in
Berlin with Weill, Jarnach and Schoenberg, and attacked the Kalomiris
agenda during his last years there in Mousiki zoi [Musical Life]. Mainly
this followed a concert in Athens in 1930 at which his Concerto for Wind
Orchestra (now lost) was performed to a hostile reception, and when he
returned to Greece in 1933 he was either ignored or reviled. Kalomiris
wrote disparagingly about Skalkottas in Ethnos, though later he would
express posthumous appreciation.41 The highest praise accorded Skalkot-
tas was for works such as the 36 Greek Dances. And it is true that he not
only wrote about demotic music with enthusiasm, but also transcribed it
for the folklorist Melpo Merlier, and appropriated it in several composi-
tions. Aside from the dances, conceived in Berlin in 1931, several of his bal-
let scores and some of his piano pieces incorporate traditional songs and
dances. But with a few exceptions his major instrumental works, whether
tonal or atonal, avoid such references. For the difficult modernist works
there was no sympathetic ear in Greece. Skalkottas chose another way,
and was forced into isolation, though it is possible to overstate this; he
was certainly not the only Greek composer to encounter difficulties in
securing performances.
He had been preceded in Berlin by the slightly older Dimitri Mitrop-
oulos, whose own creative activities, eclipsed by his later reputation as a
conductor, were of major significance. The bulk of Mitropouloss music
was composed during the 1920s, while Skalkottas did his most productive
work in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it is usual to consider them
together. However, it is over-simple to represent them as a unified opposi-
tion to the aesthetics of the National School. Mitropoulos was involved in
pro-nationalist polemics while in Athens, and several of his early works
might well be regarded as among the finest products of Greek national-
ism in just the sense that Kalomiris understood it. It was when he arrived
in Berlin in 1921 that he found a new orientation, thanks mainly to his
contact with Busoni. It is often claimed that Busonis unflattering remarks
on the Greek Sonata, composed in 1920, proved so devastating to Mitro-
poulos that he was unable to compose until his return to Athens in 1924.
Whatever the truth of that, it was the neo-Baroque atonal idiom he devel-
oped at that time that invites an association with Skalkottas.
These two composers, taken together, produced a corpus of modernist
music that had little or no impact in Greece until after World War II. The
story is of course different today. Partly in the wake of a more general
post-war rehabilitation of serial music and a corresponding rejection of
the national school, Skalkottas started to gain posthumous support among
small groups of Greek critics (the very same critics who had damned him
during his lifetime) and scholars (the musicologist John G. Papaioan-
nou was key) as well with expatriate Greeks and those with a particular
interest in the Schoenberg legacy (there are some parallels with the rein-
vestigation of Bartk in Hungary and of Enescu in Romania, despite the
different political contexts). The result was that as Kalomiriss star faded,
that of Skalkottas shone more brightly, and Greek musicologists weaved
him into the national history. The tables had turned, and the balance was
lost again, with the national school now denigrated for its aesthetic defi-
ciencies and anachronism.42
42Konstantinou 2004.
328 chapter twelve
43One other Greek composer, Harilaos Perpessas (190795), studied with Schoenberg
at this time; his music is in an expanded tonal idiom somewhat akin to Skryabin.
44For an excellent discussion of the Inventions, see Haris Xanthoudakiss introduction
to Mitropoulos 2010.
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in each of the four movements, while the strings function as the ripieno
throughout, and also by investing the gestures associated with the formal
archetypes with fresh meaning. Thus the rhythmic profile of the French
Overture is unmistakable in the opening Largo movement, while the sec-
ond movement uses a fugato technique in a predominantly 7/8 rhythm,
and the third is an extended chorale animated by contrapuntal working.
In the finale, the sound world changes, as piano and percussion enter for
the first time. Here Mitropoulos turns to traditional music, using a dance
melody from Kythera as the basis of a fugue. This, however, is anything
but conventional pastiche. The presentation of the theme in cluster for-
mations may seem an alienating device, but it is in fact a logical conclu-
sion of the intervallic argument of the work, where parallelism is applied
to progressively diminishing intervals from movement to movement.
The Concerto Grosso was performed in Berlin in 1930, at a concert in
which Mitropoulos also performed Prokofievs Third Piano Concerto as a
last-minute replacement for Egon Petri. His success as a conductor and
pianist eclipsed his compositional achievement on that occasion, and
while the Concerto Grosso was not quite the end of his activity as a com-
poser, it was his last major composition before he embarked on his career
as an eminent conductor. In contrast, Skalkottass 1930 concert, at which
his Concerto for Winds was introduced to Athens, marked just the begin-
ning of an arduous compositional road, on which the next major land-
mark was his First Piano Concerto (1931). This was followed by several
years of creative silence during which he endured a personal as well as
a creative crisis. But when the deadlock was released in 1935, two years
after his return to Athens, Skalkottas produced an unending stream of
music for the remainder of his short life, in difficult circumstances and in
the knowledge that he would almost certainly never hear the more com-
plex and technically difficult music. William Trotter quotes Mitropoulos
on this climate and its impact on Skalkottas: They killed him, you know,
Skalkottas, they killed him. And if I hadnt left, they would have killed
me too.45
The commitment and determination shown by Skalkottas the sense
of creative necessity may be reminiscent of Schoenberg, but Skalkottas
was not on an exclusively serial road. Throughout his mature years as a
composer, he wrote tonal, atonal and serial music, and without any sense
that he valued any one type more highly than the others. That said, it was
the modernist music that defined him in Greek eyes and ears, not least
because his primary posthumous advocate, the musicologist John G. Papa-
ioannou, sought to project him exclusively as a modern European figure.
Much of the modernist music is missing, but beginning with the third and
fourth sonatinas for violin and piano of 1935 there is a substantial corpus
of major chamber works (string quartets, piano trios, solo piano works),
orchestral music (suites, concertos, and overtures), stage music and songs.
In 193536 alone he produced the two sonatinas, the Third String Quartet
and String Trio, the Concertino for Two Pianos, the Suite No. 1 for Piano,
and the Piano Trio. In addition he completed the 36 Greek Dances. One is
reminded of the prolixity of Schoenbergs first atonal year (190809).
There are several analytical commentaries on Skalkottass dodecaphonic
music.46 But it might be noted here that right from its inception, dode-
caphony served any number of creative needs. Even the Viennese trin-
ity employed the method to radically different ends, and later composers
drew on these primary models and extended them in diverse ways. In the
case of most middle-generation serialists we can detect a clear evolution
of style and technique, and to a large extent this was true for Skalkottas
too. However, the lifelong inspiration was Schoenberg, and specifically the
Schoenberg of the late 1920s. This is not so much a matter of serial tech-
nique as of style and aesthetic. The nuts and bolts of Skalkottass serialism
were in fact quite different from Schoenbergs. He employed his rows in a
distinctive manner, working with multiple, motivically related rows, and
often reserving transformations (notably retrogrades; he rarely used trans-
positions or inversions) for formal functions where the effect is distinctly
audible. But on a deeper level he remained committed to the Schoen-
bergian ideal of dodecaphony as a mode of neo-classicism, a means of
renewing the classical past. In a way the world of early serial Schoenberg
entered a kind of time capsule in a culturally isolated Athens.
We might take the First Piano Suite as a starting point, since it was
one of the works associated with his renewed creative activity in 1935
36. Inevitably it evokes Schoenbergs Op. 25. Consider the two Preludes.
Skalkottass way is to expose no fewer than eight separate twelve-note
rows at the outset, a prolixity that replaces the more conventional trans-
formations of a single row that we associate with Schoenberg. But beyond
this essential difference, we may note that the processes of segmentation
46See the relevant studies in Katy Romanous bibliography (Romanou 2009b). The
major work in English is Mantzourani 2011.
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47This was the highly influential critic Sophia Spanoudi, writing anonymously in
response to the 1930 concert in Athens (Belonis 2009).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MODERNA
1 See the chapters by Ivana Perkovi-Radak, Vesna Peno and Nataa Dimi in Popovi-
Mlaenovi and Perkovi-Radak 2006.
2Konjovi 1984, 4447.
3See, for example, Karnes 2005.
moderna 333
post-war years. They included the anthem of Bulgarian choirs Rodna pesen
nas navek ni svarzva [Native Song forever binds us together].
Several of these songs employ the signature asymmetrical rhythms
so often associated with Bulgarian-Macedonian traditional music; and,
again like Mokranjac, Hristov was a scholar of this music as well as a
composer,4 believing that only music steeped in national traditions could
achieve international stature. A more immediate political context was
also invoked of course, and the date of the Balkanski pesni is significant,
given the fate of Bulgaria after the Balkan Wars, just as the collections of
the 1920s might be linked to its fate during World War I. Finally, Hristov
was as committed as Mokranjac to choral music as a medium for both
church- and folk-based composition, and no less active in promoting the
choral tradition on institutional levels; it was due to his initiative that the
Union of Bulgarian Choirs was established in 1926. There was more to
Hristov than this brief summary suggests. But my purpose is to establish
a parallel.
That parallel can lead us to other reflections. When Serbs looked east
they saw a people speaking a different language and with divergent political
interests, but with the same script, the same Orthodox faith and orientation
to Russia, and a shared cultural history stemming from several centuries
of Ottoman rule. When they looked west they saw a people with similar
origins and language, but separated by script, faith, and a cultural history
plugged in to the larger narratives of the Venetian or the Habsburg empires.
A counterfactual could be tempting here: in a word, a different Yugoslavia.5
Such an exercise helps us to see just how far cultural alignments were sub-
ordinate to political expediency in South East Europe, and that in turn may
suggest one reason why the real Yugoslavia failed to take in the way that
Germany did, or Italy.6
Culturally, the Yugoslav idea was both amorphous and ambitious, given
the mix of cultures, ethnicities and faiths that were to be embraced. Yet
it was an idea to which many artists were sympathetic. In the end some
form of South Slav unification (excluding Bulgaria)7 became a political
necessity in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the events of World
War I. If these territories were not to be gobbled up by greater powers,
they had better get together. And, as we saw in chapter 9, that included
Slovenia, whose cultural traditions were yet further removed from those
of Serbia. It is little wonder that the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slo-
venes, later the first Yugoslavia, was rife with tensions from the start, with
Belgrade and Zagreb centralists and federalists, respectively in overt
competition. But who is to say that it would not have gelled finally, had its
fate not been sealed by the events of World War II?8 Political federations
of culturally disparate peoples can work. We have the evidence.
Mokranjacs rukoveti were composed during the Kingdom of Serbia, but
the fall-out from these pieces their reception, impact and immediate
effective history, to use the language of Gadamer belonged not to Ser-
bia but to the first Yugoslavia. Then, in the post-war years, the rukoveti
took on additional layers of meaning as they entered the very different
world of Titos Communist state. And finally, in more recent times, they
were made available again to an independent Serbia. It would be hard to
find a better case study in the poetics of reception history, as we track the
shifting dialogues that are enacted between a fixed historical moment of
inception and a later sequence of changing receptions.
Biljana Milanovi has written perceptively about this.9 We learn how
inter-war essays by Serbian authors reformulated Mokranjacs ideological
position first in terms of the nationalism of the United Serbian Youth,
then in accordance with a dual identity model (Serbia-Yugoslavia), and
finally in relation to a Marxist-inspired shift of emphasis from the nation
to the folk. These latter two readings became in turn the paradigms
for post-World War II monographs on Mokranjac, where it was expedi-
ent to stress both a unified Yugoslav nation and an ideology of folklore
allied to an aesthetic of realism. Then, in more recent writings (from 1990
onwards), there were attempts to re-define the national elements in his
music yet again, including a proposal that the national should be under-
stood in purely musical terms. In this way the rukoveti have threaded their
way through changing political, social and cultural formations, attaching
course by the Second Balkan War. However, as late as 1912 the influential composer Miloje
Milojevi argued for a Yugoslavia that included Bulgaria.
8Lampe 2000, 46.
9In an as yet unpublished text, Past Musicological Discourses regarding National Iden-
tification of Mokranjacs Work, read at the conference The Composer and his Environment.
On the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Kornelije Stankovi and 150th anniversary of Ste-
van St. Mokranjac, Belgrade 911 November, 2006.
336 chapter thirteen
10Milanovi 2006.
moderna 337
how cultural collaborations laid some of the foundations for political uni-
fication in the years leading up to World War I.11 In the visual arts, there
was the Lada Federation (which included Bulgaria) and the First Yugoslav
Colony, while in literature there was the South Slavic Literary Association,
with seats in Belgrade and Sofia, and the Srpski knjievni glasnik [Serbian
Literary Herald], which despite its title worked for South Slav collabo-
ration. Moreover, as Jelena Milojkovi-Djuri points out, the Sarajevo-
based Bosanska vila [Bosnian Fairy] also played its part in promoting the
Yugoslav idea.12
Wachtel also writes about the symbolic role of the Croatian sculptor
Ivan Metrovi for Yugoslavism, notably at the Rome Exposition of 1911.
However, such ideas of a common culture were sufficiently vague and
catch all to serve more than one political programme. In the end, it was
a Serbian centralist agenda, validated by the influential theories of Jovan
Cviji,13 that came to dominate the politics, and it was often Belgrade that
played the leading role in promoting cultural reciprocity too, including
music. A symbolic moment was the concert, A Yugoslav Evening, held in
1904 at the Belgrade National Theatre on the centenary of the uprising,
with Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria all represented either by com-
posers or performers, but with Serbia taking the lead. Mokranjac was not
performed on that occasion, but his contemporary Josip Marinkovi had
two works played, including a choral piece Slavija that signified the wider
Yugoslav idea.
The concert opened with the overture Ljiljan i omorika [The Lily and
the Pine], composed by Stanislav Biniki (18721942) and conducted by
Petar Krsti (18771957). These two were the leading Serbian composers
of the generation of the 1870s, and both were active in the modernisation
of Belgrades musical life in the immediate pre-war years.14 In addition
to institutional development including the establishment of the second
(Stankovi) Music School and a prominent role assigned to music in the
National Theatre there were debates in the journals and at specially
convened conferences about the future of opera, the correct attitude to
folk music, the dialogue with Europe, and the place of the new. Krsti in
11Wachtel 1998.
12Milojkovi-Djuri 1988, 5166. The translation of vila as fairy scarcely does justice
to the resonance of this word in history, folklore and mythology.
13Cviji 1918.
14Binickis Mar na drinu [March to the Drina] was for a time widely popular; it is pres-
ent in numerous arrangements in the catalogues of every sound archive.
338 chapter thirteen
From the start, the one people thesis was more sympathetic to Serbs
than to Croats and Slovenes (very crudely, the Yugoslav idea translated
into federalism in Zagreb and Ljubljana, and into centralism in Belgrade).
Zagreb and Ljubljana continued their own cultural activities unabated,
maintaining distinctive profiles within the larger Yugoslav frame. There
were indeed major differences of orientation underlying the attempts by
artists and critics to create a synthetic Yugoslav culture following the birth
of the post-war state. In his documentation of canon formation, collabora-
tion and bridge building in literature, the visual arts and cultural politics
generally, Wachtel is sensitive to these differences, and he is careful not to
underestimate the strength of Croatian and Slovenian cultural identities.16
The one difficulty with his book is its neglect of music, where it often
seems futile to try to pin down subject matter and style as Yugoslav, as
opposed to Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian.
glasnik [Musical Herald] (1922), Muzika (192829), and then in the 1930s
Zvuk [Sound] (193236) and Slovenska muzika [Slavic Music] (193941).
In Zagreb there was the long-standing Sv. Cecilija (inaugurated in 1877),
Jugoslavenski muziar [Yugoslav Music] (1923 and 192841, as Muziar),
Glazbeni vjesnik [Musical Courier] (192731), the Marxist Muzika revija
[Music Review] (1932), and Sklad [Concord] (193245).21 And in Ljubljana
there were Novi akordi [New Chords] (19011914) and Nova muzika [New
Music] (192829), as well as specialist magazines such as Cerkveni glasbe-
nik [Church musician] (18781945).22
Leading composers took part in these polemics. As the music critic of
Srpski knjievni glasnik, and also of the daily Politika, Miloje Milojevi
(18841946) was prominent in Serbia, but Konjovi also participated, and
so did Manojlovi, Vojislav Vukovi (191042), and Stevan Hristi (1885
1958). In Croatia the key figures were Antun Dobroni (18781955) and
Boidar irola (18891956), along with the critics Rudolf Matz (190188),
Lujo afranek-Kavi (18821940) and Pavao Markovac (190341). In Slove-
nia, Anton Lajovic (18781960), Slavko Osterc and Marij Kogoj entered the
debate, as did the editor of Novi akordi, Gojmir Krek (18751942). Cultural
and political orientations among critics embraced conservative national-
ism, cosmopolitan eclecticism, modernism, and in due course committed
Marxism, the latter associated especially with the idealogues Vukovi
and Markovac. These two, Serbian and Croatian respectively, were unhap-
pily linked by the manner of their deaths. Vukovi, imprisoned in the
mid 1930s as a Communist, was murdered by the fascist police in Belgrade
in 1942 while in hiding; Markovac, a Jewish student of Guido Adler, was
killed by the Ustae while trying to escape from a concentration camp a
year earlier.
It is through debates in the press that we can most easily take the tem-
perature of musical life in the early days of the state, though the rise of
radio played a part in promoting Yugoslavism among the wider popu-
lation.23 The most immediately striking feature is the sense of urgency
attending the polemic, no doubt in recognition that the post-war settle-
ment represented a moment of political opportunity, and that music, like
the rest of the cultural world, had some obligation to respond. Composers
21For a full listing in Croatia, see Blaekovi 2002; also Majer-Bobotko 1992.
22A more comprehensive listing would include Laibacher Zeitung (17781914), Sloven-
ski narod (18681914), Slovenec (18731914), Ljubljanski zvon (18811914) and Dom in svet
(18881914). See OLaughlin 1978.
23iri 2004.
moderna 341
and critics alike were concerned to find a way forward for Yugoslav music,
and as a result ideological questions loomed large. There was much dis-
cussion of nationalism, and of the particular qualities of Slavonic music,
with Russia and Prague (rather than Germany and Italy) held up as the
most suitable models for a Yugoslav music; the sense that music based on
Slavonic folk music might offer an alternative to West European models
was palpable.
It seems clear that while the majority of composers and critics were
comfortable with an ethnic identification as Slavonic in general and
Yugoslav in particular, they were not anxious to subordinate their sepa-
rate identities as Serbs, Croats or Slovenes. Invariably local nationalisms
raised their heads, and often in an explicitly competitive fashion. With
perfect irony, cultural competition between the three nations extended
even to an argument in the pages of Zvuk about who was doing most to
promote Yugoslavia by programming music from all three nations (we
are all Slavonic, but we are more Yugoslav than you!). According to one
Slovene, it was the weakest brother (i.e. the Slovene) who knock[ed]
hardest on the door of assimilation.24
Zvuk is of particular importance in tracking the polemic of the interwar
years, partly because, as Melita Milin has pointed out, it drew its author-
ship from all over the new state.25 As a result, the debates crossed borders,
and we can gain some impression of the leading concerns of composers,
performers and scholars from all three nations. One such concern was
a widely perceived crisis of opera, continuing a debate that had already
been active in the pre-war press. The symbolic value to the nation(s) of
this genre was not in question, especially when it turned to historical
or folkloric, or increasingly socialist-realist, themes. But there were real
questions about how the genre should be developed so that it might pay
its way and attract wider audiences. These questions gained a particular
urgency in the new state, which was concerned to build or consolidate
its cultural institutions at a time when the social function of music was
increasingly on the critical agenda.
The other major topics debated in Zvuk, and they are linked, were the
musical nation(s) and ideas of the new. Here the debates were revealing
of dilemmas of identity facing a younger generation of composers. Some
24Milin 2006.
25Ibid. Zvuk had a later incarnation as the quarterly periodical of the Yugoslav Union
of Composers published in Belgrade until 1967, and then in Sarajevo.
342 chapter thirteen
26Dobroni 1933.
moderna 343
close to the Austrians for comfort, while the Serbs ignored the true legacy
of Mokranjac (there was, incidentally, a separate debate published in part
in Slovenska muzika, in which Milojevi and Vukovi took opposing posi-
tions on the Mokranjac legacy).27 Among the most interesting remarks in
all these exchanges was one by Dobroni himself right at the end of his
communication, in which he claimed that there remained three separate
musical ideologies in Yugoslavia. Here, writing in the early 1930s, a lead-
ing proponent of the Yugoslav idea acknowledged that, in music at least,
there were still three peoples, not one people with three names. The musi-
cal nations were still divided, Dobroni claimed, and he was specific about
the nature of the divide. Only in Zagreb did he hear the authentic musi-
cal voice of Yugoslavia; Belgrade had lost its way by imitating the world
beyond, while Ljubljana wandered aimlessly.
There was further evidence of this divide in the daily press. Stanislav
Tuksar has trawled the newspapers for reviews of Josip Hatzes opera Adel
i Mara, which was given in rapid succession in Ljubljana, Belgrade and
Zagreb between November 1832 and March 1933, with a further perfor-
mance in Split in May.28 The sharpest opposition was between Ljubljana
and Belgrade. The Slovenian critics, recognising the conservative idiom
of the work, were nonetheless supportive, with one critic in particular
anxious to identify the style as ours, meaning Yugoslav. Interestingly,
he included those Mohammedans, [...] Yugoslav and very attractive,
referring here to Hatzes portrayal of the Bosnian Muslims by means of
the usual signifiers (Jerko Bezi remarked elsewhere that Adels song is
studded with augmented seconds).29 Among the Serbian critiques were
accounts by Manojlovi and Milojevi, both dismissive of the opera on
several grounds: its orchestration, its dramatic characterisation, and its
conservative orientation (Mr Hatze represents all that is accepted and
traditional, bringing nothing new).
But most interesting of all was the reaction in Zagreb and Split, where
the old-fashioned nature of the musical idiom was praised in some quar-
ters and condemned in others (one critic objected to a patronising ten-
dency to support native artists just because they are native). Even irola
damned with faint praise: Harmonically, Hatze offers nearly nothing new,
but he tastefully arranges melodies filled with the sunshine of the true
vocal cantilena..... In summary, and this tells us more about the recep-
tional communities than about the opera, the Slovenes were tolerant of
Adel i Mara, the Serbs dismissive of it, and the Croats worried by it. But
they were all agreed about one thing; it was out of step with its time.
The debate between Dobroni and Osterc throws into relief the compet-
ing claims of the nation and the new. Yet even Osterc acknowledged that
in the right hands the two might be compatible. Close scrutiny of the
debates reveals that, exactly as in Greece, the issue was not just about
folk music but about defining a correct relationship to music beyond the
frontiers. The controlling assumption in Yugoslavia was that their music
had to catch up with developments elsewhere in Europe, with the strong
implication that value should be attached to the modern, the advanced,
the new. A modernist aesthetic, in other words, was the principal ref-
erence point for music in the inter-war years. Notions of lateness and
anachronism (a denial of coevalness) were accordingly prominent in the
discourses of Yugoslav critics and composers. The credo of several younger
composers was that in another place there was a progressive music spear-
heading musical culture into the future, and that they should be heading
rapidly in that direction, if not getting themselves to the front line.
Shortly I will argue that because of this attitude Yugoslav moderna was
literally a music in transition a transit to a known new is the language
I used in chapter 11 but prior to that it may be worth reflecting a little
on the inter-war debates from the perspective of today. In our present
intellectual climate, modernism is often identified as a closed, contingent,
historical moment. For this reason there may be options to rehabilitate
repertory that was considered unfashionably conservative in a modern-
ist age. In other words, we might accept more readily that the value of a
musical work can be separated from its aesthetic and stylistic allegiances.
If a composer is to interest us so the argument might run he/she must
have a voice that is distinctive, a voice of his/her own. But it may be a
conservative voice.
Eva Sedak, arguing for a more flexible understanding of periodisation
and style in Croatian music of the first half of the twentieth century, has
made two proposals that fall into line with this reading.30 One is that signs
30Sedak 2004.
moderna 345
of the moderne were present in Croatian music of the inter-war period, but
not as a period style, nor even in association with a particular composer;
rather they took the form of particular manifestations scattered across
different composers and different aesthetic positions. I will return to this
later. Sedaks second proposal is that the broadly conservative orientation
of Croatian music allows for certain continuities between early twentieth-
century composers and our own age; it is the critical stance that changes,
from one of modernist opposition to one of postmodern acceptance.
This opens up the possibility that we might re-assess Croatian music of
the modernist era, and not just Croatian. The composers classified as the
generation of the 1870s in Serbia, briefly discussed earlier, are plausible
candidates. And in Slovenia there was a comparable generation, includ-
ing Gojmir Krek, Anton Lajovic, and Emil Adami (18771936), as well as
younger composers such as Lucijan Marija kerjanc (190073), whose five
symphonies (echoes of Tchaikovsky and Franck) were composed in the
thirties and forties, the Bruckner-influenced Bla Arni (190170), and
though this needs qualification the rather more individual Marjan Kozina
(190766). The qualification is that, having studied in Prague and Vienna,
Kozina tempered his innate conservatism with tendencies towards what
some scholars from the region like to call moderate modernism.31
The issue of anachronism, in short, is not confined to Croatia. But in
Croatia, with one distinguished exception, there were few counterweights
to the conservative voice. In looking back at these repertories today, we
risk conflating the roles of historian and critic. In his study of Croatian
music, Josip Andreis discusses more than fifty composers whose main out-
put dates from the inter-war period. From these, he singles out a small
handful for more sustained treatment. There are questions to be asked
about how and why certain composers rise to the surface in this way.
They are really questions about the mechanisms of canon formation, for
there are local as well as global canons, and they invoke politics (of the
ethnic nation, the fascist ideology, and the Communist state), musical
scholarship, and more prosaic matters such as the battles to be fought
in getting music to the public platform. There are no absolutes in any of
this, and even the winnowing effects of time are crude at best. Yet there
is the greatest interest in looking back at little-known repertory from the
31See the titles of Miki 2008 and Medi 2008. As to Kozina, modernist tendencies were
already apparent in early works such as Balada Petrice Kerempuha, for bass soloist and
orchestra, with surprisingly dissonant harmonic formations, even in its final bars, and to a
lesser extent in the orchestral Proti morju [To the Sea].
346 chapter thirteen
32Steiner 1989.
moderna 347
33Quoted in Kos 1994. For a fuller profile of the composer, see Kos 1998b.
34Dobroni 1926.
348 chapter thirteen
35Dobroni 1922.
36Majer-Bobetko 1998. Meimurje is a region in the northernmost part of modern
Croatia.
37Buji 2000, 336.
38Andreis 1982, 231.
moderna 349
39Papandopulo was a major figure, and his Passion of 1936, making use of Glagolitic
traditions, is a work of some significance.
350 chapter thirteen
world, and at the very least it would have been tempting to tailor the
product to the market. Indeed Ero was in many ways the ideal of a Nazi-
approved opera, and it is no surprise that it was widely performed in
Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Contrast this with Gotovacs compatriot Josip Slavenski, whose leftist
orientation made him persona non grata in Germany, to see how musical
life was becoming politically polarised at the time.40 Naturally, this whole
issue became even more sensitive during the war years, when a Ustae
regime governed much of Yugoslavia under Nazi protection. I will return
to this later, but we may note here Sanja Majer-Bobetkos discussion of
the disquieting role of the Glavni ustaki stan [Main Ustaa Headquar-
ters) in publishing an extensive two-volume account of Croatian music
Naa domovina [Our Homeland], with contributions by Andreis, Dugan
and irola, among others.41
It would be wrong to suggest that modernism passed Croatia by. Lip
service was paid to the imperative of the new, with Debussy in particular
riding high.42 One result was a tendency to overlay conventional styles
with momentary and intermittent modernisms, and here Antun Dobroni
might be taken as symptomatic of a wider tendency. This is no doubt why
Sedak sees dispersed signs of moderne in Croatian music, and why Buji
speaks of modernity sitting uncomfortably with a folk-based style. Of
course, gentler language can be used, as in Andreiss comments on disso-
nance in Dobroni and Gotovac.43 But it was really only in Slavenski that
there was anything like a successful integration of traditional music and
modernist techniques, and his project was an altogether larger one, carried
on for the most part outside Croatia. Elsewhere the waters were calmer.
Individual pieces might stand out as excellentobjects well made but
there were few attempts to re-make the conventions, to re-set the terms
on which future evaluations would be made.
I come back to an earlier point. The exceptional talent (however arrived
at) was certainly there. But there is more to the conventional category
great music than exceptional talent. Slavenski apart, Croatian composers
seemed to lack the kind of significant project that uniquely defines both
its time and its place. There was little hint of the disruptive force of origi-
nality (not to be equated with mere innovation; I repeat that the original
voice may be both conservative and of its time) that would impose itself
on the world and in doing so might assume an exemplary status. This need
not be an adverse criticism, of course. It only becomes so if we take our
stand on genius and modernity, valuing projects of greatness rather than
projects of excellence. And in our own time projects of greatness have a dis-
tinctly twentieth-century feel to them. It may well be the great composer
who turns out to be the anachronism, for genius is out of fashion today.44
Let us replay these themes, but with variations. Earlier I established a par-
allel between Mokranjac and Dobri Hristov. Hristov was a key player in
the quest for a national identity in Bulgarian music, but he was not alone.
Following liberation, an imperative for Bulgarian musicians was to stake
out a unique territory for a national church music and a national folk
music. In both respects the demands of a newly established nationhood
distorted the picture, and in familiar ways. But in fairness to Hristov and
compatriots such as Vasil Stoin (18801928),45 there were equally distorted
claims emanating from without, and especially from the influential schol-
ars Ludvk Kuba and Franjo Kuha. Just as the Greek Church remained
sceptical of claims to an independent Bulgarian chant, so Kuba and Kuha
argued that Bulgarian traditional music was really just a derivative of the
music of the western Yugoslavs.
The reality lies somewhere between these positions. Political borders
seldom carry real privilege in classifications of music, and Bulgaria is no
exception. Where traditional music is concerned, there are commonalities
with Serbian, as there are with Russian, traditions; and in the case of epic
song the affinities extend much further afield. But at the same time there
are features of some Bulgarian music that link it more easily and naturally
to Macedonia, northern Greece and Anatolia, most obviously its rhythmic
and metric asymmetries. These non-Slavonic characteristics were among
the very first to engage the attention of Hristov and his successors, as
they attempted to define what was truly Bulgarian about Bulgarian music,
and sought to separate the national tradition off from other South Slav
44That this remark was made in the late nineteenth century (Villiers de lIsle-Adam
1985) emphasises that such thoughts are not unique to our own age.
45For the story of this great collector, see Todorov 2002.
352 chapter thirteen
musics.46 And once it had been identified with the nation in this way, folk
music could be appropriated by art music in all the usual ways.
As in Serbia, a strong choral tradition served as a mediator between
popular music and art music. All major composers contributed to this
medium, with arrangements of, and original compositions based on,
agrarian and urban songs. Potpourris of folksongs were common, as were
patriotic hymns, marching songs, and choral ballads. Solo songs with
piano also tapped these reservoirs, with Haidouk songs many of them
dealing with the 1876 uprising highly characteristic. Composers in Bul-
garia seemed able to switch rather easily between popular choral and elite
orchestral repertories, and while this is no doubt a comment on anachro-
nism and periphery, it made for interesting continuities, given the orien-
tation of musical composition following World War II. It might be argued
that the strength of the choral tradition was a constraining influence on
any impulse to change and innovation, but in any case the tradition was
a genuinely original phenomenon.
In the second half of the twentieth century choral music found ideal
exponents in the womens voices of the Koutev School at Kotel, founded
in 1967, and the Lyubomir Pipkov Choir under Vassil Arnaoudov, to name
just two such choirs. In its later development the distinctive sound of such
choirs became somewhat fetishised outside Bulgaria. Most famous of all,
in recent years, is Le mystre des voix bulgares, modelled by director
Dora Hristova on the Koutev tradition, and performing not just Bulgar-
ian folksongs, but settings of minority Sephardic and Muslim repertories
(notably in arrangements by Nikolay Kaufman). The sound quality culti-
vated by choirs such as Le mystre is unique, with soloists developing an
edge in chest register that allows the harmonics to ring out. The fluctuat-
ing fortunes of the choirs will be discussed in a later chapter. The point for
now is that the roots of the Bulgarian voices were in the choral traditions
of the first half of the century.
Reverting to that earlier period, the early twentieth century, we may
note that there was a general professionalisation of musical life of all
kinds in Bulgaria. Thus we have the beginnings of an operatic tradition
(the National Theatre was opened in 1906), a proliferation of caf orches-
tras, and eventually (in 1921) the foundation of a State Academy of Music
and (in 1928) an Academy Symphony Orchestra. Much of the pattern here
was similar to that in Yugoslavia, and that included the familiar tendency
for more talented composers either to study abroad or with Czech teachers
at home.
Again as in Yugoslavia, native operas notably by Emanuil Manolov
(18601902) and Georgi Atanasov (18821931) tried for size the avail-
able stylistic options, which usually meant choosing between pedigreed
Italian styles and a more obviously folk-based idiom. The second opera
of Atanasov, Borislav, dating from 1911, is characteristic of the second of
these options, with its Bulgarian-Turkish symbols (Haidouk songs versus
orientalisms) and its appropriation of the popular Bulgarian 7-beat dance
genre raichenitsa, one of the most characteristic cultural symbols of the
nation. With the earliest orchestral compositions overtures and rhapso-
dies by Hristov, Manolov and Panayot Pipkov (18711942), culminating in
Atanasovs First Symphony of 1912 a further step towards an indepen-
dent Bulgarian repertory was duly taken.
There was a gear change as a younger generation of Bulgarian compos-
ers came to maturity. Again the parallels with Yugoslavia are inescapable,
with the claims of the nation often thought to be at odds with the claims
of the new. Forging a national identity was a priority, privileging folk
music and church music as sources of inspiration, but the perceived need
to catch up with Western Europe was hardly less strong. Again the key
issues were debated in the journals and in independent writings: national
music, international music, and (increasingly) realist music, in the elu-
sive socialist sense of that term. There was an embryonic specialist press,
notably Musikalen vestnik [Musical Journal], edited by the composer Dim-
iter Hadjigeorgiev (18731932), Musikalen pregled [Musical Review], and
the short-lived Gusla, but music was also covered by the daily press and by
new socialist journals such as Zlatorog [Golden Way]. In addition to Had-
jigeorgiev, there were contributions from Georgi Baidanov (18531927),
Alexander Krustev (18791945), and Dobri Hristov himself.
At the centre of the debates were developing dilemmas of identity
among composers, and in particular a preoccupation with their social
and educational roles. This culminated in the foundation by Ljubomir
Pipkov, among others of the Association of Bulgarian Composers Savre-
menna muzika [Contemporary Music], which published its own journal, in
1933. That journal also called Savremenna muzika quickly became the
chief outlet for polemics about the future directions of Bulgarian music,
but now involving younger composers such as Petko Stainov (18961977),
Pipkov (190474) and Svetoslav Obretenov (190955).47
48I have in mind the Uprising of 1923, and also the destruction of churches by the
Communists in 1925.
49Wiener Figaro, Jan.Feb. 1943, 1617.
50It hardly helps that the very few English-language studies come from Communist era.
Venelin Krustev, author of the only translated history, was the son-in-law of Obretenov
(Krustev 1978).
moderna 355
Among the most persuasive of the works from this period was Improvizat-
sia i tokata [Improvisation and Toccata], composed in 1941 as part of a
larger cycle. The blend of late Romanticism and impressionistic textures
in the Improvisation (more obvious in the piano than in the orchestral
version), is reminiscent of some Croatian music from the inter-war period,
and it poses some of the same questions. As with Dora Pejaevi, we rec-
ognise a poetic quality to Vladigerovs best music, but we struggle to find
the composers voice. What he brought to Bulgarian music above all was
professionalism.
Stainov, on the other hand, continued to build on the world of the
Trakiyski tantsi, notably in a sequence of programmatic orchestral pieces.
Although conservative in idiom by the general standards of European
music of the 1930s, these exhibit a clear musical personality. They include
the Symphonic Suite Prikazka [Fairy-Tale] (1930), whose five movements
depict characters from folklore through a Russian-inspired alternation of
brittle fantasy, gnomic grotesquerie and romantic melody. A culminat-
ing stage in Stainovs work was reached with his symphonic poem Thrace
(1937), based on a Nikola Fournadjiev poem. This is music of power and
originality, again rooted in Russian traditions, but with a Sibelian capacity
to pace and modulate sections of contrasted tempi such that the entire
work unfolds with an inexorable, goal-directed logic.
A number of other composers have traditionally been grouped with
this national school. We may single out Lyubomir Pipkov, whose opera
Yaninite devet bratya [Yanas Nine Brothers] (1937), to a libretto by Ves-
selinov, is widely thought to have lifted Bulgarian opera to a new level,
and whose First Symphony (1940) is said to be a powerful, if traditionally
conceived, work.51 Also important was Philip Koutev (190382), who at
this stage of his life was active as a composer, and who in the 1930s con-
tributed orchestral and vocal suites based on the folk music he would later
make famous with his State Folksong and Dance Company. A more ambi-
tious creative profile was that of Vessilin Stoyanov (190269), best known
for his opera Salambo (1940) and his Bai Ganyu (1941), based on the Aleko
Konstantinov character. Much of Stoyanovs music sounds uncomfortably
grandiose today, but Bai Ganyu is genuinely colourful. A character sketch
in the tradition of Till Eulenspiegel, it is deftly scored and has some nice
parodistic touches, such as the oriental moments on clarinet during Bai
Ganyus travels in the first movement, the solo violin in Viennese waltz
mode in the second, and the vulgarities of Bai Ganyu at the public baths
in the third.
The early music of Marin Goleminov (19082000), including his bal-
let Nestinarka [The Fire-Dancer] (1940), his Symphonic Variations on a
Theme of Dobri Hristov (1942), and his Third String Quartet, can also
be associated with the national school. Of these early works, the ballet
score, based on a Konstantin Petkanov story about the fire-walking ritu-
als associated with St. Constantine and St. Elena (compare chapter 4 on
the anastenaria in northern Greece), has been justly popular for its lively
and strikingly original appropriations of folk dance elements, as well as
for more delicate, poetic moments (notably in the epilogue). Other com-
posers could be cited, but in general the music of this generation might
be characterised in terms of a late-romantic, folk-based nationalist idiom.
Only one composer seemed to look beyond this.
Dimitar Nenov (190253) was one of the most troubled, and at the same
time most adventurous, musical personalities of the first half of the cen-
tury in Bulgaria. It would be inadequate to characterise his music as late-
Romantic; though in one sense it is that. Hyper-Romantic might be a
better description, for Nenov achieves at times a tone of sustained ecstasy
that links him to composers such as Skryabin and Szymanowski, though
the affinity is more of tone than technique. His was a truly original voice,
even if not in strictu sensu a modernist one. Between the wars, he com-
posed a cluster of major works, beginning with his Violin Sonata (1921),
and continuing through his symphony (1922), first Ballad for orchestra
with organ (1924), and Four Sketches (192425), to the massive Concerto
for Piano and Large Orchestra (193236).
This latter is a single-movement work lasting some forty minutes,
structured around two motives that also determine much of its harmonic
language. Much of the rhetoric of the music derives from late-Romantic
pianism, but the harmonic complexity and density of counterpoint make
for a distinctive sound world, where the flow of ideas is unpredictable but
coherent. Unlike the Vladigerov Third Concerto, composed around the
same time, this work makes its own statement, and its final apotheosis
of the two motives is genuinely hard-won. Here, as elsewhere in Nenov,
fashionable sallies into folk music are eschewed, and this was symptom-
atic of a non-conformity in life and art that resulted in political difficulties
following the establishment of the Communist state in 1944, including his
temporary dismissal from the Academy of Music and (in the early 1950s)
the destruction of his recordings. Nenovs was the closest to a truly icono-
clastic musical voice in Bulgaria in the inter-war period. He was the only
358 chapter thirteen
Transit to Prague
It had long been the norm for young composers in South East Europe to
study abroad. Not all looked on this as a passport to modern styles, of
course. But for those with modernist leanings, the known new to which
they aspired was invariably located in the major cities of Central and
Western Europe, and the transit to modernism was naturally helped by
a period of study in those cities. Germany was an obvious destination for
Bulgarian and Yugoslav (as also Greek) composers. Of the student com-
posers, Vladigerov lived in Berlin, Stainov and Nenov travelled to Dresden
(the latter mainly studying architecture), Milojevi studied in Munich for
a time, and Milenko Paunovi (18891924) and Stevan Hristi both went
to Leipzig (in the latter case after spending several years in Vienna).
Yet Milojevi aside, none of these with the qualified exceptions of
Nenov and Hristi can really be described as modernist figures. Paunovi
was especially noted for his two symphonies and for his Wagner-inspired
operas, Divina tragoedia (1912) and engi-aga (1923). As Biljana Milanovi
has noted, there are some affinities between the latter work and Hristis
opera Suton [Dusk], composed two years later in 1925.52 But Suton also
registered both dramaturgical and musical influences from Debussy, and
this reflected Hristis greater eclecticism. When he finally settled in Bel-
grade after the war (following some time in Moscow, Rome and Paris), he
became a key figure in musical life there, founding the Belgrade Philhar-
monic, directing the Belgrade Opera in late 1920s and much of the 1930s,
and teaching at the Musical Academy, where he was Rector for a short
period in the 1940s.
Prior to Suton, Hristi had composed an oratorio Vaskrsenje [Resurrec-
tion] (1912), and the premire of this work along with the composition of
Paunovis Divina tragoedia, completed just prior to the Hristi premire,
represented a new stage in the development of Serbian music, a coming-
of-age, right on the cusp of World War I. Danijela Spiri-Beard, drawing
partly on writings by Tomaevi and Milanovi, has discussed the two
52Milanovi 2009.
moderna 359
55Mosusova 2002.
56Following the expulsion of students from Zagreb University after unrest in 1895, some
moved to Vienna and others to Prague, thus creating two separate groups. See Nemec and
Bobinac 1997.
moderna 361
worked there was the eclectic Milojevi, responsive to the new wher-
ever he found it. His years in Munich had seen him captivated by Richard
Strauss (songs like Nymph, Japan, and Hercegovaka uspavanka [Herze-
govina Lullaby]),57 but in the songs and piano pieces composed during
the war years in Paris he adopted the surface mannerisms, and the cool,
detached tone that we tend to associate with an impressionist sound
world. They included solo songs to French texts (Berceuse triste, Lheure
exquise), as well as piano pieces such as the Quatre morceaux (Stara pria
[The Old Tale]; Melanholino vee [A Melancholy Evening]; U suton je
ljiljan snevno [The Lily was Dreaming in the Twilight]; U vrtu [In the Gar-
den]). Impressionist influences re-surfaced, moreover, in the later inter-
war works, including the Kameje, impresije za klavir [Cameos, Impressions
for the Piano] of 193742.
In one extraordinary work, le balai du valet of 1923, Milojevi produced
the only Yugoslav composition to turn in the direction of Satie and the
defiantly deconstructionist world of pieces like Parade. To a surrealist text
by Marko Risti, Milojevi produced a so-called ballet-grotesque, whose
score comprises a parodistic collage of popular dance pieces (foxtrot and
waltz), quotations from Wagner and Strauss, well-known Serbian songs,
and even concrete effects such as a pistol shot. This was a one-off, but
it does say something about the contact between Milojevi and his mod-
els, and perhaps even something about the contact between Yugoslav
moderna and its models. Where traditions have shallow roots, contacts
with the new are likely to produce unstable results. There may be whole-
sale rejection or unprocessed imitation, or (and this is the most common
mode) there may be a fascination with external surfaces.
This latter condition, where modern surfaces are grafted onto more con-
ventional modes of thought, describes well some of the music composed
by Milojevi. The piano piece U suton je ljiljan snevao is peppered with
expressive directions that evoke Debussy, and its texture and compound
triple metre strengthens the suggestion. This music looks on the page
uncannily like Debussy. But it falls some way short of the more radical
stratification of texture we find in Debussy; there is still a single harmonic
layer that retains a background link with the harmonically directed idioms
of late-Romantic pianism. In a small handful of works, notably Jedan san
57For an account of Milojevis dialogues with western Europe, see Tomaevi 1998. See
also several chapters in Simi 1986.
moderna 363
[A Dream] from the Visions Op. 65, the textural intricacy and opaque
sonorities seem closer to Skryabin than to either Debussy or Ravel, espe-
cially in the cultivation of a particular kind of languorous melodic style,
accompanied by gently pulsating dissonant harmonies. As a body of work,
these songs and piano pieces do represent a significant achievement,
probably the closest Yugoslav music comes to an impressionist corpus.
Milojevis journeys literal and stylistic were not yet over. In the post-
war years he spent two years in Prague (192425), where he responded to
an artistic climate that might be loosely characterised as expressionist.
I will come to this in a moment. But first it is worth noting that as a musi-
cal capital of the Habsburgs, Prague had long been a magnet for young
composers from the South Slav lands. In 1904, twenty years before Milojevi
studied there, Petar Konjovi, was among their ranks. That twenty-year
difference, all-important in terms of what was on offer in Prague, can
nonetheless be misleading, for Milojevi and Konjovi were almost exact
contemporaries. Their philosophies, all the same, were very different.
Where Milojevi grouped himself with the Europeans among the Serbian
intelligentsia, Konjovi saw himself from the start as a composer in the
Mokranjac tradition. Along with Slavenski and the rather younger Marko
Tajevi (190084), whose Seven Balkan Dances for piano (1927) are still
highly valued today, he set out to achieve the kind of alliance between
traditional music and modernism that he identified in composers such
as Musorgsky and Janek.58 Moreover he aspired to the kind of psycho-
logical realism that is associated with those composers, achieved though
intonational fidelity to everyday speech.
It remains an intriguing and suggestive fact that these three Yugoslav
composers, the three who came closest to a Bartkian model of modern
musical nationalism, each followed career paths that were split between
Belgrade and Zagreb. Thus the two Serbs, Konjovi and Tajevi, were
employed in Zagreb for much of the inter-war period, while the Croat,
Slavenski, settled in Belgrade in the 1920s. It seems, too, that the larger
project of all three composers might be understood, at least in part, as a
modernist extension of a pan-Slavist ideology. This was true of Konjovi
especially. He himself made a distinction between eastern and western
orientations among Slav composers, explicitly favouring the former (by
58We need to keep the chronology in mind here. Janek had only just achieved a
belated recognition when Konjovi arrived in Prague.
364 chapter thirteen
59As Eva Sedak points out (Sedak 1989), Konjovi was criticised in the Croatian press
as either too nationalist or too European.
moderna 365
60Rijavec 1969a.
61 Rijavec 1969b.
62Cvetko 1972.
moderna 367
63Tomaevi 2007.
64A publication by Miroslav Krlea was of seminal importance here. His Predgovor
mapi crtea Krste Hegeduia Podravski motivi of 1933 instigated a debate on social art
that quickly found its way into the pages of Zvuk (see Krlea 1973).
368 chapter thirteen
and Rhythms from the Balkans, Op. 69 of 1942, though harmonically these
pieces are often exploratory (No. 16, for example), and also rhythmically
(No. 3 alternates 10/8 and 11/8 sections). Perhaps an even more interest-
ing case was Vukovi, a composer-critic who, like Milojevi, began as a
fervent advocate of everything new but in the end joined the clamour
for roots, for social function, for realism. While in Prague, Vukovi had
joined Matija Gubec, a revolutionary student movement, and on his
return to Yugoslavia he became involved with the Communist struggle,
with consequences that have already been described. His first rukovet of
1941, the very year in which Yugoslavia was attacked, occupied and broken
up, was thus a symbolic gesture of return: to Mokranjac, to Serbia, and to
Yugoslavia.
If we take the longer view through into the Communist state, we might
say that Croatia provided the continuity and Serbia the novelty, while Slo-
venia kept a foot in both camps. Such a characterisation is crude, but it
is along the right lines, and it calls into question the Yugoslavism that
continued to play in official cultural pronouncements in the reincarna-
tion of the state. Of course, my characterisation leaves out of the picture
altogether three of the republics that would form part of Titos Yugoslavia.
It was mainly under Tito that Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and
Montenegro were modernised and began to build and consolidate a for-
mal musical culture. And in this respect the differences between genera-
tions proved to be more significant than those questions of nationalism
or socialism that were so much debated by composers and critics in the
inter-war years. Meanwhile, one major composer transcended all these
categories generation, nationality and political orientation in the way
that major composers do.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SERBO-CROAT
Europes fluid borders and unstable politics can wreak havoc with
composers nationalities. Hugo Wolf was born into a German culture in
what is now Slovenia, Karol Szymanowski into a Polish culture in a now-
independent Ukraine. In former Yugoslavia, where, as the Macedonian
writer Goran Stefanovski put it, you cant be born and die in the same
country, these questions have become sensitive. Consider the difficulties fac-
ing the editors of the second edition of The New Grove. All those entries that
had been happily lumped together as Yugoslav in 1980 had to be carefully
unpicked in 2001. It is not always easy to assign a cast-iron national identity
to a composer in contexts that are politically volatile. Legalistic definitions
may well be out of sync not just with composers subjective constructions of
nationality, but with the consensus adopted by host communities.
There was a whole generation of composers born in Serbia, or in the
Croatian and Slovenian territories of the Habsburg Empire, who lived out
their adult lives in Yugoslavia, and died as citizens of the federal state.
How we label them today is moot. Most of them felt more Serbian, or
Croatian, or Slovenian than Yugoslav, though for some of them the terms
were more-or-less synonymous. As to the view from without, it was cus-
tomary until the break-up of the state to label such composers Yugoslavs.
But these days we think of them as Serbs, or Croats or Slovenes. Language
is a powerful metaphor for these shifts. We no longer speak of Serbo-
Croat, and the language is indeed separating out Dubravka Ugrei
describes it as split, tortured1 with contrived differentiation between
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (and more recently Montenegrin) variet-
ies. But for many years it was basically one, and its success was hailed as
a triumph of Yugoslavism.
Career paths further confuse the issue. As noted in chapter 13, Petar
Konjovi and Marko Tajevi were Serbs who lived for much of their lives
in Zagreb. Likewise, Kreimir Baranovi (18941975) and Josip tolcer
Slavenski were Croats who made their later careers in Belgrade. Slavenski
brings the issue into sharpest focus precisely because he is widely regarded
as the most significant composer working in the former Yugoslavia during
his lifetime. He was someone worth claiming. Scholarship on his music
has been more-or-less evenly divided between Zagreb and Belgrade.2 In
the 1970s and 1980s, there were contributions from the Croat Eva Sedak
and the Serb Mirjana ivkovi, with Sedaks 1984 monograph, reflecting
analytical approaches that were current at the time, still regarded as a
landmark publication (it contains a thematic catalogue jointly authored
by Sedak and ivkovi).3 Then, more recently, ivkovis edited collection
(2006), based on a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the com-
posers death, brought Slavenski scholarship into the modern age.4
Unhappily, the wars of succession put paid to collaborative projects
between Belgrade and Zagreb. The jointly organised publication of Slaven-
skis collected works was suspended in the early 1990s and has not been
revived. Likewise, the Belgrade conference in 2005 the source of that
ivkovi publication was conspicuous for the absence of leading players
from Croatia. It is unfortunate that such attitudes linger in the scholarly
arena. And they are not the preserve of any one party. Croats may have
refused invitations to the Slavenski conference in Belgrade (were they
blacklisting Serbian musicology, or blaming Slavenski for having settled
in Belgrade?), but at another recent conference one Serbian scholar was
heard to chastise another for describing Slavenski as a Croatian composer.
Slavenski himself would not have recognised any rationale for this com-
petition. Born in (Habsburg) Croatia, fostered by Serbia, he was owned by
neither. He was Serbo-Croat, Yugoslav, Balkan. And he was Meimurjean.
It is of some interest that he studied in Budapest, moving there from
akovec and Varadin in 1913. Budapest helped shape him as a composer,
even if his music from these early years lacked maturity, though not enter-
prise (some of the music in his early suite Sa Balkana [From the Balkans]
is both harmonically bold and metrically complex). While in Budapest he
worked for both Bartk and Kodly, studying composition with Kodly
and transcribing field notes for both men. In other words, he had the best
of models for a modernism forged from traditional agrarian repertories.
In the later war years he engaged in his own collecting activities while
serving in the military (mainly along the borders with Romania), but
2The State-funded Slavenski Archive (Legat Josip Slavenskog), located in Belgrade, has
now apparently been closed.
3Sedak 1984.
4ivkovi 2006.
serbo-croat 371
5Other constituent parts were the Prasimfonija [Symphony of Ancient Times], Koz-
mogonija [Symphony of the Cosmos], and Heliofonija [Symphony of the Sun]. Materials
from these projected pieces found their way into other works by Slavenski.
372 chapter fourteen
The major achievement of the Prague years was the First String Quartet,
which exists in several versions sharing similar musical materials. It was
completed in 1923, and it was the work that more than any other brought
him to international attention when performed at Donaueschingen a year
after its composition. Its selection by a committee that included Schoen-
berg and Schreker augured well for Slavenskis career as a composer (he
was taken on by Schotts), but he had difficulty maintaining this visibility in
later years, and was largely neglected after World War II, though still with
some success (performances of the Violin Concerto and positive reviews
for a performance of the Sinfonija orijenta) in 1950s Belgrade. By the time
of the Donaueschingen performance, Slavenski had already returned to
Yugoslavia. He had been obliged to cut short his time in Prague, and took
a modest teaching post at the Zagreb Academy in September 1923. Then,
less than a year later, he moved to Belgrade, where, apart from an eight-
month period spent in Paris in 192526, he remained until his death.
The move to Belgrade was not about nationality; any more than was
Konjovis move in the other direction. The brief period in Zagreb was
an intensely creative one (the piano sonata; the Slavenska sonata [Slavic
Sonata] for violin and piano), and during it he established or affirmed
musical friendships that would prove to be lasting. The immediate cause
of his departure was his removal from the Academy due to major cutbacks
at the end of 1923. In contrast, he had a firm offer from the Belgrade Music
School. But there are suggestions, too, that the atmosphere in Zagreb was
not entirely conducive, especially given his Meimurjean roots. Milana
Slavenski, who would marry the composer a few years later, commented
not just on the conservative influences prevailing in musical circles in
Zagreb, but on a certain snobbishness towards provincial Meimurjeans
(Slavenski was always keen to parade his credentials as a bakers son who
had turned his hand to the trade).6
Belgrade, on the other hand, was an open city, a newly minted capital,
and a blank sheet on which new stories were being written in all the
arts, with the Grupa umetnika [Artists Group], established in 1919, play-
ing a key role in expanding the cultural horizons of the city. Slavenskis
productivity remained undiminished during his first year in Belgrade. He
completed several major works, including his quintet Sa sela [From the
Village], Sonata religiosa [Religious Sonata] for violin and organ, Piano
Suite Iz Srbije [From Serbia] and symphonic Sketches Mladost [Youth],
though during the following winter sojourn in Paris he seems to have con-
tented himself mainly with revisions. All the same, Paris may have played
a role in introducing him to more radical tendencies in art. And it was in
Paris that he developed an interest in the avant-garde movement known
as Zenitism, around the time when Ljubomir Micis controversial journal
Zenit was finally proscribed by the Yugoslav authorities.
Milana Slavenski downplays the significance of Zenitism in her hus-
bands creative development.7 She does, however, discuss his encounter
in Paris with the ardent Zenitist artist Branko V. Poljanski, the pseudonym
used by Micis brother. It seems that Slavenski took Poljanski in and
helped him financially, and that Poljanski in turn introduced the com-
poser to several artists associated with the Parisian avant-garde, including
Pablo Picasso. Milana was not entirely wrong to dissociate her husband
from the Zenitists. It is true that he did not subscribe to their more subver-
sive agendas, that he tired of the Mici brothers, and that his own brand of
Balkan vehemence was different from theirs. But this is to minimise what
are very real connections.
At the outset, Zenitism was influenced by European avant-garde move-
ments, but ultimately it took its stand on an opposition between the Bal-
kans and Western Europe, and on a view of the former as a potential
source of the latters renewal. Its tone was militant in the manner of
avant-garde manifestos in the 1920s and its agenda was ambitious: noth-
ing less than to transform modern life by means of radical art. What was
needed and it is an intriguing reversal of the customary flow of ideas
was a purifying and energising Balkanisation of Europe, through the
power of the Balkan barbaro-genius, a local variation on a Nietzschean
theme. It is hard not to see an element of this in at least one dimension of
Slavenskis music, including its references to the eastern orientation of the
Balkans. Certainly it is telling that the score of Zagorski tamburai, the
second movement of his suite Sa Balkana, was given in an issue of Zenit
dated October 1925. I will return to Zagorski tamburai shortly.
By the time Slavenski returned to Belgrade from Paris in July 1926 to
take up a teaching appointment at an all boys Gimnazija, he already had
an impressive portfolio of compositions. It is time to take a brief look at
some of them. Consider first two pieces composed in Prague, both signal-
ling Yugoslavia. The suite Iz Jugoslavije exists in several versions, vocal
and instrumental. It is based on traditional music, including songs from
7Ibid.
374 chapter fourteen
8Buji 1978.
serbo-croat 375
9For a discussion of Micis zenitist manifesto and his idea of the barbarogenius, see
imii 2003.
376 chapter fourteen
10In his article, Muziki folklor kao politiko oruje (Knjievne novine, 1 April 1955),
Slavenski criticised Bartk for Magyarising the folk music of neighbouring countries,
including that of Meimurje. See Sedak 1984, i, 235.
11 Buji 1978.
serbo-croat 377
12Debray 2007.
378 chapter fourteen
etiri balkanske igre [Four Balkan Dances]. Completed in 1938 on the eve of
World War II, etiri balkanske igre was the last major composition whose
title points specifically to the Balkans in this way. Of all these works, Bal-
kanofonija was, and is, the most popular. It was first performed in Belgrade
in 1928, then in Berlin in 1929, and subsequently all over Europe. Along
with the Second String Quartet [Lirski kvartet] of 1928, it represented the
high point of what some have considered a second creative period in his
work, and its panorama of Balkan nations and regions neatly epitomises
the inclusivity of his aesthetic. Compare the Simfonija orijenta (the name
given to Religiofonija when that term was deemed politically unaccept-
able) of 1934, which speaks of inclusivity in a different way.
From the start, the creativity with which Slavenski appropriated origi-
nal and imagined traditional music and aligned it to modernist idioms
lifted his music clear of the more conventional approaches of Dobroni
and his circle. In the little choral piece Voda zvira [Water Springs Out],
composed as early as 1916, this originality was already apparent, not least
through the succession of alternative harmonisations of a pentatonic
melodic fragment reminiscent of traditional Meimurjean idioms. This
changing background technique, familiar in appropriations of traditional
music from Glinka onwards, recurred frequently in his later music, as in
Bulgarska igra, the last movement of Balkanofonija. Also typical of Slaven-
ski was the re-cycling of the melody of Voda zvira in one version of the First
String Quartet and in the Pesme i igre sa Balkana.
Such re-cycling was especially common in folk-inspired pieces, and we
find it again in the piano suite Sa Balkana, completed a year after Voda
zvira in 1917. Not only was this based mainly on existing materials for
other instrumental combinations; in the same year the first piece became
a song for voice and piano, while the last piece was arranged for chamber
ensemble. Later (1930), the entire suite was arranged for chamber orches-
tra, and in the early war years for full orchestra.13 These are much more
than arrangements. Rather like Liszt, Slavenski allowed his ideas to spread
out into multiple media, genres and forms, and new versions often have
the effect of commenting on earlier versions. In other words, the same
folk-inspired material generates a diversity of pieces that are at once inde-
pendent and mutually dependent: a series of intertexts where significance
can reside in the play of echoes, of memories and correspondences, of
13This was also the time when Slavenski arranged his Piano Sonata and Iz Jugoslavije
for orchestra.
serbo-croat 379
recognitions and differences. This is even true where there are relatively
few changes to musical substance, as in the second movement of Sa
Balkana, Zagorski tamburai. There is a world of difference between the
piano and orchestral versions of this piece, to say nothing of the earliest
form of all (1912), where the scoring is for two citterns.
The piano version, with its percussive clusters (feroce pesante) and
relentless rhythms, reminds us again of that connection with Bartk, here
the Bartk of Allegro barbaro. Yet such comparisons need to be handled
carefully. One by-product of modernist canon formation was the parallel
formation of a scholarly canon for the analysis of modernist music: pitch-
class set analysis following Schoenberg, octatonic theory following Strav-
insky. For musicologists from South East Europe, it has been hard to resist
using such tools in the analysis of native repertories, but the effects are not
always as intended. We may appear to dignify lesser-known composers by
using analytical methods derived from the music of major canonic figures.
But there is some danger that we inadvertently marginalise them further
if the fit between music and method is not adequate. In a word, they may
be deemed to fall short of achievements that were never in their sights.
Eva Sedaks study of Slavenski is not without difficulties in this regard.
It is tempting all the same to explore Slavenskis affinities with Bartk
in analytical terms. In the case of Bartk, two approaches in particular,
coming from very different theoretical traditions, have systematised the
common ground between traditional music and modernist art music, one
transforming traditional modalities into abstract inversional symmetries,
and the other proposing an integration of (organic, eastern) golden sec-
tion and (inorganic, western) acoustic systems.14 It does seem possible that
comparable theoretical systems might be developed for Slavenskis music,
which is likewise concerned with modernist transformations of melodic-
linear (often pentatonic) structures. But one thing is certain. They would
not be identical systems.15 Despite their similar aims, the music of the
two composers is really quite different. To use the language of Adorno, we
need to allow Slavenski something in advance.16
For one thing, folk or folk-inspired materials do not play a single, self-
consistent role in Slavenskis music. This is already apparent in the music
he composed before settling in Belgrade in 1926. Sa Balkana is one of
several works that remain fairly close to their folk models, though the four
pieces alternating songs and dances are certainly much more than
mere transcriptions; this group would also include the song-cycle Iz Yugo-
slavije. Slavenski made a close study of the scale and interval structures of
traditional music, and his aim in such pieces was to allow harmonisations
to emerge naturally from those structures, whether the melody was an
authentic folk song or a folk-like melody of his own invention. Bimodal
accompaniments, often based on ostinato patterns, are characteristic, but
the range of harmonic genera is actually extraordinarily wide, taking us all
the way from archetypal bourdon fifths to dense clusters.
In contrast, the First String Quartet exhibits a much more closely inte-
grated thematicism, so that concrete folkloristic elements are much less
immediate. Folk models do still inform the linear-melodic elements, but
the models are now processed and transformed to the point where they
can achieve a measure of abstraction similar to that found in the Bartk
quartets. Then, somewhere between these two extremes, we have works
such as the Piano Sonata and the Slavenska sonata, where folk or folk-
inspired materials are often foregrounded in a raw state, but where they
are disrupted in various ways, partly through tonal interferences and
partly through abrupt juxtapositions with radical modernist devices, rup-
turing continuities but at the same time lighting up the simple melodies
in new ways. The effect of this is to give the music a visceral, gestural
quality, common to a good deal of Slavenskis music. It is highly distinc-
tive, and it separates him off from his most obvious models. For better or
worse mainly better there is no other music quite like Slavenskis.
When he arrived in Belgrade, following his Parisian interlude, one of his
first compositions was Pesme i igre sa Balkana, and the symbolic geogra-
phy is reinforced by later works based on these pieces: the Balkanska svita
and Balkanofonija. The three works are by no means identical in their
musical materials. The two volumes of Pesme i igre sa Balkana contain
quite a few pieces that do not appear in the later works, including songs or
dances from Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia, the latter an arrangement
of an early choral work. There are also regional pieces from Rasina and
Meimurje (the Meimurjean one is based on Voda zvira), additional Ser-
bian pieces, a Dervish dance, and a Slavonic dance. Finally, the Roma-
nian dance is different from the one composed for Balkanofonija. In the
five-movement Balkanska svita for String Orchestra Slavenski renamed
the opening national dance a Serbian dance and kept the Albanian,
Macedonian and Bulgarian pieces. He also added Moja pjesma [My Song]
to the Suite, based on the Meimurjean-influenced slow movement of the
serbo-croat 381
that recall Borodins Steppes of Central Asia. But again the simplicities are
lost, as the parallel fourths of the second cycle give way to the complex
sustained dissonances of the third. The Greek Song, meanwhile, allows its
oriental mode to unfold in tight repeating circles that are bound yet closer
by strict canonic treatments, making space for arabesque-like ornamen-
tal counterpoints towards the end. Most remarkable of all is the Turkish
dance, where wisps of melody and high-tessitura figures interweave in
unpredictable ways, all overlaid on a recurring percussion ground. Again
there is no real hint of teleology here; and this is also true of the Romanian
dance song, which activates its modal field contrapuntally, but avoids any
sense that harmony might shape the phrase.
This is one of the keys to Slavenskis treatment of traditional music. He
preserves the principle of the ison, but replaces a single tone or bourdon
with an harmonic field that may be animated by counterpoint and is sub-
ject to tonal interferences. The melody retains its integrity, but it takes on
fresh meanings from unusual harmonic settings and from unexpected jux-
tapositions with those raw, seemingly unmotivated dissonant events that
occasionally interrupt its flow and may even act as framing devices. Inter-
estingly, the one piece in Balkanofonija that works on more traditional
lines is Moja pjesma. As noted earlier, this is based on material from the
First String Quartet, and the more conventional voice leading and warmer
harmonies somehow intensify the nostalgia that is no doubt intended in
this portrait of Slavenskis Meimurjean homeland. As to the finale, this is
the Bulgarian dance that rounded off the first book of Pesme i igre, as well
as the Suite, though it is here transformed by a thicker harmonic layer, by
changing orchestrations, and by a newly-composed figurative tracery. The
augmentation of the theme in its final cycle is characteristically presented
against a complex dissonant background. Balkanofonija is Slavenskis trib-
ute to the Balkans, a region where, in his own words, different national
cultures of natives, migrs and invaders intermingled, merged [and] cre-
ated new and often extraordinarily beautiful and interesting forms.17
Two other major instrumental works from these years, the Violin Con-
certo (1927) and the Second Lyric String Quartet (1928), are likewise based
on either authentic or imagined folksong melodies. The Lyric Quartet in
particular can stand with Balkanofonija as a major achievement of this
creative period, and through its use of a kind of changing background
technique in all three movements it has parallels with the orchestral work.
18Nothing could distort Slavenskis intentions more completely than the extraction of the
Muslimani movement for a Bosnian recording representing the Sarajevo Renaissance.
serbo-croat 385
subtitle. The imitative points and arc-like phrases of this piece belong to
familiar traditions of choral polyphony, with sideways Cecilian glances.
Only the final epilogue looks beyond this world. Muzika is more explor-
atory in tone, but it likewise constructs its web of contrapuntal strands
into powerfully expressive climaxes driven by insistent throbbing pulses
on timpani. Like Hriani, this is goal-directed music. However, towards
the end of the movement, the pulses and repetition structures begin to
approach the condition of directionless ostinati of a kind more character-
istic of the other movements of this extraordinary work.
Indeed the remainder of the Sinfonija orijenta is almost a study in osti-
nato. In the first movement, Pagani, rhythmic ostinati (xylophone and
timpani) are presented in canonically ordered overlapping layers, accom-
panied by exclamatory vocal cries (as yet without speech), but building
into ever more complex rhythmic patterns and generating high levels of
dissonance. It is a novel soundscape, but at the same time characteris-
tic of a more widespread species of early twentieth-century primitivist
sonorism. Jevreji, on the other hand, cultivates timbrally differentiated
and fragmented melodic ostinati in a manner that has something in
common with Stravinsky technically but sounds really quite different.
There are evocations here of traditional Jewish instruments (including
the shofar), and the baritone soloist and chorus likewise recreate Jewish
cantillation and choral prayer. In Budisti Slavenski builds gamelan-like
pentatonic sound worlds over which the chant-like text repetitions (m
mani padme hm) are superimposed, simultaneously fast and slow. And
in like manner, Muslimani culminates in a so-called ilhi, in which the
music is reduced almost entirely to ostinati (a study in religious ecstasy, it
is in reality closer to the music accompanying the zikr than to an ilhi).
As noted earlier, the Sinfonija orijenta was one of a group of works or
plans of works collectively labeled Misterij. One is reminded of the Mys-
terium envisaged by Skryabin, who developed a series of mystico-musical
symbols in his later music: interval types, chord colours, bell sonorities.
And also of Messiaen, for whom Hindu and Greek rhythms, neumes,
instrumentation, chord colours and birdsong all had similar signifying
roles. Slavenski was not quite a mystic in the spirit of Skryabin and Mes-
siaen, but he was deeply interested in religious experience, and attempted
in several works to convey something of the spiritual ecstasy beloved of
the other two. He was also a scientist manqu, and in this respect he went
much further than either Skryabin or Messiaen. It is true that both these
composers translated their eastern-influenced visionary ideas into sound
by way of rather sophisticated musical systems, but neither really came
386 chapter fourteen
close to Slavenskis enthusiasm for what would later be glibly labelled The
Tao of Physics.
Slavenski was interested in the (putative) underlying unity of the world
and of the cosmos, and in order to symbolise that unity musically he toyed
with neo-medieval correspondences between music and science: models
of the cosmos that might embrace acoustics, astronomy and even atomic
physics. He went so far as to coin the term Astroakustika [Astroacoustics]
to describe these adventures, and although he entertained no illusions
about their scientific importance, his aim seemed to be a re-ordering of
the tonal system in accordance with astroacoustic laws. What we know
about this aspect of Slavenski comes from notes, some dating from as early
as 1913, deciphered and summarised by Vlastimir Perii.19 Interestingly,
they contain not just calculations about measurements within the solar
system and about astrophysics in general, but also jottings of folk music
and Orthodox chant. It is clear that for Slavenski these musical archetypes
of humanitys ritual and religious experience, liberated from equal tem-
perament, were all parts of the larger scheme.
What emerges from this is not a scientific theory, but a game with num-
bers and intervals with a capacity to generate musical ideas of striking
originality. Planets are associated with musical intervals in several differ-
ent ways. In some cases, for example, calculations are based on planetary
distances as measured by astronomic units, so that the intervallic equiva-
lents naturally involve microtonal relations. Here Slavenski is an explorer,
a musical frontier man, not unlike Harry Partch, with whom he shared
a fascination with just intonation. He was less single-minded than Partch
(just intonation is the truth), but he was no less convinced that equal
temperament was an unnecessary and outmoded restriction on creativ-
ity, and he valued native Meimurjean music not least for its avoidance
of such temperament.
In 1937 Slavenski composed two pieces called Muzika u prirodnom ton-
skom sistemu [Music in the Natural Tonal System], involving in the first
the 53-note-to-the-octave harmonium of R.H.M. Bosanquet, and in the
second four (electronic) trautoniums and percussion.20 The low C with
19Perii 1984.
20Slavenski gave a lecture in 1938 on the Prirodni muziki system [Natural tonal sys-
tem], and in his article Nae narodne melodije (Slavenski 1946), he discussed the artificial
nature of equal temperament. There was a wider context for such debates at the time, and
for the construction of instruments to meet the needs of Just Intonation, taking us as far
afield as Eivind Groven in Norway (Lysdahl 2004).
serbo-croat 387
pesme is achieved as we approach the first of the works two big cli-
maxes. A moment of dissolution leaves the organ alone before the final
apotheosis. Listening to Haos, we quickly realise why Slavenski was drawn
to the idea of electronic music, not just in the Muzika u prirodnom ton-
skom sistemu, but also in the projected Heliofonija, which was conceived
for choir, orchestra and electronic instruments.
There are similar sonic explorations in two works dating from the late
1930s, the Muzika za orkestar: harmonije i disharmonije (Muzika 36), and
the Muzika za komorni orkestar (Muzika 38). Muzika 36 extends those evo-
cations of the Orient (referring here to the Far rather than the Middle
East) found in Sinfonija orijenta. To a large extent, this was achieved by
building on existing characteristics of Slavenskis music: the multiple cir-
cling ostinatos, the stratification of textures to create platforms of sound
that proceed at different tempi, the imaginative use of percussion, and the
broadly pentatonic melos. Rather like Haos, the first movement proceeds
by gradually filling out and then animating harmonic fields that remain
largely stable, though in this movement Slavenski achieves a structural
accelerando as well as a structural crescendo. Again as in Haos, the for-
mal process is a unitary one, in which the rhythmically dislocated and
ever more tightly compressed repetitions of a small handful of motives
enable a steady accumulation of energy. The second movement, splen-
didly marked allegro vandalico, is an orgy of brass and percussion, a dis-
harmony of superimposed stabbing figures in polyrhythmic layers, vying
with rather than supporting the obsessively repeating principal motive.
This is music that takes no prisoners.
In this group of pieces dating from the 1930s Slavenskis credentials as
an unreconstructed Modernist are unassailable. Here we may speak of
transition in the second of the two senses I outlined earlier: the transition
to a known new associated with Western cultural capitals. Like a handful
of pieces by Osterc and Milojevi, these works are conspicuous for their
cultivation of avant-garde techniques. They enable us to model Slavenskis
output as a whole or at least up to the outbreak of World War II by
way of a spectrum of styles. If we position Sa Balkana at one end of the
spectrum, the journey will take us past key milestones such as Balkanofo-
nija and Sinfonija orijenta until we reach Haos at the other end (the fact
that these four works are also in chronological sequence has some sig-
nificance, but is by no means defining). It is a journey from harmonised
folksong to abstract expressionism, from the modernism of Bartk to the
modernism of Varse, from the Balkans to the Cosmos.
serbo-croat 389
with this region, which thus becomes quite literally the end point of his
symbolic geographies. It represented home and mother, a locality that
could stand for the larger Balkan themes of ethnic oppression and cultural
periphery (a Slavic enclave at the borders of Austro-Hungary). At one and
the same time, it could embody a highly personal sense of identity and a
site of ancient Slavic culture.
Following the composition of these songs, in the later stages of the war,
Slavenski spent much of his time harmonising Partisan songs and com-
posing a major but blatantly propagandist work Simfonijski epos [Sym-
phonic Epos], depicting Yugoslavia through the beauties of its folk music,
describing the attack from without, the resistance struggle, the mourning
for fallen soldiers and finally the attempts at reconstruction under Tito.
The work was completed in 1947, and I will refer to it again briefly in
a later chapter. For now we might note that in the post-war years the
composer felt himself doubly alienated: too modern for the wider public,
too conservative for the avant-garde. It was a dilemma for many of his
generation, but that would not have made it easier to bear. His music fell
into relative oblivion, and for the last five years of his life he composed
nothing of substance. Only after his death did his true importance begin
to emerge, and that mainly within Yugoslavia. He was undoubtedly one
of a very small handful of truly major composers from South East Europe
in the first half of the twentieth century, but even today most of these
figures remain largely unknown in the wider musical world. Only one of
them achieved anything like canonic status.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PLACING GENIUS
In 1940 George Enescu completed his Impressions denfance, Op. 28, a suite
for violin and piano. Fittingly it was dedicated to his old teacher Eduard
Caudella, Director of the Iai Conservatoire in Enescus homeland of
Moldavia.1 One of the Impressions is The little stream at the bottom of
the Garden, and to achieve what he described as una sonorit acquatica
Enescu enlisted a little help. There is an allusion here to Szymanowskis
The Fountain of Arethusa, also for violin and piano: not a quotation
exactly, but an explicit reference to one of the most imaginative of those
musical scnes deau we might loosely describe as impressionist. Arethusa
was the first of Szymanowskis cycle of Mythes, which had been in Enescus
concert repertoire since back in 1927, and the allusion to it in Impressions
denfance was a tribute to a work he admired. Yet it remains the only obvi-
ous point of contact between these two composers. All the same, I have
reasons to consider them in tandem.
In the years just before, during and after World War I the two com-
posers followed similar paths, and the parallels can be revealing of wider
issues. Their youthful works have relatively little in common. But with
the two second symphonies, Szymanowskis composed during 190911,
Enescus during 191214, following what the composer himself described
as an appalling effort,2 there was a moment of convergence. It would be
misleading to describe these as merely formative works; both are assured
and powerful. But in each case they pre-date the arrival of a truly dis-
tinctive voice. If you hear these symphonies with an innocent ear you
may be hard pressed to identify either composer. They are very different
symphonies, but they look in the same direction, adopting the rhetoric,
the gestures and the technical devices associated with an Austro-German
1Caudellas own Moldavian Overture (1913) makes for an interestingly contrasted evo-
cation of Enescus homeland.
2Malcolm 1990, 124.
392 chapter fifteen
beginning rather than the end. In its final version, Flegs libretto reaches
back to Oedipuss earlier life, fleshing out events that are given only a
cursory mention in Sophocles. Only in acts 3 and 4 does it align itself to
the Theban plays. By depicting the entire life cycle of Oedipus Enescu
humanises the work; there is a shift from plot to ethos. This allows for
the moral victory that can come with self-knowledge, let Destiny do its
worst. It is another form of overcoming, again spelt out by the music, and
especially by the final monologue, which invites comparison with King
Rogers closing hymn to the sun. At the end of the operas the protago-
nists have reached a state of exalted solitude; they are no mere reanima-
tions of ancient heroes. Knowing their shadow, as their light, they at last
become whole.5
These two models of humanism had a bearing on the parallel folklor-
istic turn taken by both composers in the 1920s. For Szymanowski the
nationalist turn constituted what he himself called a new period of my
creative life, during which he turned to the traditional music of the Tatras
as a source of inspiration. This represented the final stage of what might
almost be described as an archetype of the evolution of national styles in
East Central Europe (compare Bartk): three relatively discrete stages tak-
ing us from hostile imitation of a status quo (German late Romanticism),6
through a quest for alternatives (modern French music), to the discovery
of ones own jewels, to use Szymanowskis language.7 We should note,
though, that the jewels in question served a double function for Szyman-
owski: a symbol of the nation, but and probably more importantly also
an alternative exoticism. The brightly coloured music of the Tatras was
both homegrown and an exotic other; the jewels are ones own, but they
are jewels. For Szymanowski, the exotic was a prerequisite of creativity,8
and the real achievement of his later music was to accommodate it, har-
nessing the new harmonic and textural acquisitions of the war years to
formal and tonal frameworks of neo-classical lucidity. His folklorism,
then, was a project perfectly in tune with the Nietzschean message of Krl
5This is encoded in the intervallic structure of the leitmotiven of Oedipe, notably the
symbolic meanings attributed to tritone, minor third and major third.
6This corresponds to the category imitative but hostile in Ernest Gellners typology of
nationalisms (Gellner 1983). See p. 114 for further comment.
7My Splendid Isolation, first published in Kurier Polski on 26 November 1922. The title
is in English in the original. See Wightman 1999, 95101.
8His loss of faith in the exotic following the war years amounted to something of a
creative crisis for Szymanowski; Can you believe? I cannot compose now.....
394 chapter fifteen
is not the seductive attraction of Dionysian life forces, but the impulse to
individuation that is inherent in, and always threatens to destabilise, the
world of collective forms.
The parallel achievements of Szymanowski and Enescu might be under-
stood in relation to a conventional narrative of East European musical
renaissance. The narrative would run something like this. Social mod-
ernisation and cultural renewal in the eastern half of Europe during the
nineteenth century were responses to ideas and practices from Western
Europe that stimulated and then fused with slowly developing national-
isms. Because of this response mode, there was initially an element of
forms without substance about this process.9 Thus, the professionalisa-
tion of musical life associated with the shift from court to city took lon-
ger in Eastern than in Western Europe, just as the underlying ideologies
of liberalism and nationalism were given rather different expression. In
particular, liberalism10 was foregrounded in the West and nationalism in
the East, a distinction that found musical expression in the manipulation
of two innocent musics. The music of Bach and the so-called Viennese
Classics music from a different era served the interests of a domi-
nant social class (a liberal bourgeoisie) in the cities of Western Europe.
In contrast, traditional music music from a different social group was
pressed to the service of a dominant political ideology in Eastern Europe.
Hence the rise of nationalist music associated with this region, finding its
historical moment in the late nineteenth century, first in Russia and the
Czech lands, then in Hungary, Poland and Romania. When the conditions
were right, the significant composers, including Szymanowski and Enescu,
appeared on cue.
This narrative is in need of some revision. Larry Wolff reminds us that
the division of Europe into West and East was in large measure a ret-
rospective one.11 Indeed we have already seen that in parts of Eastern
Europe the dynastic presence was integral to western culture, and played
an enabling role long before it became a focus for ethnic and nationalist
discontent. To push the point to an extreme, it would hardly be useful
to link Prague, a leading Habsburg capital and culturally close to Vienna,
with Skopje, which remained part of the Ottoman Empire throughout the
entire nineteenth century. Alternative divisions of Europe in the nineteenth
century might proceed along dynastic or religious lines. Thus, we might
propose a cultural division between territories governed by the Habsburgs,
Hoherzollerns and even Romanovs on one hand, and Ottoman-ruled
territories on the other. This division in no way corresponds neatly to
West and East, especially when we superimpose further divisions
between Catholic and Orthodox, or for that matter Christian, Muslim and
Jewish, communities. Nor does the pedigreed narrative hold up at all well
in its reading of cultural nationalism, which was every bit as integral to
France and Germany as to Poland and Hungary.
Poland and Romania, then, were not on one side of a single divide
as they entered the nineteenth century. Poland was a deeply Catholic
country, politically shared out between Austrian, Prussian and Russian
dynasties. It was firmly rooted in western culture, though from 1830 that
culture was subject to severe, politically motivated curtailment of a kind
familiar enough, though more extreme than, in other European (includ-
ing West European) territories. Not unnaturally, Polish cultural historians
have made much of these constraints. Romania, on the other hand, was
Orthodox, still struggling to free itself from Ottoman domination and influ-
enced profoundly by a history of Balkan (including Greek) affiliations. We
noted earlier that, for all the familiar rhetoric about an island of Latinity,
it was remote from western culture at the beginning of the century, and
that the swerve towards the West, when it finally came around 1830, was
remarkably abrupt.
So how does all this bear on music historiography? For a start, it sug-
gests that we still have to work at correcting some of the imbalances
bequeathed by the politics of the Cold War. An adequate account of Pol-
ish music history would place it centrally within the rise of European
music, even if documentation and demonstrable continuities have been
victims of Polands troubled political history.12 In just about all spheres
the cultures of church, court and city this was a European story from the
start. And it was no less a European story when Polish composers turned
to traditional music and appropriated it in the service of nationalism. Like
their German and Central European colleagues, they did not encounter
any massive syntactical space separating that music from the art music of
the day. This was as true for Szymanowski as it was for Chopin. Despite
the novelties of the Gral (Tatra) idiom, this was a music that could easily
be accommodated by the neo-classical idioms characteristic of the 1920s.
Like the Mazovian elements in Chopins mazurkas, it added a specific
colouring, an inflection, to contemporary European styles.
The history of art music in the Romanian Principalities, on the other
hand, began in earnest only in the 1830s. Existing repertories Ottoman-
influenced classical and popular music, Orthodox church music, muzica
lutreasc, traditional agrarian music were not supplanted by Euro-
pean art music in the nineteenth century, but carried on a parallel exis-
tence alongside it, and remained largely unrelated to it. As elsewhere
there were projects of appropriation, not least in some of Enescus own
early music. But the space separating European art music from just about
everything else was a considerable one, and certainly much greater than
in Western and Central Europe. What that space signifies is the factor
that most decisively undermines any attempt to embrace Romania within
a territorial grouping labelled Eastern Europe: in a word, its ambivalent
relationship to the Balkans. A glance at the map is telling here. Romania
is in the Balkans or out, depending on whether we take the Carpathians
or the Danube as defining the peninsulas northeastern border.
A socio-cultural definition one that equates the Balkans to those
areas of South East Europe in which there was a significant and sustained
Ottoman presence is no less ambivalent, in that Romania was never
overtly conquered by the Turks, but rather came gradually under Ottoman
control.13 Adrian Cioroianu has constructed a psycho-historical narrative
around this ambivalence, characterising successive stages in Romanian
history as failed attempts to escape the Balkans, and allowing this to sug-
gest elements of a collective mentalit.14 The idea of the Balkans, he argues,
looms unusually large in negotiations of Romanian identity, and this can
entail either exaggeratedly positive or exaggeratedly negative readings of
what we now call Balkanism. For Cioroianu, Romania, especially since
independence, has constantly sought detachment from its geographical
condition, while at the same time trying to claim the best things from the
Balkans, which is a way of saying that Romanians want to look West and
East at the same time.
All this has, I believe, some explanatory value when we turn to Enescus
achievement, which is Romanian not just because it turns to indigenous
from Schubert to Brahms and beyond. This culminated in the Octet for
Strings of 1899, a work of considerable power, maturity and complexity, which
would merit heavy-duty analysis in a more focused study of the composer.
Already by then his music was registering the impact of French music,
and especially Faur, who is a presence in the Second Violin Sonata (also
1899) and in the Sept chansons de Clment Marot, a cycle of consummate
nuance and sensitivity. Another strand is represented by the Gallic neo-
classicism of works such as the two piano suites (1897 and 1903) and the
First Orchestral Suite Op. 9 (1903), with its highly original unison Prlude;
and yet another in the pianistic idiom of works such as the Barcarolle of
1897 and the Nocturne of 1907, where we view Chopin through the prism
of modern French music.
After 1909 there was a period of creative silence until 1914, at least in the
sense that major works did not appear; for the two years immediately prior
to the outbreak of war he was working on the Second Symphony. Then,
during the years of the war itself, he was mainly preoccupied with the
Third Symphony. We are now aligned with our earlier narrative, which
culminated in the composition of his masterpiece Oedipe in the post-war
years. Oedipe, I am suggesting, represented for Enescu a moment of arrival,
and also of departure. It is obvious that my summary of his earlier achieve-
ments does little justice to works of importance, but in the interests of the
argument I wish to focus on the music from the 1920s onwards, the music
of Enescus full maturity.
Stylistically, the distinguishing feature of Oedipe is not just that it
pares down the big romantic gestures of the two symphonies to taut, eco-
nomical gestures, but that it processes, rather than simply appropriating,
those elements of other styles, whether German, French or Romanian,
that continued to feed Enescus music. In his earlier compositions indig-
enous Romanian elements were either strongly foregrounded (as in the
Rhapsodies or the Dixtuor) or entirely absent. Such elements had not yet
assumed the importance they would carry in other works from the 1920s
onwards. And in this respect, as in others, Oedipe is the seminal work.
Enescu himself claimed to have written an opera with Eastern elements,
and musical features drawn from Romanian liturgical music play a part
in the score, notably scale types that correspond to the Octoechos, with
associated microtonal structures.15 Likewise much of the vocal writing in
15irli 1981. Coincidentally, Byzantine elements also find their way into the choral music
of Szymanowskis Krl Roger.
400 chapter fifteen
the opera has affinities with Romanian traditional music, most blatantly
in music associated with the shepherds, but in more subtle ways invading
the general melos of the work. This even extends to the incorporation of
unorthodox vocal techniques derived from folk traditions.
The important point is that these influences worked together with the
discreet yet all-pervasive leitmotivic structure Enescu imposed on the work
to transform his approach to thematicism. It is through the density of its
motivic information, where germinal cells and their constitutive intervals
permeate every layer of the score and where more extended melodic state-
ments are products of (rather than sources for) motivic working, that Oedipe
lifts Enescu clear of the late-Romantic inheritance that was unmistakable
in his earlier music. This also has a bearing on the contrapuntal writing
that had always been central to his music. The contrapuntal combination
of independently established themes took on a new significance in Oedipe;
it was less about synthesising oppositions, as in earlier cyclic composi-
tions, and more about revealing hidden affinities, a telling, and prophetic,
change of orientation. And one final point: the constantly evolving melos
that grows out of, yet at the same time cuts across or floats above, this
densely compacted motivic structure has every appearance of a spontane-
ous, fantasia-like sequence. Yet characteristically, as Octavian Cosma has
pointed out, this apparent freedom is underpinned by carefully designed,
though discreetly articulated, formal patterns, again prophetic of the later
music.16 The end product of all this is a score of astonishing originality, in
which conventional gestures and devices have been all but eliminated.
In the musical language that began to take shape in other works from
the 1920s onwards Enescu intensified and refined the folkloristic element,
but he did so in the light of the transformations already effected by Oedipe.
Most importantly, these works aspired towards a unity of musical sub-
stance. This was hardly a novel aspiration in music of the 1920s. Indeed,
a surface description of Enescus practice would suggest links with many
of his contemporaries. The musical idea is embodied in a germinal theme
or motive, often present at the outset; that theme or motive acts in turn
on the character of subsequent material, either through techniques of
developing variation or in the form of connected antitheses, and this pro-
cess continues throughout the work (i.e. across individual movements);
constitutive intervals take on an independent structural role; and finally
the motivic shapes permeate all layers of the texture, eliminating as far
16Cosma 1981.
placing genius 401
17The second movement of this sonata, like similar movements in later works (notably
the second movement of the Second Cello Sonata, Op. 26 No. 2), steers a course some-
where between a neo-Baroque toccata and a futurist celebration of mechanism not unlike
certain movements in Prokofiev from around the same time (e.g. the second movement
of his Fifth Piano Concerto).
402 chapter fifteen
18Niculescu 1981.
placing genius 403
following it the return of the germinal motive of the sonata has the char-
acter of an apotheosis.
As in Oedipe, this dialectic between improvisatory freedom and a unity
of musical substance has some symbolic potency, and especially to the
extent that it generalises aspects of traditional music. It finds an echo in
several later compositions, including the Piano Quintet, Op. 29 (1940) and
Second Piano Quartet, Op. 30 (1944). But in two of the very last works to
be completed (at least in their final form), the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 22
No. 2 (19512) and the Chamber Symphony, Op. 33 (1954), the motivic-
symphonic topic in Enescus late music takes a more severe, classical turn.
It is in these works that Enescus indebtedness to German symphonic
thought is at its most explicit.19 The quartet retains the complex poly-
phonic-heterophonic textures of Op. 24 No. 1, but not its processive dis-
continuities and abrupt changes of Affekt. Here a rigorous, closely unified
motivic process in the first movement opens out in several directions in
subsequent movements, some of them intensely subjective (the parlando
manner of individual voices in the slow movement, at times redolent of
Janek), others celebrating collectivities (the folk-dance manner in parts
of the finale).
The emphasis is on continuities, both bar-to-bar and movement-to-
movement, but this does not disguise the improvisatory quality so char-
acteristic of Enescu, such that the twists and turns of particular motives
seem to pursue a life of their own, even if in the end they have to submit
to the collective will. As to the single-movement Chamber Symphony, it is
as though Enescu distilled the world of the quartet, including its internal
tensions, to produce a yet more concentrated thematic essence. This is an
austere, initially unyielding composition, given neither to overt expressiv-
ity nor to folklorism. It is not without sensuous surfaces and moments of
climactic intensity, but in both cases these are products of, and are sub-
ordinated to, the logic of the thematic process. Rigour and economy rule
in this work. It repays repeated hearings.
I will pass briefly over the second distinguishable idiom in late Enescu,
associated especially with musical portraits of his homeland. This idiom,
exemplified by the third movement of the piano sonata, might be char-
acterised as a species of impressionism, evocative of place; indeed the
composer later described this movement as a depiction in sound of the
19Both these works, but especially the quartet, had a long and complicated composi-
tional history.
404 chapter fifteen
20The incomplete orchestral work Voix de la nature (of which only part of one move-
ment is extant) also belongs somewhat within this category.
placing genius 405
21Rdulescu 1981.
406 chapter fifteen
apparent in the melos of the Violin Sonata. We met the doina briefly in
an earlier chapter. It has something in common with the Ukrainian duma,
but is quite unlike any of the folk traditions of the southern Slav nations,
registering a rather different aspect of oriental influence than sevda-
linka, for example. The structure and manner of the doina proper were
described by Bartk and Briloiu,22 and many of the elements of those
descriptions introductory formulae, ornamental improvisations around
the augmented second between the third and fourth scale steps, rapidly
repeated melodic turns circling around and highlighting particular notes
of the mode or makam, internal cadence figures (alternating fourths), and
closing formulae are found in the Enescu work.23 Moreover, these same
elements, together with associated affects of sorrow and lament, are once
again strongly suggestive of familiar devices from Anatolian repertories.
Much the same model operates in the slow movement of the Third
Piano Sonata, where an ornamental melody is joined by other voices in free
rhythm to create a kaleidoscopic texture that slides easily from heteroph-
ony to free counterpoint, and from there to wisps of astringently harmon-
ised melody. And it operates again in the first movement of the Second
Cello Sonata. Here, as in the Violin Sonata, the piano alternates between
providing a cimbalom-like accompaniment, weaving motivic fragments
around the unfolding arcs of cello melody, and itself taking over, and
heavily ornamenting, the principal melodic line, or, more accurately, the
multiply-layered melodic lines. Taken together, all this music makes a
statement that is quite unlike anything else in early twentieth-century
music. It is concerned neither with appropriation nor confrontation but
with transition. It succeeds, as no other music really does fully in my
view, in making great art out of the transition between West and East,
a transition that is symbolically represented by the journey through my
three idioms, but in reality penetrates deeper and more uniformly into the
substance of the later music. If we follow Adorno in arguing that music
analysis exists to show to us how significant composers can bring to full
realisation what lies latent in musical material (and for Adorno musical
material is so heavily mediated that it can provide a remarkably authentic
snapshot of its historical moment), then the analytical challenge posed by
Enescu is an important one, and yet to be adequately addressed.
In the early years of the twentieth century, coincident with the triumph of
political and cultural nationalisms, significant music emerged all around
the edges of Europe, music that attained and has sustained widespread
international recognition. If we ask ourselves why Enescu was the only
truly audible Balkan voice in this chorus, we might try out a number of
possible answers. Perhaps his fame as a violinist was simply transferred to
his compositions. But this will not take us far. Why, for instance, has the
music of his compatriot Dinu Lipatti failed to make headway? Then again,
networking and promotion mechanisms are poorly oiled in South East
Europe, so that there was, and is, a battle to get music through to more
prestigious centres. At least Enescu had the right kinds of connections,
we might argue. Yet despite the worldwide respect in which he was held,
Enescu suffered more than most at the hands of publishers and agents,
and continues to do so posthumously. His major significance is widely
recognised, but he receives relatively few performances, and his contrac-
tual arrangements with Salabert have proved little short of disastrous (had
he signed with Universal Edition the story would have been very differ-
ent). Compare him with Kalomiris, genuinely gifted as a composer and
infinitely more skilled in self-publicity, yet somehow unable to secure a
place in the pantheon.
Perhaps we should really be addressing our own chauvinism. Does our
ignorance of composers from the Balkans of Greeks such as Kalomiris
and Riadis, of distinguished figures such as Josip Slavenski, and of Yugoslav
Moderna in general reduce in the end to questions of cultural politics?
Michael Herzfeld suggests that we need the Balkans to ennoble ourselves,
arguing that the perceived fragmentation, diversity and general fractious-
ness of this region are recognisably the other side of a familiar coin: the
Western self-characterisation in terms of individual genius.24 In recent
years scholars have been anxious to submit precisely this kind of self-
characterisation to critical scrutiny, not least in music. They have sought,
in other words, to contextualise the idea of creative genius as a perceived
historical category, and even to deconstruct it. Tia DeNora has examined
the contingencies of genius in relation to Beethoven, for example, and Dana
Gooley has attempted something similar with Liszt, usefully switching the
Enescu may also be related; likewise works such as trarii [The Gypsies]
of 1934 by Dinu Lipatti (191750).
In her account of modernity and the avant-garde in Romanian music
between the wars, Clemensa Firca discusses the impact of both Bartk
and Stravinsky on Romanian composers such as Rogalsi and Lazr, and
she further discusses moderate modernisms in music by Mihail Jora
(18911971), Paul Constantinescu (190963), Constantin Silvestri (191369)
and Zeno Vancea (192890), some of whom will emerge in later chapters.27
Firca outlines some of the trends that we associate with inter-war music in
Europe more generally at the time, and assesses how far Romanian com-
posers responded to them. And she argues, with Pascal Bentoiu, for certain
unifying tendencies in this music. Her survey also gives us a good sense
of the gradually widening catchment area for performances of modern
Romanian music, its increasing penetration of the world beyond. At the
same time, Firca is much too astute a critic to make exaggerated claims
for any of this music. Her account does indeed reveal that Enescu was
not a lone voice in Romanian contexts; indeed it allows us to see very
real connections between his music and that of his compatriots. But at no
point does Firca suggest that there is anything in earlier or coeval Roma-
nian music that might stand alongside the music of Enescu.
We could say much the same of almost any music composed in the
Balkans during these years. In the end it is probably impossible to say why
a figure such as Enescu should have emerged where and when he did. But
we can at least try. I suggested earlier that as an historical category, cre-
ative genius demanded not just individual aptitude (sometimes described
as talent), but a convergence of this with the kind of significant project
that was enabled by an institution of art. I further argued that the signifi-
cant project had to be uniquely defining of both its time and its place.
This latter formulation invites questions about the distribution of genius,
invoking geographical as well as historical perspectives. Just why do our
so-called great composers appear where and when they do? Why do we
find clusters and vacuums? There are no easy answers to these questions,
and some of the obvious answers (to do with political stability, a consoli-
dated bourgeois class, a well-developed institutional infrastructure, and
so forth) founder on closer inspection. I went on to outline a number of
options for the flourishing of creative genius. Depending on context, these
might include an increasingly individuated patronal art, Kunstreligion, art
as an embodiment of the nation, or art as a model of dissent.
27Firca 2001.
placing genius 411
What separates him from the others is the Balkan context. I would argue
not just that an investment in transition was uniquely attuned to Balkan
history and geography, but that it may indeed have been the only viable
project for this region at this time; as we have seen, Enescu was far from
alone among Balkan composers, though he was certainly the most suc-
cessful, in attempting a modernist project of transition between East and
West. An analytical approach that is properly attuned to Enescus project
would have no difficulty in revealing the exceptional qualities of his later
music, even its greatness, in something close to Leonard B. Meyers use of
that term.29 But the key part of this is the attunement, and it is the part
that differentiates my own position from Meyers. Meyer appears to allow
for little if any element of historical contingency in his attempt to define
the attributes of greatness.
I have some sympathy, all the same, with Meyers attempt to rescue the
aesthetic from the many ideologies that lay claim to it. We should resist,
I feel, the tempting tendency to explain away (rather than to explain)
creative genius, to understand it exclusively as a category of reception.
Nothing is easier than the deconstruction of genius. Contingencies need
relatively little excavation. Yet the capacity of a small corpus of European
music to enchant or re-enchant the world, to create a symbolically dense,
clearly marked, privileged place, will not reduce quite so transparently to
the conditions of its production, nor to the ideologies that have undoubt-
edly shaped its reception.30 That corpus is not, however, immutable. It is
subject to revision, and the more so now that our historical narratives are
increasingly freeing themselves from a utopian modernist bias.31 Herein
lies the importance of placing genius. Not only does it avoid the mysti-
fication and reification of genius associated with critics such as George
Steiner and Harold Bloom; it leaves open the possibility that the very idea
of genius may have outlived its usefulness in todays world.32
EASTERN EUROPE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Left, Right...
A distinguishing feature of the fascist Right in the 1930s was its mobilisa-
tion of the masses, and its capacity to sustain political engagement through
mass culture.1 Communism adopted similar means, and this accounts for
continuities in music-making across pre- and post-war administrations in
much of South East Europe. The pre-modern territories of the Balkans
were ideal breeding grounds for nationalist movements of the radical
Right, complete with grassroots anti-semitism, as the history of the Roma-
nian Iron Guard demonstrates.2 But the pattern was not monolithic. In
Croatia other factors came into play, including the catalytic role played
by the Catholic Church in promoting Ustaa as a populist movement, a
bulwark against the revolutionary Left. Such polarisation was a feature of
the wider region, and it continued into the war, with Communists promi-
nent in the resistance movements, and especially in the partisan forces of
Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece.
The increasing economic dependence of the Balkan states on the Axis
alliance ensured that Bulgaria and Romania were on side when the war
broke, and that Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania would quickly be overrun,
so that by the end of April 1941 Hitler effectively controlled the peninsula. Of
the puppet states, Ion Antonescus regime in Romania and Ante Pavelis
independent Croatia, extending well beyond present borders, stood out
for their singular brutality. In Romania, Jews and Roma were the victims
of pogroms and deportation.3 In Croatia, there were summary executions
or forced conversions of Serbs, ghettoisation of Jews, prison camps, and a
reign of everyday terror. The eventual outcome of the fighting in Yugoslavia
was largely determined by the decision of the Allies to back the partisans
1 The idea of mass culture is larger than a symbiosis of popular culture and the mass
media. It is in the end more to do with whether artworks adapt to these media or resist
them in Modernist mode. This Adornian formulation is articulated and glossed in Pad-
dison 1996.
2Ornea 2000.
3Deletant 2006.
416 chapter sixteen
rather than the royalist etniks. But for the Balkans as a whole, a no less
crucial factor was Romanias coup in August 1944, since this opened the
door to the Soviet Red Army. By the end of the war the entire peninsula
apart from Greece was under Communist control.
Wartime allegiances shaped formal culture to a marked degree, and
there is some irony in the fact that the two rival canonised traditions of
European art music should have found themselves politically aligned in
the war. Accordingly, Italy and Germany were well represented in the
musical cultures of the Axis puppet states. Frankfurt Operas production
of Wagners Ring in Athens was one of numerous visits from German and
Italian companies to the Balkans on the eve of the war, and during it.
At the National Theatre of Zagreb there were guest performances from
the Royal Opera of Rome, the Berlin Philharmonic and a Choral Society
from Graz in the 194142 season alone.4 Conversely, German and Aus-
trian opera houses during the Third Reich hosted several productions of
Greek, Croatian and Romanian operas, even if such events often took
place outside the regular season as part of a special festival.5 This is the
wider context for those performances of Kalomiris, Zoras, Vladigerov and
Gotovac in Germany, and one might add Romanian composers such as
Paul Constantinescu.6
The notion of collaboration is not usually appropriate, but in the
case of some composers Kalomiris in Greece, for instance, and irola in
Croatia there were writings and speeches that explicitly supported not
just the puppets but the puppeteers. German and Italian support of, and
subsidy for, native musical life, including the all-important radio, was
often the key to this. Transparently, the motivation was control, but for
some native musicians the benefits for their own careers and for local
cultures outweighed any propaganda value to the Axis Powers. The line
is hard to draw. In Bulgaria, most would have drawn it at Todorovs
Bulgarisch-Deutschen Gesellschaften. In Croatia, some would have singled
out the German-Croatian evenings that took place in Zagreb from 1943
onwards, though major figures such as Papandopulo and Baranovi saw
no difficulty about representation on these occasions. It should be noted
too that there were contacts between Bulgarian and Croatian composers
in the inter-war period.7
The war forced issues in the field of art music, where the structures of
formal culture were easily compromised or appropriated, and where mid-
dle grounds were hard to maintain. Arguably there has been an asymme-
try of blame in the subsequent reporting of these matters. The tolerance
accorded to musicians deemed to have engaged in necessary compromise
in the Soviet Union, for example, has rarely been extended to so-called
collaborators in fascist states. In both cases, it often came down to sur-
vival, and to the viability or not of alternative responses. It is easy to be
wise after the event. Of course there were many victims, and their fate has
influenced the retrospective gaze. Musicians (especially Jewish) suffered
and died in the war, whether through direct fighting or through persecu-
tion; the respective ends of Vojislav Vukovi and Pavao Markovac have
already been described.
A whole story might be told about music and music-making in pris-
ons, concentration camps and ghettos in the Balkans as elsewhere. Only
relatively recently has this subject has been tackled in a serious way by
musicologists, notably by Guido Fackler and Shirli Gilbert, and currently
by Barbara Milewski.8 But accounts are mainly confined to a few camps,
especially Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau. It has
been noted that this research does sometimes lack nuance, supporting
(or attacking) narratives of music-making as spiritual resistance, where
first-hand memoirs strongly suggest that motivations were less clear-cut.9
But the Fackler volume in particular is remarkable for the enormity of the
source pool consulted and the wealth of information provided. Most of
the memoirs come from German camps, where there were many Balkan
musicians (they include an account by Predrag Miloevi of his time in
Nurenberg). What is so far lacking is an account of music in the camps
and ghettos of South East Europe itself, apart from descriptions of Miloje
Milojevis activities in a camp in Belgrade, where he continued to com-
pose and lecture.
There are some harrowing observations about Jasenovac in the puppet
state of Croatia. We read in Anton Ebersts collection an account by Jakob
Danon of his arrest by the Ustae in July 1941 and detention in the camp
until 1945.10 Among the prisoners there were excellent musicians, and they
brought their instruments with them. One prisoner, Dr. Slavko Goldmit,
who worked as an accountant in the camp, had been employed in the
Croatian National Theatre before the war, Danon tells us, and founded
an orchestra made up principally of strings, but with accordions, guitars,
trumpets and harmonicas. Several of the musicians had professional back-
grounds, including the conductor Erih Samlai, who had taught music in
Osijek, but with only two exceptions, Roma were not allowed to play in
the orchestra. The normal practice was to play classical and light music on
Sunday afternoons, but the orchestra also performed for the Ustae when
they had guests from Germany.
There were few scores, so the musicians were obliged either to write
down the music from memory or to compose it themselves. Danon gives
one example of how it worked. He recalls that a certain Moritz Kohen, a
prisoner from another camp at Stara Gradika, wrote a libretto based on
Scheherazade, that somebody from that same camp wrote music for it in
an oriental idiom, and that the score was then clandestinely transported
to Jasenovac. The end of the orchestra was tragic. In 1944, convinced that
Ivo Volner, a Jewish member of the orchestra, had tried to escape, the
Ustae killed all the Jews playing in the orchestra, including Goldmit, and
forbade all further musical activities. There are further stories of a choir
established by partisan sympathisers in the prison in Vukovar and of an
orchestra at the camp in Porto Re in Istria, but the whole subject is in
quest of comprehensive review.
Beyond the camps, the effect of wartime politics was to prolong and
intensify the nationalist orientation that had characterised art music in
much of the Balkans during the interwar years, and specifically to enhance
the folkloristic ethos. Programming policies reflected this, but so too
did original wartime compositions. There was movement into a middle
ground somewhere between art music and folk music, and it came from
both directions. Even as composers aimed at accessibility through the
appropriation of familiar material from folk-popular culture, creating not
just patriotic songs but effectively propagandist war songs, so there was
a move to add new layers of sophistication to folk traditions, in effect to
classicise them. This latter tendency was especially evident in the official
cultural policies and discourses associated with the puppet governments,
10Eberst 1985.
the curtain descends 419
11Ceribai 1998a.
420 chapter sixteen
12Leotsakos 2005c.
13There are interesting reflections on this in ani 2007.
14Hercigonja 1972.
the curtain descends 421
22Tomaek 1982.
23Hercigonja 1962.
24Xenos 1984. For a study of leftist positions on rebetika, see Zaimakis 2010.
424 chapter sixteen
However, it was really only after liberation in October 1944, when the
Communist-led Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council was transmuted
into the Provisional Government of Albania under Enver Hoxha, that
Albanian music was put on an organised footing, along lines familiar in
the other Soviet client states. Again there were obvious musical continu-
ities between wartime partisan activities and the post-war regime. Thus,
in the immediate wake of liberation the Ensemble of the Peoples Army
was founded, along with a State Chorus, and exactly as in Yugoslavia
their repertory was made up largely of partisan songs and socialist mass
songs. Several of these songs were subsequently published, and of the
original compositions most are by composers who have since disappeared
without trace.
An exception to this was the contribution of the Shkodr-born com-
poser Prenk Jakova (191769). One might indeed spotlight successive
stages of Albanian post-war music history by way of Jakovas fortunes and
output. His song N nj dor kazmn, n tjetrn pushkn [A pick in one
hand, a rifle in the other] was characteristic partisan fare. It was popu-
lar at the end of the war, and very much in harmony with the socialist
direction Albania was to take in post-war years. Jakovas post-war career
was symptomatic of the brave new socialist world of music-making that
developed during these years. He became an influential figure in Albanian
musical life when he was appointed music director at the House of Cul-
ture in Shkodr shortly after the Liberation, and while there he organised
and directed a choir and orchestra that enabled him to promote Albanian
music, including the works of his younger compatriots.
In the country at large, music was hardly the first priority in these early
years of socialism. But music education was taken seriously, and again
it was organised in accordance with policy shaped in Moscow. The Jor-
dan Misja Music School was established in Tirana, and at the same time
the brightest young performers and composers were encouraged to study
in friendly countries overseas, especially Czechoslovakia and the Soviet
Union. State-subsidised publishing and recording were initiated, a Union
of Writers and Artists with a separate music section was established,
and several key performing institutions were put in place, including the
National Philharmonic Society (1949), which later (in 1953) absorbed the
Opera and Ballet Theatre. Then, after 1955, when the first groups of stu-
dents returned from overseas, now professionally trained, there was an
acceleration of activity, a burst of renewed energy that continued up to
the first major turning point in post-war Albanian history, Enver Hoxhas
breach with the Soviet Union in 1961.
the curtain descends 427
This was the context for the composition (195658) of Jakovas opera
Mrika, to a libretto by Llazar Siliqi, an extension and elaboration of his
earlier musical tableau Drit mbi Shqipri [Light over Albania] of 1952.25 It
was the first full-scale Albanian opera, and it was performed in Shkodr
and Tirana in 1958, at a time when Albania was still a Soviet client state.
The subject matter is on message, depicting the building of socialism in
Albania in the context of post-war reconstruction and external hostil-
ity, though the story of Mrika herself, one of feminist self-determination,
transcends this context. Like the libretto, the dramaturgy is indebted to
Soviet models, in that the fate of individuals, portrayed by soloists and
ensembles, is positioned against an all-important background of the peo-
ple, portrayed by the chorus. Predictably, the musical idiom is conserva-
tive harmonically, while its melos is heavily influenced by folk models.
Mrika may have been one of the more professionally realised works to
emerge from Albania during this period, but it also demonstrated that the
implementation of a socialist realist aesthetic was already much stricter in
Albania than elsewhere in the Eastern bloc.
This had been true almost from the start, following a brief period of lib-
eral governance under the first Minister of Education Sejfulla Malshova.
In the wake of Zhdanovs proclamations, the obligatory conference of the
Writers Union, including its music section, was held in 1949, and from
that point artists and intellectuals were subject to surveillance and guid-
ance. All modern music and modern here included Debussy as well
as all jazz and popular music were condemned; the recommended sub-
jects for opera and ballet were the partisan struggle and the building of
socialism; and the idiom of contemporary composition was severely con-
strained. The official party line on compositional style, neatly articulated
in the brief section on music in an English-language guide to the country
published in 1978, was rigorously enforced, and for scholars such as Rama-
dan Sokoli, as well as composers, there were many problems.26 It was a
dangerous time, during which the alternative to conformity was persecu-
tion, internment or worse.
25A recent study of Jakova (in Albanian) by the Italian-based Albanian scholar Spiro
Kalemi looks at his achievements as the founder of Albanian opera (Kalemi 2006). Prior
to this book, Kalemi had already written extensively about Albanian music, notably on
musicians from Shkodr.
26An Outline of the Peoples Socialist Republic of Albania. Tirana: 8 Nntori Publishing
House, 1978.
428 chapter sixteen
result of the isolationist policy was that all Albanian musicians studying
abroad were obliged to return. Another was that not just Western and
Soviet music but all religious music Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim
alike was officially proscribed, with implications for choral societies, and
even for organists, that need no spelling out. This came in the wake of
Albanias coming out as the worlds first officially designated atheist state,
a policy enshrined by a museum of atheism established a few years later
(1972), in Shkodr of all places. These repressive policies culminated in the
Fourth Plenary Session of the Central Committee in 1974, at which Enver
Hoxha presented the now notorious report that effectively cut Albania off
totally from the remainder of the contemporary world.
Little was known of Albania during these years. From the late 1950s
the country had been something of a closed book to all but a handful of
western visitors. As to music, these included expeditions by the Romanian
ethnomusicologist Emilia Comiel in the early 1950s. Then, as noted in
chapter 7, there were collections made by the Stockmanns in 1957 and by
Albert Lancaster Lloyd (himself far from neutral politically) in 1965. There
were also several trips by the leading contemporary (activist) composer
Gerhard Stbler.28 But between 1975 and 1991 such visits were few and
far between.29 One exception was George Leotsakos. In 1981, right in the
middle of this reign of terror for artists and intellectuals, Leotsakos, then
employed as a music editor for Larousse, was invited to Albania. He was
astonished by what he found there during that initial fifteen-day visit, and
his first-hand account of it reminds us that even the most negative aspects
of the political system in Albania were incapable of quelling the creative
spirit of composers.30 It reminds us too that the more positive achieve-
ments of the system were remarkable.
Leotsakos was met by the composer Feim Ibrahimi (193597), who
despite having to toe the party line officially, demonstrated an unexpected
familiarity with the music of Iannis Xenakis and showed Leotsakos a Cello
28In an earlier period (1903), the German ethnographer Paul Traeger (18671933) vis-
ited northern Albania, and made a number of important recordings, predominantly among
Catholic Albanians. These, along with the recordings made by Edith Durham around the
same time, are the earliest known recordings of Albanian traditional music.
29Occasional windows on Albanian music were opened by enterprising musicians such
as the British composer Dave Smith, who travelled there in 1983 on the one (carefully
controlled) package holiday then available, and briefly recorded his impressions of urban
popular music, traditional music and a selection of compositions by leading Albanian com-
posers (Smith 1983). Later, in the 1990s, Joan Emerson (self)-published a short book listing
the major institutions of music-making and the leading composers (Emerson 1994).
30Leotsakos: personal communication.
430 chapter sixteen
verbal and musical quite so complete, and even with the death of Enver
Hoxha in 1985 the grip of the Party did not slacken. It was not until 1991,
following the collapse of one of the last Communist regimes to survive in
the Balkans, that the doors to the wider world were pushed ajar.
31As Marina Frolova-Walker indicates, the formula national in form, socialist in con-
tent was a temporary ideal only. Only the outward forms, the technical means of expres-
sion, might reflect the nationality of each republic [of the Soviet Union], and even this
was meant as a temporary concession, until all the national tributaries could merge into
432 chapter sixteen
should lose another of its bourgeois associations, this time with the primi-
tive. To a modernist, the primitive could be a highly valued category; to a
socialist realist, it was a mark of inferiority and regression.
It was this investment in classical music and traditional music that
determined the direction of musical life under Communist regimes. And
conversely, it was the opposition of these regimes to modernism and pop-
ular culture that resulted in severe curtailments of creative freedom. Since
they were wrapped in a single package, it may seem nave to label these
developments as pluses and minuses. But as part of the effective history
of the Communist years, that is what they were. The contrast was at its
most extreme in Albania, where an impressive infrastructure was con-
jured up seemingly ex nihilo, but where creative artists were reduced to
unwilling agents of propaganda. In the other Cominform states of South
East Europe, where there already existed an infrastructural history and
well-established creative directions, issues were less clear-cut. There was
not quite the same tabula rasa, on which a new socialist story might be
written, and although prescriptive dogma was imposed, history and tradi-
tion had a way of creeping back in to modify the story.
Much also depended on relationships with Moscow and with the West,
and here there was little uniformity. There has not been the same degree
of specialised scholarship on the musical life of the Communist states of
South East Europe as on Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but one
certainty is that the more we learn about these cultures, and about Cold
War cultures in general, the more we are inclined to deconstruct the ste-
reotypes.32 The avant-gardes of Western Europe, far from cutting loose
from a political establishment, were themselves institutionally grounded
and subject to political influence. And, conversely, East European censor-
ship left much more room for artistic expression and disinterested judg-
ment than the conventional narratives allow. Ideological questions will
be addressed presently. But first I need to sketch in some of the shared
background to the structures of musical life.
Opera, its elitist origins conveniently forgotten, was widely supported
across the whole of the Eastern bloc in the spirit of the Soviet opera
a single mighty river of international Soviet culture, socialist in both form and content
(Frolova-Walker 1998, 334).
32For two studies of music in the Cominform states, see Thomas 2005 and Beckles
Willson 2007.
the curtain descends 433
35As Michael David-Fox points out, there were many different words for meeting with
discussion in the political language of the early Soviet years (David-Fox 1999, 8).
436 chapter sixteen
Composers on Message
Nationalist rhetoric persisted, then, but there was a major shift of emphasis
under Communism. Separatism and competition were in theory replaced
by a brotherhood of nations, ideologically grounded by the socialist ideal,
by the international struggle against capitalism. It would be a mistake to
regard this new discourse as invariably the product of enforced propa-
ganda missions. In many cases it stemmed from conviction. A belief in the
promise held out by a new Communist order had been widely shared by
the interwar intelligentsia, and it remained robust at least until the Soviet
proclamations of 1948, and in several quarters beyond that. In the case of
Yugoslavia, the breach with Stalin ensured that composers were not really
subject to such severe constraints as their colleagues elsewhere in the
bloc.37 But for the other states, getting on message was an imperative.
The hard-line policy established by Zhdanov in 1948, and continued
by Tikhon Khrennikov, reaffirmed the dogmatic collectivism of 1932, and
it was an unmistakable signal to the bloc generally that conformism was
to be the order of the day. In each of the client states, a conference took
place in 194849 to determine the direction of the national musical cul-
ture, though by that time the message was already clear from earlier pro-
nouncements on literature and cinema. The certainty and determinacy
that ensued proved destructive, as certainty and determinacy invariably
do. Samuel and Thompson remind us that both positive and negative
myths were established across the bloc.38 There was the myth of socialist
man, a progressive figure there to be celebrated by artists, and there was
the myth of his political enemies, there to be demonised, for as Tzvetan
Todorov has remarked the totalitarian state cannot live without enemies.39
Those enemies included artists and intellectuals who refused to accept, or
whose work was deemed to mystify, the new reality.
No-one was left in any doubt about the official line on demons. There
was typically a hunt for opposition, followed by the coordinated denunci-
ations that had become formulaic within the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s.
Such denunciations were exported to the satellite states after 1948, and
they were indicative of an increasingly repressive political culture from
that point onwards. Some patterns were common to all. In 1948 the Inte-
rior Ministries issued circulars to bookshops and libraries, censoring west-
ern culture in general, and singling out and removing what were regarded
as subversive books. At the same time the activities of journalists, writers,
artists and musicians were all brought under the aegis of agitprop sections
of the Party Central Committees. In Bulgaria in particular the repression
was severe, associated especially with camps such as Bellene.
Reform of education was high on the list, with schools taken over by the
states, foreign schools closed, universities purged of perceived dissidents,
and school and university curricula revised. The national histories were
re-written along Marxist-Leninist lines, and that included airbrushing out
problematical war records. In Romania, for example, the first step was to
link nineteenth-century revolutionary nationalism to Communism, then
to unify acts of war-time resistance by groups from very different social
and political backgrounds into a single movement of Communist protest
and dissent, and finally to present the all-important coup of August 1944 as
Communist-inspired and Communist-led. All of this added up to an envi-
ronment of indoctrination, denunciation and nepotism, of which artists
and intellectuals were understandably wary; questions were moot about
just who might or might not be trusted. Michael David-Foxs description
of Soviet political culture in the 1930s might well be transposed to the
satellite states from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s: At times it could seem
like the political culture of the party-state had come to resemble a big and
deadly masquerade.40
If we compare the discourses of the inter-war period with those of social-
ist realism, we will note continuities but also clear differences. The latter
were distinguished by what Ivan iber has called a systematised world of
meanings that operates some way beyond manifest content.41 Key words
and phrases acquired a formulaic character, established through endless
repetitions: text after text, party conference after party conference. They
triggered meanings that could only be understood within the prevailing
political culture, and that were distinct from even opposite to mani-
fest meanings. One way to conceptualise this discourse is to view it as a
series of dialogues or attempted fusions between a core matrix, derived
42MacIntyre 1981.
440 chapter sixteen
between the autonomy character of music (music is for me) and its com-
modity character (music is for all) became seriously skewed.
Composers found their own pathways across this treacherous terrain.
Some supported the ideals of state socialism, and had no difficulties with
ideological correctness; personal friendships with key ideologues in the
Ministries of Culture or Education naturally helped. Some preferred to
keep their head down, avoiding controversy as far as possible. Some were
already living abroad and decided not to return, while others went into
exile; typically, their music would then be banned. Some tested the limits
of correctness in public art, both through verbal discourse and composi-
tionally. And some offered what Maruka Svaek has described as private
acts of resistance.43 Svaeks formulation is useful, for there was indeed
an explicit separation between public and private spheres of music dur-
ing this period. The former was the preserve of the epic genres (opera,
symphony), of mass songs and of folksong-based compositions, all subject
to adjudication and censure on ideological grounds. The latter was the
province of chamber music and of various kinds of ad hoc groupings, and
here it was sometimes possible (though it could still be dangerous) to
work outside the world of official art.
There was unofficial music, in other words, and it could venture into
forbidden modernist territory. The more experimental compositions
might remain in the drawer or receive only private performances, but
modernist music also reached the concert platform in some modest ven-
ues, even in the early days of state socialism. One narrative might indeed
be characterised as the progressive penetration of the public sphere by
the private. Depending on the location, there was movement on several
fronts from the mid 1950s onwards: increasing experimentation in com-
position, greater contact with western modernism, a more openly criti-
cal discourse, and a more tolerant line in official circles. None of these
proceeded in a straight line. But they were recognisable tendencies, and
they were strengthened by the liberal policies taking effect elsewhere in
the bloc after 1956.
For those younger composers who aspired to a moderate modernism
under state socialism, there were real questions to ask about possible
ways forward. And here we may note a significant difference between
South East Europe and East Central Europe. In Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary there were major canonic figures from the early twentieth
43Svaek 2001.
442 chapter sixteen
century, conveniently dead for the most part, who were unambiguously
part of the national history but at the same time recognised by a wider
modernist culture. In the post-war era these composers could form ref-
erence points for negotiations between the claims of ideology and the
imperative of the new. The official line was still to present nineteenth-
century masters such as Moniuszko, Smetana and Liszt-Erkel as the echt
models, but internationally recognised modernist figures could not be
ignored, and there was often an argument for appropriation and habilita-
tion rather than rejection.
Thus in Poland Szymanowskis later style formed a reference point
for a folk-based idiom of neo-classical lucidity, though the point was not
unduly laboured in official discourse.44 In Czechoslovakia, the argument
for Janek was stronger. He was promoted as a precursor of socialist real-
ism following the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1948, and in some
respects it was an easy case to make. As to Bartk and Hungary, this raised
yet more ambivalent questions. It is no exaggeration to claim that critical
discourses in Hungary were shaped and re-shaped through the prism of
Bartk reception, so that at varying points different features could be held
up either as warnings (the music of the twenties) or as models (the folk-
song arrangements; the later music); Danielle Fosler-Lussier has recorded
these shifting phases of Bartk reception.45 For composers, as opposed
to ideologues, the importance of such key modernist figures lay in their
potential as models of mediation. They offered possible options for steer-
ing a path between Soviet ideology and a modernist language.
There were no real parallels in the Balkans. The closest was Enescu,
but since he remained abroad after the war, he was persona non grata
with the Romanian authorities, and, along with Constantin Briloiu, he
was denied membership of the newly vamped Composers Union. As a
model for younger composers he was compromised, at least initially, and
his music was barely performed during the first post-war decade. We
might compare him in this regard with Martin in Czechoslovakia, who
likewise blotted his copybook by remaining overseas, despite the best left-
wing credentials and a resistance record in the war; he was habilitated
only with the thaw of the 1960s. And we might contrast him with Kodly,
who remained in Hungary and followed a broadly pro-Soviet line. Signifi-
44An interesting aspect of this is the blend of Marxist discourse and German Idealist
thought that informed the writings of key Polish ideologues such as Zofia Lissa, by no
means explained away by a narrative of common origins.
45Fosler-Lussier 2007.
the curtain descends 443
cantly, it was only after Enescus death in 1955 that his status changed, and
a major re-examination of his music began in Romania. For Romanian
composers who were coming to maturity in the sixties, he was a crucial
model.
There was no composer in either Bulgaria or Albania who qualified
as an international figure in quite the way that Enescu did. Yugoslavia
had a more promising contender, of course, but the situation there was
not strictly comparable, given the break with the Soviet Union in 1948.
And in any case Slavenski all but disappeared from view in the post-war
years. All in all, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the options taken
by composers in this region was to turn to the early modernists further
north in East Central Europe as models for a fusion of nationalism and
moderate modernism (for Romanians, Bartk had in any case a unique
significance). There were already inter-war precedents for this, but the
new political structures welcome or not strengthened the possibility
of a more generalised East-European musical culture, and not exclusively
Slavonic.
There were other options however. One was to aspire towards the
seductive modernist achievements of a still only partially known, but
increasingly materialising, western post-war culture. Even in absentia,
western modernisms the idea of them, as much as the actuality were
a powerful force in the Communist states, and a major attraction for cre-
ative artists in particular, though to engage openly with them in the early
post-war years could be to court denunciation or worse. But of course
the most obvious option for all for these composers was to look directly
to the Soviet Union itself. Nor did this necessarily mean slavishly follow-
ing Party lines and remaining faithful to the tyrannical requirements of
socialist realism. Soviet composers were not just about mass songs and
cantatas. They had more experience than most in finding ways to walk
the tightropes, and they had much to teach others. There was in any case
a long history of affiliations between the Balkan states and Russia prior to
the establishment of a post-Yalta Eastern Europe.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DIVERGING PATHS
Two empires carved up the Balkan Peninsula for much of its post-medieval
history. But from the eighteenth century onwards, a third also had designs
on it. In Russia there were dreams of the Patriarchate, of a Byzantine
succession, and of access to the Mediterranean. Various modes of cultural
imperialism linked to Orthodoxy the stories of the border Serbs and
later of Bulgaria were in support of these ambitions. But so too was
military force, resulting in a century of Russo-Turkish wars (from the 1770s
to the 1870s) during which other interested parties, especially Britain and
the Habsburgs, watched, waited, and on occasion intervened. The Prin-
cipalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) were directly in the line of fire. They
were overrun by Russia in the 1770s, became Russian protectorates in the
1830s, and then took advantage of the 18778 hostilities to declare an inde-
pendent Romania. But Serbia and Bulgaria were also agents of Russian
ambition at various stages of the narrative, and in those same hostilities
Bulgaria became the main theatre of war.
Following the Berlin Treaty of 1878 there was both disillusionment with,
and dependency on, Russia on the part of each of these states. Romania
lost Bessarabia (modern Moldova) to Russia in 1878, was rescued by Rus-
sia following a failed attempt to take Transylvania during World War I,
re-took Bessarabia at the end of the war, was forced by Hitler to cede it
to the Soviets in 1940, and submitted to the conquering Red Army at the
end of World War II. Bulgaria resented the Russian acquiescence in 1878,
but submitted to a strong Russian presence in, and influence on, the new
nation state, and again yielded to the Red Army. Like the Bulgarians, the
Serbs, despite their deep-rooted cultural affinity to Russia, were disap-
pointed by the outcome of 1878, and even more by Russias acceptance
of the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. However,
one important later difference was that Serbia-Yugoslavia, unlike Romania
and Bulgaria, greeted the Red Army with an already formed Communist
administration under Tito, albeit one that had seized power only thanks
to Stalins patronage.
diverging paths 445
The acquisition by the Soviet Union of four client states in South East
Europe, in one sense the realisation of a long-standing Russian ambition,
imposed some degree of homogeneity on the socio-political and cultural
profiles of these states, with terms of reference established in Moscow.
Where music was concerned, the hard-line Stalinist position established
by Zhdanov in Moscow was followed faithfully by Khrennikov, but under
Krushchev there was a political and cultural thaw roughly between 1955
and late 1958. Show trials, aggressive ideological campaigns and arrests
were all replaced during those years by new cultural initiatives, and these
gained sufficient momentum to survive the official end of the thaw, so that
in the 1960s previously proscribed works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev
were reinstated, and figures such as Myaskovsky and Khachaturian were
taken off the suspect list.
A younger generation of Soviet composers also emerged at this time,
and several of them managed to forge a musical career at some distance
from the officials of the Composers Union. During the Brezhnev years,
networking was all-important in the Soviet Union, with overlapping and
interactive circles of composers centred on the Moldavian-born teacher
Philipp Moyseyevich Hercovici, on Shostakovich and Shebalin, and on
the short-lived electronic studio (closed in the mid-1970s). As to composi-
tional options, two were broadly successful for those walking the tightrope.
One was to develop the kind of ironic play of genres and gestures honed
to perfection by Shostakovich, and the other was to cultivate the polysty-
listic composition that was to become emblematic of Soviet modernisms.
It was not the end of censorship, of course, and Denisov, Gubaydulina and
Schnittke all had their share of problems. Only under Gorbachev did the
curtain begin to rise.
This sequence does not apply to the client states in any uniform way.
Political relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites took differ-
ent forms, and those differences provide a necessary framework for under-
standing cultural policies in South East Europe. Yugoslavia, dissident
almost from the start, was expelled for bad behaviour, and found itself
in dialogue with the capitalist West as well as the socialist East. That is a
story for the next chapter. Albania, as we saw, retreated into its Stalinist
hermitage in the sixties, with the severest consequences for all intellec-
tual and cultural life. For the two remaining Cominform states there was
relatively little deviation from a hard-line Stalinist position during the first
post-war decade. Politically, Bulgaria remained a faithful acolyte of the
Soviet Union, so much so that on two separate occasions Todor Zhivkov
was willing to cede its separate political identity in favour of incorporation
446 chapter seventeen
1Bulgaria served as a laundry for suspect Soviet deals during these years, and reaped
the rewards financially.
2Buchanan 2006, 11.
diverging paths 447
3Ibid., 180ff.
4Guentcheva 2004.
5Krustev 1978, 186.
448 chapter seventeen
6Cosma 1995.
7In this climate of recrimination, even the fact that a composer or musicologist had
studied in the Soviet Union could serve as the basis for condemnation.
450 chapter seventeen
8Frolova-Walker 2004.
diverging paths 451
this repertory. Russian and Soviet music was still performed, but increas-
ingly artistic quality was the principal criterion for inclusion in concert
life, so that the tendency was to perform Russian classics rather than pro-
paganda pieces. Initially, the break with Moscow seemed to signal greater
freedom. But in the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was again a
freeze, as Ceauescu effected his own version of a cultural revolution. In
the later stages of the regime the sense of a maverick fiefdom, ruled irra-
tionally and veering rapidly out of control, was palpable.
How far this affected music is another question. These were years when
music was obliged to serve massive public spectacles, notably through
the institution of the choral competition Cntarea Romniei [Singing for
Romania]; years too when composers were obliged to take on a public
role in all the usual anniversaries, and when all contacts with Westerners
were very carefully monitored.9 Yet for all that, new music of a radical
cast was cultivated in Romania. It did not have the public exposure of
the comparable school in Poland, but its political resonance was similar.
New music became, in a word, a powerful assertion of artistic indepen-
dence, and of political resistance.
9My own experience researching Enescus music in Bucharest in 1983 provided ample
evidence of this.
452 chapter seventeen
music in new directions.10 Both Iliev and Nikolov made some necessary
concessions to official culture. Iliev in particular composed choral pieces
in a more traditional idiom. But in their instrumental music they experi-
mented with much more radical techniques (in Ilievs case partly stem-
ming from his studies in Prague in the immediate post-war years), and
they were clear about their rejection of both the late-Romantic idioms
associated with Vladigerov and the heroic, folk-based idiom demanded by
a socialist realist aesthetic. Although both composers, Iliev in particular,
secured high-profile positions in the musical world, this did not insulate
them from State opposition, and from endless difficulties with censorship.
Their works represent pandemonium, a senseless accumulation of disso-
nance, a sort of musical equilibristics, was the view of Blazho Stoianov in
Blgarska muzika in 1956.11
Ilievs First Symphony of 1947 and Nikolovs Piano Concerto were
both condemned as formalist; and in Ilievs case it hardly helped that he
worked tirelessly to introduce modernist repertories to Bulgaria in his role
as a conductor. Perversely, it was only in the late sixties, when there was
some relaxation of political constraints, that Iliev began to investigate folk
music, but he did so not in the spirit of socialist-realist folklorism, but in
new, creative ways. He had, after all, first established his modernist cre-
dentials in a series of tough-grained compositions dating from the more
ideologically difficult decade of the 1950s. The Concerto Grosso, composed
in 1949, inaugurated this creative period. It cultivated a dissonant coun-
terpoint and a rhythmic complexity that would certainly have proved dif-
ficult to sell to the commissars of culture at the time.
Much later, beginning with his Fragmenti [Fragments] (1968) and con-
tinuing through to works such as Bukoliki [Bucolics] (1977), Glasovete na
ravninata [The Voices of the Plain] (1971) and the Sixth Symphony (1983
4), Iliev turned to the carefully controlled aleatory textures that we associ-
ate with some Polish music from the sixties. It was in these works that he
began to explore ancient layers of Bulgarian folk music; compare Grecki
and Kilar. Polish sonorism was undoubtedly a tempting model for Bulgar-
ian composers. It loomed large in the later music of Lazar Nikolov too, and
even more so in that of Georgi Tutev, whose visit to the Warsaw Autumn
Festival in 1965 was immediately registered in the music he wrote from
10A more detailed survey would seek to do justice to more traditional figures such as
Alexander Raichev and Simeon Pironkov.
11Guentcheva 2004, 213.
454 chapter seventeen
the late sixties onwards. Tutevs modest but meticulously crafted output
ranged from the early, and still relatively traditional, Metamorphoses for
13 String Instruments (1966) to the radically experimental Calvinomusica
(inspired by the Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino). Calvinomusica
was one of his last compositions, and it is a measure of the difficulties fac-
ing avant-garde composers in general that, along with several of his major
works, it was proscribed in his native Bulgaria, and was premired instead
at an overseas festival.
This is no doubt one of the reasons that several composers bypassed the
State-monitored larger ensembles and reserved their most experimental
music for smaller forces, and especially for the piano. Several exploratory
works for piano were produced in Bulgaria, including sixteen sonatas
(dating from 1962 to 2003) by Dimiter Christoff (b.1933) and a three-
volume Izkustvoto na seriyata [The Art of Series] (196670) by Ivan Spassov
(193496).12 Inspired by The Art of Fugue, each of these volumes consists
of twelve short sections, to be performed in indeterminate order, and
with the materials all based on transformations and transpositions of a
single twelve-note series. If we follow the chronology of their composition
(which differs from the final sequence) we will note a progressive free-
dom in rhythmic control, a loosening of the time connections between
sounds, in Lutosawskis phrase, that no doubt evidenced Spassovs links
with Poland. We might also include here piano works such as Sonograms
(1980) by Georgi Mintev (b.1939), and works by Alexander Kandov (his
Las mariposas nocturnas of 1993 is appreciated). Of the younger genera-
tion, key figures have been Mihail Goleminov (b.1956) and Georgi Arnaou-
dov (b.1957). Rituel I of 1988 by Arnaoudov and Klavierstck I of 1992 by
Goleminov are representative.
The seven piano sonatas of Nikolov, embracing four decades of post-
war creativity, lie at the heart of this corpus. Even in the early 1950s
Nikolov was writing uncompromising music, including the second of the
sonatas (1951), whose constant shifts and turns speak more of angularity
than whimsy. The dissonance level here is high, and there is little hint
of anything approaching a unifying tonal structure. This, in short, is far
from accessible music. Nor does it yield much on repeated listening, for
there is something oddly unsatisfying about its mix of old and new. If we
leap forward thirty years to the Sixth Sonata (1982), the difficulty melts
away. Here the modernist idiom (developed in works of the sixties, such
13A full account of Albanian music will have to wait for George Leotsakoss book, cur-
rently well advanced, though it will be published in Greek. Sokol Shupo is also preparing
materials for a history of Albanian music, though this may be long in the making. Spiro
Kalemi recently published a volume on late twentieth-century music in Albania (Kalemi
2010).
diverging paths 457
Rhapsodies for Piano and Orchestra, the two orchestral rhapsodies by Feim
Ibrahimi, and a cluster of similar pieces by Ramadan Sokoli, Simon Gjoni,
and others. These pieces tended to be formulaic, arriving at a folk-based
idiom somewhat indebted to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
works so labelled, while at the same time nodding towards the epic tradi-
tions of the north, where the term rapsodi is also used. The formula was
acceptable to the Union of Artists and Writers, and was soon adopted by
younger composers. Here we might cite the folk-based Concert Rhapsody
Toka ime, knga ime [My Land, My Song] of 1979 for Violin, Cello and
Orchestra by Thoma Gaqi (b.1948), best known for his symphonic poem
Borova (another title that recurs, referring to the site of a World War II
massacre); or the Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra (1977) by Aleksandr
Pei (b.1951), one of the most popular figures in Albanian music (his Litur-
gical Dialogue uses the voice of Albanias most famous daughter, Mother
Teresa); or the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra by Sokol Shupo (b.1954),
a key figure in the organisation of Albanian musical life today.
Comparable works for orchestra, chamber ensemble or piano, usually
based on Albanian traditional music and with titles such as Fantasy, Bal-
lade, Variations, or simply Poem, were written by most composers prior
to 1991. The output of Pllumb Vorpsi (b.1957) is characteristic, including
Variations for Piano (Ballade) on an Albanian Folksong (1978), Symphonic
Poem (1983) and Fantasy for Symphony Orchestra and Choir on the Alba-
nian Folk Dance Napoloni (1988). In some of these folk-based pieces by
composers of all generations as also in the many concertos composed
during these years there are occasional glances towards Bartk and
Stravinsky, but this remained a largely surface matter. At root the idiom
was unambiguously traditional. Naturally all this changed after the fall of
Communism. Nowhere in the rest of the eastern bloc was the chaos as
great as Albania in 199091. Along with many others, musicians fled the
country in droves in a context of riots, profiteering and anarchy. From 1991
there was an abrupt transformation in Albanian music from infrastructure
without freedom to freedom without infrastructure. Once more Albania
presented as a land in extremis.
Some of the most interesting music to emerge from South East Europe dur-
ing these years sprang from political contexts that were neither in hock to
the Soviet Union, nor aggressively defiant of it, but rather steered a course
460 chapter seventeen
through the middle ground, maintaining some sort of dialogue with both
East and West. This broadly describes the position in both Romania and
Yugoslavia, and although internal repression could be severe in the former
country, it was more of an issue for writers than for musicians. As in Bul-
garia, there was an older generation of composers in Romania several
of them discussed briefly in Chapter 15 who continued to work in the
post-war years. Of these, a number (including Enescu himself of course)
either remained, or emigrated, overseas. But others, such as Mihail Jora,
Mihail Andricu, Marian Negrea (18931973), Sabin Drgoi (18941968),
Marcel Mihalovici (18981985), Theodor Rogalski (190154) and Paul Con-
stantinescu, were based in Romania, and they adapted as best they could
to the new political realities. Aside from the direct conflicts that arose with
the authorities and the obligation to produce mass songs and cantatas, the
major difficulty was the lack of contact with musical developments else-
where in Europe.
In considering the possibilities open to composers we might begin with
some key works from the immediate post-war years, prior to the imposi-
tion of clear directives from the Composers Union under Matei Socor.
First, there was the diptych of oratorios for Easter and Christmas by Paul
Constantinescu (1946 and 1947, respectively). The symbolic potency of
Easter and Christmas oratorios in the aftermath of the war would have
been lost on none. With the help of his religious mentor, the priest Ioan
Petrescu,14 Constantinescu made a study of sacred music in Romania, and
cultivated in a number of works instrumental as well as vocal a con-
sciously archaic modal idiom based on those traditions. In this respect he
made a contribution both to the repertory of harmonised Orthodox music
and to that of Byzantine-influenced contemporary music. The second of
these paired oratorios Naterea domnului [The Nativity] was given its first
performance in the Bucharest Atheneum in 1947. It has since become a
popular work, with exposure beyond Romania, but at the time its poten-
tial to point to the future was bound to be limited. The contrived sim-
plicity and archaism of its musical idiom was in tune with the demands
of socialist realism, but the religious orientation ensured that this could
never be a way forward for Romanian composers. Significantly, the work
was not presented again until 1967.
For the group of composers gathered around the Andricu and Jora stu-
dent tefan Niculescu (19272008) it was possible to establish something
of a power base within the Union, for example, and in later years they
were able to play an important role as teachers of the next generation.
They formed, in short, a real community, and again in ways that remind
us of Warsaw, where the modernist composer was a familiar part of the
furnishings of musical life in the 1960s and 1970s, known to audiences and
performers alike (Niculescu was the prime mover in the public listening
sessions for contemporary music promoted in Bucharest in the 1970s, for
example). Radical modernism in music may not have been an official art
in Romania, but for a time it did become a sort of orthodoxy.
Many of these composers took the later music of Enescu as a starting-
point, bearing in mind that Romania has emphasised particular qualities
of Enescus mature music, most of them relatable to indigenous reperto-
ries. They include the use of isons, microtonal writing, parlando-rubato
rhythms, various kinds of mi-voix speech-song, and above all what Roma-
nian scholars and composers describe as heterophony. The densely motivic
textures found in Enescu might be interpreted in several ways. But for
Niculescu and his colleagues heterophony was the privileged reading, and
it became subject to re-workings that allowed for modernist complexi-
ties while at the same time maintaining a link with archetypes of tradi-
tional music. During the 1960s Niculescu studied for a time with Kagel in
the Studio Siemens in Munich, and he was a regular at Darmstadt. His
Htromorphie (1967) is characteristic of the kind of densely interwoven
textures that resulted from a unique synthesis of Enescu reception and
post-war techniques. Later, in the 1970s, he wrote several works with the
title Ison, where again there is a considerable complexity of texture of
a kind that might be labelled either heterophonic or micro-polyphonic.
And in general his achievement right through to late works such as the
fourth and fifth symphonies (Deisis and Litanies respectively), composed
in the 1990s was one that allowed qualities understood as indigenous to
generate modernist sound worlds. There may be superficial resemblances
to Ligeti in works like Htromorphie, and to Messiaen in parts of the
Fourth Symphony. But, as with some Bulgarian composers, Niculescus
alliance of post-war modernisms and folk-chant archetypes resulted in a
very particular idiom: a unique product of its time and place.
Among the other composers associated with this modernist group
were Anatol Vieru (192698), Tiberiu Olah (19272002), Adrian Raiu
(19282005), Miriam Marb (193197), Dan Constantinescu (193193),
Aurel Stroe (19322008) and Cornel ranu (b.1934). Naturally they each
diverging paths 463
his case they are based on the pentatonic scale. This is clear in the pitch
organisation of later works such as the Second Symphony of 1987, which
invests in familiar triadic harmonies in novel ways.
There are many correspondences to be found across the work of this
group of composers. Several of the compositional preoccupations of Olah
are also found in Adrian Raiu, for instance. He too used Enescu as a start-
ing point, and he went on to develop a modal system of that in its turn
links to the concerns of Anatol Vieru. On the other hand Raiu took modal-
ity in different, and rather less accessible, directions, exploring a principle
of complementarity that owed a good deal to serial thought. This method
was rather consistently developed, beginning with less public composi-
tions such as his Cycle of Piano Works (1957), then transferring to a more
public arena in the 1960s (Concerto for Oboe, bassoon and strings [1963],
Concertino per la Musica Nova [1967]), and eventually reaching a culmi-
nating point in the chamber cycles of the 1980s and 1990s (Transfigurri
[Tranfigurations] I and II, and a series of Convergene [Convergences]).
Some of this music is almost Feldman-like in its reduction of the musical
argument to a state of near stasis and non-assertiveness. It can be austere,
and often arcane, but it is somehow always arresting.
It is impossible to do justice to the work of this generation with such
characterisations. Much could be said of Aurel Stroe, who visited Darm-
stadt in the sixties, worked in the US for a bit and also in Berlin, and
finally settled in Mannheim, teaching both there and in Bucharest. Politi-
cal agendas are rather clear in works like his ambitious Oresteia trilogy
(19731988), with its focus on ideas of freedom and resistance against tyr-
anny. But Stroe also developed a computer-assisted compositional system,
based on principles of morphogenesis derived from developmental biol-
ogy. It is at work in a series of radical works from the 1960s onwards, and
it culminates in the orchestral composition for saxophone and orchestra,
Prairie, Prires of 1993, which journeys from aleatory sonorism towards
determinism, its progressively shorter movements culminating in a 27-
second finale in which the pitch material has been stripped down to a
single scream on the solo instrument.
The contribution of Myriam Marb is also an individual one, albeit
with a shared interest in associating aleatory techniques with folk archa-
isms (her Serenata of 1974, a composed-out jubilation in which the sym-
phony orchestra appears to stylise traditional vocal ululation techniques,
is indicative). And similarly, we could discuss Dan Constantinescu, whose
music moved from a modal-serial synthesis that found its culminating
expression in the Piano Concerto of 1963, a work of real dramatic and
diverging paths 465
sound sources and vocal recitation, already looks ahead to the work that
many consider his masterpiece, the third opera Hamlet (1969), first given
in Bucharest in 1975.
Stylisation is the watchword of Bentoius Hamlet. His approach to the
Shakespeare was to focus on its conceptual aspects rather than its dra-
matic action, with the latter mainly portrayed through pantomimic and
balletic means. There are ten scenes that pinpoint what Bentoiu (his own
librettist) identifies as the crucial moments of the tragedy, and a series
of interludes that either pick up and develop ideas from the preceding
scene, as in the spectral first interlude, or presage the coming scene, as in
the second, passacaglia-based interlude. It is an ingenious solution, allow-
ing the spotlight to rest clearly on the speculative dimension of the play,
manifest in the mind and thoughts of the central character as they are
lit up by his very different responses to the other characters. Thus, scene
three holds on to the passacaglia of the second scene for the dialogue
between Hamlet and Gertrude, before ceding to the actors pantomime.
The pantomime then proceeds in parallel with an ever more intense musi-
cal argument that increasingly transfers to the orchestra, entwining Ham-
lets theme and the revenge motive to build a magnificent climax.
All the ingredients of Bentoius musical language are brought to the
service of this concept, with audible leitmotivic devices (partly based on
instrumentation and rhythm, but including 12-note themes that take on
radically different meanings in the case of Hamlets uncle and Ophelia),
and with a magnetic tape based on Hamlets voice to represent the ghost.
A degree of musical stylisation also enters in, allowing us to view the dia-
logues as to some extent stylistically discrete: the otherworldly magnetic
tape of the ghost, the exquisite transparent scoring associated with Oph-
elia (scene 5), the solid triadic writing for Laertes (scene 6), the monodic
idiom for to be or not to be (scene 8), the parodic qualities of Osrick
(scene 9), and so on.
Hamlet is one of the triumphs of modern Romanian lyric art, and it
stands as a monument to the so-called moderate modernism that repre-
sents a discernible direction in Communist South East Europe. It was not
of course the end of Bentoius story. All but one of his eight symphonies
(so far) post-date Hamlet, and there is a wealth of chamber music. It is
fitting that he became the first post-Ceauescu President of the Compos-
ers Union. By then, a younger generation of Romanian modernists had
come to the fore: Nicolae Brndu (b.1935), Mihai Moldovan (193781),
Corneliu Dan Georgescu (b.1938), Octavian Nemescu (b.1940), Fred Pop-
ovici (b.1948), Adrian Pop (b.1951), Maia Ciobanu (b.1952) and Dan Dediu
diverging paths 467
(b.1967). But the sense of group identity associated with the Niculescu cir-
cle was lost, even if many of the techniques developed by that circle in
particular the anatomising of folklore through heterophonic and aleatory
devices have been carried forward. It is surely significant that certain
key words appear almost ubiquitously in the liner notes of Composers
Union recordings of works by the younger generation of composers. One,
referring to the quest for origins, is archetype, sometimes linked with
archaic, a trend associated with Nemescu and Georgescu in particular.
Another, associating these repertories with folk models, is modal, some-
times linked to pentatonic, and also to heterophony. In addition, there
is a range of terms that invoke mathematics (fractals theory, complexity
theory), indicating that developing systems remains a preoccupation of
younger Romanian composers.
In some ways the continuing vitality of modernist impulses through
into the 1980s was remarkable, given that political constraints were if any-
thing even more severe at that time, and contacts with the West more
limited. In any event the collapse of Ceauescu changed everything, and
since 1989 no-one has been much interested in dictating style or ideology
to younger composers (the Society of Composers the old Union has
lost much of its power and influence). The trouble is that no-one seems
interested in them at all. Or so one might conclude from a glance at the
music shops and concert programmes in todays Bucharest. CDs of con-
temporary music have been produced in voluminous numbers by the
Society of Composers, but are available only for promotional purposes
and cannot be sold, while Editura Muzicala, which with the help of gov-
ernment subsidies had published and helped disseminate the music of
Romanian composers, is no longer in a position to support contemporary
music. Locating modernism indeed art music generally within post-
Communist South East Europe is not an exercise destined to raise the
spirits. It will be attempted in a later chapter.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ANOTHER TRY
That the second Yugoslavia survived its expulsion from the Cominform is
a matter of wonder. Titos stance faced opposition not just from Stalin, but
also from within. He stamped it out ruthlessly, and this may have taken
the steam out of Stalins anti-Tito propaganda campaigns and dashed any
hopes that the Yugoslav experiment might be brought to a swift close.1
In the post-Stalin era, Yugoslavia pursued a separate path, committing to
a self-governing model of socialism that attempted to reinvest in Lenin-
ist principles.2 But prior to that, and of necessity, Tito had engaged in
extensive dialogues with the capitalist powers, and especially with the US,
for whom this crack in the Communist edifice presented obvious strate-
gic advantages.3 In due course Communist Yugoslavia found its historical
roles first as a mediator between the two blocs, and later as a player in the
international non-aligned movement.
Nationality was the bugbear. The official line of the administration was
to recognise individual national cultures within a supranational state, a
position at variance with the Yugoslavism of the inter-war state, and in
theory at least one that facilitated the building of bridges to neighbour-
ing states.4 But the brotherhood and unity of Communist Yugoslavia
was inherently unstable. There was from the start a conflict of interests
between the anti-statist socialism favoured in the poorer republics and the
statism associated with Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia; ironically, in the later
stages of the state, to declare as a Yugoslav came to signify the last refuge
of either the dissident or the disadvantaged. This conflict of interests
was reflected in the leadership. As Dejan Jovi has argued, the victory of
1 Across the rest of the Soviet bloc, there was a vitriolic and well orchestrated anti-Tito
campaign, including cartoon depictions of him as a poodle led by the US.
2Benson 2001, 1013.
3Campbell 1967.
4Katherine Verdery remarks, admittedly of another part of the region, that precisely
because the Soviet regime had destroyed all other bases for political organization while
constitutionally enshrining the national basis, national sentiment emerged to overwhelm
federal politics. See Verdery 1996, 86.
another try 469
5Jovi 2004.
6Wachtel 1998.
470 chapter eighteen
federation were tangible. However, the matter was viewed rather differ-
ently in the three dominant republics of the second Yugoslavia. Far from
looking towards Belgrade as a model for cultural reconstruction, Zagreb
and Ljubljana looked to their own active pasts; elite western culture
had thrived in both cities, after all, at a time when Belgrade still hosted
the pashas. The positive side of this was that there were infrastructures
already in place in these cities, albeit in need of re-activation after World
War II,7 and also that there existed traditions of national music on which
to build, or against which to react. But the down side was that cultural
life could often be insular. In general Zagreb and Ljubljana lacked the
wide-open quality that had characterised Belgrade at its best during the
inter-war period.
As to restructuring, the opera and ballet of the National Theatre in
Zagreb resumed their normal activities after the war, while the Symphonic
Orchestra of Zagreb Radio (established in 1948) became the Zagreb Phil-
harmonic Orchestra. In addition, numerous chamber ensembles were
founded, of which the best known were the Zagreb Soloists and the Zagreb
Quartet. Orchestras were likewise established in Rijeka and in Dubrovnik.
In Ljubljana, the Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra was re-established in
1947, complete with its own choir. The Radio Orchestra of Ljubljana was
founded around the same time, closely followed by the Maribor Philhar-
monic and the Chamber Choir of Radio Ljubljana. The opera houses in
Ljubljana and Maribor also picked up the threads of their earlier activities
in the post-war years. Various specialist groups were created at this time,
and in 1962 a festival of contemporary chamber music was established
at Radenci, and has been held there ever since. The Music Academy in
Ljubljana also resumed after the war, and in 1962 a musicology depart-
ment, validated by the University, was founded at the Academy. Similar
institutions were cultivated in Belgrade. It is unnecessary to list them, but
special mention should be made of the Academy of Music, which was a
magnet for leading teachers and promising student composers from all
over Yugoslavia. Belgrade also hosted the Union of Yugoslav Composers,
which functioned as the umbrella organisation for the associations of
composers established in each of the six republics.
That the three main cities presented a similar face to the world under
Communism was inevitable, given the homogeneities imposed by the sys-
tem. But we should not imagine that they felt the same; nor even that
7Name-changing was endemic among the institutions in both Zagreb and Belgrade.
472 chapter eighteen
they had similar goals. When we speak with musicians who were educated
in Communist Yugoslavia, it becomes clear that, even more than in the
teaching of literature and language, training in musicology or composition
meant the study of separate national traditions. The outside world may
have labelled Vinko Globokar Yugoslav, but the composer himself was in
no doubt that he was Slovenian. Symptomatic of this was the publication
of a landmark history of Yugoslav music in 1962.8 After a very short intro-
duction, the book divides into three entirely separate parts, enabling the
doyens of musicology in the three dominant republics (Dragotin Cvetko,
Josip Andreis and Stana Djuri-Klajn) to tell their national stories. Not
only was the opportunity to advertise a newly synthetic culture in the
later stages of this story passed over; the three poorer republics were cov-
ered in a few exiguous paragraphs of the introduction, roughly a page for
each in a book of over 700 pages.
Interestingly, in a slightly earlier official history, again edited by
Andreis (together with the Istrian composer Slavko Zlati), lip service was
paid to integration. Following separate treatments of the earlier music
histories of the six republics, the editors argued that in the passages
devoted to the development of Yugoslav musical life after the liberation
in 1945, such grouping proved unnecessary, and sometimes even imprac-
ticable, because some regions have already assumed general Yugoslav
characteristics to such a great extent.9 Such remarks, like the book as
a whole, were targeted at the outside world, and it is probably true that
the outside world bought into a unified Yugoslavia rather more than the
Yugoslavs themselves. Yet the major dictionary entries in Germany and
England made little effort to argue for a synthetic supranational culture
in the twentieth century. Of the 14 pages of text afforded to the art music
of Yugoslavia in Volume 7 of MGG (1958), 4 were devoted to Slovenia, 5 to
Croatia, 34 to Serbia, 2 to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and 1 to Macedonia
(21 pages were given over to traditional music, again treated nation by
nation). Astonishingly, the 1954 Grove had no entry at all for Yugoslavia;
and when the editors remedied this in the 1980 edition (The New Grove),
just over 2 of the 22 pages fewer than for Sweden dealt with art music,
again broken down into nationalities.
From todays perspective, we can look back at Communist Yugoslavia
as a political experiment that went badly wrong, after more than four
Composers in Yugoslavia entered their most testing period in the late 1940s.
We noted that already in the 1930s there had been a retreat from modern-
ism among those younger (and some older) composers who had studied
in Prague. We also noted that for several composers from the Balkans
there was a stylistic elision between partisan songs and socialist mass songs
devoted to war heroes, the popular army, the building of socialism, and so
forth. Oskar Danon was typical of a number of composers who were active
in the partisans and went on to play key roles in the post-war establishment,
and his Uz marala Tito [With Marshall Tito] was one of many propaganda
pieces; one might mention Mihovil Logars Himna Beogradu [Hymn to
Belgrade]) and Mihailo Vukdragovis Pesma izgradnje [The Song of
Rebuilding]. Composers were encouraged to write such pieces, and to
develop the rather crude form of national style (in orchestral suites and
programme pieces) for which models were available in the Soviet Union.
As a result, the modernism found in some inter-war Yugoslav music disap-
peared in the post-war years, even as contacts with contemporary develop-
ments in Western Europe were severed. In the very first issue of Muzyka,
published in 1948, Stana Djuri-Klajn warned composers against allowing
western trends to alienate them from their natural constituency.
The concert life of the new state initially reflected this orientation,
with a high profile assigned to accessible Russian and Soviet music. And
although the break with Moscow in 1948 changed much of this, the ensu-
ing cultural thaw was a gradual process, slower in music than in the other
arts. Already in 1949 there were signs of change in the literary world, as
the journal Mladost pointed young writers in new directions. Then, just
prior to the Sixth Congress of November 1952, Miroslav Krlea addressed
the Congress of Writers in Ljubljana in a plea for the rejection of social-
ist-realist strictures. The political authorities responded, albeit cautiously,
to such expressions of discontent, and a more experimental attitude was
permitted, though religious themes were still unacceptable. In music,
on the other hand, a more conservative aesthetic prevailed, and it was
only in the late 1950s that there was a general embrace of more liberal
attitudes. Again religion was the last frontier, with Serbian Orthodox
music removed from the concert halls until the early 1980s.10 Part of this
10Ira Prodanov has researched this topic, looking in particular at the hidden refer-
ences to religion in music of the time. See Prodanov-Krajinik 2007.
another try 475
stemmed from the lack of contact with Western Europe. In contrast to the
inter-war years, when many Yugoslav composers worked in Prague and in
other central European cities, relatively few managed to travel abroad in
the immediate post-war years.
For an older generation of composers, born at the end of the nineteenth
century, not very much changed. In Serbia, both Konjovi and Hristi
were active after the war, but their nationally orientated styles could be
adapted rather easily to the new aesthetic. The critique of Konjovis opera
Prince of Zeta (1927), staged in Belgrade in 1946, was an exceptional
case of ideological pressure. Little new was added by this generation in
the post-war years. Neither of Konjovis two later operas (Seljaci [The
Peasants] of 1951 and Otadbina [The Fatherland] of 1960) achieved the
success of Kotana, and even the younger Marko Tajevi is remembered
today through pre-war piano works such as the 7 Balkan Dances. Likewise
in Croatia, Jakov Gotovac continued to compose in an accessible national
style, but lives on today through Ero and the interwar orchestral music.
This was also true of Dobroni. Krsto Odak, on the other hand, did find a
rather different orientation in response to the new politics, notably in a
group of symphonic and programmatic orchestral works. There are some
parallels here with an older generation of Slovenians, including Bla Arni
and Marjan Kozina. Lucijan Marjan kerjanc, a highly influential figure in
Slovenian music, was a exception, in that some of his music from the late
1950s nods slightly in a modernist direction; he even included the term
dodecaphonic in the titles to some works.
For a younger generation official cultural policy raised more difficult
questions. The retreat from modernism in Serbian music cannot be attrib-
uted exclusively to political pressures. But whatever the cause, it is strik-
ing that all these composers marched more-or-less in step. Mihovil Logar,
a modernist in the 1930s, composed not only the statutory cantatas in
the post-war years (Pjesma o biografiji druga Tito [Biographical Song for
Comrade Tito] in 1945 and eteoci [The Reapers] in 1946), but also tradi-
tionally conceived works such as the opera Pokondirena tikva [The Stuck-
up Woman] in 1954. And the same was true of Predrag Miloevi, who
produced conservative theatre pieces in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and
Dragutin oli, who (re)turned to folkloric idioms and symphonic poems
in national style (Uskrsna zvona [Eastern Chimes] in 1946 and Nikoletina
Bursa in 1951), all a far cry from his experiments with quarter-tone com-
position in the 1930s. Milan Risti followed a similar path, moving to folk
arrangements and melodramas in the post-war years, and to a program-
matic symphonism in the Second Symphony of 1952. And Stanojlo Rajii
476 chapter eighteen
13Alexander 1985.
14Mari destroyed a substantial amount of her own music.
15Djuri-Klajn 1971.
478 chapter eighteen
cite Stravinsky, but in the Octoechos cycle any direct Stravinsky influence
has receded almost to vanishing point.
The Octoechos works were composed at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s.
We might construct two narratives around them. One would depict them
as a stage in the journey of Serbian and Yugoslav music from political
confinement and imposed insularity towards freedom of expression and
integration within European music. They were a gateway to a brave new
world. The other narrative would see them as valuable and privileged
precisely because they fought shy of a progressive Western avant-garde,
bearing in mind that this was hardly less ideological than a regressive
socialist realism. The larger political point here will be picked up later.
But for now we might note that in this narrative Mari was important in
the way that Enescu was important. She captured the historical moment
for Balkan music. Indeed this may well have been the last time that such
a thing would be possible for art music in the Balkans. Avoiding the false
consciousness of both the past and the folk that we associate with music
policy in state socialism, and at the same time avoiding the officially spon-
sored historical denials and elitism of the new music, she found a voice
somewhere in between, catching the resonance of collective voices from
the distant past, but sifting and straining them into an active present. It
was her voice, uniquely so, but as we noted in the last chapter it chimed
with the voices of others in the Balkans at just this particular moment. It
was of its time, and of its place.
In from the Cold: Mainly Croatia, a Little Slovenia, and Back to Serbia
16Opatija was also to become the site for a major international festival of popular song.
480 chapter eighteen
17On the implications for Croatian music history of the shift between totalitarian gov-
ernments of the right and left, see Tomai 2004.
18Sedak 2004.
another try 481
Moreover, the same turning point (late fifties early sixties) can be iden-
tified in the very different outputs of two leading composers from the
younger generation: Stanko Horvat (19302006), whose Polish-influenced
modernisms are still rooted in traditional idioms, and Ruben Radica
(b.1931), whose engagement with new techniques has been total.
It was symptomatic of the new eclecticism that a number of younger
composers, including both Horvat and Radica, learnt their craft in major
European centres. Some went on to make their career outside Croatia,
though in most cases they retained active musical contacts with Zagreb.
Ivo Malec (b.1925) is a case in point. He went to Paris initially for further
study in 1955, but settled there in 1959, and soon became a member of
Schaeffers Group de recherche musicale. He himself has argued that only
in Paris (i.e. from 1960 onwards) did he achieve his full maturity as a com-
poser, and especially in pieces such as Sigma for orchestra of 1963. But
already in the 1950s he laid foundations for what would become an inter-
national reputation in avant-garde circles for his contributions to musique
concrte and electronic music, for his experiments in modern virtuosity
(in the spirit of Luciano Berio), and for his work in music theatre. Not
the least interesting aspect of his work is the reciprocity it has promoted
between live and electronic forces. At its simplest, we might say that,
as in some works by Ligeti, he has composed electronic music for live
instruments.
Even more visible was Milko Kelemen (b.1924). He too studied in Paris
in the mid 1950s, and he went on to work in Siena and Freiburg, to attend
the Darmstadt seminar on several occasions, and (in 1961) to take up a
scholarship in the United States. Later, in 1969, he chose to settle perma-
nently in West Germany. But before that he taught at the Music Academy
in Zagreb, and he established his reputation there with a number of major
works composed in the late 1950s, in which he decisively pulled away
from the folk-based idioms of the immediate post-war years; they include
his Koncertante improvizacije [Concertante Improvisations] for strings of
1956, his challenging and innovatory Skolion for orchestra of 1960, and his
award-winning Transfiguracije [Transfigurations] for piano and orchestra,
also of 1960.
In 1959 Kelemen was closely involved in the initial discussions of the
Society of Composers about a festival of contemporary music, and he soon
emerged as the major power behind the Zagreb Biennale. Muziki Bien-
nale Zagreb (MBZ) was established in 1961 with Kelemen as its first presi-
dent, and it quickly secured an international reputation. Kelemen himself
has written about how he was able to turn the Cold War to advantage in
482 chapter eighteen
securing funding for the festival by playing the Soviet Union off against
the United States.19 Whatever the formula, the Biennale soon attracted
leading figures in contemporary music (the presence of Stravinsky at
the second festival in 1963 was symptomatic), and at the same time it
acted as the major platform for composers of a progressive orientation
from all over Yugoslavia. Indeed part of its mission was to set Yugoslav
modernisms in an international context, very much in the manner of the
Warsaw Autumn festival. As in Warsaw, moreover, the festival could
be at once a source of national pride and a symbol of cosmopolitanism,
though it was less successful in promoting native composers than its Pol-
ish counterpart.
The exception was Kelemen himself, for whom it was a conduit to wider
recognition, and eventually to a career in Germany. From 1961 onwards he
came to epitomise what was truly characteristic about modern Croatian
music: its increasing alignment with an international avant-garde and its
rejection of the Balkans. There is a precarious balance here. For many in
Croatia the new pluralism amounted to the recovery of a cosmopolitan
aesthetic traditionally associated with their nation. On this reading the
nationalism promoted by Kuha, and brought to fruition by Dobroni
and his circle, was a digression, or even an aberration. Since 1961, so the
argument ran, there has been a reintegration with Central and Western
Europe. There has been no Croatian music: just music in Croatia, and
music by Croatian composers living elsewhere. Croatia, after all, like Ger-
many and Italy, needed no reminders of the darker side of nationalism.
Thus, in the early 1990s the quest for independence was also a bid to join
the family of European nations. This is a comforting story for many, but in
truth the Croatian political and military record of the 1990s was Balkan
enough, by any standards. That, together with several manifestations of
mass culture, served as a reminder that the ghosts of the past are not so
easily laid.
Kelemen himself was at the forefront of internationalist agendas, and
his reputation as an exponent of the new music has been well deserved. In
his collection of writings, Labirinti [Labyrinths], published in 1994 though
dating from various stages of his career, he writes intelligently about the
limits of complexity, as also about the limits of freedom.20 A committed
23Kuzelich 2001.
488 chapter eighteen
time testifies to this energy. And it was then in Serbia, as in Croatia and
Slovenia that there was a turn towards postmodern pluralism. A key
stage in that particular journey was Trajkovis Arion, le nuove musiche
per chitarra ed archi of 1979, followed by Kulenikovs Raskovnik (1981), and
Eris widely performed Cartoon of 1984. Few were untouched by this new
post-modern orientation; we might equally cite Milan Mihajlovi (b.1945)
or Ivana Stefanovi (b.1948) as representative. And much the same gen-
eral direction was followed by a yet younger group of composers emerging
at the end of the eighties, right on the cusp of major political change in
Yugoslavia. With characteristic chutzpah, they labelled themselves The
Magnificent Seven, and we will return to them in a later chapter.
But we should move back a step first. Needless-to-say, a summary of this
sort can never be more than indicative. Mari was not the only composer
for whom easy pigeon-holing will not work at all. Vladan Radovanovi
(b.1932) committed himself to a remarkably radical position right from
the start. Already in the early 1950s he composed his Seven Chorales, a
work that has something in common with early minimalist composition.
But it soon became clear that Radovanovi was an avant-garde figure of a
more all-embracing kind. In a manner that is rare in South East Europe,
he went on to explore multi-media pieces of Stockhausen-like metaphysi-
cal ambition, even incorporating at times notations of his dreams. He
works in the visual arts as well as in music, and he has articulated novel
and interesting theoretical views on the nature of artistic synthesis. So it is
fitting that several of his compositions take the form of projects or hap-
penings, including film and computer-based installations.
Radovanovi was the spiritus movens behind the electronic studio in
Belgrade, and this has played into several of his cosmic pieces. If there
is a genealogy here, it might well return us to Slavenski. Titles such as
Kosmika muzika [Cosmic Music], Muzika sfera [Music of the Spheres]
and Sazvea [Constellations] are suggestive. It is tempting though per-
haps a little glib to see aspects of Radovanovis enterprise as extending
Slavenskis aesthetic in a rather different direction to the one taken by
Mari. Where Mari continued to explore archetypes of Balkan music very
much in the spirit of Slavenski, digging deeper and deeper into local soil,
Radovanovi pursued the other notable dimension to Slavenskis work,
pointing his telescope skywards. My earlier subtitles From the Balkans...
to the Cosmos are very much to the point.
The end of the eighties was a time of sharpening political differences
between the Yugoslav republics. Ethnonationalist agendas rode high, and
they culminated in war. For this reason it is intriguing to find areas of
another try 489
24For an English-language survey that tries to do justice to all the republics, at least as
things stood in 1980, see Lipovan 1980.
490 chapter eighteen
pieces for voice and piano, as in the cycle Crveni cvetovi [Red Flowers],
and Two Hands for singer, reciter and piano. And this in turn suggests
parallels with the most significant figure born in the 1950s, Tomi Manchev
(b.1950), especially in works such as Paganophony (1989). In some ways,
this is Yugoslav to the core, drawing together the pursuit of modernisms
and the quest for ancient roots.
Bosnia and Herzegovina also came into its own with the establishment
of the second Yugoslavia. The case was not quite as in Macedonia. Unlike
Skopje, Sarajevo was drawn more centrally into the cultural life of the new
state, somewhat at the expense of the other major Bosnian towns. The
Opera, the symphony orchestras and the Music Academy all ensured that
leading figures from the three dominant republics were a presence in the
city, as conductors and also as teachers. But even among the older gen-
eration there were key players from Bosnia too.25 The most eminent were
Vlado Miloevi (190091) and Cvjetko Rihtman (190289), and both were
distinguished musicologists and folklorists as well as composers. Miloevi
is the more highly valued as a composer, though the idiom is somewhat
anachronistic, a kind of rustic neo-classicism indebted to folk music from
Bosanska Krajina (the eight rukoveti, composed variously between 1940
and 1967 and in the spirit of Mokranjac), and in some works to Serbian
Orthodox repertories. Flirtations with impressionist devices seldom pen-
etrate much below the surface, though in some solo songs from the sixties
and seventies they are more foregrounded (Pastel; Sonet nepoznatoj eni).
There are in addition string quartets (including Kameni spava for reciter
and quartet of 1968), a violin concerto (1951), Dramatina simfonija (1967)
and the symphonic poem Hilendar (1972).26
Modernisms began to permeate Bosnian music with slightly younger
figures, of whom one of the first was Avdo Smailovi (191784), though
even here the basic musical idiom retained some contact with folklore.
Metamorfoze for piano (1980) is characteristic, including controlled alea-
tory devices and a tone that might be termed expressionist in its formal
discontinuities and explosions of dissonant harmony. A similar journey
from traditional idioms to moderate modernisms can be found in the
music, especially the chamber music and song cycles, of Nada Ludwig-
Pear (19292008), and likewise Vojin Komadina (193397), who has lived
25For a recent, immensely detailed, history of music in Bosnia and Herzegovina, see
avlovi 2011.
26avlovi 2001.
another try 493
in several parts of former Yugoslavia but was based in Bosnia and Her-
zegovina during the 1960s and 1970s, and whose early folk-influenced
neo-classical works yielded to more modern techniques in later years.
A work such as Refrain IV Silent Round Dance from Glamo for piano
(1975) has a foot in both these camps, not entirely securely. A more radical
figure, experimenting with electro-acoustic and computer music, is Josip
Magdi (b.1937), currently based in Zagreb. Some of Magdis concerns as
a composer, evident as early as his Sound Spectrums of 1968, harmonise
with developments we have noted elsewhere, including the tendency to
draw elements of church chant and folk traditions into a modern sound
synthesis.
After the Bosnian war the number of Bosnian composers working
actively in the republic (as far as one can separate them out from other
Yugoslav composers working there), dropped significantly. Creative enter-
prises looked increasingly inward at this time, despite the valiant efforts
of the Music Academy to promote and maintain an active and truly
contemporary musical life. The title of one of the CDs produced by the
Muzikoloko Drutvo FBiH [Musicological Society of Bosnia and Herze-
govina] is no doubt significant: Works by B-H Composers Living Abroad.
Nor was art music immune from the political agendas that appropriated
sacred repertories and popular music traditions in the post-war years.
Self-analysis can be the most brutal of all, and the comments of Amila
Ramovi on the state of play in Bosnia and Herzegovina today are hardly
encouraging.27
To some extent the same problems attend two other territories of for-
mer Yugoslavia that have either gained or asserted their independence. In
both Montenegro and Kosovo there are obvious attempts today to establish
national cultures and to validate these historically, despite the associations
of the former, and the minority population of the latter, with a dominant
Serbian culture. To list as Montenegrin composers the teachers and choir-
masters Jovan Ivanievi (18801940) and Jovan Miloevi (18951959),
both of whom studied in Prague, is perhaps anachronistic; and likewise
several composers associated with Boka Kotorska. Attempts to chart a music
history of Montenegro have been made by several writers, notably Miloje
Miloevi and Manja Radulovi-Vuli, and it is common for such authors to
refer to Iloja Lakei (190873) as the first Montenegrin symphonist (his
27Ramovi 2005.
494 chapter eighteen
28Radovi 1998.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1 Baudrillard 1988.
2Rasmussen 2002, 1112.
birthright of the people 497
work. And the context might be widened yet further in the post-war years,
establishing something of a divide between Eastern and Western Europe,
and perhaps a later convergence. Here the association of folklore with
the fascist regimes of the 1930s was all-important.3 The propaganda value
of folk music as a putative music of the masses had not been lost on the
Nazis, and there are predictable similarities between the folklorist proj-
ects of late 1930s Germany (in education, publishing and concert life) and
those of the post-war Communist states in Eastern Europe. Conversely, it
was precisely those associations with fascism that played to the general
tendency of Western Europe to reject traditional music after 1945, until in
due course it was re-invented in the 1960s and 1970s.4
All that said, it is not hard to see why folk music became all-important
within the Communist programme, harnessing processes of urbanisation
and modernisation to a larger enterprise of investment in but at the same
time re-fashioning of the folk. Folk music was thus institutionalised,
and the primary model was provided by the Soviet Union. The All-Union
Conferences held in Moscow in 1959 and 1960 formalised the develop-
ment of secondary ensembles in schools and factories, the institution of
regional and national competitions and festivals of song and dance, the
engagement of classically trained musicians as arrangers and composers,
and the instigation of programmes of research at the Academies. At one
extreme, there was careful scholarship into, and performance of, regional
traditions of folklore across the Union, and at the other extreme there
were song texts crudely transformed for blatant propaganda purposes.
Most important of all, this new folk culture redefined the folk, embracing
the modern proletariat as well as the rural peasantry.
The whole enterprise, riddled with contradictions, was very quickly
adopted by the satellite states. We might register some of the paradoxes
by reflecting on practices in Romania. An obvious starting-point is the
state-sponsored Institute of Folklore (later the Institute of Ethnology),
which was founded in 1949, with Harry Brauner as the driving force.5
The Institute took over the Arhiva de folklore of the Society of Roma-
nian Composers (originally established by Briloiu) and the rival Arhiva
3For a case study of this during the Metaxas regime in Greece, see Loutzaki 2008.
4See Randall 2005.
5See Marian-Blaa 2000. A year after becoming Director of the Institute in 1949,
Brauner was imprisoned, having been implicated in a show trial. He remained in custody
for fifteen years.
498 chapter nineteen
6For a discussion of the politics of these two archives in the inter-war years, see Men-
geel 2007.
birthright of the people 499
to be articulated, but they all support her central thesis about the empow-
erment of performance, and about how it has negotiated between old and
new female roles. Her book tells a fascinating story. Like Buchanans Per-
forming Democracy, it allows personal histories to break down pedigreed
accounts of socialist cultural norms.9 Moreover, in telling womens stories
Hofman is also telling mens stories. Here the relationship between the
performative and the everyday comes into sharpest focus, especially as we
move into the post-Communist era. There is a challenge to the old roles,
but not a definitive transformation.
As to the cities, the folk ensembles had a capacity mysteriously to unite
peasant culture and the urban workplace. As Beno Zupani reminds us,
some of the factories in parts of Yugoslavia were not just visited by pro-
fessional folklore troupes; they had their own KUD (Kulturno umjetniko
drutvo [Cultural-Artistic Society]) complete with folk ensembles.10 And
the same was true of Albania, where ensembles were established at Houses
of Culture all over the country, and amateur groups instituted at several of
the larger factories. Some of the best of these amateur ensembles achieved
international fame, and the propaganda value was exploited to the full. The
most prestigious platform was the National Folklore Festival that took place
in Gjirokastr from 1968 onwards. It was a five-yearly event, but it generated
an industry of folklorism by way of preparatory local festivals and competi-
tions. Moreover, like comparable festivals elsewhere (the equivalent in Bul-
garia is at Koprivstitsa), Gjirokastr not only promoted Albanian traditional
music, but identified what might and might not be regarded as such. Reli-
gious songs were out, and so was the oriental-influenced ahengu shkodran.
Even the lyrics of well-known traditional songs were subject to purifica-
tion, all in the service of the new man, the peasant-worker beloved of
socialist realism. The usual prizes were awarded, and the entire event was
recorded and transmitted by the State Broadcasting Corporation.
Earlier I noted some parallels of function, not of style between folk
orchestras and American Swing bands. Those parallels might be extended.
Just as the Big Bands of the 1930s fostered solo virtuosity (as opposed to
group improvisation), so the new folk ensembles in Eastern Europe pro-
moted the professional folk soloist, whose artistry and virtuosity might
be projected against a uniform orchestral backcloth. Star soloists could
9Buchanan 2006.
10Zupani discusses in particular the Alat factory of Trebinje in a heavily ideological
reading. See Zupani 1976, 8691.
birthright of the people 501
music, it was clear that a particular space had been carved out by drawing
together elements of narodna [folk] music, zabavna [popular] music, and
orientalna [oriental] music. As to the language of the songs, Beli and
others insisted on staying with local vernaculars, even in the recording
studios.
In tracking the early history of newly composed folk music, Ljerka V.
Rasmussen refers to a major conceptual shift occurring in the 1960s, as
the arranger gave way to the auteur.13 One practical but important
point here is that with this shift the music fell under copyright laws, but
Rasmussen had in mind changes of much wider cultural significance.
She tells the story of Sarajevo-based songwriter Damjan Babi, not just
because he was a leading player, but because his career throws light on
the institutions that determined the success or failure of newly composed
folk music: the radio, the festival and the record companies. Negotiating
with these institutions was far from easy. We learn that Babi left the
record company Diskoton when it refused to sign up Goran Bregovis
Bijelo dugme, and that the conservatism of Radio-Television Sarajevo
forced him to establish an independent studio in the city. We witness the
treacherous path he steered between the demands of radio editors for a
more classical approach to folk music (one that retained some contact with
its original spirit) and the no less strident demands of a popular music
industry increasingly tied to the commercial marketplace. The balance of
interests was between what Rasmussen calls the significance of zabavna
music in providing the environment for this musics early development,
and an organised attempt at the creation of Yugoslav song within the
early festival context.14
Rasmussens account of these events exposes the workings of the cul-
ture industry in Communist Yugoslavia, bearing in mind that, as she had
already pointed out in an earlier essay on Juni vetar [Southern Wind],15
the particular model of self governing socialism cultivated there allowed
a robust, semi-privatised popular (but not unified) music market to
emerge at a much earlier stage than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. We
learn from her study something of the difficulties faced by musicians
as they negotiated much the same tricky path as Damjan Babi, a path
that led, broadly speaking, from folkloric to popular music environments.
13Rasmussen 2002.
14Ibid.
15Rasmussen 1996.
birthright of the people 505
20See Kurkela 2007 for Bulgarian contexts; also Lipsitz 1997, though here the focus is
not on the Balkans.
21There is an interesting discussion of this in relation to Balkan cinema in Iordanova
2001.
birthright of the people 507
Kusturica that puts it mildly). But in its heyday Bijelo dugme responded
to the changing fashions of a global popular culture. And in that respect
the band belonged within a much wider set of local-global dialogues that
took place in the late 1970s and 1980s.
If modernised neo-folk music formed one pole in Yugoslav popular cul-
ture at this time, the other pole was a thriving rock scene, linked to the
West, and implicitly or explicitly critical of state socialism, though the
politics of Yugoslav rock could look in several directions.22 It oversim-
plifies the picture to suggest that the former was associated with Serbia-
Bosnia-Macedonia, and the latter with Croatia-Slovenia. Croatia had its
own internal east, for example, and neo-folk thrived in the caf culture
of the cities even when blacklisted by official media channels. Conversely,
Yugo-rock was cultivated in Belgrade and Sarajevo as much as in Zagreb
and Ljubljana. There was indeed a pre-history to this attempt to create a
vibrant urban popular culture in the late 1970s. Already in the late 1960s,
initially in the teeth of opposition from Tito, a countercultural rock scene
had developed (Grupa 220 in Croatia, YU Grupa in Serbia, and the cover
band Kodeksi in Sarajevo). YU Grupa in particular cultivated a Balkan
rock sound, whose folk-orientation served to emphasise that the space
between this world and neo-folk was as much about rhetoric as style. This
is not to say that the space did not exist. What constituted it was the over-
all framework of the idiom, distinguishing rock with elements of folk from
neo-folk with elements of rock.23
The initial impulse for New Wave punk-rock came from Zagreb in
1977, associated with the caf-pubs Zvecka, Blato and Kavkaz (and later
the club Kului), and heavily promoted by the influential socialist youth
paper Polet [Enthusiasm]. Among the key bands were Paljavo kazalite
[Dirty Theatre], Pankrti [Bastards] (from Slovenia), and Patrola, but most
influential of all were the two incarnations of Azra, with its front man Bra-
nimir (Johnny) tuli (the break-up of the first Azra gave rise to another
influential band Film, led by Jura Stubli). Following the death of Tito there
was a second wave, this time including bands from Belgrade, such as arlo
Akrobata [Charlie Chaplin], Idoli [Idols] and Elektrini orgazam [Electric
Orgasm], associated with the Student Cultural Centre and brought to
wider notice by the Three Days of Young Slav Culture held in Belgrade
22For an account of the rise and fall of Yugo-Rock, see the chapter Rock Music in
Ramet 1996.
23Ibid.
birthright of the people 509
in 1980. The Serbian bands were later joined by Bora orevis Riblja
orba [Fish Chowder], whose inflammatory lyrics led them into a long
series of conflicts with the censors on both ethical and political grounds.
Then, in the early 1980s, there was increasing dialogue between Zagreb
and Belgrade, now involving more recent bands such as Darko Rundeks
art-rock group Haustor [Stairway] from Zagreb. The major festival held
in Subotica (begun way back in the 1960s) was instrumental in bringing
leading Croatian and Serbian bands together.
1981 has been regarded by some of the key protagonists as the high
point of this New Wave, with leading bands such as Paljavo kazalite
and Azra migrating from the clubs to the bigger halls, selling more and
more records, and smartening up their image at the same time. In exam-
ining this rock culture, it can be challenging to spell out the succession
of genres and sub-genres. Generic distinctions are often hard to draw in
purely musical (as distinct from more general music-dance-behavioral)
terms with such repertories; a performer in Paljavo kazalite remarked
that the band became punk more-or-less by accident, as they tried
unsuccessfully to imitate The Rolling Stones. In any event, the active punk
movement associated with the New Wave soon spread all over Yugosla-
via. And again it may be worth singling out Sarajevo, since the punk bands
there were something of an inspiration to the influential new primitive
movement that emerged in the 1980s, contributing a distinctive brand of
satirical neo-Zenitism to the mosaic of popular culture. The best known
of the bands here was Zabranjeno puenje [Smoking Forbidden], with a
later incarnation to which Kusturica would become attached for a time.
Zabranjeno puenje cultivated a deliberately insular Balkanism that
played on familiar stereotypes, spiced by parodic, almost Pythonesque,
elements.
We didnt hear the roar coming from afar, claimed one performer,
referring to political rumblings in Kosovo and Poland in the early eight-
ies. Even those New Wave bands that thought of themselves as counter-
cultural but apolitical in impulse (in interviews with Igor Mirkovi, some
spoke of their inclination to create a private universe of rock),24 were
unable to insulate themselves from impinging political realities. Leading
players have discussed the effects of new financial stringencies (the power
cuts, the petrol shortages, the rising foreign debt) that affected Zagreb
24Mirkovis comment comes from his rockumentary film Sretno Dijete, which will be
discussed in chapter 23.
510 chapter nineteen
and Belgrade from 1982 onwards, together with the increasing roar from
Kosovo. Zona sumraka [The Twilight Zone] by Film, with its obvious
double meanings, seemed to mark this change of tone. And it inaugu-
rated something of a new period, during which some bands became more
establishment-orientated while others became increasingly disillusioned,
sensing that the dream had been shattered. Already in the eighties the
exodus began, notably when the most socially aware of all the New Wave
artists, Johnny tuli, left Zagreb in 1990. Others following in due course,
and today the New Wave heroes are scattered far and wide.
The face of popular music was beginning to change in other ways.
While bands such as Bijelo dugme and Riblja orba continued to attract
huge audiences through the 1980s, alternative movements from the West
were beginning to glimmer in the local discos. First there was a grow-
ing awareness of rap and hip-hop subcultures. These had the potential to
foster feelings of social and political disadvantage, but they could equally
carry the sense of a faddish interest in the most recent western trends. It is
widely recognised that global rap could take on many different meanings
according to context, and it seems likely that its meanings in Yugoslavia in
the 1980s had less to do with its origins in black urban ghettos than with
media-mediated images of a stereotyped gangsta paradise.
It was mainly in the late 1980s that homemade varieties made their
appearance. First there were musicians such as the Montenegrin Rambo
Amadeus, whose early albums combined rap and pop-folk, but whose
parodic play on styles became increasingly anti-establishment and politi-
cally activist with the outbreak of war. Secondly, and in sharp contrast,
there was a self-consciously sophisticated countercultural avant-garde,
often incorporating elements of classical music, and best represented
by the elite and controversial Slovenian group Laibach, whose subver-
sive political satire has proved to be notoriously open to misreading as
fascistic.25 If neo-folk represented the most inward-looking tendencies
of Yugoslav popular culture, increasingly appropriated by hard-line eth-
nonationalist politics, then Laibach was among the most outward-looking
bands. This was a blatantly cosmopolitan Balkan critique that came from
within but as though from without.
We might take these positions to represent nationalist-conservative and
cosmopolitan-modernist idioms respectively. It is tempting to draw paral-
25Sabrina Ramets reading of this group misses some of the play of meanings (Ramet
1996, 1024).
birthright of the people 511
lels with the debates that took place in art music half a century earlier in the
first Yugoslavia, addressed of course to a rather different taste public. And as
with those earlier debates, the categories might be refined. Along the spec-
trum separating nationalist-conservative and cosmopolitan-modernist we
might place nationalist-modernist and cosmopolitan-conservative. All four
positions were represented by composers in the thirties and bands in the
eighties, though it goes without saying that the categories are not water-
tight. And the parallel might be extended. The debates of the inter-war
period we noted the exchanges between Dobroni and Osterc in Zvuk
were brutally overtaken by events (the outbreak of war), at which point
there was a sharp polarisation of cultures. And when a polity finally inter-
vened, it was the nationalist orientation that held sway. What effectively
happened under state socialism was that alternatives were removed; they
were squeezed out. Compare the late 1980s in popular music, where there
was a similar polarisation of pop-folk and pop-rock, and where again it
was all blown apart by the outbreak of war.
When war finally came, it threw everything into the melting pot, styles
and taste publics alike. Even traditional folk instruments, such as the gusle
and the tamburica, came to assume symbolic values in this political context
(as noted in an earlier chapter), and especially when allied to popular
music genres. Here folk and pop fused in a blatantly ideological manner.
Many of the established groups disbanded at this time. Bijelo dugme had
the highest profile, but the case of Riblja orba was perhaps more repre-
sentative. First they decided to disband; then they revoked the decision.
Finally, in the 1990s, they were victims of the increasingly polarised atti-
tudes that inevitably accompanied the wars, as Bora orevis support
for Arkan and for the Serbian action in Bosnia and Herzegovina (though
he was no fan of Miloevi) and his collaboration with the nationalist
turbo-folk singer Baja Mali Kninda lost him a fan base in key quarters. It
was characteristic of the separating power bases associated with these twi-
light years of the second Yugoslavia. And in this polarised context it was
of course the nationalist orientation that rode high under official politi-
cal prescription, a process documented by Eric D. Gordy precisely in the
terms of a destruction of alternatives, and not just musical alternatives.26
Gordy tells us how the rock culture enabled by the liberal version
of Communism found in Yugoslavia was pushed to the margins under
Miloevi, though he may exaggerate the extent to which the dictator was
27Collin 2001.
28Hogg 2004.
birthright of the people 513
musical tastes were already receptive to the idiom, given the extensive
contact with Rom musics, and with the new ethno-pop styles coming from
Serbia, Greece and Turkey. And it goes without saying that the association
of these repertories with cultural decay with a decadent East rather than
a progressive and stable Europe was already well grounded.
A similar story might be told of Romania. Again there was Romani
music, including manele, which retained points of contact with the older
lutar traditions, and was circulated largely through private performances
and on cassettes. Again it was considered subversive by the authorities
and was given no real access to official media. And again there was influ-
ence from neighbouring cultures. As Margaret Beissinger points out,
Bulgarian svatbarska muzika crossed the southern border freely, just as
Serbian neo-folk idioms made their way to Banat, where Serbian musi-
cians commonly performed at weddings, and from there to the rest of the
country (they were also disseminated through foreign radio channels).30
Beissinger also points out that in Timioara underground tapes of lutar
music, somewhat on the model of Serbian neo-folk, were produced in pri-
vate studios and then sold on the black market. And she comments on the
names assigned to these pop-folk repertories. For a time the generic term
muzic srbeas (Serbian Music) was used to describe the kind of ethno-
pop that was heard more and more commonly, but always unofficially, in
Romania. Then, in its subsequent (mainly post-Communist) crystallisa-
tion, the Romanian species of pop-folk was known as muzica oriental;
and eventually the older term manele was adopted. Like its counterpart
in Bulgaria, this title announces a particular historical genealogy and a
particular range of associations.
The larger message is that Yugoslav neo-folk became popular across
much of the Balkans in the 1980s, even before separate indigenous genres
emerged in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. And there were similar devel-
opments in Greece, despite the different political context (see chapter
20), suggesting that much deeper questions of identity were raised by this
repertory. In the Communist world, the ascendancy of pop-folk registered
a shift in the political significance of popular music. It is hard to see pop-
folk as a counter-cultural movement of the kind represented by svatbar-
ska muzika in the 1970s, for example. Indeed it came to take on a range
of very different meanings in the late Communist world, many of them
unrelated to the political system as such, and for that reason capable of
30Beissinger 2007.
516 chapter nineteen
outliving it. Most typically, it was regarded as trashy and tasteless. This
was certainly the view of those who were keen to reinforce links with the
West. So as the European Union beckoned in a post-Communist world,
pop-folk was associated by some with a rural, backward culture, by others
with a decadent, permissive and eastern culture, and by yet others as a
symbol of strengthening ethnonationalist aspirations. Later I will exam-
ine why such different political positions could be inscribed in this genre.
But one part of the answer might well be broached here by looking at the
changing status of folk music more generally.
It is interesting to reflect on how two major categories, art music and
popular music, appropriated, hosted, or alternatively rejected, a third cat-
egory, folk music, across Communist South East Europe. There are two
evolving histories here, and they might be presented as follows. Within art
music there were three principal stages. The hosted folk ingredient was de
rigueur in the immediate post-war years. It was an officially sanctioned
even imposed marker of both national and (idealised) class identities.
The second stage saw the rejection or squeezing out of folk music under
a modernist imperative, signalling a form of progress, an alignment to
the Western world, and with that a certain loss of locality. The third stage
(at least for a significant number of composers) reinstated folk music in
the very different form of a poeticised archaism in the renewed quest for
local (Balkan) identities. The trajectory followed by popular music corre-
sponded very roughly to the second and third of these three stages. Thus
the folk element was initially absent from what was a subversive music in
this political context. But in due course it began to inflect internationalist
pop-rock idioms, and again the impulse seems to have been a perceived
need to foreground local identities within a global culture.
What, though, of our third category, folk music itself, considered this
time as a host rather than a guest genre? Here we might trace a process of
generic mixing, as this category opened itself to influences from the other
two categories in turn. The two stages by which this occurred have already
been outlined. In the first stage traditional music, with clear ritual mean-
ings related to the calendar, was translated to the world of folk orchestras,
concert stages and folk festivals. The translation involved the addition of
European harmony, and along with that came negotiations with Western
(equal) temperament and the introduction of some manufactured Euro-
pean instruments to the folk ensemble. The second stage was marked by
a much more obvious engagement with the world of commercial show
business, including electronic instrumentation, big sound systems, and
the performance conventions and characteristic idioms associated with a
birthright of the people 517
31Baudrillard 1988.
518 chapter nineteen
It was only with the fall of Communism that such third-order simu-
lacra were fully registered. But already in the 1980s, overtly in Yugosla-
via and unofficially elsewhere, the stage was prepared for a time when
an orientalised pop-folk would be all but ubiquitous, heard in every taxi,
and on every radio and TV music programme all over the Balkans. The
genre markers are recognisably part of an Ottoman legacy. But they are
syncretic, and as a result they function on a purely operational level: as
signifiers without a single signified. More crucially, the collective iden-
tity that might register such symbols as the inscription of a shared his-
tory (a history that excludes the West) engages in a much simpler act
of substitution, for which other orientalist markers might and do serve
just as well. More often than not such markers are actually products of a
western cultural production, the outcome of those globalising tendencies
that we associate today with world music. And it is because both Easts
are present simultaneously backwards and Balkan and glamorous and
global is how one author describes them32 that conventional significa-
tion breaks down. In this particular imaginary, this myth of the east, only
the simulacra are left.
32Catherine Baker in a paper delivered to the ASN Globalization, Nationalism and Eth-
nic Conflict Conference in Belgrade 2006. See also parts of chapter 6 of Baker 2010.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1Kalomiris 1961.
2Ibid., 356.
520 chapter twenty
3As noted in chapter 3, popular art song is not an adequate translation of the term
used by Theodorakis. A more literal translation might be artistic popular songs.
one got away 521
5Ibid., 44 ff.
one got away 523
art music, and several of the piano pieces are not so distant from pieces
by composers from the Kalomiris circle. Yet invariably there is a foun-
dation in the familiar melodic and rhythmic patterns of Greek popular
music, and on occasion there is a swerve towards an idiom with greater
mass appeal. His association with Nana Mouskouri, whom he discovered
and promoted, but whose later global fame did something to return the
favour, helped keep him in the public eye. So too did his Oscar-winning
score for the Jules Dassin film Never on Sunday, especially given its asso-
ciation with Dassins wife Melina Mercouri.
One of the key ingredients of Hadjidakiss musical world, distinguishing
it clearly from more commercial forms of popular music, was his respect
for, and ear for, poetry of real artistic merit. There are analogies here with
a particular species of popular, literary chanson in France (Brassens,
Ferr, Gainsbourg).6 But in any case the new Entekhno lako tragoudhi
[popular art song] or poetry set to music took its stand on an intimate
connection between poetry of status, old and new, and demotic musi-
cal idioms. This was no less true of Theodorakis. Ritsos was only one of
the highly valued 30s Generation modernist poets to whom he turned in
later years; indeed his central aim was to present this poetry to a wider
public by way of a music with popular appeal (this was not always greeted
with approval by the poets themselves). There was, however, a major dif-
ference in orientation between the two artists. Unlike Theodorakis, Had-
jidakis was not inclined towards poetry of political commitment. He was
reluctant to identify explicitly with populist causes, and it was this more
than anything that separated him off from the cultish popularity enjoyed
by Theodorakis. For Theodorakis the message was all, and popular appeal
was essential. He forged his melodic style from traditional music of vari-
ous kinds, including rural dance songs, Byzantine chant and rebetika, but
from Epitaphios onwards he avoided the kinds of sophisticated appropri-
ations of traditional music associated with the national school, aiming
instead at direct communicative simplicity. For this reason his accompa-
niments tend to be unobtrusive and uncomplicated, for nothing must be
allowed to stand in the way of the poetic message.
At the same time his artistic ambition remained high. He wanted his
music to endure, but he also wanted it to reach the people, and that
6Papanikolaou 2007. There are close parallels between the two traditions, and especially
the use of high-prestige poetry to generate a superior form of popular song. Papanikolaou
discusses the critical discourses that developed around these two national canons, com-
paring Brassens, Ferr and Gainsbourg with Theodorakis, Hadjidakis and Savvopoulos.
524 chapter twenty
7Theodorakis 1972.
8Holst 1980, 8299.
one got away 525
9As Eleni Kallimopoulou notes, he was the producer of the album Dhinamis tou Egheou
[Powers of the Agean] by the band of that name in the mid 1980s. Kallimopoulou 2009.
one got away 527
in the revival of rebetika. Then there are the divas, including Savina Yan-
natou, Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Haris Alexiou and Vicki Leandros. And there
are younger artists still emerging today. A singer such as Athena Andreadis
belongs more to the world of popular art song than to commercial pop.
What is true of all of these singers is that they eschew the explicit politi-
cal content as distinct from a more generalised patriotism or nostalgia
that was part and parcel of Theodorakiss music.
in the Soviet bloc, with the avant-garde as an insignia of the Free World:
anti-Communist as well as anti-Fascist. In the case of France and occupied
West Germany, this oversimplifies the picture; it is not without founda-
tion, but needs qualification. What one might say is that the Congress
of Cultural Freedom, the radio stations of the occupied zones in West
Germany, and other USIS-sponsored activities made room for an avant-
garde to develop (almost a definition of Isaiah Berlins so-called negative
freedom).14 But propaganda was only part of the story. Local agendas sur-
faced, and there are alternative narratives for the ideology of a post-war
avant-garde. At least recent literature has exposed something of an asym-
metry in earlier musical scholarship dealing with the Cold War era, where
ideology and propaganda were regarded as the province of the eastern
bloc, and the western avant-garde was somehow apolitical.
Against this background how are we to locate Greece in the post-Civil
War years? Political power moved decisively to the right following the
elections of 1952, and from that point onwards the Cold War ensured that
Communists were confined to opposition. However, if power moved to
the right, culture moved to the left. The Communist cause, or at least the
cause of a broadly Humanist left, gathered around itself the sympathies
and talents of a very broad swathe of the artistic and intellectual commu-
nity. In the battle of ideas, the left held sway, and it was helped by a long
tradition of anti-establishment thought in Greece. A figure such as The-
odorakis belonged centrally within this tradition, and although he could
appear a maverick figure at times, he was able to draw a following from
right across the social spectrum. That his more political music was peri-
odically banned was of considerable help. But there were other threats to
his domination of popular music, not least the sudden influx of American-
influenced mass culture, siphoning off a major part of his support. This
may have been partly responsible for the greater ambition of some of his
later music. But the space he might have hoped to enter was already occu-
pied, and not just by the Kalomiris circle. Art music, invariably dependent
on some measure of official support (even when it appears dissenting),
was taking new directions in Greece, and as usual they were inseparable
from politics.
Greece depended heavily on the US during the later stages of the Civil
War, both militarily and economically, and that dependence, closely tied
to Cold War strategy, ensured that it became hardly less of a client state
14Berlin 1969.
one got away 529
15In reality, the EEC countries had been Greeces major trading partners for some time
before that.
16There are some intriguing exchanges between the British Council in Athens and
the Foreign Office on these matters: including the request to send modern English music
urgently by air: they have nothing but Vaughn Williams and Quilter. FO 024/162. 9 March
From Athens to FO (Sir R. Leeper). National Archives, London.
530 chapter twenty
Review we can almost literally graph the cultural withdrawal of the Brit-
ish, as they handed over to the Germans and their Americans mentors
from around 1947 onwards.17
It was in 1952 that the first Goethe Institute outside Germany was
founded in Athens, and it promoted a series of concerts of music by Greek
and German composers that culminated in the highly ambitious Goethe
Institute Workshops for Contemporary Music, co-organised by the musi-
cologist John G. Papaioannou and the German composer Gunther Becker,
at that time resident in Greece. Then, in the same year, a series of Ameri-
can concerts was initiated, funded by the US Information Service and held
at their film room on Monday evenings (where USIS-funded propaganda
films were regularly shown) with the explicit aim of introducing contem-
porary music to Greece (there were comparable initiatives in Turkey).18
Programmes were mainly of music by Greek and American composers,
and typically they combined recorded performances of American music
with live performances of Greek chamber works.
These events not only helped displace the National School; they
encouraged the development of a modernist culture among native Greek
composers, including, as we noted in chapter 12, established figures such
as Zoras and Poniridis. This is not to claim political motivations on the
part of the composers themselves. Rather it is to argue that a space was
opened up by Cold War politics for a modernist music that was assured
of some level of official backing. To some extent this simply duplicated
the pattern observable in Western Europe. When Adorno referred to the
ageing of the new music, he partly meant the transformation of an avant-
garde from the explosive, dissenting new of the first half of the twentieth
century into the officially sponsored new of its second half. But in Greece
this sequence was played out in a particularly blatant form. Modernist
music was one way to express an allegiance to the West, and to distin-
guish clearly an official Greek culture from the socialist realism of the
eastern bloc.
Such cultural aid culminated in the Hellenic Weeks of Contemporary
Music inaugurated in 1966, and running through with several breaks until
1976. The programming tells a fascinating story (especially in relation to
the canonising of Skalkottas), but hardly less significant was the pattern
17I am grateful to Kostas Kardamis for his help with this topic.
18Regarding the introduction of musical modernism in Athens see Romanou 2006b,
2347.
one got away 531
of sponsorship. Here we can see very clearly the context within which
Greek modernism had its moment in the sun. For the first week (1966) the
principal external sponsor was the Goethe Institute. For the second week
(1967) the cultural office of the US Embassy joined in, and the programme
reflected that. Then, for the third week (1968), organised within the period
of the Junta, most of the funding came from the Ford Foundation, and
exactly the same was true of the fourth week (1971). For the last of the
weeks (1976), now post-Junta, all external funding was withdrawn, and
it is obvious from the Acknowledgements and Introduction on the pro-
gramme that there had been great difficulty in securing local funding.19
The inauguration of the Hellenic Weeks represented the point at which
modernism was finally acclimatised in Greece; the point at which it found
a sympathetic hearing and became an official art. Admittedly this was a
period when young composers tended to study abroad, and several did
not return. Of those born in the 1920s and 1930s one might cite Argyris
Kounadis (19242011), Dimitris Terzakis (b.1938) and Yannis Vlachopoulos
(b.1939), all of whom settled in Germany; or Anestis Logothetis (192194),
who chose Vienna. But for those who did come back to Greece, there was
now a more receptive climate for the new music. The Greek section of the
ISCM and the Hellenic Association for Contemporary Music (more-or-less
synonymous in practice) were founded around the same time as the first
Hellenic Week, along with the Hadjidakis composition competition at
the Technological Institute, and Theodore Antonious Hellenic Group for
Contemporary Music. Antoniou (b.1935) established the Hellenic Group
in 1967, and he did much to promote new music in the brief period of its
activity before he too decided to base himself in North America, though
he continued to spend part of the year in Greece. We might also refer to
the key role played by Yorgos Sicilianos (19202005) in a variety of admin-
istrative and media positions.
But more than anything, it was the composer Yiannis Papaioannous
presence at the Hellenic Conservatory that made a difference, for this
ensured that contemporary compositional methods, and especially the
twelve-note technique, were taught to Greek composers. His own music
led the way. In a schematic periodisation of his oeuvre, Papaioannou pin-
pointed 1952 as a turning-point (as we saw, it was a turning-point more
generally in Greek music). Strictly speaking, it inaugurated the fourth of
19In current research in progress, Ioannis Tsagkarakis nuances this picture, especially
with regard to Ford Foundation funding.
532 chapter twenty
20Xanthoudakis 2004.
21Quoted in the liner notes of the recording in the collection 20th-Century Greek Avant-
Garde Music: A Cross Section, p. 177.
534 chapter twenty
its childs voice inevitably recalling Gesang der Jnglinge, just as its final
breathing recalls the Hymn of Pluramon from Hymnen.
Certain gestures were ubiquitous in the Contemporary Music festivals of
Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. We are reminded of what Leonard B. Meyer
once described as the aesthetics of stability.22 The beehive sonorities that
resulted from fairly standardised aleatory devices were one such; and the
Varse-like changing coloration of a single pitch was another. When we
listen to a work such as Projections, composed in 1968 by Yannis Ioan-
nidis (b.1930), it is hard not to hear these and other devices as part of the
anonymous modernist soundscape of their time. And likewise, when we
hear the polystylistic moments in the Music for Wind Quintet (196566) by
Georges Tsouyopoulos (b.1930), where Tchaikovsky invades the modernist
world, we are reminded of similar gestures of parody or stylistic counter-
point in any number of contemporary scores. There appeared to be no
ambition in either case to distinguish this music as peculiarly Greek, but
rather to see it as a part of European music, as up-to-date as anything
from the more prestigious cultural centres. It is possible to read this as
a symptom of cultural maturity. Like the Hellenism of 1930s modernist
literature, it might be argued, the new music dignified modern Greece,
allowing it to compete with Western Europe on its own terms. That the
West remained largely indifferent to an avant-garde it had initially helped
to make possible was largely a matter of straightforward chauvinism.
In any case, the ideological charge of the avant-garde weakened soon
enough, and its political value lessened as a result. It succeeded somehow
in maintaining its status as an official culture, but as Cold War politics
lost its immediacy, the tendency was to realign the avant-garde, to see it
as at best the spearhead of a wider classical music culture (in which there
was little investment in Greece) and at worst as a kind of cultural ghetto.
Appropriations aside, avant-garde composers had always tended to view
their own activities as largely apolitical, if not autonomous, and in this
they aligned themselves with more general international tendencies. We
perhaps need to ask, then, how valuable it is to invoke a national perspec-
tive on this music at all, given that Darmstadt set the trend for composers
everywhere. There was what some writers have called (in another con-
text) a national bypass operative within this culture.23 Admittedly, the
postmodernism of the late 1970s acquired a particular piquancy in Greece
22Meyer 1967b.
23Malm and Wallis 1992.
536 chapter twenty
with the fall of the Junta, but this point could be over-stressed. The real-
ity is that if modernist composers saw their activities as apolitical, most
politicians saw them as not worth claiming.
Only within the institution of art itself, embodied in a musical estab-
lishment that struggled to gain funding from successive governments, was
there a sustained attempt to promote this culture and to construct its tra-
dition as something intrinsically national. And even here the nationalism
was less about projecting a particular, culturally unique, brand a Greek
product and more about holding ones own in a global cultural market-
place. If anything, it represented a conservative view, a tacit acknowledge-
ment that for art music there was still some life in binary centre-periphery
models of national identity that had become obsolete in popular music.
Inevitably, perhaps, the agency involved here proselytising exercises on
behalf of a sophisticated and genuinely undervalued culture of Greek art
music increasingly extended to composers whose successes owed little
to Greece, though they might conceivably be viewed as representative of
another Greece, and a prominent one: the diasporic nation. At the heart
of this lay a form of proprietorship, with nationality foregrounded among
many competing modes of identity construction. It was applied to the
migr composers mentioned above, most of whom retained close links
with Greece. But above all it was applied to two towering creative fig-
ures of the post-war era, men whose association with Greek music was
at best indirect.
Jani Christou (192670), already a cult figure in certain circles, is emerg-
ing as a composer of international significance. Born into the Greek com-
munity in Egypt and educated in philosophy with Russell and Wittgenstein
in Cambridge, he spent only his last ten years in Greece, and even then he
had relatively little engagement with its musical life. As Panos Vlagopo-
ulos has observed, he was doubly isolated, an outsider to Greek contexts
during his early life, but later removed (through his move to Greece) from
international contexts.24 At the time of his early death, he was working
on what Leotsakos has called a massive stage ritual after Aeschyluss
Oresteia.25 Had it been completed, it might well have brought to a culmi-
nating stage a process that seems to have been under way through much of
his output. That process might perhaps be described as the gradual yield-
ing of music to philosophy, and it was no doubt influenced by his studies
24Vlagopoulos 2004.
25Leotsakos 2001.
one got away 537
both composers, the creative journey was endlessly challenging, and inter-
estingly Xenakis even saw this partly in national terms. Greeks are like
that: they are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready
to launch out into all kinds of rapid, violent, sometimes fatal actions, and
end up by not finding themselves. Carrying this Greekness with him in
the world of cosmopolitan modernism was an asset in later life, a way of
marking him as distinctive. But in his early years in Paris success was by
no means immediate. His anti-serial, anti-pointillist path won him few
friends among the avant-garde, and for some time he was ignored by the
institutions of modernism in Germany too, despite early performances
of Metastaseis and Pithoprakta given by Hermann Scherchen. But in the
1960s the tide turned, and the singularity and sheer power of Xenakiss
stochastic music, in which massed sonorities (notated with precision) are
controlled by mathematical processes, above all the calculus of probabil-
ity, succeeded in converting the critics.
It is in their attention to the larger features of the form, where the pur-
poseful shaping of sonorities within a space-time continuum takes pri-
ority over the miniscule constitutive elements of those sonorities, that
these early works of Xenakis may be distinguished from classic essays
in multiple serialism in the early 1950s. Those essays in serialism were
similarly unitary in effect, but they exhibited, in Xenakiss view, a dras-
tic disjunction of means and ends. Thus in Pithoprakta, mass events are
created from intersecting, measured glissandi (cf. ruled architectural sur-
faces) and from pizzicato or col legno clouds (cf. kinetic theory of gases),
where both continuities and discontinuities are statistically controlled by
probability theory. Soon he would use a computer programme to deter-
mine these and other derived processes (including mathematical game
theory, Markov chains, and sieves, which allow particular ordered sets
of pitches and/or durations to develop by a process of blocking and dis-
placing). Something of this thinking remained with him to the end, but
from Synaphae (1969) onwards it was inflected by new kinds of random
processes embodied in Brownian movement (random movement of par-
ticles within a gas or liquid under thermal agitation), and arborescences,
where voices branch out randomly into tangled polyphonic strands. Haris
Xanthidakou has written about this, proposing that this new direction was
tantamount to an investment in dualism, replacing the monism charac-
teristic of Xenakiss earlier stochastic music.
The techniques and systems at work in Xenakiss music were multi-
ple, and they have been multiply documented. Of all the composers in
this book, he is perhaps the one best served by secondary literature of a
540 chapter twenty
It is true that in the post-war years Greece was largely isolated from its
Communist neighbours, and there was no lack of mutual hostility. Yet in
looking at the background to an emergent popular culture it may be more
helpful to consider features that cross political divides than to emphasise
the differences. In the 1950s and 1960s there was planned social moderni-
sation under the right-wing governments of Greece as also the Commu-
nist governments of the eastern bloc, and common to both was the rapid
spread of concrete across the cities and the rush to newly-built city tower
blocks from rural populations. This laid the seedbed for an emergent mass
culture, and at the same time it helped break down the structures of rural
life. Even the place of western culture within the two worlds was not so
different, whatever the official policy.
A fully commercial Anglo-American popular music scene remained a
forbidden fruit in the eastern bloc, but attempts to counter it with folk-
lorism proved in the end ineffectual, given the widening accessibility of
hegemonic mass media. At the same time a resistance to this cultural
imperialism a quest for local identities was established in popular
music, even if this too was eventually subjected to political manipula-
tion. In Greece there was a comparable attempt to promote folklorism. It
began in fact under Metaxas, notably with the folk festivals presented at
the Olympic Stadium in Athens (193740), was continued with less obvi-
ous political intent by the Dora Stratou Theatre, founded in 1953, and was
picked up with enthusiasm by the Colonels. Given some of the associa-
tions here, it is not surprising that from the late 1970s onwards folklorism
was widely regarded as politically tainted in Greece.
Folklorism needs to be distinguished from the conservation and revival
of local cultures, activities that continued apace on both sides of the
political divide. In Greece, there was an historic devotion to the rural
nation, however idealised, and this was intensified as modernising ten-
dencies forced a rejoinder, generating a tension between opposing forces
in the society and the culture. Local traditions from the regions were thus
grouped together to form a national music, and, crucially, they were
associated with the music of the Orthodox Church, another emblem of
authentic Greece. Under the auspices of Simon Karras in particular, these
two musical worlds were brought under a single explanatory framework.
And since that framework was strengthened by familiar arguments about
historical continuity, the effect was to give a kind of national legitimacy
to cultural expressions of the East. Karras had entrepreneurial flair, and
he was a proselytiser of genius. Already in the inter-war period he had
established a Society for the Dissemination of National Music, and had
assumed the role of Director of the Department of National Music at the
542 chapter twenty
Already by the time of the Junta (1967) laka were thought of as mass-
cultural songs associated with the bouzouki and were widely promoted
by record companies in what had become a newly affluent nation. Laka
developed their own star system we might take figures such as Lefteris
Pantatzis and Angela Doimitriou as representative and they were widely
performed in music tavernas as well as over the air waves. In general,
we could probably claim that the oriental elements in this music per-
formed something of the same double function associated with those in
the Slavonic Balkans. In Greece, exactly as north of the border, there was
often an uneasy slippage between a Balkan east associated specifically
with Ottoman legacy and a more fashionable and stylised east identified
with pop divas (sirens) everywhere.
The oriental elements in laka raised deeper issues of identity, espe-
cially in the aftermath of the Junta in the late 1970s. This was a time of
self-scrutiny and self-definition in Greece, a time when the old debates
about double-descendedness and language were brought into sharp focus,
achieving resolution in some particulars (notably language), but allow-
ing for continuing antitheses in others (they were expressed politically in
the opposition beween the European orientation of Karamanlis and the
traditional nationalism of Papandreou). From this point, as we move into
the 1980s, patterns of popular culture began to register their receptivity
to different cultural worlds in ways that did not always mirror political
realities. Thus American political influence was on the wane as Greece
looked increasingly towards Europe, but Anglo-American popular culture
was in the ascendant. It is at this time that Greek pop music (minus the
bouzouki) might almost be said to begin. All the familiar sub-genres of
western pop and rock were registered, and with all the usual confusing
taxonomies. In the 1980s there were New Wave bands (Metro Decay, Film
Noir), punk bands (Deus ex Machina, Adiexodo), rock bands (Diafana
Krina, Endelekheia) and hip hop bands (Vita pis, Razastarr), and in later
decades other genres (Indie, Metal, Techno) joined the parade.
This did not always imply surrender to western pop, however. Hip hop
in particular, because of its origins in black ghetto-land and its prioritising
of the verbal text, could use western idioms to critique a western status
quo, and at the same time to promote a more local identity. An Ameri-
canised mass culture was a powerful force in Greece, then. Yet by the
1980s the mainstream of popular music, while it certainly drew on western
pop-rock, also looked to the north and to the east. As to the former, it is
notable that the barriers erected by Communism were beginning to break
down at this time. There was still mutual suspicion between Greece and
bordering territories (indeed there were border disputes), but the quest for
544 chapter twenty
GLOBAL BALKANS
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ALL CHANGE
Why does the ancien regime collapse? We might ask this question about
the end of the Roman Republic,1 about Constantinople in 1453,2 about
France in 1789, which by convention marked the beginning of the long
nineteenth century,3 and about Eastern Europe in 1989, the year that
rounded off the short twentieth century.4 Both 89s were indeed falls.
They were revolutions in the full sense of the term, where an existing
order was displaced, and where part of the impulse underlying the change
was mass protest, a movement of the populace (for it is possible to over-
state the extent of the orchestration, even if the unique power of modern
media to politicise the masses was clearly crucial in the latter case). For
both 89s, the date marked the beginning of a process rather than a dis-
crete event. Thus in 1989 the (mainly velvet) reversals in Eastern Europe
initiated socio-political transformations that extended through to 1991,
by which time the unification of Germany and the disintegration of the
Soviet Union were both faits accomplis. In South East Europe at least
in former Yugoslavia the process, which involved an accumulation of
capital by new elites (in reality close to the old elites), continued well
beyond that.
The Communist world was never a monolith, however much that image
may have informed Western policy.5 Yet even as the fissures appeared,
the inert power of an internationalist political system, allied to imperial-
ist policies where these could be imposed, created certain social and cul-
tural uniformities. The collapse of that world was accordingly responsive
to pressures that were uniform in some respects and singular in others.
The dynamic of the change is imperfectly understood, even today. But
1See Alston 2010 for a thoughtful contribution to debates about the End of Antiquity,
based partly on what he calls resilience theory.
2Runciman 1990 is still the authoritative account, but see also Wheatcroft 1995.
3Doyle 1990. An original take is Schama 1996.
4Hobsbawm 1995. See also the later stages of Brown 2009.
5Selverstone 2009.
550 chapter twenty-one
6Brown 2009.
7Ramet and Wagner 2010. See also the various other essays on Former Yugoslavia in
this volume.
8Siani-Davies 2007.
all change 551
9Bell 1998.
10Le Carr 2010.
11Vickers 2006.
552 chapter twenty-one
12Among the most recent at the time of writing is Djoki and Ker-Lindsay 2011. But
authoritative studies are Woodward 1995, Woodward 2001 and Jovi 2009.
all change 553
At the root of this question lies the most commonly appropriated of all
repertories: traditional music, or, as it may be legitimately described in its
diasporic form, folk music. This repertory had long been identity-affirming
among Balkan populations abroad, but it exerted a no less powerful
556 chapter twenty-one
attraction for their hosts. Not for nothing did the late Mirjana Lauevi
call her absorbing study of American Balkanites Balkan Fascination.16
During the 1990s Lauevi, a native of Sarajevo, engaged in extensive field-
work in the North American Balkan music and dance scene. However,
some of the most interesting parts of her book concern the pre-history of
that scene: not just her account of the gradual consolidation of folk prac-
tices but her analysis of the intersecting ideologies that lay behind those
practices. Thus, the settlement movement, developed by wealthy middle-
class Americans from the late nineteenth century onwards, promoted folk
dancing within a programme of social meliorism and integration. Para-
doxically enough, it was considered both an aid to Americanisation for
the immigrants, and a healthy antidote to corrupting commercial culture
for Americans. As the folk dance movement spread to schools and col-
leges it took on further layers of significance, ranging from health- and
character-building to the quest for history and European roots, the latter
a familiar antidote to the newness of American culture. In all of this, of
course, Balkan music and dance represented just one corner of a much
larger field of international folklorism.
Lauevi further addressed the infrastructures of folk dance programmes
during the inter-war years, including the proliferation of festivals (of which
the World Fairs were the most high-profile), the appearance of publica-
tions and recordings, and the emergence of key teachers and entrepre-
neurs. Through all of this America was able to promote multiculturalism
as a positive value, while at the same time enabling the kind of virtual
tourism that constructs alterities as imagined peasant communities. It
was on the back of these developments that a Balkan craze developed
in the post-war years, associated with the proselytising work of teacher-
ethnographers, and finding its institutional expression in the New York
Balkan Arts Centre, founded in 1966, and in the Balkan camps that pro-
liferated in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them sponsored by the Eastern
European Folklife Centre, still active today. In this later stage of its devel-
opment the Balkan scene maintained close links with the region itself,
hosting leading musicians from there, employing teacher-ethnographers
who had spent long periods of fieldwork in South East Europe, and main-
taining close links with Balkan festivals and ensembles. Yet there can be
conflicted responses when the region itself becomes real for Balkanites
16Lauevi 2007.
all change 557
in this way. The Balkan village, after all, is largely a construction in this
scene: a simulacrum.17
One development that can be associated with the North Ameri-
can scene today, but is not unique to it, is the divide that has opened
up between traditional folk idioms and Balkan-inspired dance and rock
music, especially popular for weddings and youth dances.18 Lauevi did
not enter this territory in her book, but we might note that the separa-
tion effectively created three types of ensemble: traditional, modern and
in-between, meaning those that attempted to cater for both tastes. There
are countless groups (choral, instrumental and dance) that are relatively
purist about folk music and dance and that use only traditional instru-
ments: one might cite almost at random the tamburica orchestra Prazna
flaa [Empty Bottle] from Milwaukee or the Bulgarian-Macedonian group
Lyuki chushki [Hot Peppers] from Washington. At the other extreme there
are bands such as Kultur shock from Washington or Toids from San Fran-
cisco that specialise in Balkan-inspired (and on occasion Middle Eastern-
inspired) rock. As to the third category, bands such as Izvor [Fountain]
have been fairly successful in bridging the gap between traditional and
modern, maintaining a folkloric ethos, but expanding it where necessary.
Likewise Mike Gordons Washington-based Balkanarama has now gained
an international reputation for a practice that crosses borders freely and
eclectically. Synthetic approaches are not always trouble-free, of course,
and in some bands the difference in philosophy between old and new
styles has resulted in complex histories.
Greek-American culture is a category all to itself, and one that I will
largely sidestep here. Of course it celebrates Greekness, but it does so in
ways that maintain a certain independence of the motherland. It has, in
short, defined an identity of its own. This is apparent in the distinctive
practices and idioms of the Greek-American Church, organ and all, and in
the thriving activities of traditional music and dance (where characteristi-
cally some native Greeks claim to have difficulty recognising the dances).
It is no less apparent in popular music, where Greek-American artists
have carved out a singular niche. Among the most distinctive is Diamanda
Galas, though to assign Galas to popular music is hardly adequate. At any
rate, she is Greek-American rather more than Greek. Both her parents
17At the same time, Lauevi is at pains to argue that the Balkan craze created in the
end a unique and valuable space within American culture.
18One might include here the jazz crossovers associated with Don Ellis, notably his
famous recording Bulgarian Bulge of 1971.
558 chapter twenty-one
were born in North America, and her identification with Greece takes a
highly individual form. Drawing eclectically on many streams of popular
music, jazz and gospel, she blends them with traditions from the eastern
Mediterranean, including the amanedes tradition in Greece. Her music is
political in the sense of supporting minority causes, but she insists that
she is not interested in propaganda, even if some of her pronouncements
suggest otherwise. In the end, whatever the rhetoric, her commitment to
the aesthetic sphere ensures that she has a restricted but loyal fan base,
and if the rhetoric is occasionally divisive, the music tells a more humani-
tarian story.19
Today there are Balkan scenes all over the world, though few are as
highly developed as those of North America and Canada. Only in Austra-
lia, where there is a substantial immigrant presence, are they institutiona-
lised somewhat on the American model, with folk festivals taking place
all over the country, with a pronounced Balkan presence in the many
international folk societies, and with sound worlds that range from Bul-
garian voices to Bregovi-inspired brass bands. There has already been a
reference to one band that specialises in Macedonian repertories, Linsey
Pollaks Tsrvena Kniga, but one might also mention Xenos, which special-
ises in Rom dance music of Macedonia and northern Greece, or BabaGra-
noush from Preston, which performs a more generic Balkan music that
can slide from ethnic music to caf music and beyond. On the more popu-
lar front there is also a lively dance scene associated with recorded music
(the usual remixes) played in bars and clubs, and here the DJ team Balkan
Beasts, located mainly in Melbourne, has a prominent role. This takes us
into world music, where Balkan specificities (the inevitable gypsy brass)
yield to crossover styles of various kinds, including Middle Eastern music,
jazz and reggae, klezmer music, ska, and rock.
It is unnecessary to embark on a Cooks Tour of Balkan music around
the world. But it may be worth closing in on my home ground, to convey
some sense of the diversity of the offerings, and of the different philoso-
phies that lie behind them. As in the American scene, it is not uncommon
for immigrant populations in Britain to initiate processes that then extend
to native British participants. This was the case when Dessislava Stefanova,
a former member of the Koutev Ensemble, founded the London Bulgarian
Choir in 2000. Capitalising on the popular status of the Bulgarian choral
mention Dave Kelbies Szapora, and although this seems to have disap-
peared from view at the time of writing, one of its Bosnian personnel,
Ta Hodi, has established the thriving Ta Hodi Trio. One intriguing
feature of concerts by such groups is that British audiences happily listen
to songs sung in languages of which they have no knowledge whatever.
Ta Hodi admits to some bewilderment at this, given that the words of
the songs are so utterly central to their significance, and are indeed their
true starting-points. And the same goes for other traditions; witness the
London-based Algerian band Fantazia, the various Arab musics associated
with performances at the Dash Caf venue, and the thriving Latin scene
in London. If it indicates anything at all, it is that the other Balkans is
part of a much larger construction of alterity, that it remains an exoticism
for British audiences: truly a Balkan fascination. The Balkans as made in
Britain, in other words, tells us relatively little about the Balkans in situ.
This is yet more apparent when we turn to the fusion repertory per-
formed by groups such as Trans-global Underground and the Newcastle-
based, but now internationally known, Baghdaddies. Such Balkan- or
Middle East-influenced world beat can now be heard all over the world in
relevant festivals and clubs, and it is a very long way from the folk music
and dance scene described by Mirjana Lauevi. Closer to popular music
than folk music, it often takes its initial impulses from the Rom bands of
South East Europe, the more high-profile of which were given international
exposure by well-placed Western entrepreneurs. Some of these bands
were discovered, others constructed. But either way one might want to
complain about the manipulation of the musicians by external commer-
cial interests (money is made, but seldom by the musicians). In any case,
by the time Taraf de Hadouks appeared in the films Latcho drom (1993)
and The Man Who Cried (2000), there was already a widespread interest in
the essentialised Balkan sounds associated with such Rom bands.
A little further commercialisation was all it took to seal this interest,
and with the help of the German dance producer Shantel, associated with
the Bucovina Club in Frankfurt, and the Belgian record label Crammed
Discs, DJs began to mix traditional Balkan music with techno drum and
bass to create a global dance music widely associated with club culture.
Producers and DJs now came into their own, with Balkan traditional
music typically forming a foundation layer, remixed electronically with
other idioms. Percussion-driven Balkan brass met with Latino beats; fla-
menco rhythms were blended with heavily manipulated samples drawn
from Balkan traditions; Bulgarian vocal magic sat alongside guitar riffs
and techno beats. This was global fusion.
all change 561
The production of new recordings along these lines for labels such
as Six Degrees involves first a contract with an existing label producing
mainly Rom music, of which the most prominent is Crammed Discs, then
a selection of suitable tracks, and then a remix for the dance floor (one Six
Degrees CD, produced by Simon Emmerson and Phil Meadley, is called
Ethnomixicology). Effectively this creates a new piece, where for example
the original vocals might be kept but the instrumental backing replaced
by synthesised drum-bass idioms in house music style. Alternatively, in
the case of underground DJs, several recordings might be sampled sepa-
rately and then mixed into one. All this has become a widespread practice
in dance music generally. Indeed the tendency to reduce other traditions,
notably hip-hop and rap, to dance music though remixing, is a common
one today, and in most such cases, including those where Balkan CDs are
used, the original source is not just modified but totally deconstructed.
Leaving aside questions of ontology, or for that matter copyright, it is
enough to remark here that the Balkans becomes an ambivalent, and
largely catalytic, presence in this corner of what is in reality an interna-
tional idiom. Indeed one might go further and argue that it is an ambiva-
lent presence more generally in World Music, understanding this term
in its narrow definition as an independently marketable commodity pre-
sented in dedicated festivals such as Womad and proselytised by journals
such as Songlines. Any sense of place here is inevitably reduced to that of a
brand. And it is not surprising that this should have attracted criticism on
the part of those whose interest lies in Balkan music first and foremost.
There is, however, one place that could stake a claim to be the centre
of these Balkan-inspired fusions, and appropriately it is the fons et origo
of the Balkans, understood as Ottoman legacy in South East Europe. In
Istanbul today a synthetic image of urban Balkan culture is manufac-
tured through fusion sounds. In the lanes behind Istkal Caddesi music
cafs and clubs host a lively mix of international and Turkish musicians
performing a wide range of fusion music, where Sufi electronica, gypsy
funk and oriental hip-hop not only co-exist but blend. A key player in
this history was Hasan Saltik, who founded the record label Kalan Mzik
in 1991, with the intention politically tricky at the time of presenting
the music of Turkeys minority groups (Aynur Doans Kurdish-language
Kee kurdan [Kurdish Girl] was a notable landmark). But it was above
all Ahmet Ulu who launched and promoted modern fusion sounds. He
is the co-owner of the nightclub Babylon, which is right at the centre of
the live music scene, and also of Doublemoon Records, which transmits
that scene to the rest of the world. Musicians such as the rap artist Ceza,
562 chapter twenty-one
the fusion band Kolektif Istanbul, and the Sufi-inspired performer Mercan
Dede (whose career raises all kinds of questions about the ambivalent role
of Islamic music when it is appropriated by a culture it inherently resists)
all record on Doublemoon. Accepted that this remains a niche market, it
was nonetheless given considerable global exposure when Fatih Akins
documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sounds of Istanbul, was issued on
general release at cinemas all over the world.
The centring of Balkan fusions in Istanbul rooting them in a place
draws attention to some of the paradoxes surrounding notions of authen-
ticity with this kind of Balkan beat. It is perfectly true that pre-modern
traditional repertories in the Balkans were closely tied to place and
loosely defined temporally; i.e. without an obvious history. They had spa-
tial boundaries, in other words, but they tended to flow unimpeded across
time. Naturally when such repertories are appropriated by commercial
World Music ensembles, and especially when they are mixed with very dif-
ferent repertories, the significance of place is bound to be changed; we are
offered in effect something rather like the musical equivalent of cultural
tourism (even Crossing the Bridge cannot quite escape this charge, if it is a
charge). However the story is arguably rather different when urban music,
and especially Rom music, forms the basis of the remix. If anything could
be described as authentic within Rom traditions, after all, it is precisely
the idea of fusion and the related embrace of commercialism. Moreover,
a sense of place was always of secondary importance within Rom music-
making, and was very largely a product of contingency, a market-driven
adoption and transformation of local idioms. It is no surprise then that
the gypsy bands of the Balkans have themselves been more than happy
to be associated with the institution of World Music. They are in a sense
working within their own traditions. Today, the leading bands not just
standard Rom bands, but native fusion bands such as Shukar Collective
and Mitsoura are sell-outs at prestigious venues.
Nevertheless, several cognoscenti have suggested to me that enthusi-
asm for this kind of world beat is beginning to wane (possibly related
to the revival of live music, of which more later), or at least that it is no
longer showing signs of conquering all to achieve the status of a new
form of classicism, as once argued by Jan Ling).21 I am not well placed to
assess this. But in any event, there can be no doubt that several Balkan
musicians living outside the Balkans have found a niche for themselves
21Ling 2004.
all change 563
Composers in Exile
There were obvious reasons for the exodus from Sarajevo and Belgrade
during the 1990s. Unlike most capitals in the region, for which the key
moment of change was the beginning of the decade, these cities were
unable to attempt any kind of renewal until rather later: the mid-decade
for Sarajevo and the end of the decade for Belgrade. I will consider the fate
of music in both cities in the next chapter, but for now I will look rather
at the exodus. In 1989 there were ninety professors at the Music Acad-
emy in Sarajevo. In 1995 there were nineteen. At the time of writing there
are fifty-three.22 These figures tell an obvious story: a dramatic collapse
followed by a process of steady, but partial, re-growth. However, the re-
growth has been largely the result of new recruitment. Of those professors
who left because of the war, only five have returned. The majority settled
abroad. There is a similar story when we look to other musical institutions,
notably the Opera and the three professional orchestras. In all, some four
hundred musicians left the city during the early 1990s, and they are to be
found today in orchestras and conservatories all over Europe, and as far
afield as Australia. It should be added that relatively few of the composers
who had been active in Sarajevo before the war remained there through-
out the 1990s. Conspicuous among those who did remain is Ivan avlovi,
who is also the Director of the Academy.
22These figures refer to full-time teachers. There are (again at the time of writing) a
further forty to fifty part-time teachers at the Academy.
564 chapter twenty-one
Of the composers who left, some of the older generation moved else-
where in the former Yugoslavia. Two were discussed briefly in chapter 18.
Vojin Komadina and Josip Magdi both left during the war years, the
former for Serbia-Montenegro and the latter for Zagreb, and Magdi in
particular has maintained a creative interest in folk music from the moun-
tain regions surrounding Sarajevo. Both men were of the generation of the
1930s, and so too was Alojz Ajdi (b.1939), who moved to Slovenia, where
he has played a prominent role in music education as well as in compo-
sition. The younger generation of composers was more inclined to look
further afield. Vojislav Ivanovi (b.1959) settled in Greece, and has been
associated with jazz and traditional music as well as with concert music
and film scores. He founded the Levantine Jazz Trio and has collaborated
with leading singers such as Savina Yannatou. The Kosovo-born Ramiz
Tahiri (b.1950) worked mainly in Zenica until the war, at which point he
left for Germany, as did Jasmin Osmanagi (b.1963). Dino Reidbegovi
(b.1975) likewise moved to Vienna, and Igor Karaa (b.1974) to North
America. Several of these composers Ivanovi and Karaa in particular
have kept close links with Bosnia and Herzegovina. And it is notable too
that, aside from their creative deployment of traditional music, some have
made explicit references to the war in their music. Magdis Sarajevo War
Postcards, a suite of ten pieces for organ or piano composed in the midst
of war in 1993, each of them pinpointing a particular place in Sarajevo,
is emblematic.23
Is there an umbilical cord linking these Bosnian composers to their
homeland? And if so, is it a matter of straightforward nostalgia? We might
ask the same questions of Serbian composers in diaspora, bearing in mind
that Sarajevo and Belgrade inevitably invite comparison in the post-war
years. There was indeed an exodus of composers from Belgrade in the 1990s,
and in at least one case, Vuk Kulenovi (born in Sarajevo before settling
in Belgrade), exile to North America in 1996 was a direct result of political
protest against the Miloevi regime. For reasons that are not immediately
obvious a high proportion of those who left Serbia were women.24 They
included Nataa Bogojevi (b.1966), now in Chicago, Katarina Miljkovi
(b.1959), now in Boston and Aleksandra Vrebalov (b.1970), now teaching
23As noted on p. 493, one of the CDs produced by the Academy of Music in Sarajevo
is dedicated to Works by B-H Composers Living Abroad.
24See the interesting essay on women and music in Serbia by Jelena Novak (Novak
2011).
all change 565
25Also New York-based is the interesting crossover figure Milica Paranosi, who
engages in various kinds of performance art, often with educational or socially activist
intent, and drawing on classical, popular and world musics.
26These were Igor Gostuki, Isidora ebeljan, Ana Mihajlovi, Nataa Bogojevi, Ogn-
jen Bogdanovi, Srdjan Jacimovi and Vladimir Jovanovi.
566 chapter twenty-one
and Ligeti, and these composers are still a presence in his music today.
However, since leaving Bulgaria Pantchevs modernist, monodic-hetero-
phonic idiom draws more and more on Bulgarian traditional music both
melodically and rhythmically. Thus, the music of Orthodoxy is evoked in
the Doublebass Concerto of 20012, while traditional agrarian repertories
were the inspiration for the Trumpet Concerto of 20023. If this plays into
a larger pattern, it is one that has already been articulated in this book. It
is by no means a question of narrow nationalism (Pantchevs music has
many other points of reference, from Baroque repertories to Mozart and
Gershwin). Rather the swerve towards traditional repertories is symptom-
atic of a quest for roots that seems to be profoundly motivated in this
region. In Pantchevs case such a quest may well have been accentuated
by the experience of exile.
In Romania the exodus was not dramatic in the early 1990s, though
numerous performing musicians, and especially singers, did seek their for-
tunes abroad at this time. In fact, several of the leading diasporic compos-
ers had already left in earlier years. Of these the best-known is Corneliu
Dan Georgescu (b.1938), who settled in Berlin in 1987, but one might also
cite the Olah pupil Lucian Meianu (b.1937), who moved to Lausanne in
the late 1960s and taught at the Conservatory there, and Gheorghe Costi-
nescu (b.1934), who settled in the US and taught at various institutions,
including CUNY. Predictably, Paris was also a magnet, and among the
composers who settled there were Mihai Mitrea Celarianu (19352003),
Costin Cazaban (b.1946), and the popular film music composer Vladimir
Cosma (b.1940). However, the diasporic composer with the most nota-
ble success, apart from Georgescu, is the Myriam Marb pupil Violeta
Dinescu (b.1953), at present a Professor of Composition at the University
of Oldenburg in Germany. Dinescu moved there in 1982, and inter alia her
childrens opera Der 35. Mai [The 35th of May] (1986) was performed in
Hamburg and Vienna to considerable acclaim. It is appropriate that she
should have been awarded the Society of Composers prize for the most
prominent diasporic composer, for she maintains close links with Roma-
nia, not least by ensuring the presence of Romanian music at the annual
Komponisten-Colloquium she has organised since 1996.
When we turn finally to Greece, we note that in most cases the sig-
nificant waves of emigration pre-dated 1990. The truly eminent of the
migr or diasporic composers, Xenakis and Christou, have already been
discussed. However in both cases there remain interesting questions
about their reception in Greece. In the post-Junta years that reception
was invariably enmeshed with political motives, and in ways that often
did considerable disservice to the two composers own views on matters
all change 571
political. Next in line would be Theodore Antoniou, who for many years
maintained a double existence in Boston and Athens (he has now returned
to Greece), and who has been responsible for teaching a whole generation
of younger Greek composers at the conservatory Musical Horizons in
Kalamata. He carved out a smaller niche for himself in the United States
than some in Greece might like to think, but he does remain a significant
figure for all that, and he now plays a typically energetic role in promoting
contemporary music as director of the Hellenic Group for Contemporary
Music. His award-winning work Oedipus at Colonus (1998) was designed
for programming alongside Stravinskys Oedipus Rex.
Antoniou is really the only Greek composer of note to have settled in
the new world, though Christos Hatzis (b.1953) has made a name in Can-
ada for an eclectic idiom that draws in some part from Greek traditions,
and Dinos Constantinides (b.1929), teaching at Louisiana State University,
has had notable successes, especially with his opera Antigone. In a more
limited way Vicky Tzoumerka-Knoedler (b.1941), has emerged in dance
circles as a composer with an interesting if conservative, voice, often
indebted to traditional idioms. For most Greek composers, the familiar
West European capitals proved more seductive. Mention has already been
made of some of those who settled in Germany or Austria. The most sig-
nificant were Anestis Logothetis and Argyris Kounadis. Logothetis, who
was born in present-day Bulgaria to Greek parents and who studied in
Greece, left at an early stage, settling in Vienna in 1942 and following an
avant-garde path there (notably with his graphic scores) while at the same
time keeping links with Greece (he featured in the Hellenic Weeks). Kou-
nadis also left for Germany at an early stage, securing a teaching post at
the Hochschule in Freiburg. Of the younger generation a key figure in the
world of new music, also based in Germany, has been the highly success-
ful conductor and composer Konstantia Gourzi, currently a professor at
the Hochschule in Munich.
The picture since the 1990s is harder to sketch for a Greek and Greek
Cypriot diaspora. It is still very common for younger composers to study
abroad. For Cypriots in particular Britain has been an obvious destina-
tion, as it has been too for several Albanian composers, and even some
Turkish.31 One is struck in informal conversation that many of the younger
composers are very relaxed about whether or not they return to the home-
land. Perhaps this is not so very different from the past. At any rate, the
31Notably the Albanian composer Thomas Simaku and the Turkish composer Emre
Araci.
572 chapter twenty-one
CONSERVATION
Julian Johnson would balk at any suggestion that classical music is for an
elite, and especially a social elite.1 His is an inclusive message. He pleads
for a re-investment in the aesthetic, and for a rejection of cultural relativ-
ism. We might want to argue that he proposes a sharper division between
art and entertainment between the autonomy character and the com-
modity character of music than is realistic. But his thesis is not really
damaged by this. What Johnson wants to suggest is that classical music
multi-layered, dense with information, richly implicative, discursive, and
pretentious in a good way has a capacity to transcend social dependen-
cies, including the dependencies that made it possible in the first place.
This should not really be a controversial position. It is incontestable that
the ideological privileging of the aesthetic within European culture was
socially and politically contingent. But that privilege resulted in ideal con-
ditions for the flowering of creative genius, promoting those very qualities
that refuse to yield to contingent explanation. For that reason, classical
music retains its capacity to enrich us today. Its universalist aspirations
may have been based on a myth (the developing belief that a bourgeois
culture might speak on behalf of all), but it turned out to be an immensely
productive and valuable myth.
The continuity between this tradition and new music is another mat-
ter. Earlier I suggested that creative genius was an historical category
instituted in Early Modern Europe. As that category was increasingly
embedded within bourgeois culture its Janus-faced character became
more marked. There was the great music of the past (the canon) and
there was the great music of the future (the avant-garde).2 At the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these two had been rather cleanly
divided, and both were further separated from a third category, which we
might label commercial music. In a Modernist age these three classical,
1Johnson 2002.
2See the chapter The Great Composer in Samson 2002.
574 chapter twenty-two
early nineteenth centuries. Within that culture the instrument itself gen-
erated interconnected, increasingly specialised and mutually dependent
roles, all addressing the needs of a new kind of consumer (they included
piano manufacturer, publisher, promoter, critic, teacher, performer and
composer). But such corners of free-market economics, embodied in
the benefit concert, could survive only by responding very directly to
the demands of popular taste. The more aspirational investment in the
piano as an agent of expression, in part a reaction against such mercan-
tile values, was possible only within the framework of a patronal culture,
whether of the salon or the subscription concert.
When we turn to the former Communist states this issue really comes
into focus. Here the shift from state patronage to the free market could
hardly have been more abrupt. Under Communism there was no short-
age of subsidy for the performing arts. Artists may not have made their
fortunes, but there were plenty of jobs and they had a palpable sense
of their place in the community. And when Communism fell, there was
accordingly a rather major reality check for artists and performers alike.
Classical music, it was quickly learned, does not thrive if left entirely to
market forces. We may find some of the evidence by returning to our pair-
ing of Sarajevo and Belgrade, two cities whose fates were unhappily linked
in the 1990s. For both cities there was a virtual disintegration of formal
musical culture during that decade. In Sarajevo, where classical music had
shallow roots, the Opera was hit hardest of all. It collapsed totally during
the siege, and re-opened again only in 1996. But despite its avowed policy
of introducing two new productions each year it struggles to maintain a
professional standard, and today it faces many pragmatic and personnel
difficulties. The story of the Philharmonic Orchestra is happier. It is not
what it once was, but like the Music Academy, which now mounts an
ambitious programme of teaching, scholarship and performance, it is on
a steady upward curve. Yet before the war there were three orchestras in
the city, and of these only the Philharmonic remains.
The story in Belgrade is similar, albeit on a different scale, and for that
very reason endowed with a greater capacity for renewal. It is clear that
the economic elites who rode high during the Miloevi years had very
little interest in any corresponding elitism in the cultural world. Where
music-making was concerned, most existing institutions including the
symphony orchestras, the Opera and Ballet, Radio Belgrade, the music
festivals BEMUS and the International Tribune of Composers, together
with the whole music-educational establishment were very badly bat-
tered during the 1990s. Naturally there were the financial problems that
576 chapter twenty-two
3In an unpublished paper Serbian Music in Times of Transition read at the 17th Con-
gress of the IMS, Zurich 2007.
conservation 577
musicians alike, but to no effect. This decision was a real blow to classi-
cal music in Serbia. The tendency now is to concentrate its activities into
festivals, which are increasingly separated from, rather than an outgrowth
of, regular concert activities (there are very clear parallels in the other arts,
notably film; the number of cinemas has dropped drastically, but film fes-
tivals continue). The major music festival is BEMUS, currently directed
by Ivan Brkljai, but even this is not what it was due to financial strin-
gencies, and the same is true of the International Tribune of Composers.
Moreover questions are being posed just now about the future viability of
the many festivals in Serbia, including the NOMUS festival in Novi Sad, the
Marble and Sounds festival at Arandjelovac, and several festivals devoted to
individual instruments, such as the International Cello Festival.4
The other side of this coin has been the success of a largely uncriti-
cal popular culture. In this respect little has changed since the Miloevi
regime, and it is doubtless significant that some of the turbo-folk stars
of the 1990s above all Ceca have had comebacks in recent years. It
is only fair to add that little of this is unique to Serbia among the post-
Communist countries in South East Europe. But Serbia does bring into
very sharp focus the division that lies deep at the heart of the wider
region, a division that is thematic to this book. I have referred on several
occasions to two Serbias. They still exist. There is the Serbia celebrated
by Miloevi and by subsequent populist nationalists: xenophobic, anti-
western, proud of its Byzantine roots and legacy. And there is the Serbia
that looks to Europe. Tomaevi neatly encapsulates them in two festivals
whose character and location speak of the deeper divide: the now-famous
trumpet festival at Gua, increasingly branding a commercial form of Rom
music, and the rock festival EXIT at Novi Sad, which mounts a challenge to
the ubiquity of pop-folk (even the locations are telling). The EXIT festival
is indeed viewed as the province of an elite audience, an intelligentsia
whose disdain for pop-folk is total. What seems clear is that this intel-
ligentsia is not supporting or not in significant numbers the culture
of classical music.
The pattern is not so different elsewhere in the ex-Communist Balkans.
In Albania and Bulgaria one might venture that there had been quite sim-
ply too many orchestras, both classical and folk, under the Communists to
be remotely sustainable. In Bulgaria almost every reasonably sized town
had been well catered for, thanks to generous, if ideologically motivated,
4Jankovi 2007.
578 chapter twenty-two
state subsidies. And when cuts were imposed, theatres, symphony orches-
tras and folk ensembles across the country were forced to close, leading to
familiar tales of unemployment, and for those of a feasible age to emi-
gration. Only the leading ensembles, and especially those with the status
of national institutions, such as the National Theatre and the National
Symphony Orchestra, continued to receive adequate state support. Even
the Koutev ensemble was affected adversely, obliged to change its pro-
gramming and its aesthetic in response to newly reduced subsidy. Nor
was this exclusively a phenomenon of the 1990s. Perverse understandings
of cost-effectiveness in the artistic sphere continue to beleaguer cultural
and educational institutions in Bulgaria to this day, and perhaps espe-
cially those that are perceived to have close links to the ancien rgime.
The pattern in Romania is similar in some respects, but significantly
different in others. There were predictable difficulties in the early 1990s,
especially with provincial orchestras, as performers left Romania for more
fertile land. But if anything there are now more orchestras in the country
than in Communist times, thanks to the competitive ambitions of local
authorities, which have been prepared to fund them (as indeed they fund
universities and conservatories, for several provincial cities have a univer-
sity with a music school) to gain prestige. Quality is another matter, and
in some cities both performance and educational standards leave much
to be desired. In the major centres, Bucharest, Cluj and Iai, where the
level remains fairly high, and where there is national government subsidy,
the programming is depressingly conservative. The opera in Bucharest is
symptomatic, relying mainly on standard nineteenth-century Italian fare.
Wagner is a rarity, and Russian, Czech and twentieth-century repertory
likewise. Even Enescus Oedipe is performed only as part of the biennial
Enescu festival, which has separate guaranteed funding. Indeed Roma-
nian composers are conspicuous by their absence from the programmes
of big public concerts, despite lobbying from the Society of Composers.
On the other hand, ticket prices at the Opera, and also at the orchestral
concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Radio Orchestra,
remain cheap. Only the Operetta Theatre, which mounts truly innovatory
productions, has seen a major price hike.
It is no doubt predictable that Slovenia, which sports its EU member-
ship, and Croatia, which will be a member when this book is published,
should have a happier story to tell with respect to formal culture, includ-
ing the institutions of music and music-making. And in some measure
this is true of Greece too. Yet the picture in Greece is a decidedly ambiva-
lent one. The key moment of change here was in the mid-seventies, with
conservation 579
the fall of the Junta, the symbolically charged visits of Xenakis, and the
return of Theodorakis. It would be hard to overestimate the effects of the
latter. For one thing there were cross-over activities between classical
music and popular art song, with many Greek composers now turning to
the latter, for reasons that could be idealistic, pecuniary or both. But for
another, it raised the status of music generally. Until the seventies the
three orchestras in Athens (State, Radio and Opera) consisted of many of
the same performers, but with the conservatories turning out many more
musicians all this changed, and a new professionalism entered the scene.
Much the same could be seen beyond Athens, moreover, notably in Patras
and Thessaloniki.
This is not to say that the culture shift in the early 1990s passed Greece
by. There were both pluses and minuses at this moment of caesura. On
the negative side, we might mention that in the 1990s the regular, albeit
small, audience base for the concerts given by the Athens State Orches-
tra was somewhat dissipated. And likewise, we would note that in the
last few years much of the dynamism and ambition associated with the
Festival of Athens has also been lost. In other words, just as in the ex-
Communist world, one can see evidence that the institutions of bourgeois
music-making took a hit in the new climate of aggressive capitalism asso-
ciated with the nineties and noughties. The situation in music education
likewise remains an unhappy one in many respects, with no real National
Academy and with an in-built constitutional weakness regarding the sta-
tus of conservatories. And it remains the case that the best graduates from
these institutions are likely to seek their fortunes abroad.
On the plus side we would note the mushrooming of big cultural proj-
ects from the 1990s onwards, beginning with the Megaron, whose sym-
bolic significance was considerable. It was with the establishment of the
Megaron that a new professionalism entered Greek musical life. But it is
significant that the major funding for this project derived not from the
Greek Government but from the Onassis Foundation, which is also at this
moment planning to develop a new Cultural Centre for arts and literature.
The tradition of sponsorship from wealthy Greeks and expatriate Greeks
extends back to the late nineteenth century (the monumental projects
that characterised town planning in Athens at that time owe a great deal
to it). And it has continued ever since. Like the Onassis Foundation, the
Niarchos Foundation is currently funding similar major projects, includ-
ing the new National Library and a proposed Maria Callas Opera House.
Projects that would be well beyond the reach of the Greek government,
in short, become possible due to these big Foundations. And they are
580 chapter twenty-two
5Adorno 1956.
6Williams, A. 1997.
conservation 581
The second narrative did not entirely supplant the first. Rather there was
a shift in emphasis between two co-existing impulses among contempo-
rary composers, and it was a shift that may well have been influenced by
more material questions. Another way of saying this is that the need to
negotiate cultural identities no doubt seemed more urgent given the new
realities of a post-Communist world.
As we have seen, the transfer to an uncompromising market economy
wreaked havoc with the Communist culture of state subsidy (hence the
exodus), and as a result contemporary music returned once more to the
more typically rarefied existence (niche product or ghetto, depending on
your taste) with which it has most typically been associated. In major west-
ern capitals high-profile public music-making could and did make room
for contemporary modernisms, though in the sort of modest proportions
that can all too easily smack of tokenism. But in the former Eastern Bloc
this was more difficult to achieve. Those who followed the postmodern
minimalist trails blazed by the likes of Arvo Prt in Estonia and Henryk
Grecki in Poland could well achieve wide, and even mass, appeal. But
modernists of the old school were relegated to the college-conservatory
circle, where they could indeed secure avid support.
We may make a return visit to Sarajevo and Belgrade to follow these
fortunes. One issue at stake here is the prominence of the academy in
the public domain, for it is in the nature of the academy to support new
music. It may be precisely because the public domain as a whole is under-
developed in Sarajevo that new music has gained some support there
since the war. The Academy of Music is central to a good deal of Sarajevos
musical life. It promotes concerts by the Sonemus Ensemble (a dedicated
new music group, comprising staff from the Academy, programming only
music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), as well as sponsor-
ing recordings associated with the annual symposium Music in Society,
and in series devoted to concert music and competition works. These
recordings are not commercially available, however, reinforcing the sense
of a niche product. (Indeed this is a pattern found elsewhere; as noted
earlier, recordings sponsored by Composers Union in Romania cannot be
sold in the market place.) The overall impression is of a group of young
Bosnian composers none truly outstanding, it has to be said who have
a clear sense that they belong to, and are valued by, a relatively small com-
munity, even if they remain largely hidden from the wider view. There is a
political dimension too. The contemporary music that really does reach a
wider public the classic example is Asim Horozis opera Hasanaginica
(2000) is invariably populist, and with an obvious capacity to reinforce
the political status quo.
conservation 583
7For a very detailed technical study of Kazandjievs music, see Bojikova 1999.
586 chapter twenty-two
Faculty of the State Academy of Music), but in the latter field she has
developed a genuinely novel contemporary idiom involving pastiche and
collage. In her music of the 1990s and beyond she has cultivated a reflec-
tive, restrained modernist manner, somewhat inspired by oriental phi-
losophy. Works such as her Triptych for piano (1996), Green Silence (2000)
and Amadeus Rondo for Flute and piano (2006) are representative.
Of the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most dis-
tinctive and original voices is undoubtedly that of Georgi Arnaoudov. His
music has a wide range of expression (there are interesting experiments
in extending classical and baroque styles in some works), but the slow-
moving crystalline textures not static, but building intensity steadily and
carefully of Le Temple du silence for two pianos of 1996 perhaps reveal
him at his best. Inspired by an evocative passage from the Life and Teach-
ing of the Masters of the Far East by the New Age writer B.T. Spalding,
this work also reflects Arnaoudovs interest in Ancient and Far Eastern
Music. Other prominent figures from this decade include Velislav Zaimov
(b.1951), currently President of the Union, a relatively more traditional but
nonetheless challenging composer. His recent work, including a series of
instrumental concertos and symphonies, is invariably carefully thought-
through, while smaller-scale works such as the Fourth Piano Sonata of
2005 are terse and economical in construction, but at the same time
capable of considerable poetic intensity. Lubomir Denev (b.1951) is also a
significant figure, one of several Bulgarian composers who seem equally
at home in the worlds of contemporary classical music and jazz (compare
Julia Tsenova and Milcho Leviev), and of the younger generation.8
The picture in Romania is not dissimilar. For a senior figure such as
Pascal Bentoiu, the present state of affairs has been so enervating that
he has all but stopped composing. The Society of Composers continues,
though it is embroiled in legal questions over the status of its splendid
quarters in the Cantacuzino palace. But its once powerful role has been
reduced. Exactly as in Sofia, funding is maintained by renting parts of the
building, as also much of the space within its shop on Bucharests Calea
Vittoria, but compared with the funding it was in a position to offer for
commissions and prizes in the past, the present provision is poor. Above
all, it has lost its role as an arbiter of quality, a role that naturally had
its problems, but that worked well for the most part. In the current free
market decisions about commissions and performances are commercially
the larger Balkan fold. I will suggest in chapter 24 that the underlying nar-
ratives that shaped compositional histories in the Communist sector were
no less active in Greece. But it is harder to draw firm conclusions about
developments since 1990, in Greece as also in the ex-Communist world.
Determinate compositional trends are not so apparent. Nor can one iden-
tify with certainty the most significant composers, given that those per-
ceived to be so are more often than not key personalities in musical life
more generally.
Consider first two very different, composers of the older and middle
generations, both of whom worked in Paris for several years. The Messi-
aen student Giorgos Kouroupos (b.1942) made a good career in France as
a respected composer and teacher, and could indeed have stayed there.
His return to Greece immediately after the fall of the Junta was largely for
idealistic reasons, and was instigated above all by Hadjidakis, at that time
hugely influential in the determination of culture. Working mainly in the
Third Progamme of the Radio, Kouroupos has played an influential role in
promoting music characterised by new simplicities. In contrast, the com-
poser and musicologist Haris Xanthoudakis (b.1950) is a committed mod-
ernist, and has made use of various mathematical processes to activate
structures that objectify, without destroying, the expressive impulses
that underlie much of his music. He too studied in Paris, but after teach-
ing in several conservatories in Europe returned to Greece to found and
develop the dynamic music programme at the Ionian University of Corfu,
where he was for a time Vice-Rector.
Consider, secondly, three of the many younger composers working in
Greece today, all born in the 1960s, and all sustaining a high reputation.
Minas Alexiadis (b.1960), who studied in Dusseldorf, has also worked in
jazz and has developed a rather specific form of contemporary heteroph-
ony in some of his major works. Periklis Koukos (b.1960), the most high-
profile of the three, explored modernist styles in his earlier compositions,
but has subsequently from the late 1980s onwards cultivated a neo-
tonal idiom that stands apart from more fashionable, and one might say
conventional, expressions of a postmodern aesthetic. And finally Nikos
Xanthoulis (b.1962), a distinguished trumpeter, has an extensive output
for the theatre, including childrens operas and incidental music for the
Epidaurus Festival. All three are relatively high-profile figures in Greek
musical life. Yet their music remains somewhat in the shadows. And in
this respect too Greece is not so different from its neighbours. New music
everywhere struggles to be heard.
conservation 589
9Stobart 2008.
10Bohlman 2008.
11Stokes 2008.
590 chapter twenty-two
hermeneutic circle, and in the status it has assigned to urban and minor-
ity cultures. Today these distinctions have much less meaning, such is the
fluidity of scholarly commerce, but they have not entirely disappeared. Of
course, what both approaches share is an investment in area studies, and
it is against this background that the views of Bigenho and Stokes might
be revisited.
For Bigenho, a preoccupation with area studies still emerges clearly
from the course structures and textbooks of the North American College
circle, however much ethnomusicologists insist that they have moved on.
As she sees it, this betrays the lingering presence of the colonialist origins
of the discipline and of the ethos of the exotic wrapped up in those origins.
Stokes accepts the critique, but makes a claim for a form of area studies
that transcends this ideology, that allows for an imaginative crossing of
boundaries, both physical and repertorial, and that promotes a more criti-
cal engagement with constructions of place. What neither author takes
any account of is the very different ideology that has informed area stud-
ies in the hands of East European scholars, and which catches a differ-
ent resonance from the origins of the discipline, and from much earlier
Herderian notions of culture. Bartks approach to traditional music was
an evolving one, but from the start it involved the conservation of mate-
rial that had been bypassed by the rationalising tendencies of Western art
music, and as a result was regarded as both privileged and in some sense
pure. At various stages of his evolving thought this approach was allied
to questions of ethnicity and nationhood, and it was this latter tendency
that was highlighted in post-war Eastern Europe. It is not hard to see how
all this could rather easily slip into a form of xenophobia that took a step
beyond anything found in Bartk.
Far from an exoticism, then, traditional music was here understood as
a badge of nationhood in the familiar Herderian tradition. The verities
of local cultures were respected, but they were subordinated to an offi-
cially sanctioned and motivated ethnonational agenda, and often at the
expense of minority cultures within the state. It would be wrong to associ-
ate this approach exclusively with Communist programmes, for it was no
less visible in other parts of Europes periphery. In practice, it resulted in
ambitious, and in the case of Communist states systematic, programmes
of collection, with the aim of conserving, and also mapping, the nations
music. Something of this was discussed in chapter 19, where it was also
noted that ostensibly countervailing forces stemming from impulses to
modernisation were in due course reconciled with the nationalist agenda.
To this day, programmes of conservation, revival and revitalisation are
conservation 591
alive and well in South East Europe, as are the festivals, partly a hangover
from Communist days. There are still scholars who see a unique kind of
strength and lyricism in dying rural traditions, and who view these tradi-
tions with a nostalgia infused by national pride. But for others, the study
of continuity and change has sloughed off much of this ideological bag-
gage. Even for them, however, the focus is often on home ground, if only
because accurate reconstruction of a traditions history can help prevent
its political manipulation.
There are other reasons for the focus on home ground. Resourcing
ethnomusicology can be an expensive business, for a start. But in any
case one thing is certain. Fieldwork of the traditional kind is a game with
diminishing returns in South East Europe, for the very obvious reason
that the generation with relevant memory is disappearing. There are, in
short, pragmatic as well as ideological reasons for the reorientation of
ethnomusicology towards urban repertories, an engagement with new
global media (e-fieldwork), performance studies, and activism (applied
ethnomusicology). For younger scholars, and especially for those in the
university sector, there is also no doubt a strong sense that the evolution
of the discipline (cutting-edge research) creates its own imperatives. We
are left, then, with a diminishing pool of scholars who continue to plough
the older furrows, who still place conservation high on their agenda, and
who do so by and large within the framework of national, if not national-
ist, scholarship.
We have met several of them already. In some cases the mapping has
been local, as with Athena Katsenevakis fieldwork in north Pindus, Jelena
Jovanovis research in umadija, Dimitrije Golemovis recordings from
Plav, or (in an interesting combination of insider-outsider perspectives)
Jacques Bout and Sperana Rdulescus project in the Oa Country. And
we might add here the recordings of Pomak songs made by Nikos Kok-
kas in Western Thrace, and by Vasilis Nitsiakos in Konitsa. Elsewhere the
framework is the wider nation, as in the continuing projects of the (Mer-
lier) Music Folklore Archive in Athens, under the leadership of Markos
Dragoumis. Yet even here and it is typical of such archives just about
everywhere more time is now devoted to digitising existing collections
than to collecting new material. An impressive collection of CDs has
already emerged from the Music Folklore Archive, covering the islands
as well as the mainland, and in some cases mixing old and new record-
ings. There are previously unpublished recordings from the Dodecanese
(Baud-Bovy collected here in the 1930s), recordings of lullabies from all
over Greece, of songs from Asia Minor, and from Siphnos, Samothrace,
592 chapter twenty-two
12Bezi 1998.
13ganec 1962.
conservation 593
14Bezi 1998.
15Ceribai 1998.
16Ibid.
594 chapter twenty-two
study of ethnic minorities such as the Roma. Much the same has been true
of Bulgaria, where monies are still made available to support the bigger
folklore festivals such as Koprivstitsa, but where it is increasingly difficult
for individual scholars to gain institutional support for their fieldwork.
Again the tendency has been to look to ethnic minorities, including, as we
saw in an earlier chapter, Turkish communities in the East.
Interestingly, it is Greece that has seemed to move with greatest diffi-
culty on the issue of ethnic minorities. At risk of over-generalising, it seems
that traditional collection, conservation and digitisation of the national
heritage continues apace, notably through the efforts of Dragoumis and
his team. It seems, too, that there is openness to new perspectives within
the discipline, promoted by Pavlos Kavouras at the University of Athens,
and including various kinds of urban ethnomusicology. What has proved
more difficult, and has tended to run up against official opposition, is seri-
ous research by Greek scholars into the music of ethnic minorities that
maintain their separateness. Of course there are exceptions, and some of
them have already been noted. But the work of Nikos Kokkas on Pomaks
in Western Thrace has not been plain sailing. And likewise there has been
resistance to the attempts by Haris Sarris to include music from Slavo-
phone villages in the recordings he has made in northern Greece. The
official agendas, those dictated by the funding bodies, would prefer not to
acknowledge such repertories. Conservation, in other words, is selective.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BALKAN BEAT
Heroes
This is the story about the times when they were big and I was little.
In this way the political commentator Igor Mirkovi introduced his 2003
rockumentary film Sretno dijete [Lucky Kid]. The they in his narration
referred to his onetime heroes, the performers associated with the so-
called New Wave movement that dominated Yugoslav popular music in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mirkovi looks back, in other words, from
one century to another, and from one political system to another. And as
the title of his film indicates, he sees that earlier stage of Yugoslav popu-
lar culture as a kind of golden age. It is a story of idealism (a privileged
moment in the narrators life remembered and treasured), but also of
some loss of idealism on the part of the heroes themselves and of at least
one member of their public. In the closing moments of the film Mirkovi
remarks: I lost that fantastic nave ability to admire them [the heroes]
unreservedly. Even so, his love for his golden age is everywhere apparent;
the memories are an active part of his present. Nor is he alone.
Sretno dijete centres around a reunion of some of the key personnel in
Zagreb in 2003, but to track down his heroes Mirkovi has to travel far
and wide: to Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Utrecht and New York. Some are
still involved with music, some are not; some have achieved material suc-
cess, some have not. Most are cooperative, and the personal reunions, the
exchanges of memories, make for genuinely interesting footage. But one
of the most influential of them, Branimir (Johnny) tuli, proves elusive
to the end. Although he retains a messianic aura in former Yugoslavia,
even today, tuli has consistently resisted all attempts to draw him out of
his secluded private existence in Holland. Accordingly, he refuses to play
Mirkovis nostalgia game, a game in which multi-sited interviews set in
the present are juxtaposed with footage recorded in the Yugoslav capitals,
Zagreb in particular, back then in the golden age.
Naturally this juxtaposition invites us to reflect on what might have
been lost. For one, there is the excitement and energy that derived from
a specific place at a specific time; and in this respect the Kului Club in
596 chapter twenty-three
Zagreb, where you rubbed shoulders with your heroes, might almost be
compared with the Cavern Club in Liverpool back in the 1960s.1 The Yugo-
slav capitals may indeed have felt at the edge of the world, as Mirkovi
puts it, during the Communist era, but for a brief period at least they
throbbed with the energy of a vibrant, defiantly self-confident youth cul-
ture, played out against a background of decaying socialism. For Mirkovi,
and for others of his generation, Zagreb was the only place to be during
this explosion of punk-rock culture, prior to its anaesthetisation by the
culture industry. Compare this energy, the narrator seems to say, with the
standardised and stereotyped pop-folk played all over the Balkans today.
For another, there is the idealism. When Jura Stubli, the frontman of
the band Film, tried to articulate some of the values associated with the
New Wave, he remarked that he and his colleagues disliked people with
money. And it is true that, at least in the early stages, the heroes made rel-
atively little from record sales or gigs, and that money was not really what
motivated them. Again we are implicitly invited to compare this punk-
rock anti-materialism with the image and ethos associated with todays
heroes. Who, we ask, are todays heroes? Are they the turbo-folk divas of
the culture industry, with their kitsch palaces and saccharine sentiment,
all available on tap through the TV music channels? Could they even be
the machismo heroes of gangster land, no doubt deplored in reality, but
idealised and even celebrated in some of the trash imagery of pop-folk
videos? None of it is quite that simple, of course. For one, Mirkovi him-
self makes no such direct comparison with todays popular music. For
another, it would be a mistake to translate an autobiographical film into
straightforward social commentary. And for yet another, todays pop-folk
constitutes neither a uniform repertory, nor a repertory entirely lacking in
critical edge. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that New Wave fans of
a certain generation find it hard to understand how young people today
can idolise figures such as Dino Merlin.
Mirkovis film unfolds against a background of political events. We see
in rapid succession first the celebrations surrounding the fortieth anni-
versary of Titos regime and then the public mourning that attended his
funeral. We see the small-town atmosphere of Zagreb in those days, a
town where just about everything was closed by 10 pm. We see the evi-
dence of economic collapse in the 1980s: the power cuts and electricity
1See Cohen 1991, 15, for a discussion of the shaping elements created by local
contexts.
balkan beat 597
in Sarajevo and (during the siege) Zagreb, but Nele Karajli, himself an
ethnic Serb, moved to Belgrade, where in due course he established a sec-
ond version of Zabranjeno puenje, and later a third with which Emir Kus-
turica was at one time involved. The result has not been promising. It is
hard to know whether Karajlis current pro-Serbian stance is a response
to his rejection by Bosnia (his attitude was once very different), but in
any case the musical results add up to a very pale shadow of Zabranjeno
puenje in its Bosnian heyday.
Even at the height of the New Wave the bands in Bosnia and Her-
zegovina were clear that their primary audience was a local one. There
was a sentimental strain running through some of the lyrics (links with
sevdalinka) and often too a faux-heroic quality that might be directed, for
example, to local sports figures. But there were also provocative messages,
anti-establishment critiques, and parodic gestures. With the departure of
the heroes, much of this was lost. The new role models, who include Hari
Mata Hari and Dino Merlin, still probably the biggest figure in pop-folk in
Bosnia today, are both more localised (though in Merlins case there is rec-
ognition beyond Bosnia) and more conformant. And that in turn speaks
into a larger narrative about the redefinition of Bosnian identities in the
post-war era, marked by new national ideologies, new parties, new cultural
associations, and new public spaces for the playing out of national nar-
ratives. Music contributed in two ways to these reformations of national
identity. National musics in modern guise sevdalinka in particular, but
also ilahije have become ubiquitous. But at the same time a more anony-
mous pop-folk, common to so much of the Balkans these days, is given
spurious national associations. Amila Ramovi comments scathingly on
both the labelling and the marketing of one of Merlins CDs, a tribute to
Burek, the familiar pie found all over Bosnia and Herzegovina.2
In recent years there have been some indications of a resurgence of
a critical popular music in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Attempts to revive
the old bands have not been notably successful, but a handful of socially
aware, provocative bands have made an appearance, referring freely to
a variety of traditions, including that of pop-folk. One such is Letu tuke
[Airoplane], based in Sarajevo, and led by Dino arin, who together with
producer Dzani Pervan set out to rebel against the narrow limits of todays
popular music scene. Several of their lyrics are both anti-capitalist and
2Ramovi 2005.
balkan beat 599
Re-Inscribing Yugoslavia
Such hints of renewal hardly challenge the ubiquity of pop-folk, not just in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, but all over the former Yugoslavia. This calls for
some comment, not least in relation to expressions of nationhood among
the successor states. Within a classic understanding of cultural national-
ism, the spirit of the nation is embodied in its language and in the cul-
tural practices of its people. It is interesting, then, to consider the fates
first of language and then of cultural practices in the Yugoslav successor
states. Serbo-Croat had its dialects, but throughout the twentieth century
it was in practice a single language. Since 1990 it has been fragmented,
forced apart by nation state politics. When we turn to popular cultural
practices, on the other hand, there has been an increasing convergence
since 1990, and especially in music, where an orientalised pop-folk rules.
The discourses emphasise that similar things can mean different things,
but the music tells its own story.
It is of some interest, then, to examine pop-folk boundaries between the
principal South Slav nations. I will pass over the propaganda war music
associated with the early 1990s (as discussed by Ljerka Rasmussen),3 and for
that matter the anti-establishment, underground rock music cultivated in
4Mijatovi 2008.
balkan beat 601
8Baker 2010.
9Ibid. See also Baker 2007.
10Lauevi 2007.
balkan beat 603
11In her paper (unpublished at the time of writing), Backwards and Balkan or glam-
orous and global: locating the east in Croation popular music. This was delivered at the
ASN Europe conference, Sciences-Po, Paris in July 2008.
12Bohlman 2007.
13Bohlman 2008.
604 chapter twenty-three
big percussion that would soon become a recognisable sound and sight at
Eurovision. In the same year, it was Serbia and Montenegro, with a native-
language song, traditional instruments (a kaval solo at the beginning) and
nation-historical imagery abounding, that came through to second place,
while the English-language, more western-orientated songs of Greece and
Albania reached third and seventh place respectively. In the winning song
of 2005, Greece stayed with the English language, but allowed recognisable
elements of local colour in the instrumental interludes, while both Bul-
garia (which has not yet made the final) and Romania seemed determined
to present themselves as good Europeans. In this year it was Albania and
above all Croatia that went for local colour, with the Croatian song (in the
native language) conspicuously drawing together dinaric and Pannonian
elements of the national culture. Then, in 2006, Bosnia and Herzegovina
came to the fore (third place), with Hari Mata Hari making play with sevd-
alinka, while Croatia veered in the direction of ethnic kitsch. This time it
was Macedonia (in its most successful entry in Eurovision) that looked
westwards while still working within the broad framework of pop-folk.
2007 was Serbias year, and the importance of that victory was consider-
able, not least as a way to present Serbia in new ways to Europe (it was a
bonus that Marija erifovi could be harnessed to minority causes of both
sexual orientation and ethnicity).14 It is perhaps a little glib to risk too
many conclusions about what Eurovision success meant for the shifting
sands of identity politics in Serbia. Nevertheless one might hasard that
it did have some bearing on the two Serbias we have encountered on
several occasions in this book. Both in musical style and in presentational-
behavioural coding, erifovis Molitva seems to have possessed a con-
siderable symbolic value. Naturally it had limited power to dissolve the
stereotypes, or to expunge from collective memories the worst excesses of
totalitarianism and nationalism, but it did suggest at least the possibility
of transcending traditional dualities and of embracing multiplicity on sev-
eral levels. Preparation for hosting the 2008 event in the gaze of the wider
world presented its own problems, of course, especially in light of predict-
able Serbian responses to the Kosovan declaration of independence early
in the year. But in the end the contest was a triumph of organisation and
spectacle. It was a test case for the new face of Serbia, in which the local
14Gligorievi 2007.
balkan beat 605
environment shaped the event, while the global event shaped the envi-
ronment. Did it in fact establish a model for Serbia in Europe?15
It is tempting to propose that this is ultimately what Eurovision pro-
vides: a mass-cultural model for the negotiation of national identities
within Europe. But in reality the contest is too conformant in its stylistic
imperatives to allow this. It has become a site for world music mixes of all
kinds, but they are invariably subordinated to a standardised mainstream
idiom. What Bohlman calls the aesthetic centre remains something of
a given (albeit one that changes with changing fashions), while at the
same time the national identifiers are themselves homogenised, directed
to the wider region by means of recognisable but generalised symbols.
For this reason the contest neatly accommodates the general tendency for
the boundaries between popular music styles in the Yugoslav successor
states to become increasingly blurred, including endless mutual covers.
Eurovision was certainly not the cause of this, but it has become a channel
for its very public promotion and display, and that in turn can be origi-
nating. While looking at recent developments in art music (chapter 18),
I suggested that cultural Yugoslavism seems to have greater potential in
the aftermath of the state than it did under either of the two Yugoslavias.
Something similar seems to be happening in popular music. It is not just
the voting blocks in Eurovision that reinstate Yugoslavia. It is also the
music. Indeed it could be argued that the music reinscribes not just Yugo-
slavia, but the Balkans.
Divas
15Interestingly the Serbian entry for 2010, by none other than Bregovi, was a defiant
Ovo je Balkan [This is the Balkans], complete with Balkan brass. Bosnia and Albania, in
contrast, presented a decidedly European face to the world on this occasion.
16Sugarman 2007, 301.
606 chapter twenty-three
ensured that further associations were made with more regressive forms
of nationalism, and these were strengthened by the appropriation of
turbo-folk by the Miloevi regime. Yet, paradoxically enough, one of the
things that marked off turbo-folk from neo-folk was its response not only
to modern global musical styles but also to video-presentational imagery
modelled on a Western star system, albeit blended in highly idiosyncratic
ways with elements drawn from Turkish, Egyptian and even Indian pre-
sentations of popular music and dance. Both the musical styles and the
imagery enabled turbo-folk not just to outlive its association with the poli-
tics of xenophobic nationalism but also to influence, if not to colonise,
pop-folk right across the region.
Part of this can be explained by the nature of these societies as they
emerged from and reacted against their socialist past, and by the kinds
of values that were not just on public display, but were implicitly or even
explicitly approved by the new regimes. Once more there was a distinc-
tive mix of Balkan specificities, arising partly from the prevailing gangster
capitalism of the early 1990s, and western mass-cultural models, of which
the most prominent and influential was probably American music televi-
sion. Thus, the blatant sexuality of some of the pop-folk videos, at times
moving into something close to soft porn, is often linked to a machismo
imagery (warrior chic is a term sometimes used) that harmonises alarm-
ingly easily with traditional Balkan stereotypes involving violence and
the subjugation of women. Such associations are positively invited by the
folk element in pop-folk. On the other hand, the pop element insists on
the slick modernity of the society that is represented here. The males in
these videos are decidedly part of a modern world, specifically a get-rich-
quick world of easy consumption, fast cars and designer clothes: a world
that hints at a glamorised criminality (guns, drugs), and one where beauti-
ful women seem complicit in their own exploitation.
This latter point needs scrutiny. The question of who exercises power,
and conversely who is the victim, in these videos is often moot. Most of
the singers are female; they are glossy divas, marvels of cosmetic surgery,
presented as seductive sex objects in a context of male dominance. Yet,
exactly as with some better-known Western pop icons, their beauty can be
controlling and even destructive. The tradition of the Siren, who combines
the seductions of music with those of the feminine, is an obvious back-
ground here, reinforced by settings that are often imaginary, even mytho-
logical, in character, where the performance becomes an escape from the
drab immediacies of life. The figure of the Siren is ambiguous, however,
and its significance has changed from Classical through Medieval and
608 chapter twenty-three
of the chalga music videos that are his primary concern. The slippage that
occurs constantly in pop-folk between Balkan and global orientalisms to
reprise that distinction is also discussed by Kurkela, and he goes fur-
ther than most in setting up a typology that enables this slippage to be
assessed. By pairing his categories through the mechanism of connected
antithesis, he is able to make clear distinctions between the oriental
themes in chalga videos and the classical discourse of orientalism pio-
neered by Said. And in a perceptive conclusion he pinpoints the paradox
that underlies so much pop-folk not just in Bulgaria but across the region,
arguing that orientalism mirrors and emphasises its apparent antithesis,
the westernisation of culture. This is why the seductive diva of the music
videos, like her machismo (mafioso) male counterpart, can be both a
home-grown product and an amalgam of two separate exotic others.
It is an all but arbitrary exercise to single out particular divas. In many
cases a background in more traditional forms of folk music is evident. A
case in point is the Serbian turbo-folk star Jana (Dragana Todorovi), one
of a number of singers whose success in exploiting the local idioms of Ser-
bia has not dissuaded her from living outside its borders. In her concert
performances of ta e ti pevaica [Why do you need a singer], one of her
most popular songs, the musical hybridity expertly-performed oriental
roulades, Serbian folk idioms with folk-iconic accordion accompaniments,
and Western dance music is matched by dance and gesture, with the
supporting dancers grounding the performance in Serbian traditions. And
one can find much the same hybridity in Bosnian-born Indira Radi, who
rose to prominence in the 1990s and is now a popular artist all over former
Yugoslavia. Her TV Pink video Ratovanje [Warfare] is characteristic.
If this hybridity is a central reference point, we might then locate to
one side of it the Bulgarian diva Ivana (Vania Todorova Kaludova), whose
videos take us into the modern world of city landscapes and stretch limou-
sines (Bezumna tsena [Crazy Price] with the ubiquitous telephone), high
fashion and girl power (Nai-dobrata duma [The most beautiful word],
and hotel trysts (Kato na 17 [17 Years Old]). Or, to take a step further in
this direction, we might cite the popular Serbian singer Jelena Karleua,
who presents as a siren in futuristic, often utterly surreal settings (Candy
Life, with balloons in the washing machine, or Insomnia, with the singer
as a kind of Darth Vader figure). To the other side is the Albanian singer,
Maya Alikaj, who allows folk elements to assume much greater signifi-
cance, both musically and visually. Here it is the traditional music of
Epirus is that is recreated, from the unmistakable Epirotic clarinet style
of Guri i rnde n vend t vet [Heavy stone in its place], to the rhythmic
610 chapter twenty-three
ison and pipes of Fustani i verdh [The green dress]. The videos spell out
that although Maya is a modern diva, pastoral images of nature, myth and
history provide an often disturbing counterpoint (she is juxtaposed with
an old Albanian peasant woman in Guri i rede). Strikingly, the Bubulina
video depicts her as a mermaid (the Siren figure par excellence), and the
final image is of a (presumably drowning) male protagonist.
Maya is one of the ubiquitous singers on Tirana Music TV and STV
Super Sonic, which together offer a panorama of Albanian pop-folk to any-
one spending a quiet evening in a Tirana hotel room. Her appropriations
of traditional music root her firmly in a specific place, and connect her
indeed with a specific repertory, the music of southern Albania (Epirus).
Not all the singers are as firmly rooted in rural traditions. Macedonian-
born Muharrem Ameti, no less popular on Albanian airwaves, offers an
alternative perspective, appropriating either Rom musics (especially tal-
lava) or urban oriental idioms that relate to the Greek amanes or the Otto-
man gazel. His recording of Aman, aman, one of several covers of this
popular song (see also Elda Shabani) is entirely characteristic. Ameti is
one of several male stars on the Albanian folk-pop scene, including Bujar
Qamili and Mozi, and his style of singing has much in common with male
singers of manele in Romania (Adrian Copilul Minune and Nicolae Guta)
and of chalga in Bulgaria (Iliqn Mihov Baroveca and Ivo Tanev). National
specificities notwithstanding, we are left to wonder again at just how far
the musical materials and styles of folk-pop, like the liquids in Zygmunt
Baumans liquid modernities, flow freely across the borders.
For the most part, the fame of these singers does not reach far beyond
their native country, and certainly not beyond the Balkans. Pop-folk
remains an art for local consumption. This is broadly true even of Azis,
one of the best-known of the Bulgarian chalga singers, though he has had
his outings in a wider global marketplace. A Rom musician, and with an
earlier career as a folk singer, Azis draws freely on Rom traditions, but he
is known today rather more for his cultivation of a typically androgenous,
sexually ambivalent or sexually marginalised image and performance
style. As so often, it is possible to relate this image on one hand to some
avant-garde tendencies in global pop (and it might be noted in passing
that even female divas such as Jelena Karleusa occasionally exploit it in
this spirit), and on the other hand to a more immediate inheritance. I
refer here to an older and more specific tradition of drag belonging to the
eastern Mediterranean and yet further to the east. It is a familiar trope
among some niche communities of Indian popular singers and dancers,
balkan beat 611
Greek Mythology
The collapse of the Communist world at the end of the 1980s was not
without consequences for, and parallels with, the political events unfold-
ing in Greece. From June 1989, in a context of instability and political
scandals, there were multiple elections, resulting in coalition parliaments
through to the end of 1990. At this point the socialist Pasok party lost
power and a new conservative, western-orientated politics was initiated in
Greece, accompanied by many of the same features, social and cultural as
well as economic, that we associate with the immediate post-Communist
years in the former Eastern Bloc. Even the subsequent re-design and
re-election of Pasok reminds us somewhat of the facelifts and successive
re-elections of the old Communists north of the Greek border. Exactly as
19Stokes 1992.
612 chapter twenty-three
20Tragaki 2007.
balkan beat 613
21Polychronakis 2007.
614 chapter twenty-three
on fire], with its gypsy campfire setting and ethnic drums in the middle
eight. In others she can be an iconic victim (Na tin xerese [Enjoy her
Presence/Company]);22 compare Vissi in Call Me. If anything really sepa-
rates them, it is perhaps determined by generation, for Vissi remembers
in many of her performances the lure of the bouzouki culture: Kanena
or Methismeni mou kardhia [My Drunken Heart]) are examples. And
she remembers too her early experience with the popular art song tradi-
tion, notably in a song such as Den thelo na ksereis [I dont want you
to know], which she performs with Piaf-like intensity and emotion. In a
word, that she retains a more grounded sense of an indigenous Greek tra-
dition of popular music than her younger rival.
It seems hard to escape the controlling power of our two narratives in
all of this. Even those movements that set out in defiance of Greekness
often proved in the end unable to resist its pull. Consider the emergence
of Hip-Hop in Greece in the late 1980s. It began of course as an import
from the United States, and remained a marginalised style right through
to the mid nineties, with the usual informal distribution networks (chief
among them pirate cassettes), and with the familiar associations with par-
ticular post-industrial neighbourhoods, whose invisible borders were jeal-
ously guarded. But with the emergence of the group Hemiskoubria [Half
Sardines], and especially when this group collaborated with well-known
artists such as Elpidha [Hope], Hip-Hop was drawn closer to the main-
streams. This was still a music created in defiance of tradition, and spe-
cifically of a national tradition. However, as the Hip-Hop groups became
more individual in style and character, even this began to change. Increas-
ingly the conflicts of style, somewhat as in conflicts between US East and
West coast styles of Hip-Hop, began to take on a national dimension,
determined by whether or not one looked away from Greece (the com-
mercialised brand) or towards it (the authentic brand).
From the late 1990s and into the 2000s, these two tendencies were
epitomised by Nikos Vourliotis [NiVo] and TXC (Terror X Crew) respec-
tively. The latter began as a trio, but in due course American-born DJ
ALX, together with Artemis Efthimis (AE), renamed it as TXC. It was at
this point that the associations with narratives of Greek nationalism and
Greek identity became pronounced. Reacting forcefully against wide-
spread perceptions of the genre and of the group as representative of a
22It should be said that the text here is heavy with irony, where na tin xerese means
exactly the opposite of what it says.
balkan beat 615
nasty subculture, TXC set out to reconnect with a national heritage, and
they looked to all the usual sources to do so. In this way the world of
Hip-Hop, or as it was then increasingly known, urban music, found itself
somewhat bizarrely invaded by references not just to the Classical past
but also to the world of post-Byzantine Orthodoxy. The old debates about
double-descendedness thus found an unlikely site for their continuing
articulation in modern Greece. What this shows above all is that whatever
the influences that came from the Communist and ex-Communist north,
or indeed from the global music scene, Greek popular music retained an
identity that was essentially distinct, almost at times in spite of itself. If
there are synergies that remain vital in this music, they are with the east-
ern (Anatolian) rather than with the northern (Slavonic) neighbours. The
voices of the Fathers refuse to be silenced.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In Theory
If we look back over the various stories in this book, we can scarcely ignore
the proliferation of boundaries in South East Europe. There are boundaries
of all kinds. They divide societies; they separate ethnicities and genders;
they draw lines between the generations, and between musical styles.
There are boundaries of place, and boundaries of time: partitions of politi-
cal and cultural spaces, and markers that punctuate the flow of history.
Spatial and temporal boundaries are often interlocked. Where communi-
ties have been separated, where borders have been created, there is usu-
ally a pre-existing ground a social ontology that renders the separation
intelligible if not predictable. But there may also be a defined moment
of severance. An agency may intervene; a moment of rupture may occur,
and from that point onward division will be formalised. In short, there
may be an event. I will explore a little further some of the implications of
boundaries and events for a cultural history. This will mean looking again
at questions of alterity, for the relation between self and other underlies
any discussion of boundaries. But it will also mean reflecting again on the
event, the singularity whose disruptive force can make structural change
possible both for individuals and for societies.
Some key points about the philosophical underpinnings of the event
are relevant to our stories. One is that subjectivities are dependencies; the
subject is shaped, indeed Alain Badiou would argue it is created, by the
events to which it is subjected (we happen).1 Another is that the limits of
transformative possibilities created by the event are infinite. A third, and
now we move to a more pragmatic level, is that investing in the event
allows for breakdowns in historical narratives, countering or attenuat-
ing putative plots. Both the instigation of Communist rule in South East
Europe (Red Amy incursions and the Yalta Declaration) and its dramatic
fall half a century later might seem to conform to this latter criterion.
Both occurred at, or emerged from, moments of maximal stress, and both
might be understood to have sprung from the void that Badiou identi-
fies when conventional power is no longer able to police the anarchic
multiplicities inherent in any situation. The evental site, for Badiou, is
located at the edge of this void, outside the normal state of the situation
as between centre and margin, included and excluded, and it is this loca-
tion that enables a reversal, a transformation within the structure.
An event, as Badiou understands it, exceeds its context. Admittedly it
is not always entirely obvious how this criterion is to be tested in prac-
tice. Indeed it remains a matter of judgement whether even those key
moments of inception and closure in the history of Communism in Europe
do in fact qualify; the issue at stake is presumably how far they may be
understood in relation to a pre-existing socio-political ground. But what
is not in doubt is that both moments resulted in truly massive structural
transformations, and that these were manifest politically, socially and cul-
turally. Significantly, both also involved acts of separation and division.
And, even more significantly, violence loomed large over both transforma-
tive moments. There was the violence of World War II and the Red Army
advances that drove a wedge through Europe, and there was the orgy of
violence, terrifyingly proximate both temporally and spatially to our own
civilised version of Europe, that tore asunder a formerly unified nation
state when Communism fell.
Most of us find it hard to make sense of the inhumanity that con-
fronts us when we look into particular corners of Balkan history in recent
decades. The brutality of the succession wars has been widely publicised;
but there was also the treatment of minority populations in Bulgaria and
Romania in the later stages of Communist rule; and there was the ruth-
less suppression of a dissenting voice in Albania. Despite abundant evi-
dence that it is a norm of human history, that it is hard-wired into all our
histories, this impulse to do violence to people and places, as well as to
ideas and symbols, continues to shock and disorientate us. It is redundant
to specify Balkan traumas in any of their harrowing detail. We have the
histories in plenty, and we have the personal accounts of those who lived
through these times. Yet, as Susan Brison reminds us in a moving account
of her own violation in an entirely different context, the challenge of find-
ing language that is true to traumatic experience is [...] a daunting one.2
Ironically, perhaps, it is fiction that can sometimes meet this challenge,
conveying more potently even than autobiography the effects of violence
2Brison 2003.
618 chapter twenty-four
3Drakuli 2001.
4Bartsch 1998.
5Spentzou, forthcoming 2014.
6Eagleton 2008.
on boundaries and events 619
longer seems to believe in the future. Since social and cultural forms are
no longer given time to solidify in this world, the capacity of events to
transform it is correspondingly reduced. Bauman is alive to the ethical
implications of what he calls this seductive lightness of being. The world
he portrays is one where the advent of instantaneity ushers human cul-
ture and ethics into unmapped and unexplored territory.11
As to boundaries, Baumans analysis of the meetings of strangers in our
modern world (when strangers meet strangers) is not exactly a cheerful
one. Inter alia, it adds new categories to the classic strategies already iden-
tified by Claude Lvi-Strauss for dealing with difference. Thus, in addition
to Lvi-Strausss exile or annihilation of the others and suspension or
annihilation of their otherness (emic and phagic strategies respectively),
both potently linked by Bauman to rather specific types of modern public
space, there are the non-places which serve to keep differences at bay,
and there are the empty spaces where differences are wittingly or unwit-
tingly occluded from our individual mental maps. Baumans exposition of
the great transformation we are currently living through adds up to an
uncertain and in some ways a bleak portrait, but we may be entitled to
draw some reassurance from it with respect to the boundaries that con-
tinue to divide communities in the Balkans. In our present age of liquid
modernity, might one hope that such divisions are part of a history that
slowly draws to a close? And if this is indeed the case, does this closure
entail a loss of identity among the relevant protagonists?
The recent thaw in hostilities around much of the present-day Greek border
might well be viewed in this light, an attribute of the wider social transfor-
mation Bauman describes. It might also be an implicit acknowledgement
that traditional constructions of Greek identity, forged by language, religion
and culture and progressively defined against alterities of various hues from
ancient times to the present, are becoming harder to sustain, and the more
so following the large influx of immigrants from the 1990s onwards. Greece
traditionally worked to assimilate and hellenise its non-Greek populations,
including the Arvanites and the Aromanian Vlachs living within its borders
(Lvi-Strausss phagic strategy). Those who proved unassimilable the
11Bauman 2000.
622 chapter twenty-four
Slavophone and Muslim communities in the north, and the Roma every-
where were marginalised, affirming Greek identities through their alter-
ity (the emic strategy). But recent patterns of immigration have been of a
rather different order. While for many Greeks these new immigrants may
seem to occupy Baumans empty spaces, barely registering at all on their
individual mental maps, they do nonetheless signal an encroaching multi-
culturalism at odds with traditional Greek ideas of nationhood. One should
not overstate the case. The Greek ethnos, cemented by Orthodoxy, remains
powerful, but the effects of globalisation, softening the edges of hermetic
identities, are ever harder to ignore.
For much of the twentieth century there was a less amenable story to tell
about alterities. As national boundaries were carved out of empire across
this region, Greece was involved in a succession of disputes with its neigh-
bours, and some of these linger on today. Moving from west to east, we
note that since the declaration of Albanian independence there have been
difficulties over respective minorities in Greece and Albania (especially over
the expulsion of the Cham Albanians), though currently relations are rela-
tively good. Next we encounter the controversy surrounding the naming of
a newly independent Macedonia; Greece has consistently refused to accept
the constitutional name, which it views as potentially irredentist and an
appropriation of its own historical legacy. Continuing eastward, we note
that while present-day relations with Bulgaria are good, the two nations
were on opposite sides of three separate wars in the early twentieth cen-
tury; and in the last of them Bulgarians occupied parts of northern Greece,
leaving a legacy of hostility that has been hard to expunge. Then there is
Turkey. Leaving aside the shared Ottoman legacy, the twentieth century has
witnessed wars, the population exchange, the Istanbul pogrom, the Aegean
dispute, and Cyprus. Yet here too relations are currently improving, espe-
cially following the earthquake diplomacy in 1999.
Against this background, it may be interesting to return to three stories
about Greece and its neighbours. They take us around the political bor-
ders from west to east. And as they do so, they traverse other boundaries:
from pre-modern through modern to postmodern cultures and societies;
from traditional music through art music to popular music. Maria Todo-
rova reminds us that if we study boundaries we foreground divisions right
away, whereas if we study spaces we allow that there might be unities.12
In reality it is rather hard to examine the one without the other, but it
12Todorova 1997.
on boundaries and events 623
does come down partly to how we frame our questions. My three stories
reveal some of the tensions that arise when we shift our perspective from
boundaries to spaces and back again. And I will suggest that they are very
often tensions between politics and culture.
The first of them concerns the polyphonic music of Epirus, discussed
briefly in chapters 2 and 9. In an essay published in 2003, the anthropolo-
gists Vassilis Nitsiakos and Constantinos Mantzos surveyed both Greek
and Albanian literature about this music, and in doing so they showed
us how two mutually incompatible national traditions were constructed
around it, and how each tradition was given historical depth, returning
us respectively to Hellenic and Illyrian pasts.13 More recently Eckehard
Pistrick has extended this work to look to the public presentation of poly-
phonic song today, notably in Greek and Albanian festivals, and he looks
also at the ideologies that inform those festivals.14 All of this exhibits a
familiar enough pattern. Music has to belong to someone to have an iden-
tity, it seems. And as political borders force cultural communities either
side of a line, invented histories validate the new spaces.
We may remember too that that this tradition is shared with Vlach
communities. This complicates the binary Greek-Albanian picture, add-
ing a minoritarian dimension. Vlachs are not of course a single group.
Nor do they articulate a single politics. You will hear very different sto-
ries about identity if you travel around the Vlach villages of Epirus and
western Macedonia, or indeed if you simply trawl the blogs on the inter-
net. You will encounter a pro-Romanian faction (it has its heroes, and its
history).15 You will find assimilationists, Greek Vlachs, for example, who
are insulted to be called a minority given what they and their forefathers
did for Greece, but who are also conscious of material advantages offered
by Greek affiliation. And you will meet nationalists, if that is the right
word: members of the Vlach Association in Albania or the Pan-Hellenic
Association of Vlachs, who resist assimilation to any national culture, who
demand language rights in education, hold annual conferences on Vlach
culture, and so forth. There are, in short, conflicted Vlach identities.
16Romanou 2010.
626 chapter twenty-four
one of the principal reasons the Biennale was able to survive and indeed
to become an enduring success was that Kelemen and his colleagues
were in a position to play the Soviets off against the Americans in the
sponsorship stakes.17 The other was the Hellenic Weeks of Contempo-
rary Music in Athens. This too was a landmark event, but in the end it
was not sustained, mainly because American funding was withdrawn
after the fall of the Junta. The point here is that the Hellenic Weeks foun-
dered because, unlike Yugoslavia, Greece was at the mercy of one of the
two superpowers.
This was in the late 1970s, and by then my second narrative of home-
coming, of Balkan identities, of the quest for roots had begun to re-assert
itself, displacing and eventually subsuming the first. This development
was discussed in relation to the Communist Balkans. But again it is worth
noting that it influenced Greece no less than its Communist neighbours.
It may be a little over-glib to put it in this way, but one might argue that
if the composer Yiannis Papaioannou was the emancipator in Greek post-
war music, the self-conscious stylist and innovator, then Dimitris Draga-
takis was the seeker after archetypes and roots. In this respect he found
common ground with Ljubica Mari in Serbia, with Konstantin Iliev and
Ivan Spassov in Bulgaria and with tefan Niculescu and Tiberiu Olah in
Romania. And we noted earlier how this marriage of archaism and mod-
ernism offered a distinctive identity to composers from this region.
In this second story about art music, as in the first about traditional
music, a divided politics both created and actively promoted a divided
culture. It differs from the first story, however, in that the cultural world
then worked to cross the divide. In both, music was hijacked by politics,
but in the second it talked back. If we take a birds eye view of post-war art
music in the Balkans, what we see I think is that while political appropria-
tions pulled Greece and its northern neighbours apart, the talking back
actually drew them together through shared narratives of emancipation
and of Balkan identities. That was then. In todays world, native scholars
disenchanted in the main fight the corner for art music in a hostile
environment, struggling to gain recognition and funding from successive
governments. In the process, they are inclined once again to construct
musical traditions as intrinsically national, unique brands that might hold
their own in a global cultural marketplace. This is understandable. But
it is not comfortable to see division originating from within rather than
18Tragaki 2007.
19Susam-Saraeva 2006.
20Kallimopoulou 2009.
628 chapter twenty-four
Music Partitioned...
A glance at the map says a great deal with respect to Cyprus. The island is
just a few miles from the Turkish coast and distant from mainland Greece.
This accounts partly for continuing insecurities among the Greek Cypriot
majority on the island. It also accounts for the sense of entitlement among
Turkish Cypriots, bearing in mind that Cyprus was under Ottoman rule
for three centuries before coming under British administration from 1878.
Almost from its belated start Greek Cypriot nationalism, with powerful
support from the Church, took the form of enosis (union with the mother-
land, as they perceived it, in a spirit of Panhellenism), rather than an inde-
pendence movement (Cypriotism), and understandably this was resisted
by the Turkish Cypriot population, who had a four-hundred year history
on the island, and who accordingly boycotted the plebiscite on enosis in
1950. The results of this plebiscite more than 90 per cent of the Greek
Cypriot population in favour were in any case ignored by Britain.
From this point, and faced with anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare by
the radical pro-enosis EOKA, British policy was to look favourably on
indeed to energise Turkey, effectively widening the space between the
two communities on the island and even condoning the discourse of
taksim [partition] that accorded with the aims of the radical Turkish-
Cypriot organisation TMT. It was a policy of divide et impera. And it
21Nye 1990.
on boundaries and events 629
22Few accounts of recent Cypriot history can avoid allowing their subject position
to come through. For studies that emphasise the global players, see Mallinson 2005 and
Papadakis, Peristianis and Welz 2006. See also the trenchant, far from balanced, article by
Perry Anderson (Anderson 2008).
23Pick 1993.
630 chapter twenty-four
And we would refer to works such as Cypriana (1943) for solo piano by
the Cypriot-American composer Anis Fuleihan (190070). European art
music, in other words, had a presence on this island at particular stages
of its earlier history. Likewise post-Byzantine chant was also cultivated by
the Cypriots, though Cypriot chant lacks the regional identity of, say, the
Smyrnean school of the late nineteenth century or even of the Thessalo-
nians today.27 And finally, Ottoman traditions were well established from
the late sixteenth century onwards; indeed the Mevlev tekke in Lefkoa
(on the Turkish side of the city) functioned as an important early school
of music and poetry (mevlevihne).
As for traditional music, this as one might expect belonged to the
wider Greek-Anatolian region, though there are distinctive features (often
a faster tempo) that identify it as Cypriot. The major dances were familiar
ones originating in Asia Minor and found also in Greece: using the Greek
names, they include the sirto, the karsilama, the tsifteteli, and the zeibekiko.
There have been projects on both sides of the island documenting record-
ings of these dances and dance pieces from the pre-1963 era, some with
Turkish-Cypriot musicians and dancers, some with Greek Cypriots, and
some with a mixture of the two ethnicities. The blind violinist Mehmet Ali
Tathyay (192088), who appears with his trio on many of the videos housed
by the Lefkoa Folk Association, had major exposure and exerted consid-
erable influence on the course of traditional music among the Turkish-
Cypriot community. From 1963 onwards, there are predictable stories to
tell about the attempts to draw this island-wide repertory into national
narratives of both Greece and Turkey, attempts that have not always been
acceptable to either Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot musicians.
Culturally, no less than politically, Cyprus presents something of a
microcosm of the wider Greek-Anatolian region, while at the same time
offering something distinctive, not just because all islands inflect generic
idioms one way and another, but because the British presence as in
the Ionian islands left its own mark. Thus, from 1879 onwards Euro-
pean music was cultivated both at diplomatic residences, at British (and
also French) schools, and by way of the British army bands. Teachers and
27I am grateful to Alex Lingas for information about this tradition. It seems that during
the Venetian period Cyprus did seem to be developing distinctive regional idioms similar
to those found on Crete (notably the works of John Korkodotos and Hieronymos Trago-
distes). Nicoletta Demetriou has written interestingly on the attempts by Theodoulos Kal-
linikos to draw Byzantine and demotic traditions together in support of familiar readings
of a continuity in Greek music history (Demetriou 2008).
632 chapter twenty-four
28Yeilada 2008.
29These have been usefully brought together in Adanir 2001.
30This is confirmed by the current doctoral research by Anastasia Hasikou in the Pub-
lic Information Office in Cyprus.
on boundaries and events 633
Not surprisingly, the two parts of the island have fared very differently
economically and culturally since 1974. With partition there are always
winners and losers. It is to the great credit of the Greek Cypriots that they
succeeded in building a prosperous modern state with a high per capita
income and low unemployment following partition, re-designing a tour-
ist industry whose prime locations had been in the North and forging a
successful commercial economy prior to the crisis of March 2013. As the
economic base of the society gradually strengthened, moreover, educa-
tional and cultural activities were increasingly promoted. Today there are
numerous festivals, the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, a Centre for Cypriot
Composers (with Music Information Centre), Youth State Orchestra, and
music programmes at the University of Nicosia (formerly Intercollege)
and the European University of Cyprus, as well as at private schools such
as the Arte Academy. At the time of writing a major Cyprus Cultural Cen-
tre, to an innovative architectural design, is nearing completion.
There is also a quite well developed compositional culture on the Greek
side. Aside from Michaelides, one could cite composers such as Michalis
Christodoulides, who makes creative use of makam-s and a Middle East-
ern melos more generally (O Saratsinos, composed in the early 1990s, is
characteristic, including an opening taximi), and Patras-based Andreas
Georgiou, who uses traditional melodies in some works (Steile me mana sto
nero [Mother, send me to the fountain] for solo guitar) but more typically
allows folk elements to provide a kind of background ambience (Costantia
and Dhoron Exagnismou [Gift of Purification]). There is even a Symphony,
Kypriakes Eikones [Cypriot Icons] and one-act Chamber Opera, Manoli...!,
by the Limassol composer Vassos Argyrides, best known for his work in
film and TV.31 Composed in 1990, and based on the coup of 1974, Manoli ...!
is a work of considerable expressive power, and it has already secured pro-
ductions in Kaiserslautern and Hamburg. Other notable composers are
Mikis Costeas, Tasos Stylianou and Andreas Moustoukis.
It would be hard to claim the same successes for North Cyprus, where
there have been the inevitable economic and social problems that accom-
pany a proscribed state. North Cyprus is a unique case. But it also presents
similarities with other fragments of territory small, isolated, defensive
that have calved off from larger units, the outcome of nationalist violence
and consequent ethnic separation. We will encounter other cases in
these last two chapters. Seeking to establish or confirm an independent
31Papaeti 2010.
634 chapter twenty-four
nationhood, they try to build a national culture almost ab initio, but they
are vulnerable and exploitable both from without and from within. Char-
acteristically they will be prone to a corrupt political culture, and to an
establishment that enjoys and protects its privileges.
North Cyprus is obviously heavily dependent on Turkey, and that in
turn has bred resentment at what are taken to be exploitative and con-
trolling policies. Indeed what is not always appreciated is that Turkish
Cypriots (those whose mother and father are both Cypriot) are a minority,
and that their relations with Anatolian settlers are not harmonious. There
is also a considerable population of ex-pats living in the Girne (Kyrenia)
area in particular, and that too has a cramping effect on the survival of a
local culture. At the time of the Annan plans there was real enthusiasm
in the North for peace, but when the final plan was rejected, following
the referendum in 2004, a different mentality ensued. One can feel tangi-
bly the force of Badious point about subjectivities and events. In North
Cyprus today the philosophy is live for the moment, or perhaps dont
face the reality. None of the current options for resolution appear par-
ticularly attractive to the Turkish-Cypriot community.
The attempts to build a culture in this part of the island have a ram-
shackle quality that is not without a tragi-comedic element, as in the fate
of the so-called State Symphony Orchestra and Choir, now reduced to
three fully-salaried members, and with a building so under-used that it
was occupied by squatters. More active is the Lefkoa Belediye Orchestra,
but its ambitions as a classical ensemble have taken a knock, and it now
performs an almost entirely popular or light-classical repertory. Moreover
there is little belief among the (accomplished) performers in the conduc-
tor, whose appointment was largely political. During my period in North
Cyprus, critiques of this state of affairs were in the newspapers and on the
radio. There is a group of committed younger musicians who have pressed
for reform, but as yet with little success. Building something sustained is
notoriously difficult in North Cyprus, as in all such regions. It is easier to
invest in festivals. Some, such as the Famagusta festival of popular and
world musics, cultivate an indigenous audience. But more often they are
linked with tourism, as in the two festivals at Bellapais Abbey organised
by the North Cyprus Music Foundation (Yilmas Tanner) and the Cyprus
Music Association (Halil Kalgay).32
Two decades after the partition of Cyprus, the Dayton accord finally
brought an end to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are paral-
lels. In both cases an act of war resulted in a formal separation of ethno-
religious groups. But there are also major differences. For one, there were
three groups involved in Bosnia; and during the war every possible permu-
tation of enemy pairings was in evidence. For another, there is the matter
of scale. There was much devastation in Cyprus in 1974, but nothing that
happened there was on the scale of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And for a
on boundaries and events 637
third, the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two separate political
enclaves, Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Federation, was the product
of an internationally sponsored peace treaty, and with only limited local
support. It was a foreign imposition, but it has status in international law,
whereas North Cyprus is recognised only by Turkey. Republika Srpska
does have legitimacy, but in the eyes of many the decision to establish it
as a largely autonomous region is hard to justify. Other things aside, there
is no real geographical logic to the region; the Inter-Entity Boundary Line
was negotiated somewhat arbitrarily according to the status quo at the
time. The Dayton peace was an international construction, just as much of
the responsibility for the war must be assigned to the international com-
munity. Even so, Dayton Bosnia, a fudge in terms of sovereignty norms,
did at least stop the bloodshed.33
Despite the division, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a single state, albeit
with a cumbersome institutional structure. The Office of the High Repre-
sentative commits to strengthening cross-sector state institutions, but the
reality on the ground is somewhat different. Agreement between national
representatives at state level is rare, and the two entities largely govern
themselves, and have separate police authorities. Any referendum held in
Republika Srpska, not that such a thing is likely, would certainly result in
an overwhelming vote for independence. In other words, it is the inter-
national community that holds Bosnia and Herzegovina together. Even
so, the regeneration of this country from its low ebb in the mid 1990s
should be presented as a success story on material, economic and cultural
levels. It is the politics that remain in question. Although populations are
drifting back slowly to their places of origin, Republika Srpska remains
predominantly Serb today, and the Federation mainly Muslim and Croat.
The different nationalities co-exist more easily than in the immediate
aftermath of the war, but ethnonationalist forces remain powerful, and
few could confidently rule out conflict in the future were the international
pressure to ease.
Violent events are transformative. And the post-Dayton political trans-
formation naturally had implications for cultural life. Many of the basic
structures of musical life remained as in the pre-war years, of course, and
were common to both Federation and Republic. This was especially the case
33The most thoughtful dissection of Dayton I have read is Woodward 2001, which also
contains useful analyses of the acceptance by European powers of Slovenian and Croatian
sovereignty in the early 1990s.
638 chapter twenty-four
in music education, though even here one might note that the curricula (if
not the structures) of the national music schools have been drifting apart
over the years. But for musical life more generally the changes were bound
to be considerable once a formal boundary was in place. In earlier chapters
I tried to give some indication of how musical activities were slowly regen-
erated in Sarajevo following the trauma of war. In truth they had never
stopped entirely even in the darkest days of the siege. I leave aside here
the iconic figure of Vedran Smailovi, the Cellist of Sarajevo, who used
music to draw the eyes of the world to Sarajevo for a time in a gesture that
inevitably echoes Pablo Casals with his Catalan folk melody. Rather I refer
to the continuing activities of the Academy, thanks to the determination
of the few, and even the continuing, if greatly emaciated, concert life that
just about functioned, sometimes underground, in the city.34
Sarajevo remains of course the cultural as well as the political capital
of Bosnia, but when Republika Srpska gained its semi-autonomous sta-
tus it acquired a separate capital and began to develop a separate cul-
tural life. In the aftermath of the war, there were debates about where
the seat of government should be located. East Sarajevo, centred on Pale,
staked its claim, but the association of Pale with Radovan Karadi and
with the worst excesses of Bosnian Serb wartime activities counted heav-
ily against it. There is an Academy of Music within the University of East
Sarajevo today, but its activities remain little known (hosting the 58th
Trophe Mondiale de lAccordon in 2008 gave it momentary exposure),
and it has no real contact with the more prestigious Academy. In any case
Banja Luka, Bosnias second city, beautifully situated on the river Vrbas in
the northern hills of Bosanska Krajina, was chosen as a more amenable
administrative capital, and it is effectively the cultural centre too. In pre-
war days, Banja Luka was home to a typically Bosnian mlange of eth-
nicities. Today, of course, it is mainly Serbian, and much of its Islamic
heritage has been eliminated or suppressed. But despite the destruction
of the Ferhadija Mosque (now under reconstruction), other mosques and
Muslim cemeteries survive. During a stay there I did occasionally hear the
call to prayer drifting across the city.
Musically, the local hero is Vlado Miloevi, whose compositions
make frequent reference to the folk music of surrounding territories in
34I am not aware of published accounts of music in wartime Sarajevo. But for a vivid
account of just what it meant to be a musician in a war-torn city (Osijek) in the early 1990s,
see Hadihusejnovi-Valaek 1998.
on boundaries and events 639
35Boym 2001.
on boundaries and events 641
are dissatisfied with their lives here and now, but because they fear for
the future. And the music they listen to seems to confirm this ecumenical
position. Turbo-folk, still imbued with political memories, has lost much
of its popularity among the youth of Republika Srpska in favour of more
international western styles or of politically neutral Serbian and Croatian
stars such as Zdravko oli in Belgrade and Severina Vukovi in Zagreb.
By way of a brief footnote on the generations, it will be worth adding
here that two of the most prominent musicians in Republika Srpska today
are a father and daughter from Banja Luka. They are Bosnian Serbs, and
both have symbolically nailed their colours to the adjective rather than
the noun. The father is Duan esti, a well-known local composer, whose
achievement it is to have composed the national anthem for Bosnia and
Herzegovina (there is, as a matter of fact, a separate hymn for Republika
Srpska, composed by Mladen Matovi). And the daughter is Marija esti,
a graduate of the Academy in Banja Luka, who represented Bosnia and
Herzegovina in the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki in 2007 with the
ballad Rijeka bez imena [Nameless River]. She was twenty at the time and
was placed a respectable eleventh in the contest. Bosnia and Herzegovina
once led the way in popular music circles. It now trails badly. It needs new
stars, and it is encouraging to see that Marija esti continues to build an
impressive reputation in local circles.
The question for Cyprus is whether a divided people might eventually
come together. The question for Bosnia and Herzegovina is whether a sup-
posedly unified state might eventually split apart. For despite sustained
attempts to create cross-sector collaboration by the paymasters and their
administrators, the Republic and the Federation seem to be emphasis-
ing rather than smudging the line that separates them. They increasingly
present the aspect of symmetrically mirrored independent entities, even
down to the iconic placement and significance of Brko and Mostar within
Republic and Federation respectively.36 In pessimistic moments, one might
well feel that Dayton has been more holding operation than resolution. As
usual, music can either reflect or resist underlying political tendencies. No
genre is safe in this respect, but in general it is the music with national
resonance the music of the church and of the folk that reflects, and the
music that crosses national boundaries the music of concert halls and
clubs that resists. People use music, but they are also used by it.
ENDGAME
Degenerations
3An interesting case study of this, with a bearing on East and West in music, is Lend-
vais discussion of two natural principles (vertical and horizontal, rational and organic).
See Lendvai 1983.
4Mann 2011.
644 chapter twenty-five
novel, seemed to draw a line under this symbiosis, and where it lingered
World War II finished the job. In the later twentieth century, progress
and degeneration were disaggregated in the discourses of cultural as also
of social histories. Specifically there was a loss of faith in the former. One
could remain committed to the necessity of the modern, but it seemed
more difficult to link this with a belief in progress. Only in the Commu-
nist world was there a calculated propagandistic attempt to preserve that
belief, and even to maintain its specific associations (in the case of music,
an over-rationalised avant-garde, a healthy music of the people, a degener-
ate popular culture). Elsewhere it withered, or led a kind of underground
existence as a latent Utopianism (une promesse de bonheur).
Degeneration was another matter. Daniel Picks classic discussion of
degeneration as cultural history locates itself, with perfect logic, in the
age of progress, meaning the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, culminating in more than a simple chronological sense in the
First World War.5 Looking at medico-psychiatric and social-scientific dis-
courses, at criminal anthropology, and at fictions of degeneration, crime
and decay, his magisterial study gathers together several themes already
discussed in this study, and some about to be discussed. And it analyses
with acuity how stereotypes of West and East emerged around this potent
pairing of progress and degeneration. In essence, the West is harnessed to
progress (albeit a progress that harbours indeed produces degeneracy),
while the East is equated with degeneration (albeit a degeneration that
carries the potential for renewal). Naturally stereotypes of this kind dis-
tort reality, but they can become self-affirming, and often to the point at
which even those stereotyped may begin to believe in them.
Let us fine-tune the stereotypes. One class that emerged from Europe
was the orientalism practised by sophisticated western artists at the turn
of the century. A European image of Asia, racially and sexually degen-
erate but replete with vital life forces, confronted a Europe of decadent
modernity, associated with the coldly mechanical, trade-obsessed west-
ern city. The East was branded as enervating and seductive for the most
part (Picks book Svengalis Web is informative as to music, and there
are relevant commentaries by David Weir and Stephen Downes),6 but
its primitive qualities might also revitalise, and fin de sicle orientalism
5Pick 1989.
6Pick 2000; Weir 1995; Downes 2009. For Weir, decadence provides a conceptual focus
that helps to unify the cultural transition from romanticism to modernism.
endgame 645
7Humbertclaude 2006.
8Buruma and Margalit 2004.
646 chapter twenty-five
popular music most listened to today right across the Balkans somehow
fits the picture, for it brings all three of these ingredients together in a
kind of synthesis. Of course, there is not much doubt about where this
pop-folk really originates. It is first and foremost a species of a modern,
western, urbanised mass culture, and where it points to an exoticised East
or to native folk traditions, it does so primarily to establish local (Balkan-
Anatolian) identifiers within that mass culture. Despite appearances, there
is not much more than a trace of the orientalist and Zenitist impulses of the
early twentieth century in pop-folk. And what remains of those impulses
has now been both commodified and neutered, subsumed by the culture
industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an industry
that in the eyes of many, and despite the prevalent cultural relativism of
postmodern discourses, is itself a symptom of cultural degeneration.
There is a long history of reading mass culture as an index of social
and cultural decline. Patrick Brantlinger demonstrated that this attitude
in essence the belief that forms of mass entertainment tend towards a
debasement and trivialisation of culture was already alive and well in
the ancient world, citing the Heraclitean axioms that virtue is rare and the
multitude is bestial.9 Likewise, we are reminded by Buruma and Margalit
that Juvenal, in his satire on ancient Rome, equates the commodification
of culture to moral laxity.10 However, it was in post-French Revolution
Europe that this view gained decisive momentum, as the secularisation
and commercialisation of European societies promoted a sharper polari-
sation of attitudes, and creative elites increasingly protected themselves
from the forces of massification. Already in the early nineteenth century
processes of industrialisation and early forms of mass production were
seen to be destructive of art and culture. Such views were given expres-
sion by Blake and the English Romantics, as also by Stendhal and Balzac,
well before they were articulated by fin de sicle decadents. If there was a
natural culmination point for this history, and one that seemed to validate
all earlier discourses of degeneration, it was again the First World War,
the terminus of Picks account.
War and accounts of it do indeed focus the theme of degeneration. It
will be as well to make my general remarks on this subject in the previous
9Brantlinger 1983.
10Buruma and Margalit 2004, 28. Analogies between ancient and modern decadence
became fashionable in the nineteenth century. Already in Gautiers Mademoiselle de
Maupin (1835) analogies between contemporary mores and the declining years of the
Roman Empire were made explicit.
endgame 647
chapter a little more specific by returning one last time to the war in Bos-
nia and Herzegovina. In the siege of Sarajevo we have a powerful instance
of modern urbicide, to use a term that has recently gained currency,
notably in the work of Martin Coward.11 Here a modern city became the
principal target of ethnonationalist violence, in a strategy that, as Cow-
ard suggests, was partly aimed at destroying plural spaces. There was an
attempt to kill the city, a city that in so many ways represented the acme
of a modern youth culture in the Balkans, not least in music. Music was
certainly not the gravest of the many casualties of this war, but it was a
casualty nonetheless. One of the most dynamic pop-rock scenes in former
Yugoslavia was decimated by the events of the early 1990s, a victim of
both physical and cultural siege, for turbo-folk could be in its own way a
kind of weapon. The dispersal of the bands amounted to an almost com-
plete collapse of that scene, and there has been little of comparable value
since. Classical music fared little better. It will be remembered that the
infrastructure for a classical music culture was all but destroyed at the
time, and its subsequent recovery, in both Sarajevo and Banja Luka, has
been slow and painful.
The siege of Sarajevo, and in particular the destruction of its great
library, was really a sustained attempt to eliminate all traces of a long
tradition of Islamic culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It represented the
brutal summation of a history of ethnonationalism that had developed
much more widely in Europe after 1870, closely linked to ideas of nation-
hood, racial degeneracy, and religious persecution (for the notion that
Islam puts the brakes on progress was a long-established one). We should
be cautious about bandying about accusations of genocide, which must
surely stand as the most brutal face of degeneration: barbaric, regressive,
uncontrollable, not just defying reason, but engulfing it.12 But the ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia took such an extreme form that serious commenta-
tors such as Susan L. Woodward have felt no compunction about invoking
this term, even if no less serious commentators (Maria Todorova) have
rejected it.13 Genocide or not, the devastation was immense, and in its
aftermath all cultural forms were transformed. Thus, the sacred music
of Islam and the secular oriental tradition of sevdalinka, both already
freighted with ideology in the early 1990s, were assigned a highly public
11Coward 2008.
12Levene 2005.
13Woodward 1995. Todorova 2000 (here in relation to Kosovo in 1999).
648 chapter twenty-five
14Pick 1993.
15See Johnstone 2002, with reference to the later interventions in Kosovo.
endgame 649
Generations
17Armstrong 2008.
endgame 651
resemble our fathers, but we may also resemble our times. Indeed, the
full message is that we resemble our times more than we resemble our
fathers. The suggestion is that generation may be an even more potent
marker of difference than any of the others mentioned above. It may, in
short, outweigh genealogy as a determinant of our identity. In a powerful
essay on Russian social and intellectual history, Stephen Lovell addresses
this question in some detail.18 He examines the shift from genealogy to
generation (to what he describes as cohort thinking) with reference both
to social practices and institutions, and also indeed principally to lit-
erature and criticism. Lovells argument is directed specifically to Russia,
and he is anxious to complicate, in a good way, over-facile readings of
the shift to generational consciousness, notably by unpicking key nine-
teenth-century texts, and by distinguishing between their original mean-
ings and their later resonance. But the broad trajectory from genealogy to
generation remains intact in his exposition, and several of the common-
sensical reasons he gives for that trajectory can have a distinct bearing
on our story.
We may return at this point to the transformative, and often violent,
event. One implication of the event that was not considered in the pre-
vious chapter is its capacity to separate the generations. The argument
would be that it is precisely at moments of extremity, of maximal stress,
of dramatic change, even of reversal, that young people will be provoked
into finding common cause with their coevals, and that this will override,
if not directly oppose, inherited values. The French Revolution might be
taken as the paradigmatic case, and this in turn would link generational
consciousness to processes of rapid modernisation, especially in the con-
text of the increasingly nationalised armies (binding together their per-
sonnel in a collective mentality) that followed the revolutionary period.
Generational difference, it has been suggested, would then have been fur-
ther nurtured by the subsequent, and to some extent consequent, forma-
tion of new civic institutions in the early nineteenth century, as also by
the massive cultural shift from court to city. Lovell, focusing on Russia, is
at pains to emphasise that this transition is anything but clear-cut, but
he does accept the pedigreed view that by the 1860s Russia had produced
something akin to a youth culture in the modern sense, and that this was
indeed the earliest such culture anywhere in Europe.
18Lovell 2008.
652 chapter twenty-five
19Fussell 2000.
20Pick 1993.
21Kadare 2007.
endgame 653
This voice is more often conformant than subversive. But in any case
it is distinctive, and clearly set apart from the voice of the fathers. In
the ensuing case study I will suggest that this gap between the genera-
tions could be as relevant to art music as to popular music. But for now
I will focus on the latter. We have already noted that popular music in
this region carved out a stylistic space in which elements of local culture
could be somehow blended with elements of western pop. We noted too
the ambivalent function of oriental elements, and above all their capac-
ity to unify the entire Balkan-Anatolian region. We should now stress the
countervailing tendency. It is hardly surprising, given the globalised, light
modernities identified by Bauman, that many features of this music, and
of the culture it stands for, are all but indistinguishable from youth cul-
tures everywhere. Balkan pop-folk may be a distinctive brand, but all the
brands work in pretty similar ways these days.
It is a bizarre prospect, no doubt, but I will briefly compare youth cul-
tures in two capital cities, London and Prishtina: one of the oldest capitals
in Europe and one of the youngest, a city at the apex of developed Europe
and one that has, to put it gently, some little way to go. The contrast is
stark. Yet if we look at the patterns of young peoples lives in these cities we
will find much common ground, and it is ground that separates them from
their elders. There is the dot com revolution. We all google today, but the
younger generation is born to it, and has neither knowledge nor concep-
tion of a pre-google world. The transformative effects of this instantane-
ity on how youth today learn, socialise and communicate, self-evidently
momentous, are not essentially different in London and Prishtina, and
the ubiquity of mobile phones reinforces a culture of the moment, a dis-
location of time and place. There is a digital playground on offer in both
capitals that simultaneously connects and isolates young people today,
locking them in their bedrooms but at the same time (literally) allowing
them to hook up with others. It is a playground that excludes adults in the
main, though that too is changing, as todays youth become tomorrows
adults (the term kidulthood has been coined in some quarters to address
a second generation of youth culture, a perpetual childhood).
Music has been profoundly influenced by this digital revolution. The
star system remains in place; and in this respect one difference between
our capitals is that Prishtina cultivates both a global and a local system,
while London has only the former. But alongside this there is a new
age of the amateur, or rather an age of do-it-yourself celebrity. We can
all put our music out there, and reality TV can make a celebrity of the
person next door. Downloading music is no less a commonplace. The
654 chapter twenty-five
dubious ideal of a free culture has taken root, and accordingly the value
of recorded music has been diminished, so that several artists now make
their music available free in the certainty that it will pay off in other ways.
This is one respect in which Prishtina has not yet caught up with London.
The material product CD or even cassette tape still counts for more
over there. But this difference is just about time lag. The DJ culture is still
alive in Kosovo, though the biggest of the club scenes, the internationally
known SPRAY, has been closed and its activities dispersed. What has not
yet been fully registered, however, is the new enthusiasm for live music
the growing weariness with DJ mixes that seems to mark youth culture
in London today. This really amounts to a kind of comeback of the live
experience, associated especially with the 02 Arena.22
If this means that Prishtina is locked into an earlier stage of youth
culture, it also means that there are fewer equivalents in Kosovo to the
more disreputable side of that culture in present-day London. The world
of chavs, binge drinking, drug abuse, gangs and hoodies has given rise to
the novel term ephebephobia (fear of teenagers), one that expresses the
gulf between the generations in no uncertain terms. This is not unknown
in Prishtina, but it is less of an issue than in London. Of course Prishtina
had, and to an extent still has, its mafia and its trafficking, but this is
organised crime (there are anyway parallels in London, where some of the
super-wealthy from dubious business communities overseas have taken
up residence), and has little to do with generation.23 The more general
get-rich-quick ethos of the 1990s and early 2000s is distinctly relevant,
however, and in both cities it has resulted in notable changes in social
patterning, with money, consumer branding and postcodes counting for
more than traditional class-based hierarchies. This whole ethos has suf-
fered a hammer blow of course. In London in particular there has been a
dramatic loss of faith in the world of the City number crunchers (banker
bonuses et al.) following the collapse of the money markets. But what
remains immune is the culture of celebrity: the footballers, their wives,
and music stars of either gender.
If the 2000s do indeed reveal certain convergences in the values and
social practices of these two cities, then the increased mobility of the last
two decades, alongside the communications revolution, has taken this a
stage further. Prishtina is now a (literal) presence in London, which is
22For theoretical reflections, see Auslander 1999 and Lysloff and Gay Jr. 2003.
23Glenny 2008.
endgame 655
one of the most multi-ethnic capitals in the world today. Kosovars have
flooded into London alongside all the others from Eastern Europe who
have serviced the British labour market from 2004 onwards. Conversely
London is a (virtual) presence in Prishtina, which is in contrast a largely
mono-ethic city. Thanks to Satellite TV, things British are avidly followed,
and they extend from English premier league football (everyone supports
a team), to the latest UK fashions, to rock and pop music, to Harry Potter.
There are even local Kosovan versions of familiar UK TV shows. And there
is one further expressive paradox. Prishtina is a Muslim city, but you will
look hard to find the veil, let alone the burka. To see both in abundance,
you must look to London, officially Christian, and de facto secular.
At the time of writing, the European Union encircles the Western Bal-
kans. The border describes an extended arc enclosing Italy, Slovenia, Hun-
gary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece (as well as Cyprus). Only Albania and
the successor states of former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, and by the time this
book is published Croatia, excepted) are now left on the outside, and all
are in the queue, as indeed is Turkey. A glance at the map exposes the
anomalous political geography here, and it is no surprise that the Western
Balkans is commonly described as a ghetto. If such it is, then Kosovo is
a ghetto within a ghetto. There are of course two ethnic communities in
Kosovo, and one communitys friend is anothers foe. Interestingly, they
take rather different positions in relation to their respective motherlands.
The minority Serbian community places its allegiance unambiguously
with Serbia and aspires to a restoration of the status quo; it makes little
or no distinction, in other words, between a Kosovo-Serbian identity and
a Serbian identity. In contrast, the Albanian community is less enthused
by any idea of a Greater Albania that would incorporate Kosovo. Just as
most Turkish Cypriots feel more Cypriot than Turkish, most Kosovars feel
part of Kosovo, not Albania.
There can be no doubt that the country struggles economically, despite
powerful backers on the world stage, for there is institutionalised corrup-
tion at high levels, there are limited opportunities for tourism, and there is
a heavy dependency on outside subsidies. Accordingly, like North Cyprus
and Republika Srpska, Kosovo has exiguous funds to disburse for cultural
initiatives. One message that comes across as with a single voice is that
the golden age for this province was the 1970s, when it benefited from the
best years of Titos Yugoslavia. There was some easement of anti-Albanian
discriminatory practices at this time, notably at school level, and there was
also an attempt to build a cultural life. One should not over-egg the pud-
ding, but as noted in chapter 18 there was a decent Symphony Orchestra
at Radio-Television Pritina (as it then was); likewise the Association of
Composers became independent of the Yugoslav Association, the Faculty
of Music at the Academy of Arts in the University was established, and a
professional choir commissioned and performed new music and toured
extensively. The Red Hall, still the leading (unattractive) venue for major
concerts, was at the centre of a high-profile musical life, hosting musicians
from other Yugoslav republics, and there were opportunities for Kosovar
musicians to take part in festivals throughout the federation. Music in the
schools was reputedly at quite a good level.
All this changed after 1990; indeed it was already changing during the
course of the previous decade. It is not going too far to say that musical
endgame 657
imported for concerts, first from Albania and later mainly from Macedo-
nia, which was cheaper. Even some of the soldier musicians from KFOR
were roped in to swell the ranks! Over the years the quality of this orches-
tra is said to have improved, and under their current Japanese conduc-
tor they are at last able to use local wind and percussion players, since
some teaching provision in relevant instruments is now available at the
Faculty. Audience numbers are robust, but without question the most
striking thing about the audiences is that they are predominantly young,
inverting the normal state of things in formal musical culture. Admittedly
the concerts are free, and just now there is a debate about whether or not
some modest charge should be made in the future.
We return to generations. It is not obvious why classical music concerts
draw in the young in this way. Partly it may simply be that any events
attract attention in Prishtina, especially when they are free. Partly it may
be that the average age in Kosovo is in any case astonishingly young (at
the time of writing, twenty-six). But it may also be symptomatic of the
palpable energy of one sector of Kosovos youth, of their determination to
build a national culture, and of their rejection of the violence of the recent
past. It is worth noting that the promotion of classical music among Koso-
var youth is an active aim of the festival DAM, initially a student-organised
event, but now dedicated to young performers generally, and attracting
some impressive international ensembles.
DAM is only one of a cluster of Kosovo festivals. Exactly as in North
Cyprus and Republika Srpska, the promotion and sponsorship of festivals
has proved a great deal easier than the maintenance of regular concert
series. Already in 2000, just a year after the war, the first of the Bach
Weeks and the first of the International Chamber Music Festivals were
established. Then, in addition to DAM, the April New Music Festival
ReMusica, now a key event in the Kosovo diary, was inaugurated, directed
by one of the leading Kosovar composers Rafet Rudi (b.1949). Other festi-
vals followed, including the Flute Festival New Spirit, the Prishtina Jazz
Festival, more recently a dedicated Chopin Festival, and a clutch of events
dedicated to traditional music and dance. There are comparable festivals
in the other arts, incidentally, and especially in film, with the Prizren doc-
umentary film festival now an internationally recognised event.
Although new music has relatively little exposure beyond the dedicated
festival, the artistic quality of the Kosovar music on parade at ReMusica is
often rather high. Composers such as Zeqirja Ballata and Mehdi Mengjiqi
are performed, as is Mark Koci, who has been living in London for some
20 years now. Rafet Rudi is also well represented, with works that range
endgame 659
from his Symphony of 1974, with a strikingly original slow movement sur-
rounded by more familiar neo-classical gestures in the outer movements,
through poetic impressionisms such as Les cloches arberesh for solo piano
of 1993, to his intensely expressive Laudatio funebris for soprano and
strings of 2006. Music does seem to run in families in the Balkans. We
encountered Doina and Diana Rotaru in Romania; we met Zeki, Yilmas
and Ruha Taner in North Cyprus; and we have Duan and Marija esti in
Republika Srpska. In Kosovo there are two such cases. One of the found-
ing fathers of Kosovos concert music was Fahri Beqiri, and his son Valton
Beqiri (b.1967) has also been a key figure in musical life, a composer of
relatively conservative bent, a teacher at the Faculty, and at one stage
Minister of Culture. Likewise Rafet Rudis daughter Donika Rudi (b.1982)
is among the most promising of a younger generation of Kosovan com-
posers, with a specialisation in chamber and electroacoustic works. There
are active attempts to promote young composers in Kosovo today, by the
Kosovar Centre for New Music and also by DAM, which now sponsors a
composer competition.
There is of course another community engaged in music-making in
Kosovo, but its activities are now sidelined even suppressed and con-
fined to north of the river Ibar, where Serbs live in a state of semi-limbo.
Certainly there is little in the way of an independent formal musical cul-
ture there, aside from the music of the Church. The Kosovo Serbs regard
themselves quite simply as part of Serbia; they are not energised to build
something new. This is the real difference between the two communi-
ties. What neither seeks nor wants is the bi-communality that constitutes
the agenda of the protecting powers, in Kosovo as in Cyprus and Bosnia
and Herzegovina. This agenda can carry penalties for a majority Alba-
nian culture as well as a minority Serb one. The Institute of Albanology
in Prishtina has a long history of distinguished scholarship on Albanian
and Kosovan culture, including music. Today it is the site for impressive
research into traditions of epic song by Zymer Neziri and his colleagues,
and into north Albanian vocal traditions by Rexip Munishi. However,
the title of the Institute, however longstanding, is regarded as a provoca-
tion to the international authorities, and as a result these scholars now
struggle to achieve anything. Funding is not forthcoming for conferences.
Even salaries are under threat. It is truly hard for culture to rise above
politics.
Youth culture in Kosovo today has many similarities with that in the
other marginalised regions I have considered. Some of this has been
touched upon. The rock culture of the 80s and 90s, epitomised by the
660 chapter twenty-five
highly successful rock festival Boom, has largely been replaced by a club
culture. As noted earlier, the big club SPRAY has been closed, but its activ-
ities continue in a way, in that the organisers now put on events in vari-
ous other locations; there is a sense in which Spray has dispersed rather
than disappeared. More recent interests are in hip-hop and rap, and there
are efforts to bring international stars to the Stadium in Prishtina, often
funded by major commercial concerns such as mobile phone companies,
with obvious vested interests. There is widespread support for some of
the high-profile divas, notably (during the time I was there) the Albanian
singer Aurela Gae. And finally there is a homegrown, socially aware music
cultivated among some of the younger bands in Kosovo today, includ-
ing The Freelancers and The Glasses. This youth culture has the levelling
effects found everywhere today. But the divisions between communities
in Kosovo run very deep. It would be an unusually optimistic commenta-
tor who trusted in the capacity of any music to heal them.
In his controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand
sets out to undermine the claims of Zionist historiography as to the ethnic
integrity of the Jews.25 His mission is to question their status as a peo-
ple. However, in the course of his (much refuted) argument, Sand makes
a broader plea, quoting Marcel Detienne: How can we denationalise
national histories? This is a challenging question, and one that has the
widest possible resonance. For present purposes, we might reformulate it.
How can we denationalise music histories? might be our question, and it
is one with special relevance to studies of music in the Balkans. It is not
a matter of denying the role and importance of nationalism in the music
histories of this region, but rather of recovering aspects of those histories
that have been suppressed or distorted by.an all-pervasive national per-
spective. When we tell this story as a series of discrete national histories,
as it has mainly been told from within the region itself, we demote com-
monalities that are everywhere apparent. At the very least, we might allow
new distortions to counter the old. We might bypass the nations, in other
words, and tell the story differently: as a tale of shared cultural substrata,
of common imperial legacies, and of the lure of modern Europe.
25Sand 2009.
endgame 661
associated with these empires, and such was the solidity of this base that
emerging nationalisms often amounted to little more than local colour-
ing. In some regions, Venetian cultures ceded to those of Habsburg or
other empires; in others regions the Habsburgs had a more longstanding
presence. But in any case the structures of musical life, whether of the
court or the city, and the compositional praxes that emerged from those
structures, were common to all, however competitively would-be nations
might assert their uniqueness. Even the traditional music to which they
turned when validating their nationhood was largely a shared music.
The other, and by far the larger, area was shaped by a Byzantine leg-
acy and by an Ottoman imperial culture, and accordingly it remained at
some remove from modern Europe. Musically it was united by a continu-
ous tradition of Orthodox liturgical repertory, by idioms associated with
Ottoman classical and semi-classical music, many of them inherited from
the Byzantine Empire, and by various species of Islamic sacred music.
Emergent nationhood was not really the key determinant in transform-
ing musical styles here. More crucial was the general process of mod-
ernisation that accompanied the colonisation of this culture area by the
fashions and ideas associated with an increasingly dominant Western
Europe, resulting in dialogues variable as to time and place between
Byzantine-Ottoman and European traditions. In this way the second cul-
ture area increasingly aspired towards the condition of the first. There
were straightforward transplantations of European art music to territo-
ries where such music lacked any roots at all, with attendant difficulties
of assimilation. There were attempts to modernise Orthodox liturgical
repertories, accompanied by controversies over the integrity of the tradi-
tion. And there was the widespread co-existence it might be relatively
peaceful or more directly competitive between alaturca and alafranca
varieties of popular music.
The Balkans emerges from this account as a region whose musical iden-
tity was pulled this way and that by politically powerful forces and their
cultures. It is not a misrepresentation. But we might put it another way.
The Balkans was a site visited by musical styles whose centres invariably
lay elsewhere. Repertories and idioms from east, west and north swept
across this peninsula, and as they did so losing something of themselves
and acquiring something new they paid scant attention to national bor-
ders. It is the general inclination of music to flow and to spread in this
way. It is part of the strange power it exerts, and one of the reasons that
governments have been keen to harness and control it. The Goethe Insti-
tute, the Alliance Franaise, the British Council: all such institutions speak
endgame 663
26Weber 2002.
27Dahlhaus 1980.
664 chapter twenty-five
with todays youth are largely Europe-wide. And equally the products of an
elite culture, including what remains of an avant-garde, are untrammelled
in the main by national traditions. In this respect even those nations in
the queue are partly there already.
That said, Europe is not a one-way street. There seems to be no dif-
ficulty on the part of leading politicians in reconciling fervent European-
ism with the most chauvinistic brands of nationalism. This is where trade
and politics to revert to earlier language tend to drag culture along
behind. For the politics of nationalism, and the consequent determination
to assert a national culture, remains strong right across the continent. If it
has been difficult for national borders to drive wedges into deeply embed-
ded shared cultures, it has been no less difficult for the European project to
erase totally the borders separating national cultures, however artificially
these have been imposed. The moral in all this is that no single narrative
will account adequately for the ebb and flow, the constantly changing cur-
rents, of politics and culture in modern Europe. The European Union in
the end exposes starkly what I earlier called the counterpoint of culture
and politics. A shared culture will not generate a shared politics. Neither
will a common politics guarantee a common culture.
Colm Tibn puts a particular slant on this when he remarks that
although Europe today remains a loose and uneasy collection of com-
peting nation states, it is also a collection of cities, each of which has
been vastly improved by membership of the European Union, with some
space in between.30 Tibn acknowledges, then, the continuing power of
a divisive nationalism, but he implies that Europes real achievements are
to be found not on this political level but rather on a cultural level. The
major cities embody the unifying triumph of humanism (note the faint
but unmistakable echoes of the classical polis), of economic success, of
efficiency, of tolerance, of international law, and of cosmopolitan reason
(or, as Settembrini puts it, of reason, analysis, action, progress: these, and
not the slothful bed of monkish tradition, nor the inaction of the East).31
For Tibn, then, the European Union is something more than the sum
of its parts; it embodies an ideal that can transcend the corruption of its
petty officialdom, the idiocies of its bureaucracy, and even the anarchy
generated by its over-developed systems. It represents, when all is said
and done, the civilising power of the West.
30Tibn 2010.
31Mann 2011.
666 chapter twenty-five
Quite apart from its celebration of the enlightened city, so often taken
as a symbol of degeneration, Tibns analysis challenges the lack of self-
belief that seems everywhere apparent in the West today. As the scare
quotes above suggest, the West has been for some time now a category
subject to interrogation. An earlier chapter referred to an extensive recent
literature on Occidentalism that either extends or inverts an earlier port-
folio on Orientalism. It includes plural readings of the West from afar,
deconstructions of hostile stereotypes of the West; and in the case of
Alastair Bonnett a probing account of the whole idea of the West, as per-
ceived by Westerners and non-Westerners alike.32 Bonnett is anxious to
delay the idea of the West. He notes that as an intelligible field of study
this idea is little more than a hundred years old, its discourses only gradu-
ally defined as separate from related discourses about race (white crisis)
and class (communism). His case study of Ziya Gkalp, Atatrks principal
ideologue, is naturally germane to our topic. Gkalp argued for a position
that is in a real sense betwixt and between, rejecting the East, aspiring
to the West, but fostering a national culture nourished by indigenous tra-
ditions (these latter included Islam, incidentally, though Gkalp was ada-
mant that religion must be separate from the state). In the end Gkalps
middle way proved difficult to sustain. It yielded first to secularism and
then to Islamism.
The interplay of forces in Turkey has been replicated in various parts of
the Balkans: the same problematising of an oriental inheritance, the same
aspiration to modern Europe, the same commitment to a national culture.
That Turkey, as well as a cluster of Balkan states, is now (at the time of
writing) lined up to join the European Union, though I doubt it ever will,
may seem like the latest stage in the triumph of the West, an appar-
ent affirmation of Hegels claim that history moves from East to West.
But again we need to stress that the march to modernity is only one of
the narratives in town. True, the European Union remains something of a
Shangri-La for some of those still on the outside. But just as we approach
the point when anomalous spaces on the map might be coloured in, when
we might indeed be there, the European project undergoes significant
change, its centre of gravity drifting eastwards, and its stability increas-
ingly in question. The future of monetary union is now regularly debated,
and if the Euro goes (if the stronger economies reach a point where they
refuse to support the weaker), it is doubtful whether political unity will
32Bonnett 2004.
endgame 667
hold. This has already produced a change of rhetoric on the part of aspir-
ing nations, with an increasingly bullish Turkey now inclined to argue that
Europe needs Turkey as much as Turkey needs Europe, and at the same
time displaying an aggressively nationalist politics that does not exclude
terms such as Neo-Osmanism.33 Europe, for its part, has the greatest dif-
ficulty with the idea of admitting an Islamic state to its community.
It is easy to understand why Watchel subtitles the final chapter of his
recent book From the Balkans to South East Europe. That is part of the
story, for certain. Yet is perhaps a little surprising that he of all people
fails to acknowledge the contrary messages emerging from the cultural
world, and in particular from music. There is a narrative of emancipation,
but there is also a narrative of homecoming, of roots. There is a strong
current drawing this region inexorably westwards, but there are eddies,
undertows that pull it back constantly to the East. Robert Kaplan found
the right metaphor, but used it to the wrong ends. Nations are haunted by
empires in the Balkans. Peace is haunted by war, history by myth. Modern
cities are haunted by rural villages. Politics is haunted by culture. When
we listen to music of all kinds from this region we cannot but be aware of
the power of cultural memory. If the music transmits any single message,
it is that South East Europe is haunted by the Balkans.
33Oktem 2011.
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Bessarabia (Moldova)212, 444 Bracewell, Catherine Wendy186n
Bezi, Jerko187, 343, 592 Brahms, Johannes247, 399
Bezi, Nada201n Briloiu, Constantin87, 406, 408, 442,
Bhabha, Homi K.82, 114, 115n, 203, 275, 448, 497
277 Brandl, Rudolf94n, 99n, 176, 502
Bigenho, Michelle39, 41n, 58990 Brantlinger, Patrick646
Biha470 Braov [Kronstadt]206
Bijelo Dugme44, 504, 5078, 5101, 597 Brassens, Georges523
Bijelo Polje1067 Bratislava [Pressburg]200, 203, 383
Biniki, Stanislav204, 264, 3378 Braudel, Fernand 46, 189
Birtwistle, Harrison568 Brul2967
Bithikotsis, Grigoris522 Brauner, Harry497
708 index
Chopin, Fryderyk237, 3057, 3967, 399, Cosma, Octavian Lzar215, 265n, 400,
51920, 658 449
Christodaktyli100 Cosma, Vladimir570
Christodoulides, Michalis633 Costeas, Mikis633
Christodoulou, Nikos322 Costinescu, Gheorghe570
Christoff, Dimiter454, 585 Cottaar, Annemarie292n
Christou, Jani260, 5368, 540, 570 Courtoys (the younger), Lambert192
Chrysanthos of Madytos1467, 150, 643 Coward, Martin647
Cichon, Ludmilla27n Cox, Harold E.212n
ifteli186 Cozb296
Cimarosa, Domenico255 Craiova2167, 264
Cimbalom88, 90, 406 Crammed Discs5601
Cimmeria94, 96n Crete147, 151, 168n, 194, 209, 424, 521,
Ciobanu, Gheorghe144n, 146n, 175n, 216n 533, 546, 631n
Ciobanu, Maia466 Crimean War216, 237
Cioroianu, Adrian3978 Crnjanski, Milo62, 64, 68n
Cipra, Milo480 Crouch, David664n
iri, Marija340n Cmb2901
Civil War (The Greek)74, 97, 2589, 520, Cune, Predrag Gojkovi502
528, 624 Cuza, Alexandru Ioan216
Clark, Bruce69 Cvetko, Dragotin195n, 198, 366n, 472
Clark, Victoria133n Cvetkovi, Sonja338n
Clausewitz, Carl von648 Cviji, Jovan189, 337
Clejani175, 296 Cyprus209, 529, 544, 558, 571, 622,
Clogg, Richard82n, 302 62837, 63941, 6559
Cloud Society567 Cyril and Methodius143, 4901
Cluj-Napoca [Kolozsvr]201, 2067, 217,
244, 434, 578 Dahlhaus, Carl33, 232, 663
oek99, 294, 505, 606 Daija, Tish430, 458
Cohen, Sara596 Dalaras, George5256
Cohen-Lnaru, Mauriciu2367 Dalkas, Antonis286
olakovi, Zlatan106n, 186n Dallapiccola, Luigi533
oli, Dragutin367, 475 Daly, Ross546
oli, Zdravko641 DAM6589
Collin, Matthew512 Danforth, Loring M.92n, 96n
Cologne456, 4834 Danilo I, Prince (of Montenegro)113n
Columbia Records285, 294 Dankoff, Robert14n, 120, 152n, 163n,
Cominform states419, 424, 437n, 468 164n
Comiel, Emilia429 Danon, Aben25n
Confucius649 Danon, Jakob4178
Congress of Cultural Freedom5278 Danon, Oskar420, 474
Constantine I, King211n Danube47, 84, 203, 207, 397
Constantinescu, Dan462, 4645 Daouli71, 95, 98
Constantinescu, Paul410, 416, 449, 4601 Darmstadt seminar450, 462, 464, 4801,
Constantinides, Dinos571 484, 5345
Constantinidis, Yannis [Kostas Yannidis] Dar-l-Elhan632
235n, 259, 313, 3156, 420 Darwin, Charles138
Conversi, Daniele221 Dash Caf560
Cook, Ian664n Dassin, Jules523
Copla245, 181, 28991 Dast-gah21
Copland, Aaron657 David-Fox, Michael435n, 438
Corfu20910, 2323, 248n, 254, 255n, 588 Dayton accord13, 552, 6367, 641, 648
Cornis-Pope, Marcel620 Debord, Guy28n, 620
osi, Dobrica476 Debray, Rgis377
710 index
Hristov, Dobri87, 148, 150, 238, 3334, 211, 214, 218, 227, 238, 256, 285, 2889,
351, 3535 305, 3112, 320, 549, 561, 622, 625
Hristova, Dora352 Istria18991, 387, 418, 472, 480, 494
Hrvatski glazbeni zavod201 Ivana (Vania Todorova Kaludova)609
Hudson, Robert511n Ivanievi, Jovan493
Hugo, Victor307 Ivanovi, Vesna113n
Humbertclaude, Eric645n Ivanovi, Vojislav564
Hunt, Yvonne182n Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosaw392
Hunter, Mary152n Izmir [Smyrna]18, 23n, 701, 147, 158,
Huntington, Samuel P.116 180, 211, 219, 258, 285, 28991, 3023, 305,
Hupchick, Dennis212n 310, 315
Hutchinson, John223 Izvor557
Hvar194, 196
Jacimovi, Srdjan565n
Iai2136, 236, 2645, 391, 434, 578 Jackson, Michael612
Ibn Arab154 Jagoda, Flory25n
Ibrahimi, Feim429, 4589 Jakova, Prenk4268, 457
Ichijo, Atsuko222n James, William648
Idelsohn, Abraham Z.22n, 23n Jana (Dragana Todorovi)609
Idoli60, 508, 597 Janek, Leo325, 3634, 374, 383, 389,
Ieromonahul, Macarie214 403, 442, 581
Ifaistos98 Janissaries65n, 152, 162, 218, 359
Ikonomov, Stefan585 Jankovi, Jelena577n
Ilhi [ilahija]3, 26, 61, 153, 158, 1701, 181, Jarnach, Philipp326
385, 598, 640 Jarnovi, Ivan Mane196n
Ili, Dragutin230 Jasenica52, 54
Ili, Jovan102 Jasenovac camp4178
Ili, Miroslav506 Jedinstvo Choir640
Iliescu, Ion550 Jeffery, Peter22n, 30n, 137n, 139, 143
Iliev, Konstantin448, 4523, 455, 626 Jefti, Dragan55
Illyrian(ism)46, 108, 110, 190, 200, 222, Jelavich, Barbara3n
2413, 245, 342, 347 Jeli, Vinko194
Imamovi, Zaim502 Jenkins, Richard29n
Imvros302 Jenko, Davorin2301, 242, 2645
Indika542 Jerusalem13, 27, 35, 290
Ioachimescu, Calin587 Jesuits66, 1976, 199, 206, 208, 425
Ioannidis, Yannis535 Jeunesses Musicales Cyprus635
Ioannina [Janina]1801, 239, 592 Jeunesses Musicales Macedonia470
Ionian Academy209 Jevrejski glas16, 22
Iordanova, Dina506 Jevrejski ivot16
Ipavec, Benjamin247 Jevti, Ivan566
IRCAM587 Jezernik, Boidar32, 35, 171, 213n
Irig68 Jirk, Karel Boleslav365
Iron Gates (The)47 Joachim III, Patriarch148
Irwin Robert152n Johnson, Julian5734
Isakovi, Vuk64 Johnson, Robert88
ISCM366, 371, 408 Johnson, Sherry41n
Islam, Aida163n, 168 Johnstone, Diana648n
Ismail Dede157 Joksimovi, Boidar264
Ison47, 148, 299, 320, 3823, 462, 533, Jonson, Ben88
610 Jora, Mihail410, 44950, 4602
Isovi, Safet502 Jordan Misja Music School426
Istanbul [Constantinople]37, 71, 92, 143, Jordania, Joseph72n
1457, 14950, 153, 1556, 158, 160, 1801, Joseph II, Emperor198
index 715
Lambelet, Georgios234, 235n, 304, 313, Ligeti, Gyrgy462, 481, 567, 570
325 Light, Andrew28n
Lambelet, Napoleon324 Lind, Tore145n
Lambrakis, Grigoris524 Ling, Jan562
Lampe, John. R.335n Lingas, Alexander631n
Lara, Manuel Manrique de15, 25, 289 Lipatti, Dinu407, 410
Larissa160 Lipovan, Sreko489n
Larousse Dictionary429 Lipsitz, George506n
Lausanne conference6971, 92 Lisinski, Vatroslav242
Lauevi, Mirjana5567, 560, 602 Lissa, Zofia442n
Latcho drom560 Liszt, Franz78, 293, 307, 315, 319, 378,
Lutari1746, 2145, 236, 283, 287, 296, 398, 404, 407, 442
360, 397, 405, 498, 513, 515 Little, Bliss Sheryl235n, 313n, 315n, 319n
Lavrangas, Dionysios234 Livadi, Ferdo242
Lazr, Filip40910 Livanios, Dimitris226
Lazar, Prince59, 225 Liveralis, Iossif2323
Lazarapole295 Livorno24
Lazarian rituals4849 Ljubljana201, 3389, 343, 361, 366, 471,
Lazarov, Simo585 474, 4856, 4901, 508
Le Carr, John551 Lloyd, Albert Lancaster186, 294, 429
Le Goff, Jacques117n Logar, Mihovil3667, 474, 4757
Leake, Colonel William M.165 Logothetis, Anestis531, 571
Leandros, Vicki527 London69n, 425, 55960, 584, 6535
Lear, Edward166 London Bulgarian Choir558
Lebi, Lojze486 Longa121
Leeper, Sir Rex429n Longinovi, Tomislav6001
Lehr, Franz104n Loos, Helmut250n
Leipzig321, 333, 358 Lord, Albert1046, 185, 186n, 220, 2256,
Lendvai, Ern379n, 643n 298n
Lenin, Vladimir468 Lortat-Jacob, Bernard40n
Leotsakos, George211n, 2334, 254n, Loutzaki, Irene497n
256n, 259n, 322, 324, 420n, 42930, 456n, Lovell, Stephen651
536 Lowenthal, David36n
Lesbos159, 183 Lozanova, Galina169n
Leskovik296 Lubarda, Petar476
Letu tuke598 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus)618
Leva332 Lucassen, Leo292n
Levant21, 87, 135, 276, 405, 564 Ludwig-Pear, Nada492
Levantine Jazz Trio Lukai, Ivan194
Levene, Mark647n Lungu, Nicolae150
Levi, Erik416n Lupascu, Marian175
Lvi-Strauss, Claude621 Lusignans630
Leviev, Milcho569, 586 Lutajua Srca59
Levin, David170n Lutosawski, Witold454, 465
Levinas, Emmanuel101, 61920 Luzha, Beza657
Levy, Claire177, 178n, 586n Lviv [Lww]237
Levy, Isaac21n, 26, 289 Lyra71, 956, 533
Levy, Kenneth30n, 136n Lysdahl, Anne Jorunn Kydland386n
Levy, Moritz14 Lysloff, Ren T.A.654n
Levy, Sultana291 Lyuki chushki557
Levy, Yasmin27
Leyser, Karl J.117n Macarie, Ieromonahul214
Lhotka, Fran349, 365 MacIntyre, Alasdair33n, 439
Liavas, Lambros94n MacKenzie, John M.117n
718 index
Metaxas, Ioannis71, 73, 2589, 318, 419, Mitropoulos, Dimitri260, 326n, 3279,
496, 497n, 524, 541 520, 533, 625
Metaxas, Nikolaos Tzanis233n Mitsoura562
Metessi, Renato597 Mladost474
Meianu, Lucian570 Moba54
Metro Decay543 Moiseyev Ensemble496
Mevlev order22, 122, 1545, 158, 1612, Mokranjac, Stevan689, 148, 150, 205,
170, 282, 631 231, 3326, 339, 343, 351, 360, 3634, 368,
Mevlt153 492, 640
Meyer, Leonard B.412, 535 Mokranjac, Vasilije476, 487
Michael, King (of Romania)450 Moldovan, Mihai466
Michaelides, Solon6323 Moldoveanu, Nicu150
Mici, Ljubomir123, 373, 375, 377 Mller, Eberhard250n
Miglia, Guido189 Monaldi, Miho192
Mihajlovi, Ana565n, 5668 Monat (Der)527
Mihajlovi, Milan488 Moniuszko, Stanisaw442
Mihalovici, Marcel460 Monod, David527n
Mijatovi, Branka600 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley18, 19n,
Miki, Vesna345n, 4767 154n, 165
Miklaui-eran, Snjeana201n Montesquieu165n
Mikov, Lubomir169n Moraitis, Thanasis91n
Mikuli, Carol236n, 237 Moras, Jean314
Miladinov, Dimitar238, 243 Morgenstern, Juraj Karlo Wisner200
Miladinov, Konstantin238, 243 Morin, Edgar118
Milan234, 290 Morlachs32, 44, 107, 1112
Milanovi, Biljana262n, 264, 3356, Moscow358, 432, 4356, 444, 4468,
339n, 358 4501, 457, 461, 474, 497
Miletich, John S.185n Mostar13, 300, 470, 559, 641
Milewski, Barbara417 Mostar Sevdah Reunion3001
Milin, Melita68n, 135n, 341, 4767 Mosusova, Nadeda360n
Miljkovi, Katarina5657 Mousika chronika326
Miljkovi, Ljubinko53 Mousiki zoi326
Miller, Jeffrey278n Mouskouri, Nana5223, 525
Millet system19, 29, 64, 69, 145, 151, 237 Moustoukis, Andreas633
Milojevi, Miloje335n, 340, 343, 3589, Mozart, Amadeus217, 268, 570, 657
3625, 3678, 388, 417 Mozi, Aladar610
Milojkovi-Djuri, Jelena15n, 208n, 238n, Mukaabele154
337, 339n, 343n Mukayyad154
Milosavljevi, Ana566 Muli, Redo494
Miloevi, Jovan493 Mller, Theodor215
Miloevi, Miloje493 Munich322, 333, 346, 358, 362, 571
Miloevi, Predrag3668, 417, 475 Munishi, Rexhep45n, 659
Miloevi, Slobodan77, 84, 5112, 552, Munteanu, Viorel150
564, 567, 575, 577, 597, 600, 607 Murad IV, Sultan155
Miloevi, Vlado298, 492, 6389 Murgu, Eftimiu235
Milovuk, Milan204 Murko, Matija104
Milton, Giles71n, 219n Musical Quarterly347
Mintev, Georgi454 Musik in Geschichten und Gegenwart
Minune, Adrian Copilul610 (Die)472
Mirkovi, Igor509, 5957 Musikalen pregled353
Miro296 Musikalen vestnik353
Mirtchev, Emil585 Musique concrete4801
Miso, Pirro140n, 296 Musorgsky, Modeste323, 3634, 477
Mitko, Thimi239 Mussolini, Benito425
720 index
Mutlak154 Nisiotika73
Muzicescu, Gavril150 Niko Polje56, 499
Muzika revija340 Nitsiakos, Vasilis46n, 221n, 591, 6234
Muziki glasnik33940 Njego, Petar II Petrovi1046, 113, 225
Muzikoloko Drutvo FBiH493 Noli, Bishop Fan Stilian425
Myaskovsky, Nikolai445 NOMUS577
Mystre des voix bulgares (Le)352 Norris, David32, 172
North, Frederick Earl of Guildford209
Nabukov, Nicolas527 Norwich, John Julius189
Nadel, Siegried F.72 Nottara, Constantin409
Nagyvrad [Oradea]206 Noumas257, 306, 313, 326n
Nai [Ney]27, 141, 157, 282 Nouras, Kostas285
Najara, Israel23, 25 Novak, Jelena564n
Nakkare153 Novk, Vitzslav371
Nakibendi order163, 168, 1701 Nova muzika340
Naples210 Novi akordi340
Napoleon Bonaparte190, 1978, 209, Novi Sad89, 204, 261, 264, 334n, 469, 577
223, 280 Novi Zvuk52n, 583
Nash, Peter H.38n Nye, Joseph S.628n
Nasi, Thoma425
Naice199, 346 Oan-Pop, Rodica264
NATO77, 529, 544, 5501, 600, 648, 657 Oberling, Pierre634n
Naumoff, Dimitar569 Obradovi, Aleksander487
Naylor, Simon664n Obradovi, Dositej103n
Nazos, Georgios211, 231, 2567, 303, 306 Obrenovi, Prince Mihailo103n, 173,
Nea estia326n 2034, 223, 229, 2612
Nea phorminx326n Obretenov, Svetoslav3534, 421
Negrea, Marian4601 Occidentalism119, 123, 608
Neikova, Rouja96 OConnell, John Morgan219n
Nemec, Kreimir360n Odak, Krsto3489, 365, 371, 475
Nemescu, Octavian4667, 587 Odeon recordings295
Nenov, Dimitar3578, 448 Odessa212
Neoellinika Grammata315n Ohrid146, 151, 168, 294, 470
Neo-folk5058, 512, 515, 6067 Oktem, Kerem667n
Nettl, Bruno31n Oktoechos142, 332, 399, 4789, 487
Neubauer, John244 Olah, Tiberiu4623, 570, 626
Neuberger, Mary169n OLaughlin, Niall340n
New York Balkan Arts Centre556 Old Stars Band597
Neziri, Zymer185, 659 Olga, Queen147
Nezirovi, Muhamed14n, 16n, 22n Olick, Jeffrey36
Niarchos Foundation579 Oltenia211
Nichifor, erban587 Onassis Foundation579
Nicolaou-Konnari, Angel630n Opatija Festival479
Nicosia [Lefkosia, Lefkoa]6303, 6356 Operation Deliberate Force648
Niculescu, tefan402, 4623, 467, 587, Orchestra of Colours525
626 Oresteiada91n
Nietzsche, Friedrich312, 346, 373, 3923, Orff, Carl477
643 Orientalism119, 272, 398, 6089, 6445
Nikoli, Sofka299 Ormenio97
Nikolov, Lazar448, 4525 Ornea, Zigu415n
Nikolovski, Mihailo491 Oro Ensemble499
Nikolovski, Vlastimir490 Orpheus92n, 96n
Ninou, Marika75 Ortakov, Dragoslav490
Ni166, 1712, 469 Orwell, George484
index 721