Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
an idealized past” (2006, 19). In 1990s Croatia, musicians’, ideologues’, and diasporic communities’ narratives of reclaiming territories recognized internationally as Croatian, and of pushing beyond to proximate intimates constituting a projected “Greater Croatia,” connected back to several periods embedded in nationalist cultural memory, each more idealized than the one succeeding it (see March 2013). In reverse chronological order, these include the short-lived, Axis-aligned Independent State of Croatia, formed in 1941; the Party of Rights’s mid-nineteenth-century self-determination project, which inspired later, Nazi-aligned separatists; and the medieval reign of King Tomislav, whose territories the Party of Rights sought to reconstitute as a sovereign state (Gow 2003, 229n8). The authority and responsibility vested in Croats through such narratives in the 1990s were rooted in reflections upon this succession of actions and near-successes.
Bohlman also argues that music “expressed national aspirations even before the rise of the modern nation-state” and “charted the landscape of struggles and great events that would inscribe the fate of the nation on its history” (2008, 253). Croatia’s past national movements were commemorated in nationalist musics long before it achieved independence. “[M]usical genres become narrative the moment they are enlisted in the service of the nation,” and such service rather than the realization of national aspirations enables this inscription of fate (250). With the advent of nation-states, however, national music, in which “reinforcing borders is not a primary theme,” shifted to nationalist music, which “often mobilises the cultural, even political, defence of borders” (250). The concern with territory and borders has certainly been a primary stake in Croatian musical nationalism and its engagement with the past. Yet Bohlman’s own narrative of evolving deployments of musical national narratives warrants an additional observation that I proffer throughout this chapter: narration of (and via) musical events inscribes the nation’s fate not only on its history but also on its present, which in war is lived and felt in service of the future (when the nation expects to fulfill its promised territorial defense or expansion). As suggested in Dubravka Ugrešić’s evaluation of Croatian wartime ideology, this required narrative as well as physical violence: “In the name of the present, a war was waged for the past; in the name of the future, a war against the present. In the name of a new future, the war devoured the future” ([1995] 1998, 6).
The emphasis on futurity in both pushing through occupied territories toward Croatia’s borders and narrating attempts and successes at realizing territorial sovereignty responded to physically proximate dangers and perceived threats. The fearsome, bearded, turbo-folk-driven, and sometimes racialized Četniks whom many Croatians perceived as threats certainly had their counterparts in actual Serb militiamen encountered in person or in official media. Their existence, however, frequently took on mythic qualities as racialization developed into animalization and demonization, paralleling the projection of a lack of human life onto Baranja and Eastern Slavonia (where only dangerous creatures were conceivable). The “fear of small numbers” provoked by minority Serb militias was all the greater for their perceived “cellular,” nonvertebral organization, which “destabilizes [society’s] two most cherished assumptions—that peace is the natural marker of social order and that the nation-state is natural guarantor and container of such order” (Appadurai 2006, 32–33). Narrations of musical and militaristic counters to perceived threats from within the nation-state, as well as actual armed attacks from the much larger Yugoslav army invasion, drew their force from the increasing intensity of experiences of fear (Povrzanović 1993). As Brian Massumi writes, “fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter” (2010, 54). Feeling the affective fact of threat as fear lent urgency to the actions (and their narration) through which musicians and other agents sought to create a future alternative to that which loomed in the presence of bearded Četniks. While actual histories of Četnik and Ustaša violence inflect narratives of future security, musical affect affords alternative moments of historical listening that block the rationalizable constructedness of cultural truths. This simultaneously makes cultural truths an aggregate of experience and understanding separate from (even subaltern to) affective fact and obstructs such truths’ surfacing for conscious deconstruction.
The abundance of narratives of Croatia’s push to reclaim and move beyond borderlands should not suggest a dwindling role for spatiality and materiality. Rather, discourse became imbricated with physical endeavors that must be considered simultaneously in order to ascertain their combined affective work in Croatian tambura music. As Michel Foucault has argued, “the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and canalized in every society […] by way of certain procedures whose task it is to subdue the powers and dangers of discourse, to evade its heavy and threatening materiality” (1984, 10–11). Such materiality, I argue, threatens not merely in accompanying discourse (unless properly controlled) but also in organizing discourse, especially narrative, with a force that states may not ultimately succeed in canalizing. It is to nonstate actors’ imbricated actions and narratives and their inspiration and divergence from official strategies that I now turn.
THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CROATIAN TAMBURA MUSIC
Of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s and youth orchestras’ several concerts in Croatia and nearby countries during the 2009–2010 school year, my longest fieldwork period, the most ambitious program was the society’s weeklong International Festival of Croatian Tambura Music. Organized each summer in Osijek and in other Croatian cities and enclaves (such as Sombor, Serbia; Pécs, Hungary; and Parndorf, Austria), this juried, noncompetitive festival brings together numerous tambura choirs and children’s, “junior” (youth), and “senior” (adult) tambura orchestras to perform for gold, silver, and bronze plaques.6 I attended most of the 2010 festival’s ten consecutive evening performances (May 14–23) and researched its history in archives in Osijek and Zagreb.
In 1961, seven years after its own founding, the STD “Pajo Kolarić” organized its first biennial Festival of the Tambura Music of Yugoslavia. Its eventual name change reflects a shift in the festival’s orientation from pan-Yugoslavian outreach to an embrace of Croatia and its intimates that closely parallels political events in the late 1980s and 1990s. This history held particular weight for the festivals’ organizers and participants, who quickly began to narrate its accomplishments in print.
In 1989 the festival still carried its original name, and booklets distributed to participants and audiences in the final years emphasize representation of ensembles from across Yugoslavia. The 1987 booklet states: “Our amateur-tamburaši from Subotica [Serbia], Varaždin [Croatia], Samobor [Croatia], Drniš and Posedarje [Dalmatia: Croatia’s coastal region], even all the way to Artiče in Slovenia, have demonstrated a high level of professional musicianship” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1987, 1). The 1989 festival booklet welcomed “one more druženje of tamburaši from our entire dear homeland” and noted representation for most Yugoslav republics (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1989, 5). The gerund druženje derives from družiti se (“to be friendly”) and connotes “friendly associating.” The booklet’s author stressed active processes of mingling, but druženje may also have the more general quality of “intimacy,” as it is also sometimes translated. Its root is drug, a noun used in Yugoslavia and later the Republic of Serbia to invoke a “comrade,” though Croats would abandon the term in favor of the synonym prijatelj (“friend”) as part of the Croatian language’s cleansing in the early 1990s.7 Having programmed ensembles from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Tuzla, Bosnia, the 1989 festival’s organizers celebrated broadening Yugoslavia’s tambura movement despite the growing financial crisis across Eastern Europe (7–8).8 Their booklet’s public articulation of druženje among Yugoslavia’s many regions and peoples was in keeping with STD “Pajo Kolarić’s” multiethnic composition and compliance with Yugoslav doctrine.
The 1991 festival did not convene, as militarization and violence that escalated from late 1990 led to full-scale war following Croatia’s declaration of independence in June 1991. In 1992 the festival organizers and “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors—with the exception of ethnic Serbs, one of whom told me that he could not work at “Pajo Kolarić”