Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
able to meet in Osijek, “the cradle of Croatian tambura”:
[B]arbarian hordes from the east and domestic Serbian highway robbers have disabled us […] devastating all that which not one army had ruined since the Roman Empire and its Mursa [Osijek’s antecedent.] Osijek has lost more than 800 of its Osijekans, and it has left more than 4,800 cripples on the conscience of those who have none at all. After all that our spirit is not destroyed. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1992, 6; my translation)
The event’s name—XVth Festival of Tambura Music of the Republic of Croatia in Osijek—emphasized its now explicitly Croatian orientation while connecting it to its previous fourteen meetings in Osijek and downplaying the alternative location. The “idealized past” (Largey 2006, 19) of this festival’s Croatian nature, implicit in the titular change, and the “inscri[ption of] the fate of the nation on its history” (Bohlman 2008, 253), evident in Dragun’s narration of Osijek’s enduring “spirit” over centuries of conquest, established an important connection between Croatian culture and spirit (whose Christian overtones I also explore in this chapter). These immaterial essences had remained and, Dragun suggested, would continue despite the physical destruction of buildings and people.9 The short 1992 festival comprised three concerts featuring nine orchestras from unoccupied Croatian regions. The only foreign ensemble was Slovenia’s group from the previous two festivals: the largely Croatian orchestra “Oton Župančić,” which performed as a guest of the festival. The festival’s geographically and ethnically narrower focus functioned as a bastion of Croatian culture, identity, and resilience in the midst of wartime violence.
REEXPANSION OF THE FESTIVAL
During the 1990s the festival’s media outlined an agenda for, and narrated, its expansion in two successive stages: (1) the festival’s return to Croatian cities ravaged and/or occupied during the war and (2) the inclusion of ensembles from Croatia’s intimates. I examine the second of these in a later section. The first stage began in October 1992, when the organizers arranged a special, nonjuried performance in the church on Osijek’s main square by three of the festival’s participating orchestras: “Pajo Kolarić,” Križevci’s ensemble, and “Ferdo Livadić” from Samobor. Reflecting on the event the following year, president Frano Dragun wrote that the
performance in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (popularly [known as] the Cathedral), the speech and the holy Mass of the illustrious bishop […], will remain permanently in the hearts and memory of numerous Osijekans, church dignitaries, the government and other guests. At last the tamburica, as our Croatian national instrument, has very successfully entered the sacral building. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation)
The festival’s return to Osijek reclaimed not only the bombarded city but also the Croatian Catholic Church. Religious institutions’ ostracism and official separation from socialist society had largely prevented public church concerts for decades. It had also been difficult to perform concerts honoring only Croatian musicians, instruments, and folklore within the doctrine of multinational Yugoslavian folklore, and “enter[ing] the sacral building” for a nationalistic concert doubly reclaimed space formerly under Yugoslavian legal and military control. Local Serbs, furthermore, were unlikely to attend a performance in a Croatian Catholic church, and selecting the “Cathedral” for the principally public concert effectively placed it in a space out of reach of the “enemy,” whether construed as Orthodox Serbs or atheistic Yugoslavs.10
This concert in Osijek’s largest Catholic church took place just four months after the bombardment of the city had ceased, and the war’s dangers and destruction were readily apparent to all who resumed playing there. The Croatian National Theater, which hosted many of the 1989 festival’s concerts, was heavily damaged by bombing in November 1991. Its position almost directly across Županijska Street from the “Cathedral” made its ravaged halls a poignant reminder of Osijek’s yearlong devastation. As ethnologist Lela Roćenović of the Samobor museum notes, the tambura orchestra “Ferdo Livadić” changed performance sites for her city’s 750th anniversary that year because the organizers were “well aware that public opinion would condemn playing and singing near the commemorative board” of the borough’s fallen soldiers (Roćenović 1993, 161). “Ferdo Livadić” and other participants’ subsequent performance in Osijek’s main church thus fit a broader pattern of relocating celebratory music from sites attesting to the war’s human and architectural casualties. Significantly, they chose a church: a space that had endured, both physically and spiritually, the socialist period and Yugoslav conflicts and that contrasted with the secular, physically compromised theater.
Osijek’s theater was only restored to performance condition in 1994, and several alternative spaces, often literally underground, harbored Osijek’s musical activity even before the bombing’s cessation. Recording and airing new pop songs symbolically resisted the bombing, and particular “importance was placed at that time on the creative act of composing” (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 169). A “rich palette of musical events […] took place at that time,” developing further in the months after the bombardment with events such as the festival’s culminating “Cathedral” concert (176).
The symbolic reclamation by STD “Pajo Kolarić” of Croatian territory continued in May 1993, when the event (now larger and renamed the Festival of Croatian Tambura Music in Osijek) returned home. It has continued to meet there annually ever since (twice as often as before the war). Affirming the connection between musical activity and the war effort, Frano Dragun wrote of the “massive” 1993 festival that “in spite of the proximity of the [war’s] front line, economic hardships, and internal and international tensions, WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy, so on the front line, thus also in culture” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation). The 1993 festival also featured a Mass with tambura music in the “Cathedral.” Duško Topić, who prepared a special tambura accompaniment (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 180), directed the performance by the Folklore Choir and Orchestra of his recently renamed Croatian Cultural-Artistic Society “Osijek 1862” (hereafter HKUD “Osijek 1862”).11 The festival’s many orchestras from all over Croatia, even Dalmatia (where tambura music historically was not prominent), evinced widening interest in the tambura as a Croatian instrument within “national integration ideology” and in reviving Croatian patriotic and religious songs banned in Yugoslavia (Bogojeva-Magzan 2005, 108–109). As Ruža Bonifačić argues, this growing interest was due in part to the military and political involvement of professional bands such as Zlatni Dukati, whose service helped establish them as Croatia’s most popular musicians (1998, 138).
AGENTS OF MUSICAL NARRATIVES
Such ideology and support for military and political resistance to Yugoslavia are also evident in Dragun’s selection and capitalization of the pronoun “WE.” This term held a particularly territorializing capacity in 1990s Croatia, since “boundaries and territory, the key issues at stake in Eastern Slavonia, were fundamental to establishing or reinforcing a distinctive Croatian national identity—a means of defining the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Klemenčić and Schofield 2001, 48). The pronoun “I” largely disappeared from Croatian popular music, becoming associated with Serbian romantic songwriter subjectivities (Crnković 2001, 38), while “us,” “we,” and especially “our” strongly encapsulated “the abstract nation” during the 1990s (45). Citizens’ common term of endearment for Croatia became lijepa naša (our beautiful), an abbreviation of the Croatian national anthem “Our Beautiful Homeland.”
In this way citizens constituted discursively and through physical acts of proximity and intimacy what Alexei Yurchak has termed a “public of svoi [ours]” (2005, 116).12 In postsecession Croatia, however, the result was not the deterritorialized milieu of Yurchak’s Soviet public but a territorialization of public sociality through the state, its lands, and its borders. Discursive formulations of “us” and “them” in the former Yugoslavia most typically connote racial or ethnic (as opposed to gender or age) distinction. Interlocutors frequently asked me Jesi li naš? (“Are you ours?”). This question can pertain to shared ethnicity or shared citizenship, but the latter is