Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen

       INTRODUCTION

      Dangerous Playing and Affective Block

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

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

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

       NATIONAL INTIMACY, RACIAL DANGER

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