The sevdalinka in exile, revisited: Young Bosnian refugees’ music making in Ljubljana in the 1990s (A note on applied ethnomusicology) (original) (raw)

Gender and Music-Making in Exile: Female Bosnian Refugee Musicians in Slovenia

Two Homelands, 2017

This article explores the role of Bosnian refugee women in the music-making and organisational activities of two refugee bands (Dertum and Vali) in Slovenia in the early 1990s. Endorsing the ideas about the transformative power of art and looking beyond the dominant identitarian doxa that views music-making in exile as simply the preservation of the ethnic/national identity in a new context, the article places particular emphasis on the active role of women as creative agents of social change. It traces their role ethnographically not only in the process of reinvention of a traditional musical genre (the sevdalinka), but also in identity negotiations and transformation of the gender and power relations within and beyond the boundaries of the heterogeneous Bosnian refugee community, which had been shaped by the strict Slovenian migration policy.

Doubly excluded, doubly included, 'Something In-Between': A Bosnian refugee band and alternative youth culture in Slovenia

Sounds of Attraction: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Popular Music (eds. Miha Kozorog & Rajko Muršič). Ljubljana: Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts, 2017

The paper 'Doubly Excluded, Doubly Included, “Something In-Between”: A Bosnian Refugee Band and Alternative Youth Culture in Slovenia' is about a group of young Bosnian refugees who – after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing war in Bosnia-Herzegovina – migrated to Slovenia and formed a punk rock band called Nešto između (Something In-Between) at the Ilirska Bistrica refugee centre. The memoirs, as well as the artistic expression of the band, provide a portrait of how nonconformist and perhaps rebellious youth confronted the exile.

Music Tradition and Musical Practice of Serbs - Refugees and IDPs Settled in Belgrade in the 1990s

The paper treats music tradition and musical practices of the majority of settlers in Belgrade in the 1990s, who arrived in large compact groups and whose musical practices were most markedly pronounced. This majority of newcomers consisted of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the war-stricken territories in the 1990s. Thus, the situation of these settlers was quite specific: it involves the "phenomenon of forced migrations caused by wars and interethnic conflicts at the territory of former Yugoslavia" (Ladjević, Stanković 2004: 3). The great majority of newcomers were Serbs, refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as IDPs from Kosovo and Metohija. War and destruction were devastating for the traditional musical heritage in the regions where it occurred. In the new conditions and new surroundings, it was renewed in some cases, while in others it was denied and got fused with other music genres. It may be observed that refugees from the western parts of the former Yugoslavia in their musical practice in Belgrade rely considerably on their traditional rural idiom. Settlers from the south parts of Serbia, on the other hand, keep standard features of the town songs. There are also the two main tendencies in music-making in the new settings: the one - to keep and renew the features of the musical idioms of the home counties, and the other - towards the "new-composed" genre, including acceptance of the new elements of group identity.

Inside and Outside, Here and There - Music from Bosnian Posavina to Zagreb

Music in society, 2018

The essay represents the synthesis of a fieldwork dedicated to the musical practices in use among the communities of Croatian refugees coming from Bosnian Posavina. It analyses the technical, stylistic and organological features of the expressive tradition, focusing primarily on the processes of transformation from the original rural custom to the current application within the urbanised communities. Finally, it looks at the role of making music as an antidote to the sense of material and human loss and of the loss of identity following the drama of the war and forced displacement. Key words: rural culture in urban context; crossbreeding in music; diasporic movements; borders vs. links; ethnic identities in progress; music as cultural autopoiesis; ethnomusicology as interpretation means of the complexity. The aim of this paper is to present a synthesis of the wider results of the fieldwork which I have conducted over the past few years, thanks to the support of the Ministero dell'istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca (Italian Ministry of Universities, Education and Research). This project-which originated with an idea of Italian ethnomusicologist and ethno-organologist, Febo Guizzi (1947-2015)-has now led to the publication of two books, written in Italian, entitled La Posavina canta e piange (Posavina sings and cries). 1 With the goal of contextualising specific musical expressions, mindful of Italian and international readers, my survey began with a historical reconstruction of the Croatian and Catholic presence in southern Pannonia, and in the more circumscribed region of Bosnian Posavina.

Post-war life-space and music in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Risk, Protection, Provision and Policy, Geographies of Children and Young People vol. 12, 2015

War and violent conflict can alter the physical and social living space available to young people in post-conflict societies in multiple ways. Ethnic partition of the geographical space – an increasingly common characteristic of postwar landscapes – further restricts the environment, creating the phenomenon of the divided city and enforcing rigid social and political norms that enshrine ethnicity as the primary form of identity across all spheres of public and private life. This chapter focuses on the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and examines the way that one group of young people reclaimed the exploration of identity and the expansion of their constrained physical and social worlds through participation in music-making activities. It examines the self-reports of their experiences through the idea of “life space”, a concept most commonly found in gerontology but expanded in this study to encompass three dimensions – physical, inner, and social life space. The testimonies of former participants in the music activities form the primary data source. Data were gathered during a period of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in October–November 2013 and analyzed inductively and thematically. The relatively long retrospective view yielded findings that include the contributions that provision of diverse music activities made to the broad conflict stabilization and recovery effort, including goals concerned with peacebuilding and youth engagement. The provision of music and arts activities in a nonpolitical space were found to make a contribution to the maintenance of cultural alternatives in the city and the nurturing of a “capacity to aspire” among individuals, findings which have significance for locally driven development and the cultivation of more stable, tolerant societies.

“SONGS FROM THE HOMELAND” – POPULAR MUSIC PERFORMANCE AMONG DESCENDANTS OF SLOVENIAN REFUGEES IN ARGENTINA: THE CASE OF “SLOVENSKI INŠTRUMENTALNI ANSAMBEL”

“Songs from the homeland” – popular music performance among descendants of Slovenian refugees in Argentina: The case of “Slovenski Instrumentalni Ansambel” The article presents an anthropological perspective on the selection, transformation and invention of Slovenian popular musical forms among the Slovenian expatriate community in Argentina. Among many descendants, the wish to continue their ancestors’ cultural practices created a “homeland-oriented” community in which their members felt committed to preserving their roots and social memories, and thus to “musically” enacting their Slovenianness. To illustrate this, I will particularly explore the case of the Slovenian Alpine ethno-pop band “Slovenski Inštrumentalni Ansambel”, analysing how the migration and memory processes of their antecessors influenced the life of these ethno-pop artists, and how these experiences were appropriated in their music and lyrics. KEY WORDS: Alpine ethno-pop and popular music, , diaspora, identity, social memory, Argentina

Traveling Tunes. Pumping up the Volume of X-Yugoslav Pop Music in Diaspora

is paper is intended as a preliminary exploration of a complex and confusing subject. It does not cover all the relevant literature on the subject,  but rather raises some preliminary questions which seem crucial for the discussion of how migrants from the countries of the former Yugoslavia use popular music, how this use is connected to different modes of belonging, and whether there is a perspective of resistance. It is not a musicological paper, yet popular music and its uses are at the center of my considerations. us, music gures in this paper both as the semantic eld of metaphors for several cultural practices and, at the same time, as a specic form of cultural expression, which owes its importance to the fact that it does not necessarily require expensive technologies. Music is more mobile than perhaps any other cultural practice and has, at the same time, a specic, highly emotional impact.

INTRODUCTION MUSIC AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY – ENCOUNTERS IN THE BALKANS

This paper presents an overview of the latest experiences in ethnomusicological research based on the texts incorporated in this collection of works. These experiences emanate primarily from the local researchers' works on music of the Balkans, with a heightened theoretical and methodological dimension. The distinctive Balkan musical practices, created through the amalgamation of elements from different cultures, ethnicities, and religions, made this geo-cultural space intriguing not only to researchers from this very region but also to those from other cultural communities. A theoretical framework for interpreting these practices together with the contemporary research methods stem from interactions of local scientific communities' experiences, sources and practices they deal with, circumstances, ideologies and politics, including the influences of the world's dominant ethnomusicological communities as well as researchers' individual affinities and choices. A comparison with the research strategies applied in similar, transitory geo-cultural spaces contributes to a more complex exploration of the Balkan ethnomusicologists' experiences.

Performing Identity After Yugoslavia: Contemporary Art Beyond and Through the Ethno-National

This project suggests readings of contemporary performative artworks from the South Slavic region that look beyond the ethno-national identity of the artist to examine intersectional identities in play, expressions of war memory and trauma, and repudiations of the often essentializing gaze of the international art market on artists currently working in the post-Yugoslav space. While issues of ethno-nationalism are certainly a part of identity construction in post-Yugoslav society, and a result of the identity politics of the globalized art world that these artists entered into after the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, it is reductive to relegate the works thusly without addressing the intersectional nature of both self- and social-identities. Whether rejecting or reifying signifiers of identity from the Yugoslav period, recalling family histories and traditions, celebrating or lamenting reinvigorated religious practices, or examining hybrid cultures and life in the diaspora¬– the performative practices of artists from the South Slavic region are indicators of the identity work being taken on by the artists themselves, as well as their publics. This project proposes a methodology that could be employed to study the contemporary art production of regions that do not have a unifying culture, but that have been understood to have a monolithic cultural identity by the essentializing gaze of the art world in the former West.

World music in the Balkans and the politics of (un)belonging

Beyond the East-West divide: Balkan music and its poles of attraction, 2015

The tropes of East and West in the discursive formations centered on ethnic and folk music have taken various historical forms, with the ever-changing and complex relation of Orientalism and Occidentalism qua Balkans. The contemporary discourses on world music in Serbia and in the wider space of shared popular culture of former Yugoslavia often rely on a rich elaboration of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ elements of musical style, tradition and history that serve as an important axiological and aesthetic point of reference. During the early phase of development of Serbian and regional world music/ethno scenes in the mid-nineties, the idea of ‘East’ vs. ‘West’ was frequently evoked in terms of musical sound, but also in the context of bringing out the histories and divergent strains of musical traditions in the process of redefining the ethnoscapes (Appadurai), with a resulting conceptual tapestry of intertwined ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ features that is by no means univocal. Certain strains of world music (loose) network of the Balkans exemplify how the binary East – West is being debated, negotiated or even deconstructed and, moreover, how a strategically non-essentialist, but at the same time ‘thick’ identification and sense of belonging is being created and offered as an alternative to more conservative or exclusive concepts of ethnic cultural identities in the region. This can be observed in the revival of musical traditions and genres that historically did rely on the blending of Eastern (Oriental) features and local musical styles. Revivals and newly formed fusion scenes like Bosnian nova sevdalinka (new sevdalinka song), Serbian vranjska pesma (the song of Vranje), or the cultural events like Belgrade’s Ethno Fusion fest with a proclaimed tendency to draw parallels between Balkan and South Mediterranean musical heritage, all share a common trait or at least an important structural homology: namely, a goal to differently inscribe common poles of triad Eastern – Western – local and to remove the whole debate from the essentialist discourses that often dominate the public sphere of former Yugoslavian nation-states. The very idea of the “bridge between East and West”, therefore, takes a different (political) form, where the musicians as social actors refuse to be caught in the imago of the Big Other, but instead propose a different, dislocated reading of a common cultural habitus, in favor of a possible, newly-imagined Balkans.