Playing It Dangerously - Ian MacMillen Music / Culture

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sponsorship by relatively wealthy diasporic intimates feed narratives of Croatia’s geographical and developmental emplacement in between economically still weaker (former Yugoslav) and more robust (Western Europe/North America) countries (107). Moving beyond simplistic national frames to material relations that cause such inequalities, we can recognize that

      while the creation of a sovereign ethnic homeland fed the demand for patriotic music that initially enabled the rise of many tamburaši to celebrity status and commercial success in Croatia, it also eventually fed into constructions both of Croatia’s “domestic” problems […] and of foreign enclaves […] as distant, independent sites for sidestepping Croatia’s economic policies and bureaucratic institutions. (107)

      Intimacy, especially engendered across or within displacements, is neither utopian (as quickly proffered instances of familial, sexual, and spiritual intimacy might suggest) nor “solely a private matter,” for “intimacy can be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory or estranged by a critique” (Boym 2001, 253). Thus there also operates within these networks a codependent intimacy with the state’s embellishments and estrangements. This “cultural intimacy” internalizes not only national ambivalence over tambura bands but also tamburaši’s own “rueful self-recognition” of their complicity with gray economic practices that they see as a sign of the state’s inability or unwillingness to match “Western” developments (Herzfeld 1997, 4; MacMillen 2011a, 108).

       Music and Public Intimacies

      “Intimacy” in music typically conjures up the sights and sounds of physically proximate social or sexual interaction. Such interaction does pervade the musical lives and actions that I examine, yet the intimacies at play here do not merely elide distance; they are constituted through experiences of separation, danger, and even violence. Analyzing how musicians and audiences foster such “dark” relations of closeness at local, regional, and transnational levels, I contribute to a growing body of literature that posits music’s claim to intimate experience as persistently enabled through its mediations across physical and cultural spaces that connect but also separate people.

      Byron Dueck argues that public space “occup[ies] a middle ground between publicity and intimacy” for Manitoba’s First Nations (2013, 8). While contrasting intimacies (“engagements between known and knowable persons”) with imaginaries (“acts of publication and performance oriented to an imagined public”), he notes that public space may afford an inclusive “civil twilight” in which strangers easily recruit one another from the “imagined public” into intimate “face-to-face engagement” (7–8). Essential to this capacity for intimacy and to its efficacy in pursuing meaningful musical interaction is an “orientation to a public of strangers” (5), which characterizes both First Nations’ indigenous imaginaries and nation-states’ “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983).

      In Michelle Bigenho’s work on Bolivian music in Japan, intimacies depend upon far greater spatial and cultural separation. Bigenho’s “intimate distance” emerges through “desire across [geographical and national] boundaries” and maintains a “conceptual tension [in] experiences through which one feels like and unlike others” (2012, 25). Thus diverse nonnatives employ racialized imaginaries of shared genetic heritage but paradoxically do not identify with contemporary natives: a “move of both intimacy and distance […] made through the complicated historical hubris of race and indigeneity” (138).24

      I situate musical intimacy’s spatialization betwixt and between the structures of closeness and distance that these studies model. On the one hand, this book considers how music bolsters intimacy within a community imagined singularly (within rather than spanning national and racial boundaries) but beyond the territorial bounds of the nation-state, on a geographic scale approaching that of Bigenho’s study. On the other hand, it analyzes a Croatian public space in which social imaginaries overlap with musical intimacies in ways that unexpectedly make porous the boundaries of race and gender that musicians mobilize from the country’s intimates. It thus joins Barry Shank’s examination of how such “boundaries of an intimate public are often charged with affective intensity, where different values or ways of being that can’t be ignored can spark a struggle between the ordinary and the unjust” (2014, 49). Roma are the objects of an unjust, essentializing discourse (sometimes self-perpetuated) of hereditary musicality. Their perceived ability to play dangerously solicits intimate distancing as Croatian musicians aspire to this skill as a potential source of national pride, yet channel its affective capacities toward affirming rather than destabilizing national intimacies and insular values. Roma, Serbs, and additional musical Others, such as African Americans in Pittsburgh, variously enjoy these musical intimacies, perceivably endanger them through territorializing presence, and elicit desire within Croatian communities for transgressing racialized musical sensibilities. Music’s claims on intimacy as interior affect, public sentiment, and (trans)national relation are bound to its enticing transgressions: “the danger of music,” the “suspicion” and “control” that it provokes among authorities, and the resistance to oppression that musicians have mobilized in the circum-Mediterranean for centuries (Taruskin 2008, 168).

       SCALES OF SPACE, STRUCTURES OF ANALYSIS

      This book situates affect’s interactions with systems of meaning—narrative, discourse, and ideology—by dedicating pairs of chapters to each of three corresponding geographical scales of intimate spatialization. It takes up the scalar analytics of Lila Ellen Gray, who notes of fado that a “sentimentalizing aesthetic” and representations of place “echo a geopolitical strategy of scale” through which the state produces a “cartography of both the enormous and the miniature, where social and geo-spatial structures of intimacy and interiority (of neighborhood, of family, of faith) symbolically st[an]d in for the expansive reach of the nation and the imperial, corporate, totalitarian state” (2014, 113). Expanding the scope of ethnographic research to scales well beyond the state, this book similarly examines the structuring of musical intimacy, social danger, and racializing affect within and through the nation-state in three interconnected scales of spatialization: the transnational and diasporic, the regional and urban, and the proximate space of ritual and bodily contact. The progressive contraction from “enormous” to “miniature” geography (and from more elaborate to more ingrained forms of meaning into which musical affect transgresses) foregrounds important histories of tambura’s transnational movement at the book’s outset. It also deliberately cuts across the grain of standard analytic narratives of intimacy as a quality of local, face-to-face interaction that may then spiral outward into larger spaces. Instead I posit intimacy as intrinsically spatialized and spatializing at multiple levels of scale and examine its role in small and large ensembles, thereby representing the range of ensemble types while also considering how intimacy accrues and is mobilized within different scales of human organization.

      This introduction and the following chapter elaborate the history of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” and related city and professional ensembles and examine the work of musical and affective responses to danger in generating and blocking narratives of race and mobility since the Yugoslav-Croatian conflicts. Chapter 1 focuses on “Pajo Kolarić’s” youth orchestras, tracing further their musical travels into militarized and demilitarized zones and abroad after the outbreak of war in 1991. Connecting wartime concerns over neighborhood, family, and faith to both emergent narratives of national awakening and affective experiences of danger, the chapter takes up affective block in its less disruptive sense of tambura ensembles generating new blocks of becoming (affectively shoring up the public disavowal of Yugoslav identification). It also begins to examine affective block in its second instance: the curtailing of certain counternarratives via the intensities of musicking in sites of racialized fear and danger as ensembles (re) connected Croatia’s intimates to the country’s core territory.

      Two subsequent chapters address the capacity for affective responses, in turn, to be blocked through strategic or incidental discursive maneuvers. They examine music as a spatializing and socializing force (Krims 2007) that brings diverse populations into contested territories and racialized sentiments at the level of urban centers (Pittsburgh and Osijek) and the regional territorial

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