Playing It Dangerously - Ian MacMillen Music / Culture

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imagined towns and cities in Eastern Slavonia and Baranja not merely cleansed of Croats but altogether devoid of residents, though many Serbs remained throughout the occupation (Kardov 2007, 66). Yet as this song demonstrates, tambura music was also an effective sonic medium by which to “tell the tale” of war to nonoccupied Croatia and the world beyond. In this respect, the tambura remained decidedly outspoken throughout the war.

      In 1992, however, tambura performance was also becoming important for reclaiming Croatian territory, establishing postconflict transnational networks, and other material processes that, like the advance of riflemen, have reconfigured musical performance’s human geography in Croatia and beyond. Tambura music’s connection to danger became most concrete during this period as some tamburaši, far from playing it safe, used songs and performances to confront not only discursively but also physically the actions of Yugoslavian forces. Prominent tambura ensembles’ movement during and after the war and the conflicts’ narrativization in publications, song texts, and other media illuminate the resonance and affective capacities of war, danger, and aggression for tambura performance in independent Croatia.

      I consider these processes’ material and spatial dimensions by examining diverse divisions and intimacies in relation to national musical belonging, which has intensified since 1991 through tambura networks centered in Croatia. The chapter focuses on the regional and international activities of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” as a primary case study while also examining affiliated or comparable professionals such as Slavonski Bećari and the tambura/rock singer and songwriter Miroslav Škoro. All hail from Osijek, which Yugoslav forces bombarded but never occupied. I consider their performances and discourses on tambura music during and after the war, both in Croatia and abroad. The chapter further elaborates “national intimates” as an approach to transnational nationalism, its tambura narrativization, and the intersections of secession, militarization, diaspora, affective block, and constructions of national music.

      In examining the flows and disjunctures in ensembles’ movement across these territories to reconnect to intimates beyond Croatia’s new national borders, I also consider the nature of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, or “balkanization,” as it has of course also been labeled. This term, which emerged from studies of Southeastern Europe, has come to connote rupture and fragmentation in geopolitical entities the world over. Its use reflects the focus of much political discourse, journalism, and scholarship on the creation of separate, often mutually hostile or fearful nation-states out of larger republics such as Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and Sudan.3 Just as notably, however, national independence has often been cause for intensification of communal ties and intimacy across the very borders it has erected.4 I consider the affective work of making and narrativizing border crossings through musical performance in contexts of wartime danger and fears.

       DANGEROUS PERFORMANCE

      The most pressing territorial concern for such ensembles throughout the 1990s was the return to lands where tamburas had perceivably fallen silent. Armed conflict and bombing severely limited transport of passengers and mail via car and train, and Croatian media saturated their programs with fear-inspiring reports on the dangers of accessing contested regions (Povrzanović 1993, 140). Even for those in areas not directly affected by the encroaching Yugoslav forces, occupied Slavonian territories and cities in danger of capture and destruction became objects of longing tinged by threat. Several prominent tambura ensembles took advantage of opportunities to fight for, return to, and reclaim these territories. Their efforts to stabilize the state’s outlying lands and borders were important not only for physically and symbolically instituting Croatian sovereignty but also for resurrecting access to communities in neighboring states, Central Europe, and North America.

      The act of pushing toward the front lines and borders responded to the perceived and, for many tamburaši, physically experienced dangers of war. Svanibor Pettan notes that the war “brought together musicians and musical genres that would otherwise hardly be considered compatible. The shared necessity to neutralize the threat made folk musicians, opera singers, and rappers perform on the same occasions” (1998, 14). Music fulfilled three functions: encouraging “those fighting on the front lines and those hiding in shelters,” provoking and humiliating “those seen as enemies,” and calling on “those not directly endangered—including fellow citizens [and] the Diaspora” (13).

      Often situated or originating in East Croatian regions that felt the war most heavily, tamburaši themselves spanned the spectrum of endangerment. Their responses often extended beyond such discursive functions to include direct physical, musical, and affective engagement with the war’s dangers. Analyzing music’s relationship to territories and deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari write that musical expression is “inseparable” from a minoritarian becoming “because of the ‘danger’ inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward destruction, toward abolition” ([1980] 1987, 299). “Music,” furthermore, “has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential ‘fascism’?” (299). In taking up the call to arms (to arm themselves with instruments), tamburaši engaged affective, embodied flights toward the destruction of dangerous performance. Through the musical deterritorialization of wartime milieus and their own minoritarian becomings (Yugoslavs were becoming Croats), they simultaneously reterritorialized themselves as citizens of the new nation and physically assembled these milieus into a sovereign state.

       Dangerous Media

      In 1991–1992 many prominent professional tambura bands released war-themed musical media, such as Škoro’s and Zlatni Dukati’s videos for “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu,” one of the period’s most iconic tambura songs (see the introduction). The tambura band Dike (The Glories) released a similar video for “Oj Hrvatska Mati” (Oh Mother Croatia). They paired lyrics telling Croatia to “grieve not” (for the “falcons” will sacrifice themselves for her) with war footage and shots of the band in camouflage fatigues.5 They reinforced their image as protective “falcons” by posing with helmets in a trench for a publicity photograph (reprinted in Ferić 2011, 259). Three of them hold their tamburas outstretched over the trench’s lip, aiming them like rifles, while one reaches an arm overhead as though throwing a grenade. Another holds a tank ammunition round raised upward from his pelvic area, which along with the butt of the round remains hidden behind his nearby tambura bass. This suggestive image of wartime virility responded to “Serbia’s ‘masculine’ and warlike [musical] self-representation,” defending Croatia, which was symbolized as a “mother figure [who] is proud but also worried for her son/defender” (Ceribašić 2000, 226, 230).

      A number of tambura bands, including Agrameri, served in the war (Baker 2010, 36). Zlatni Dukati’s members also attempted to enlist (Bonifačić 1998, 138), reinforcing tamburaši’s perceived duty to protect and reclaim Croatian lands by any means at their disposal. The “rejection of their applications confirmed […] the powerful propaganda role of patriotic songs and the activities of the Zlatni Dukati in a war-time situation,” and the government instead had them perform “on the very front lines, and at numerous charity concerts” (138), mobilizing them as a political instrument, a territorializing machine of martial affect.

      As numerous studies demonstrate, discursive and other symbolic practices concerning wartime musical performance significantly impacted Croatian ideologies and actions during this period (Bonifačić 1998; Pettan 1998; Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998; Ceribašić 2000; Bogojeva-Magzan 2005; Baker 2010). Catherine Baker in particular has privileged the discursive framing of the past and present in musical texts, devoting an entire chapter of her book to what she calls the Presidential narrative of the war (2010, 11). I examine here how musical affect and related material forces mobilized individual and social bodies in wartime and postwar territories, blocking and otherwise impinging on discourses (subalternating ubiquitous representations) and ultimately “circulating and transforming official and unofficial historical narratives” to render history “as a feeling” (Gray 2014, 9). I begin with discourses on danger, or opasnost, that emerged in popular music—and acutely in tambura music. I reexamine narratives and other discursive formulations cited by tamburaši (and earlier scholarship) through

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