Playing It Dangerously - Ian MacMillen Music / Culture

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and racialized feelings play in a national music. The tambura’s national status has emerged in waves over the past two centuries of Croatian history, even as musicking on the tambura—or tamburanje (“tambur-ing”), as such activities are known to practitioners—comprises a diverse set of practices that persistently cross national and racial boundaries, as well as those of genre and style. As such, Playing It Dangerously refers not only in a narrow sense to the particular virtuosity to which many tamburaši aspire but also broadly to the multiple transgressions that tamburanje has mobilized, elicited, and enabled as musicians, rather than playing it safe, have countered physical and social threats during and following the “Homeland War” with Yugoslavia.6 The transgressions that make such performance dangerous have been messy and often contradictory, at times breaking with Croatian ideals of Catholic and European behavior while simultaneously confronting the war’s physical threats to churches and other sites of national resistance.

      This is not to say that tambura music’s contexts are always so serious; the gerund tamburanje connotes jocularity in addition to performance and is a play on the word tamburaš, reinterpreted not as a noun (its proper usage) but as a verb conjugated into the second person singular, with -aš humorously suggest ing the meaning “you tambura.” When not connoting actual harm or threats, the adjective “dangerous,” opasan (fem. opasna), can even refer humorously and deprecatingly to someone who “presents himself as worthy but isn’t” (Hrvatski jezični portal; my translation), linking the idea of danger to good-natured boasting and slights. Yet in striking contrast, musicians expressed deep earnestness when describing their peers as playing dangerously, privileging the adverbial form (which has retained its more serious connotations)7 and reintroducing humor as a distancing mechanism only when the intensities of playing dangerously were felt to risk too much. The concept’s flexibility in describing a range of lighter and more intense feelings highlights the dynamic relationship between discourse and the affects that it responds to and channels. It also speaks to a continuum of intimacies with racially or geographically distanced musicians such as local Roma and foreign-born Croats and the wielding of musical feeling as a resource that can distribute acts of inclusion along various axes of discursive meaning.

      The danger in the practices considered here, far from deterring musicians and fans, accentuates their affective capacities and constitutes them as the locus of a delicate yet intense, sometimes even threatening, intimacy operating within and between Southeast European communities. The eliciting on a transnational plane of a danger that is desirable for its corporeal excitement and of an intimacy that threatens in its binding (even as it comforts) affords an ideal opportunity to examine the materiality of musical nationalism and racialization in the wake of regime change and violence. This book elucidates the musical unfolding of the recent past and ethnographic present through the interconnections of two assemblages: reterritorialized geographies of public consciousness and national sentiment (Croatia and its intimates) that tambura music has helped to reconfigure since Croatia’s war with Yugoslavia; and affective experiences and responses in which musicians feel (do not merely discourse on) racialization and closeness in the bodies, relationships, and spaces that they incarnate.

      This book is ultimately about the material work of musical affect in generating intimacy, aggression, and racialized sensibilities in contexts of physical and social danger. Taking musical performance as an illustrative confluence of affective, linguistic, and somatic faculties, it examines how new understandings arise and coalesce around terms such as “dangerously” and “Cigan” through both embodied and discursive modalities and through the continuities and differentials between them that change dynamically in the spaces of musical ritual and encounter. Asking what happens when musicians’ feelings conflict with their thoughts, I introduce the concept of affective block to theorize the musical and sensorial responses that aggregate in the body beyond (yet variably inclusive of) systems of conscious thought, social discourse, and cultural referentiality. These responses constitute a block—an aggregation of intensities and desires (often complex or unspecified) that amounts to a sense of selfness and Otherness and that holds capacities for both sequestered resilience and outright emergence through what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call “becoming” ([1980] 1987)—yet they also are able—unless strategically controlled—to block: to circumvent and supersede referential understandings that are configured and learned socially.

      Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “becoming” provides an important framework for the confluence of affect, race/ethnicity, and territory, especially in the first half of this book. Becoming, as a process of simulation, is less about resemblance than feeling; it “is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming” ([1980] 1987, 272). Performing and listening to music are ready modalities for establishing these relations, yet it is important to distinguish their role here from the identity work of racializing musics analyzed by scholars such as Adriana Helbig (2014). “Becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone,” rather it “is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 272, 259). It does not refer to conscious identification or higher-level representations, whether of subject positions or of underlying psychological states; rather, its signification, its simulation, is of a term (ethnic, gendered, etc.) in which one invests considerable feeling. This may align with the nominal identity one is perceived to have or may differ dramatically (something one becomes only temporarily). This makes it a useful analytic for understanding race, particularly in Eastern European countries where, as Anikó Imre notes, racial understanding frequently informs national consciousness without the term “race” ever being used or acknowledged (2005, 84).

      Becomings may be associated with specific territories (see Tomlinson 2016), yet also involve a deterritorialization, such as when musicians employ the affect of performing intensely or dangerously for (at least) temporary release. It is a release from feelings of belonging to national communities and lands and a release into the affective realm of the Other (here the term “Gypsy”—not actual Roma but the figure of the Cigan—is the deterritorialized, nomadic, even fantastic object of becoming par excellence). Becoming may be especially important in tambura milieus, where “race-thinking” (Arendt [1951] 2004) is perhaps unusually fraught in that Serbs and Croats often speak in kinship terms of their shared ancestry and history, a symbolism borne out in the practical signification of their commonality (e.g., recognition of physical resemblance in the absence of reliable phenotype markers of intergroup differences). Yet as Tomislav Longinović (2000) writes, musical differences nonetheless frequently stand in for (or justify assumptions of) biological distinction. Roma, on the other hand, who migrated to Europe from South Asia centuries ago, mutually construct with South Slavs a divide based upon skin color, regional/continental origin, and affective proclivities, yielding a decidedly racial discourse of difference. As my research shows, however, Roma for these reasons are often more likely subjects of becoming for South Slavs than South Slavic groups are for one another. In Croatia, I witnessed Croat and Serb tamburaši imitating one another’s performance practices humorously but never embodying them with the earnestness and feeling with which they imbued their flights into Romani modalities of playing. In Pittsburgh, a notion of common, marked East European whiteness did admit Croat-Serb becomings, but Romani music still facilitated an even higher level of affective expression and corporeal abandon. On both continents, I observed Roma musicians navigating a strategic, contextually dependent boundary between becoming-white/European and cultivating their own becoming-Roma/Cigan.

      “Becoming” affords a fruitful way of navigating these affective investments ethnographically, for unlike an identity, which typically is opposed by another identity in tautological signification, a becoming may also be opposed by a nonbecoming. Engaging intensively with strains of ethnomusicology that bring ethnographic attention to musical styles and scenes saturated with affective labor and listening (e.g., Gray 2014; Tatro 2014; Hofman 2015), as well as work in affect theory, especially the positing of affect’s autonomy from signification (e.g., Massumi 1996), this book also makes a deliberate departure from them. In addition to the affective intensities highlighted in such scholarship, this book not only considers the “ordinary affects” of the “everyday” (Stewart 2007, 2) but also calls for attention to affect’s proscription,

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