[ Erinnerung | Memory ]

Musical culture and memory (Belgrade, April 11-14, 2006)

Thomas Aigner, Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Musiksammlung, Vienna
Johann Strauss's 'Serbian' Operetta Jabuka
Jabuka, premiered in 1894 in the course of the festivities connected with the fiftieth anniversary of Strauss's beginning of the career, is an early example of Balkan operetta, a genre to become popular in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The great success of Smetana's Prodaná nevesta had inspired Strauss to write an operetta with a Slavic background. The plot of Jabuka is set around the traditional Serbian wedding ceremony of the same name. Its location is Serbian Banat, which then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the early years of his career Strauss had come into contact with Vienna's Serbian community who became one of his chief audiences throughout the period of rivalry with his father. In several of his compositions of that time Strauss treated Serbian melodies, some of which he later reused in Jabuka. However, the Serbian idiom does not pertain to the whole operetta, its musical texture featuring also Austro-German, Hungarian and pseudo-Slavic styles. The libretto, by Max Kalbeck and Gustav Davis, occasionally reverts to jingoistic clichés concerning the portrayal of the Serbian people. Moreover, the censor's comments in the course of the approval procedure the operetta was subject to, reflect the patronising attitude of the Austro-Hungarian authorities towards whom they believed to be the lesser developed peoples inhabiting the state's territory, thus explaining the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire due to the unsolved nationality issue only one and a half decades later.

Catherine Baker, University College of London
From Thompson to Turbofolk: Contesting Croatian Cultural Boundaries Through Popular Music
Many developments in popular music in Croatia since the 1990s have demonstrated the tensions and contestations involved in defining a national musical culture. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Croatia's independence, and the explicit nationalization of the Croatian cultural space, the normative question of what was and was not suitably Croatian acquired great symbolic weight.
The boundaries of the Croatian popular-musical space are called most sharply into question in the Croatian variant of newly composed folk music, performed by singers and groups such as Severina, Ivana Banfić, and "Magazin". Critical disapproval of this music associates it with a so-called 'eastern melos' (said to have been cynically imported by Croatian producers after the fall of Yugoslavia), in a discourse, which perpetuates mythical oppositions of urbanity/rurality and European/Balkan belonging and excludes such music from an unchallenged place within Croatian cultural identity.
Three particular cases will be used to demonstrate the instability of national popular-musical culture in Croatia. First, the widely mediatized problematic of Serbian 'turbofolk' and its apparent popularity in Croatia, which is discursively constructed through the national Croatian media as a fundamental cultural Other. Second, the emerging genre of patriotic show business, epitomised by the figures of Marko Perković Thompson and Miroslav Škoro, which is itself subject to a critique based on the musicians' regional associations and their use of newly composed musical elements. Finally, the recent case of Severina's participation in the Croatian pre-selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, controversially performing a song arranged by the renowned ex-Yugoslav musician Goran Bregović, which has brought to the fore issues of language, nationhood, essentialized folk tradition, and the memory of the common Yugoslav past.

Antonio Baldassarre, Hochschule Musik und Theater, Kurt Leimer Stiftung, Zürich
Joseph Haydn's "Paris" String Quartet op. 54 and 55
On the basis of a broad analysis of the source materials, it is apparent that Haydn's string quartets op. 54 and 55 were explicitly composed for the Paris market. This analysis includes considerations of economic and social aspects in late-eighteenth-century Europe and a discussion about aspects and consequences of the reception of Haydn's music in Paris and instrumental music from Paris in Vienna. The analysis also embodies a new music analytical approach to Haydn's string quartets by contextualizing the quartets with contemporary instrumental music production and with Haydn's so-called Paris Symphonies. By this approach the paper also provides a new interpretation of the still not solved question of the order of the quartets.

Stephen Blum, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Remembering Warriors in Song
In the late 1960s singers in northeastern Iran performed verses in Kurmanji Kurdish praising the valor and lamenting the deaths of Kurdish heroes. Most had been killed by gendarmes or soldiers who regarded them as bandits or rebels. The earliest conflict described in the verses I collected in 1969 occurred in 1921 near Qučān, when Colonel Mohammad Teqi Xān and the Kurdish xans who had supported his rebellion were defeated by government troops led by Rezā Xān (later Rezā Šāh). The most frequently sung verses were those about Seyyed Reşîd, his son Xelîl Xan, and his companion Habib Sādeqi. Similar verses had been collected by the Russian scholar V. V. Ivanov in 1918-1920, and others were recorded by Ameneh Youssefzadeh in the 1990s.
This paper attempts both to draw together what is known about this genre of song and to compare it in several respects with other sung narratives about bandits and rebels in West Asia, the Caucasus, and southeastern Europe. Unlike many of the latter, the Kurmanji verses have never been admitted to the sphere of "public folklore." Singers have described their function as a commemorative one and have occasionally attributed the composition of the verses to the protagonist's wife or sister. This paper considers other possible answers to that question, with reference to the theory of social banditry advanced by Eric Hobsbawm in 1969 and modified in later editions of his book Bandits.

Barbara Boisits, Kommission für Musikforschung der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna
Music as Monument. The Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich - A Patriotic Activity
The establishing of monuments is a fundamental characteristic of the nineteenth-century historicism. Increasingly nationally influenced politics as well as civil society's strive for cultural identity meant a demand for historically based traditions that could be recalled by means of stone-made memorials as well as of printed editions documenting the exemplary masterworks of the past. This meant for historical research a concentration on "sources" that could well fit to the task to represent a certain community's historical and cultural heritage. As a matter of fact, the most highly regarded arts of all, music was especially suited for this purpose. After first steps set on the field of editions towards the end of the eighteenth century, the development of the discipline added musicological expertise in the following decades, resulting in editions that followed scholarly norms. While those editions were at first directed to international contexts, soon public sponsoring engaged in nationally orientated editions. For the Austro-Hungarian monarchy things were much more complex: seeking for unifying symbols against what was regarded as the temptations of nationalism, the musical heritage was seen as a first rate instrument to strengthen loyalty to the multi-national state. It is the aim of this paper to describe the assumptions and circumstance under which Guido Adler, the founder of Austrian musicology, undertook the publication of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, and to recontextualize its significations for the tradition of the discipline in Austria up to the present.

Yea-Tyng Chang, Humanities Research Center, National Science Council, Taipei
Taiwanese Multi-ethnic Musical Cultures
When most people think of Taiwan, first come to mind a certain set of associations, such as Chiang Kai-shek's Cold War garrison state, and a once-roaring Asian economic 'Tiger'. However, most of the Westerners never thought that aborigines who live in Taiwan long ago belong to island nation. Yet in the 1620s, when the Dutch East India Company first began exploring the island that the Portuguese had named Ilha Formosa, they found no signs of ethnic Chinese settlement, but only the indigenous peoples. Divided into highland and lowland tribes, these peoples were distinct from the mainland's dominant Chinese population, which they belonged to the Austronesian language family. Based on linguistic evidence, anthropologists believe that Taiwan was the cradle of Austronesian culture; the ancestral home from where the great Pacific and Indian Ocean migrations were launched.
Today, Taiwan's indigenous people are divided into more than 25 officially recognized tribal groups and subgroups, and each has its own distinct culture. Like other indigenous groups around the world, they have been somehow marginalized in their own circle since they are minority in Taiwan. Most of the lowland groups have lost their land and assimilated and the highland groups live in government-sanctioned reservations. However, remaining aborigines in Taiwan deal with subjects as diverse as distinct languages, rituals, belief systems and most intriguingly musical cultures.
This paper will show the condition on reconstructing the Taiwanese multi-ethnic culture from the various musical cultures.

Bojana Cvejić, Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, Brussels
Recasting The Sensible: 'Mouvements für Lachenmann'
Having disrupted the logomimetic relationship between the written note, the playing action and the heard sound in the Western tradition, Helmuth Lachenmann developped his poetics near the utopia of a politics of aesthetics (Jacques Rancière): the dream of recasting the relationship between the visible, the audible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. In the place where Lachenmann recuperates a traditional concert performance, the choreographer Xavier Le Roy continues experimenting with the potentialities to listen, not-listen, hear, not-hear, see, not-see. Departing from the performance Mouvements für Lachenmann by Xavier Le Roy and Helmuth Lachenmann, I will analyze the procedures for a condition of potentiality, for an empowerment of senses through the experience of possibility as a capacity of both presence and withdrawal.

Žarko Cvejić, Cornell University, Ithaca
This Composer Who Is Not One: The On-Going Sexualization of Chopin
The reception of Chopin in British musicology and music historiography since the 1880s provides a useful case study for illuminating the workings of sexual ideologies in ostensibly disinterested aesthetic appreciation. The ruling image of Chopin in prewar British reception was that of Beethoven's inferior, at times even abject Other, both in terms of the perceived deficiencies of his music and in terms of his 'flawed masculinity', as a number of reviewers often put it. In this vicious cycle, those 'deficiencies' of Chopin's style were simultaneously taken as both the consequence and chief evidence of his perceived effeminacy and homosexuality.
From the 1950s on, the landscape of British Chopin historiography and aesthetic reception changes markedly, with the composer securing a stable place among the 'great ones'. Nevertheless, as I argue in the final segment of my paper, the spectres of misogyny and homophobia are still haunting us, if only as uncanny reminders of an ontological phase we should have surmounted in musicology but haven't. A prime example is Jim Samson's relatively recent Chopin biography, which explicitly denies or simply ignores the 'compromising' details of Chopin's life in an effort to shore up the composer's position in the canon. Similar tendencies can be observed in a number of other biographies as well as analytical responses to Chopin's music. I conclude with a reading of these and a call for an alternative, less repressive model of aesthetic appreciation.

Nevena Daković, Univerzitet umetnosti, Fakultet dramskih umetnosti, Beograd
The Sound of Nostalgia
Zoran Simjanović's soundtracks composed for Srđan Karanović's films Nešto između (Something in Between, 1982), Grlom u jagode (The Unpicked Strawberries, 1975), Jagode u grlu (A Throat Full of Strawberries, 1985), and Sjaj u očima (Loving Glances, 2003) are examined as a signifier of ideology, history, emotions, Weltanschauung or Zeitgeist. In the genre hybrid texts - melodrama, drama, romantic comedy, with fiction-faction structure - both diegetic and non-diegetic music succeed to effectively represent ideas and cultural stereotypes of the past. Soundtracks of these films, labeled by F. Jameson's term 'nostalgia films', will be analyzed as an "agent of nostalgia" (as defined by Jankelevič in L'Irrversible et la Nostalgie). The choice of period music helps the creation of particular practice of pastiche (that) is not high cultural but very much within mass culture that characterizes "la mode retro". The music themes are composed in a style that helps the invention of "the feel and shape of characteristics art objects of an older period". The textual elements and mis-en-scène reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality, managing to reawaken sense of the past associated with those objects. Music themes, as part of representational and signifying system in rational and affective ways, manage to evoke and embody the nostalgia for the memory of the past.

James Deaville, School of Art, Drama, and Music, McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario
Hon-Lun Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University
Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
Sites, Scores, and Screens: (Mis)Remembering National Musical Cultures (panel)
The three papers refer to the following points of insight identified on-line as recommended for discussion at the conference itself:

1. defining a (multi)national musical culture (Saffle, Yang, and Deaville)
2. semiotic contribution to socio-cultural research (Deaville)
3. the ideology of national historiography (Saffle, Yang, and Deaville)
4. historiography as a memory of the past (Saffle, Yang).

Panayiotis Demopoulos, University of York
The Delusional State of Global Folklore
The Balkans and their music share a long history of multiculturalism that is caused by and reflected in cultural conflict. How does the latest model of cultural imperialism/initiation from the West fare when compared with its historical counterparts? What is historically the effect of such transformations in musical culture on the cultural memory of a nation/ethnic group/religious body? The paper will demonstrate the extreme delusions and many dangers (such as political, economic and social side effects) inherent in the global market vision of a complete commercialization of the music folklore.

Snježana Dobrota, Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište u Splitu
Socio-cultural Significance of Popular Music
Music is an integral part of the culture, and its functions could be therefore described in almost exclusively social terms. Popular music is the primary leisure resource for young people and it features young people's lives in a variety of different ways and in a diverse range of contexts. In this work we will examine Adorno's theoretical approach, which explains socio-cultural significance of popular music. Adorno argues that popular music is a part of standardized culture industry. The category critical for distinguishing, what he might call, good serious music form popular music is standardization, which in itself forms an entire theory of popular culture. Adorno's treatment of jazz has to be seen in the context of his understanding of mass culture in general. He insists that jazz is a commodity in the strict sense, because it seeks to improve its marketability while masking its commodity character. Four main points around which we can focus the main criticism of Adorno's account of popular music are: immanent method, historical and social location, innovation, and analysis.

Emanuele D'Onofrio, University of Manchester
Film Music as "lieu de memoire" of National Identity: The Case of the Contemporary Italian Cinema
The 1970s in Italy were marked by class conflicts, terrorism and violent repression. Since the affluent 1980s, Italian society has evinced a post-traumatic amnesia, hiding such struggles within its own unconsciousness. In consequence, its cultural identity has been relentlessly eroded. Driven by the current social divisions, nowadays several Italian filmmakers are revisiting the 1970s and choosing popular songs and rock music to evoke an intentionally occluded past. Increasingly, films bring into public awareness cantautori (songwriters) who were themselves intensely committed to political struggles. Such a tendency reveals the need of a belated (Freud) confrontation with such history and of the recognition of those collective experiences as social memory.
Focusing on works such as Lavorare con Lentezza (by Guido Chiesa, 2004), and Radiofreccia (by Luciano Ligabue, 1998), I will explore the extent to which the "traces" of memory strewn by their film music play a role in orchestrating ideas of national identity. By establishing aural connections with the past, these filmmakers aim to produce a form of political cinema able, in Benjamin's words, to pull "the emergency brake" on the train of contemporary reality and create a "status of exception" in history. Whereas the other mass media turn events of the "historical present" into commodities (Pierre Nora), this new political cinema offers itself as an archive, or "lieu de memoire". Film music becomes an original lens through which the viewer may acknowledge fragments of his own identity and be encouraged to take the revolutionary chance of an ethical awakening.

Stephen Downes, University of Surrey, Guildford
Forgetful Music and Music for Amnesiacs: Wagner, Strauss, and Nietzsche's Dionysian Doubleness
Nietzsche characterizes the uncovering of knowledge as a recovery - metaphysics 'forgets' that the new is an illusion, that the perception of the new and the recollection of the old amount to the same - a 'recognising, recollecting, a return and a home-coming' (Beyond Good and Evil). But Nietzsche also asserts the necessity of forgetting, for an excess of memory leads to the decadence and melancholy of modern culture. His critique of metaphysics - where concept formation is compared to constructing a tomb, where all sense of contingency and becoming is lost - places emphasis on the body, for by contrast with the metaphysical, the physical emphasises the here and now, not the beyond or the past. These concepts find their place in Nietzsche's developing notion of the Dionysian, in the ecstatic forgetting of self and in the intoxicating physical excitement, which dissolves individual identity and opens up the sublime threat of incoherence.
For both Nietzsche and Adorno Wagner's music of gestural repetition and pervasive leitmotivic recollection is music for amnesiacs. Adorno also criticised Strauss's post-Wagnerian music as one founded upon shocks and sudden surprises rather than developmental musical logic, as static rather than dynamic. Strauss's music, Adorno says, is 'forgetful on principle', as the listener is not required to make connections, expect certain continuations or anticipate coherent endings. Yet for Strauss Nietzsche's criticisms of metaphysical idealism and resulting emphasis on the physical and the now were important stimuli in his distancing from Wagnerian transcendentalism.
This paper will analyze and compare motive, gesture, knowledge and the working of memory and forgetting in the 'double' closing cadences from Götterdämmerung and Salome, to undo Nietzsche and Adorno's critique of Wagner and Strauss.

F. Merve Eken, Istanbul Technical University, Turkish Music State Conservatory, Istanbul
Tradition, Society, And Change: "Fasıl" in Turkish Music
Fasıl is a traditional performing style of Turkish classical music and Turkish folk music in Turkey, and in some countries in Middle East. Fasıl was performed as a classical performing style during the period of Ottoman Empire; however, it has changed through the centuries and especially when şarkı form became popular at nineteenth century. Since the nineteenth century, it has started to perform in some entertainment places are called as gazino. After the foundation of Republic and falling of Ottoman court, which supported the classical tradition, fasıl tradition survives by interest of people in the city. But it began to be forgotten with the effect of social change that came on the scene with economical change after World War II. During these decades, the migration, which was from rural to urban, accelerated this change. So gazino customers also changed. So, people lives in Istanbul, which used to come to this entertainment places to listen to fasıl only, disappeared from the gazinos by the end of the 1950s and after the gazinos were closed, fasıl begun to perform in only homes. This study is based on my field study about fasıl programs executed Kumkapı, Etiler, Bakırköy, and Taksim, covering contrast social and economic features in Istanbul.

Richard Elliott, International Centre for Music Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Searching for Blue Unicorns: Popular Music and the Persistence of Memory in Postdictatorial Chile
The role of popular music in the life of memory is one that is only recently receiving the attention it deserves. Twentieth-century popular music, the product of a cultural industry that Adornian accounts would have us believe is dedicated to instilling amnesia in the populace, can also be seen to create persistent markers in the fabric of late modernity that outlast the ostensible transience of popular songs. While this potential for aural mounumentality is, I would argue, present in all recorded popular music, it is particularly noticeable during and after times of trauma. In this paper I will discuss the role of popular music in Chile following the return to democracy in 1990 in negotiating the tortuous paths of memory and amnesia, truth and reconciliation, in this posttraumatic period.
The paper will focus on a concert given by the Cuban singer and songwriter Silvio Rodríguez in Chile shortly after the return to democracy. I will discuss the concert as an important site of memory in the cultural landscape of Chile and suggest that it can shed light on the relationships between music, loss, mourning and remembrance. The paper will also include a discussion of sound recordings as historical markers, using recent Chilean CD reissue programs as an example of reclamation practices in ongoing memory wars.

Andreas Engström, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för musik- och teatervetenskap, Stockholm
Instrumental Theatre - Traits, Discourse and Cultural Specifics
The paper is about the discourse around the instrumental theatre of the 1960s. The instrumental theatre developed as a genre on its own, with its own characteristics and traits around 1960. Important for this was the works of Mauricio Kagel and also his writings, mainly on his own pieces. Kagel's instrumental theatre was part of a general tendency of focusing on aspects of theatre, visuality or performability in the new music. This tendency is to be found in the works of various composers like Dieter Schnebel, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Fluxus artists. Instrumental theatre as well as other tendencies in this culture of performability within the new music, was also discussed within the context of the development of the music drama. In the paper I will first present the intellectual discourse around the instrumental theatre as well as trying to place it within the context of the new music drama of the avant-garde. Focus will be on the German discourse. Secondly, I will give examples from the Swedish scene. Although highly influenced by the general movements within the European (and American) avant-garde, this works as a way of examplifying the diversity the genre and discourse took depending on the specific cultural situation/politics in Sweden during the same period.

Klemen Fele, Ljubljana
Music as a Metaphor for the Stream of Consciousness
Phenomenology has a strange place in the South-Eastern Europe, and it is usually associated with extreme right-wing oriented philosophers. However, I am certain that at the beginning of the twenty-first century we should raise the question whether the so-called left-wing philosophers are much more authoritarian and hegemonic than their opponents. There is perhaps something in the phenomenology that could be used as a philosophy of the art today. Nevertheless, epistemological issues of phenomenology are without any doubt a possible approach to the musicology, or at least a possible theoretical instrument for understanding the perception itself. This text will present some points of phenomenology as the theory of consciousness. I will try to explain what Husserl wrote in his second period, offer the paraphrases of metaphors used in his phenomenology which are closely related to the field of musicology, and finally, present some origins of musical hermeneutics (C. Dahlhaus), that is connected with the father of phenomenology.

Beat A. Föllmi, Université Marc Bloch, Département de musique, Strasbourg
The Disruption and Transformation of the Collective Musical Memory Among the Urban Population During the Reformation: The Case of Strasbourg
At the end of the fifteenth century, musical activities in Strasbourg, a free city of the German Empire without a royal court, formed a unique fabric of collective memory. As the result of a centuries old tradition, these activities constituted an important element of local identity and were linked to the wider categories of culture or religion. Through a few significant examples - such as the Strasbourg Palm Sunday procession from the early Middle Ages up to the middle fifteenth century - the paper will show the creation and continuing development of the musical memory among the urban population. From the 1520s onward, the revolutionary events connected with the Reformation brought a radical change to the collective musical activities of the city. In many respects the collective memory resisted these transformations, which were mainly outside the church repertoire (for example private musical activity or music during official municipal functions for the arrival of kings or dignitaries). Therefore, the efforts of the Strasbourg ecclesiastical leaders demanded the supplantation of the old and the creation of a new collective memory. The choral melodies published after 1524 are in some regards the attempt to build up a new common memory, which on the one hand was an original local idiom and on the other connected with the establishment of the new Protestant churches.

Marta Gajić, Univerzitet umetnosti, Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, Beograd
Tracing the "Frozen" Memory
During the fieldwork in the central part of Dobric (southeastern Serbia) during 2001/02 it became clear that many of ritual-rites categories exist in memory. One such ritual-rites complex is the Lazarice ritual was used to be performed until the 1960s. After a period of discontinuation the circle has been reconstructed in some areas with children as the main actors. The key question is what are the consequences of such a discontinuation of the ritual in general and its language systems in particular, as well as what is the notion about the ritual that have its current performers, and what is the relationship between active and passive participants towards concrete ritual event.

Kofi J.S. Gbolonyo, University of Pittsburgh
Want The History? Listen To The Music: Historical Evidence in Anlo Ewe Traditional Songs
Anlo Ewes used and relied extensively on music as a powerful tool in aid of memory, means of documentation, and repository of historical events. Based on social historical theories and approaches that try to reconstruct the past from the records of ordinary lives, I examine "Notsie Migration Narratives", an Ewe historical epoch in song texts and musical practices. I analyze explicit and implicit evidences in relation to available historical sources and discuss musical and linguistic variations and changes that occurred in time and space. Ethnomusicological studies of Anlo Ewe traditional music have typically focused on drumming and rhythm. Some attention to song texts, for example would have challenged assertions that Africans have no history, based on assumptions that there are no historical documents. These notions prevailed primarily because the scholars' definitions of historical evidence were limited to written documents. Nevertheless, other researchers have asserted that the organization of every traditional society is based on attitudes that incorporate its myths, legends, history, and arts. In literate societies, these attitudes are mostly preserved in written literature while the non-literate ones do so orally and thereby regard their oral tradition as the basis or roots of their attitude.

Philip Graydon, Department of Music, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Kildare
'…[B]etween Moscow and New York … ': Richard Strauss's Die ägyptische Helena (1927) in Cultural-Historical Context
Die ägyptische Helena arguably stands as Hugo von Hofmannsthal's most accomplished libretto precisely because it trades in a realism that expressly undermines its mythological frame. If there is one connecting thread through all of the libretti written for Richard Strauss on mythological subjects, it is the conscious subversion of divine or deific qualities in favour of the recognizably human. But, in Die ägyptische Helena, mimesis and anagnorisis - basic concepts of ancient Greek theatre - are taken to a new level. By delving into a mythical past, Hofmannsthal recast the story of the homeward journey of Menelas and Helen from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, highlighting the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. For Hofmannsthal, the marital rift between Menelas and Helen (caused by her infidelity) operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in Austrian and German politics, society, and the arts, and the concomitant necessity for national unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. This paper charts the origins and development of the libretto that emerged concurrently with Danae oder die Vernunftheirat - a Hofmannsthal draft that carried similar concerns - and shows that both librettist and composer forged an opera both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

Lynn Hooker, Indiana University
The Rural Past, the Urban Present, and the "Gypsy Question" in the Hungarian Folk Revival
In the 1970s, founders of the Hungarian folk revival known as the táncház (dance house) movement, following in the footsteps of pioneering ethnomusicologists Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, set out into rural Hungary and Hungarian areas of Romania to "collect" folk music and dances. But instead of using their researches as a source for art music composition, these revivalists aimed to reproduce traditional village music and dance practices in a new urban setting. The most celebrated informants for the revival movement are Roma (Gypsy) string players from Transylvania, whom táncház musicians rely on as authentic sources of traditional Hungarian repertoire and style. The authority wielded by these "tradition bearers" is magnified by the mystique attached to their racial Otherness. At the same time, these Others are sometimes viewed with suspicion, as potential agents of dangerous hybridization. Since the discourse of the táncház movement emphasizes the preservation of authentic traditions of the past, many view the introduction of new elements as pollution.
Drawing on media sources and on fieldwork in Hungary, Romania, and North America, in this paper I first examine how scholars and organizers erect boundaries of genre and status in order to contain the authority of Rom musicians as authentic tradition bearers. I then discuss how musicians, and the crowds that gather to hear and dance to their music, together challenge those boundaries, both through an alternative discourse of authenticity and through the creation of a carnival atmosphere that breaks down some of the boundaries that organizers work so hard to create.

Jelena Janković, Jugokoncert, Beograd
Jazz Opera as a Racial Manifesto
Duke Ellington was not just one of the greatest pianists and bandleaders and most prolific songwriters of the Classical Jazz Era, but he also created several important musical stage works and film scores, demonstrating great skill and innovative approach in orchestrating and placing a strong emphasis on the black African-American musical heritage. One of his most interesting pieces of this genre is the musical stage work A Drum is a Woman, originally created as a special episode of "The United States Steel Hour" TV series in 1957. In this one-hour work, Ellington as a librettist and composer tells the history of jazz music, from its African roots to American and Caribbean developments. My intention is to show how the genre of opera meets the need of the African-American population in the 1950s to promote their racial cultural heritage and to present themselves in a sympathetic and favorable way in front of the TV audience.

Dragana Jeremić-Molnar, Univerzitet umetnosti, Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, Beograd
Back to the Past - "Eternal Return" or the Road to Salvation? Richard Wagner's and Modest Musorgskij's Critique of Modern Civilization
Considering apparent differences between Richard Wagner's and Modest Musorgskij's work and life, it is not surprising that musicologists rarely put the German composer in a connection with his Russian contemporary. However, one of their generally known (and only at first glance incidental and unimportant) similarities is the fact that both composers wrote librettos for their dramas which can be interpreted as (probably the key) assumption for another, more essential, similarity: Both Wagner's and Musorgskij's complete and full involvement into the creation of poetry and drama of Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal on one side, and of Boris Godunov and Hovanščina on another, enable them not only to express their own understanding of their nation's pasts and to present their talent in reconstructing past times, but enabled them also to express their critique of modern civilisation and to reveal their own Weltanschauung.

Jelena Jovanović, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, Muzikološki institut, Beograd
Searching for the Right Form: From a Song "na bas" to "traveler's" Playing. Recalling Performance of the dvojnice Player Miladin Arsenijević
The repertoire of this successful self-taught traditional dvojnice player from vicinity of Topola (Šumadija region, Serbia) consists of lyric songs of newer rural tradition, na bas, and kolos (dances). In his attempt to recall and reconstruct old-time traveler's playing (putnički or rabadžinski), through several performances he has gradually condensed the developed form of homophonic song na bas to the fragmentary form of heterophonic traveler's playing. In this paper the accent is placed on this searching and creative process in player's attempt to derive from his memory the right musical form of a piece, since he has not heard or played it for quite a long time.

Elaine Kelly, School of Arts, Culture and Environment University of Edinburgh
Reshaping Cultural Memory: The Politicization of the Germanic musical canon in the German Democratic Republic
The problems associated with identity formation that afflicted many of the Sovietised Eastern-Block countries were compounded in the German Democratic Republic by the existence of the rich cultural heritage that it shared with the Federal Republic of Germany. The difficulties that this heritage presented, however, were eclipsed by its potential as a state-building tool and underlying virtually all government-led cultural policies in the fifty years of the GDR's existence was a drive to establish the state as the true successor to the riches of Germany's cultural past. This strategy had a dual purpose, serving not only to distinguish the GDR from the FRG in terms of cultural superiority, but also to convince the GDR's own citizens of the validity of a socialist society. The party was keen not to portray the GDR as a brand new entity, but to align it instead with Germany's past, to depict communism as the natural culmination of the philosophies and culture formulated during the German Enlightenment.
This paper will explore the politicisation of the Germanic musical canon in this context. Considerable attention was devoted to the canon by party officials and their supporters, and it was the subject of numerous reinterpretations designed to present it as an intrinsic link in the evolving communist society.

Irina Kotkina, European University Institute in Florence
Cultural Politics or Culture and Politics
Subject of my investigation in the broad sense is the way cultural politics of the totalitarian governments shaped the classical operatic culture in the three countries with highly developed standards of musical performance. Being unable to avoid the classical opera heritage, the authoritarian governments had to give a new meaning to operas in order to make them serve a new ideology. This process manifested itself in various measures taken by cultural officials, such as performances of national operas, the development of a new style of opera productions presenting history from a specific perspective, and the frequent rewriting of the libretto. The question that still remains open in spite of much scholarship devoted to cultural politics is how the cultural establishment in the authoritarian society worked; to what extent it was determined by the general regulation of the central power, to what degree was influenced the patron-client relationships, the tastes of the audiences, and the autonomous dynamics of cultural development. One of the core axioms of the analytical framework of my research is the notion that culture has the dynamics of its own. I am attempting to challenge the existing concepts of the totalitarian culture by proving that development of arts; evolution of artistic styles is a self-motivated process that has its own cycles. It is full of twists and turns and only partially could be explained by present political situation. The inquiry to what scope the cultural and artistic life can be really controlled from above is critical for my research: if politics in the totalitarian state controls the arts completely, or it has to a certain extent to adjust to what is developing itself? In my presentation I would like to highlight the two modern historiographical conceptions: one - pre-determined by cultural politics development of arts in the totalitarian societies; another - complex relation between culture and politics in such societies; and artistic production as the result of negotiation between power and artists.

Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, University of Ulster
Ideology as a Filter for Memory: The "Imperialism" of Music, Transcedence, and Stylistic Labeling
Memory is a highly elusive phenomenon affected by different factors, which influence both the appearance of its "content" and its possible interpretations. In the same way personal memory is dependant on the psychological make-up of its owner, so is cultural memory reshaped by the forces of ideology. This claim is tested and confirmed on a regular basis in the daily politics of the modern world, and is a particularly topical subject in our own society which is deeply affected by the flux of competing ideologies. The same observation applies to music culture in which ideology has become the prism through which music history is interpreted. One example is the tendency to interpret or dismiss "unfashionable" ideas in ongoing practices as remnants of Romantic philosophy, while at the same time "blocking" the memory of their previous incarnations or ignoring their significance in the contemporary context. What particularly comes to mind is the interpretation of the "imperial" status of music (Goehr, Flinn) in comparison to other arts as a distinctly Romantic idea, which this paper challenges by examining its origins as well as its influence on modernist ideas of the twentieth century and on cinema as the youngest of the arts. Consequently this paper questions the reliability of stylistic labeling, and indeed argues its ambiguity in the contemporary context, by using the example of the relationship between music and film.