(1984, 10–11). Such materiality, I argue, threatens not merely in accompanying discourse (unless properly controlled) but also in organizing discourse, especially narrative, with a force that states may not ultimately succeed in canalizing. It is to nonstate actors’ imbricated actions and narratives and their inspiration and divergence from official strategies that I now turn.
THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CROATIAN TAMBURA MUSIC
Of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s and youth orchestras’ several concerts in Croatia and nearby countries during the 2009–2010 school year, my longest fieldwork period, the most ambitious program was the society’s weeklong International Festival of Croatian Tambura Music. Organized each summer in Osijek and in other Croatian cities and enclaves (such as Sombor, Serbia; Pécs, Hungary; and Parndorf, Austria), this juried, noncompetitive festival brings together numerous tambura choirs and children’s, “junior” (youth), and “senior” (adult) tambura orchestras to perform for gold, silver, and bronze plaques.6 I attended most of the 2010 festival’s ten consecutive evening performances (May 14–23) and researched its history in archives in Osijek and Zagreb.
In 1961, seven years after its own founding, the STD “Pajo Kolarić” organized its first biennial Festival of the Tambura Music of Yugoslavia. Its eventual name change reflects a shift in the festival’s orientation from pan-Yugoslavian outreach to an embrace of Croatia and its intimates that closely parallels political events in the late 1980s and 1990s. This history held particular weight for the festivals’ organizers and participants, who quickly began to narrate its accomplishments in print.
In 1989 the festival still carried its original name, and booklets distributed to participants and audiences in the final years emphasize representation of ensembles from across Yugoslavia. The 1987 booklet states: “Our amateur-tamburaši from Subotica [Serbia], Varaždin [Croatia], Samobor [Croatia], Drniš and Posedarje [Dalmatia: Croatia’s coastal region], even all the way to Artiče in Slovenia, have demonstrated a high level of professional musicianship” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1987, 1). The 1989 festival booklet welcomed “one more druženje of tamburaši from our entire dear homeland” and noted representation for most Yugoslav republics (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1989, 5). The gerund druženje derives from družiti se (“to be friendly”) and connotes “friendly associating.” The booklet’s author stressed active processes of mingling, but druženje may also have the more general quality of “intimacy,” as it is also sometimes translated. Its root is drug, a noun used in Yugoslavia and later the Republic of Serbia to invoke a “comrade,” though Croats would abandon the term in favor of the synonym prijatelj (“friend”) as part of the Croatian language’s cleansing in the early 1990s.7 Having programmed ensembles from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Tuzla, Bosnia, the 1989 festival’s organizers celebrated broadening Yugoslavia’s tambura movement despite the growing financial crisis across Eastern Europe (7–8).8 Their booklet’s public articulation of druženje among Yugoslavia’s many regions and peoples was in keeping with STD “Pajo Kolarić’s” multiethnic composition and compliance with Yugoslav doctrine.
The 1991 festival did not convene, as militarization and violence that escalated from late 1990 led to full-scale war following Croatia’s declaration of independence in June 1991. In 1992 the festival organizers and “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors—with the exception of ethnic Serbs, one of whom told me that he could not work at “Pajo Kolarić” after the war’s outbreak due to assumptions that he supported “Četnik” militias—moved the event to Križevci, near Zagreb, which unlike Osijek had not been heavily shelled. The festival’s president, Professor Frano Dragun, wrote about their affective resilience, despite not being able to meet in Osijek, “the cradle of Croatian tambura”:
[B]arbarian hordes from the east and domestic Serbian highway robbers have disabled us […] devastating all that which not one army had ruined since the Roman Empire and its Mursa [Osijek’s antecedent.] Osijek has lost more than 800 of its Osijekans, and it has left more than 4,800 cripples on the conscience of those who have none at all. After all that our spirit is not destroyed. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1992, 6; my translation)
The event’s name—XVth Festival of Tambura Music of the Republic of Croatia in Osijek—emphasized its now explicitly Croatian orientation while connecting it to its previous fourteen meetings in Osijek and downplaying the alternative location. The “idealized past” (Largey 2006, 19) of this festival’s Croatian nature, implicit in the titular change, and the “inscri[ption of] the fate of the nation on its history” (Bohlman 2008, 253), evident in Dragun’s narration of Osijek’s enduring “spirit” over centuries of conquest, established an important connection between Croatian culture and spirit (whose Christian overtones I also explore in this chapter). These immaterial essences had remained and, Dragun suggested, would continue despite the physical destruction of buildings and people.9 The short 1992 festival comprised three concerts featuring nine orchestras from unoccupied Croatian regions. The only foreign ensemble was Slovenia’s group from the previous two festivals: the largely Croatian orchestra “Oton Župančić,” which performed as a guest of the festival. The festival’s geographically and ethnically narrower focus functioned as a bastion of Croatian culture, identity, and resilience in the midst of wartime violence.
REEXPANSION OF THE FESTIVAL
During the 1990s the festival’s media outlined an agenda for, and narrated, its expansion in two successive stages: (1) the festival’s return to Croatian cities ravaged and/or occupied during the war and (2) the inclusion of ensembles from Croatia’s intimates. I examine the second of these in a later section. The first stage began in October 1992, when the organizers arranged a special, nonjuried performance in the church on Osijek’s main square by three of the festival’s participating orchestras: “Pajo Kolarić,” Križevci’s ensemble, and “Ferdo Livadić” from Samobor. Reflecting on the event the following year, president Frano Dragun wrote that the
performance in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (popularly [known as] the Cathedral), the speech and the holy Mass of the illustrious bishop […], will remain permanently in the hearts and memory of numerous Osijekans, church dignitaries, the government and other guests. At last the tamburica, as our Croatian national instrument, has very successfully entered the sacral building. (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation)
The festival’s return to Osijek reclaimed not only the bombarded city but also the Croatian Catholic Church. Religious institutions’ ostracism and official separation from socialist society had largely prevented public church concerts for decades. It had also been difficult to perform concerts honoring only Croatian musicians, instruments, and folklore within the doctrine of multinational Yugoslavian folklore, and “enter[ing] the sacral building” for a nationalistic concert doubly reclaimed space formerly under Yugoslavian legal and military control. Local Serbs, furthermore, were unlikely to attend a performance in a Croatian Catholic church, and selecting the “Cathedral” for the principally public concert effectively placed it in a space out of reach of the “enemy,” whether construed as Orthodox Serbs or atheistic Yugoslavs.10
This concert in Osijek’s largest Catholic church took place just four months after the bombardment of the city had ceased, and the war’s dangers and destruction were readily apparent to all who resumed playing there. The Croatian National Theater, which hosted many of the 1989 festival’s concerts, was heavily damaged by bombing in November 1991. Its position almost directly across Županijska Street from the “Cathedral” made its ravaged halls a poignant reminder of Osijek’s yearlong devastation. As ethnologist Lela Roćenović of the Samobor museum notes, the tambura orchestra “Ferdo Livadić” changed performance sites for her city’s 750th anniversary that year because the organizers were “well aware that public opinion would condemn playing and singing near the commemorative board” of the borough’s fallen soldiers (Roćenović
