Such tambura ensembles were particularly effective at promoting local culture and language in the nineteenth-century nationalist Illyrian movement, which sought to assert Slavic identity (specifically of the local, Catholic Slavs) in the face of Austro-Hungarian cultural and political domination in the middle of the nineteenth century (March 1983, 106). Tambura music’s connections to dangerous, nationalist transgressions of multinational sovereignty date back at least to this period, and Pajo Kolarić, an agitator within the movement, was imprisoned by the Hungarians in 1849 for his actions in support of the Croatian revolutionary Ban Josip Jelačić. Franjo Kuhač, a music ethnologist and childhood admirer of the older Kolarić, would later write that the tambura orchestra leader and other tamburaši “helped a great deal to fire up the Slavonians to support Ban Jelačić and our national politics” (1877, 81; translated in March 2013, 55).
Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to The Invention of Tradition (1983) demonstrates amply that practices taken as a culture’s connection to the ancient past are often fully modern in being recently introduced, constructed, and woven into national narratives, and that this “historic past into which the new tradition is inserted need not be lengthy” (Hobsbawm 1983, 2). Incorporating an Ottoman instrument, paralleling (and perhaps modeled after) Romani bands, and consciously deployed for nationalist purposes in the nineteenth century, the tambura orchestra was clearly one of those “‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted” (1). In Croatia, however, the deliberate invention of the tambura tradition was well recognized by tamburaši in the nineteenth century, as it is now, and its lack of insertion into a national narrative predating the Illyrian movement has in no way diminished the earnestness with which musicians assert their nation’s historical claim to the instrument. As I argue throughout this book, there is more at work in the invention, acceptance, and mobilization of such a musical tradition than the strategic insertion of a national emblem into histories whose shallowness is obscured in their embedding in spoken and written words. That such politicized mobilization of the music in Croatian media in the 1990s (and in earlier periods of Croatian national organizing) could proceed so quickly and effectively without completely obscuring inherent contradictions in its symbolism suggests that the tambura’s role as a Croatian national tradition relies as much on affective responses as on discursive rationalizations: tambura music is Croatian because playing and listening to it feel Croatian (while feeling Cigan, for instance, transpires through a different set of musical relations). In the current day, however, the emphasis on the emergent affects of race and ethnicity (of “becoming”) over their discursive constructions also situates the tambura’s impact in experiences of the nation that are less concretely bounded than those of ethnic identification and national signification, a fact that opens tamburanje to manifold transgressions.
Initially, tambura musicians were less concerned with local ethnic distinctions than with opposing Austria-Hungary, and the signification of difference and the affective intensities of shared becomings were neatly aligned in the tasks of building solidarity on the fringes of the empire. Official imperial suppression seemingly only aided the music’s significatory and affective appeal to Pan-Slavists and Illyrianists. Even after Austro-Hungarian rule put an end to the Illyrian movement, amateur tambura ensembles continued to spread to other Croatian urban centers such as Zagreb; throughout towns and villages in present-day Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina; and by the late nineteenth century to places such as New Zealand, Australia, and North and South America, where many tambura musicians sought to escape poverty and/or political oppression (March 1983, 120–121).
By the time the first Yugoslav state was founded at the end of World War I, diverse amateur, professional, and semiprofessional ensembles throughout the region and abroad were using various combinations of common tambura instruments. These ranged from small, usually round-bodied, lead prim tamburas (aka bisernica, or simply tamburica), to hourglass-shaped secondary melody tamburas (e.g., the čelović, the čelo, and the basprim, aka brač), to harmony tamburas (the kontra, aka bugarija), and finally to the largest, berda (aka bas), which resembles a double bass in appearance and function.10 A functional tambura group almost always featured a minimum of berda, kontra, basprim, and one other melodic instrument, but many ensembles had one, two, or three additional tamburas. Some bands incorporated violin and/or accordion into their lineups, although this was less common in the East Croatian region of Slavonia, where many Croat patrons associated these instruments with Roma from Vojvodina and with Serbian musical practice rather than with Croatian national identity (see chapter 3 and Pettan 1998, 16–18). Musicians to this day use plectra for all tambura types and, with the exception of berda and kontra players, typically play with tremolo all note values longer than an eighth note.
In the socialist Yugoslav state founded after World War II, tambura ensembles operated in a variety of private and public contexts. Amateur and professional groups performed at private wedding events and at taverns across much of the country (with the greatest concentration in the area triangulated between Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade/Novi Sad). Official town and city orchestras performed folk, classical, “old-city,” and international light popular music. Folklore ensembles also formed as parts of the amateur Kulturno-Umjetnička Društva (cultural-artistic societies; hereafter KUD) that the socialist government established throughout Yugoslavia to promote the folk traditions of its many nations.11 Alongside older tambura schools founded before the adoption of socialism, in 1954 the Slavonsko Tamburaško Društvo “Pajo Kolarić” (Slavonian Tambura Society “Pajo Kolarić”; hereafter STD “Pajo Kolarić” or “Pajo Kolarić”) commenced its educating of young musicians in Osijek, the largest city in Croatia’s easternmost region of Slavonia. These KUDs and schools trained many of the musicians who have performed professionally in state folklore ensembles, such as Lado in Zagreb and Kolo in Belgrade, and in the radio tambura orchestras of Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb. In promoting the musical cultures of the many Yugoslav peoples to their publics, these ensembles’ members traversed much of Yugoslavia’s territory and interacted and performed for and with diverse ethnic groups.
In this manner, the ensembles in theory realized the ideal of bratstvo i jedinstvo (fraternity and unity) promoted by the Yugoslav state. Yet such staged representations of state ideology and socialist narratives of the Yugoslav federation did not always translate into actual intimacies between or even within the many nations, nationalities, and ethnic groups12 that contributed the repertoire and members of folklore ensembles, especially following periods of nationalist (re)awakening in the early 1970s and 1980s. Tony Shay notes that even in the early socialist period, Croatian groups in particular, such as Lado, navigated internal tensions arising over members’ relationship to the Communist state, from forced dismissals of those whose familial ties or musical tastes suggested sympathies with the World War II Croatian nationalist Ustaša movement to performers’ defection while touring Western Europe (2002, 117). As Ljerka Rasmussen writes in her work on newly composed folk music, the socialist period “presents us with both the high points of the quest for ‘multiculturalism’ and the failure to sustain it by the class-based, meta-ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’” (2002, xxviii).
American tambura players had minimal contact with ensembles in Europe for decades, but in 1950 the Duquesne University Tamburitzans led by Walter Kolar made their first trip to perform in Yugoslavia “at the behest of the [US] State Department to make closer ties with [Yugoslav dictator Marshall Josip Broz] ‘Tito’ and his brand of communism when he broke ties with Stalin” (Kolar 2009). Although their pan-Yugoslav and -American repertoire suited both countries’ ideals for cultural ambassadorship, what resulted was a long-lasting relationship of international tutelage. Concerned about the Tamburitzans’ inauthentic, hybridized performances, Yugoslav folklorists emphasized perfecting distinct nations’, nationalities’, and ethnic groups’ repertoires (Kolar 2009). Although this was in keeping with the Yugoslav ideal for multinational diversity, it was these nations, nationalities, and ethnic groups, rather than the socialist ideal of antinationalist unity, that would ultimately draw the affective investments and transnational projects—risky