Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen

TAMBURA PERFORMANCE, 1979–1989

       A North American Tour

      Especially since the late 1970s, the Socialist Republic of Croatia’s ensembles have traveled to the United States and Canada under the auspices of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America (CFU; an insurance and fraternal organization) and the Matica iseljenika Hrvatske (MIH; the “parent body of emigrants from Croatia,” often translated as the Croatian Heritage Foundation). Located in Croatia, the MIH emphasized Croatian ethnicity, culture, language, and transnational connections.¹³ Vanja Vranjican, MIH’s president through the mid-1980s, wrote of its collaborations with the CFU: “Hosting folklore ensembles and sending our own into emigrant milieus is only part […]. Occupying an important place in this collaboration is help with Croatian language study, textbook printing, organizing courses in our country and the U.S.A.” (quoted in Šovagović 1981, 6; my translation). These programs fostered a transnational “fraternal union” of Croats rather than “fraternity and unity” between diverse peoples living across the officially multinational socialist state. Its projects abroad suggest that the MIH accomplished more than “the promotion of the socialist self-management identity of the Yugoslav years” that Francesco Ragazzi attributes to what he calls “an uncritical, ignored organ of the established power” (2013, 68). Admittedly, the MIH did curtail its domestic operations following the 1971 Croatian Spring’s suppression, in which MIH leaders such as future Croatian president Franjo Tuđman were arrested for their roles in this movement for political and cultural autonomy (Ramet 2006, 235).

      In 1979 the MIH and CFU organized a North American tour for three Osijek acts: “Pajo Kolarić”; the popular singer Krunoslav Slabinac “Kićo”; and Slabinac’s backing tambura band, Slavonski Bećari (Slavonian Bachelors), which he had formed with lead prim tambura player Antun Nikolić “Tuca” and which included Rudolf Ergotić (an artistic director at “Pajo Kolarić”). “Pajo Kolarić’s” women’s folk choir Šokadija (Land of the Šokci [Eastern Croats]) went, too, and programs prioritized the region’s Croatian music. Their membership and directorship also included Serbs, however. The orchestra’s tour guide noted that “Pajo Kolarić” “equally well performs concert compositions, old-city songs and pieces of the rich folkloric heritage of Slavonia, as well as of the other nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia” (Marija Vukelić, quoted in Šovagović 1981, 11; my translation). Yet journalist Đuro Šovagović describes a much narrower focus in his travelogue. Coinciding with the CFU’s eighty-fifth anniversary and geographically distant from official Yugoslav stages, the performances celebrated the Slavonian music, Croatian culture, and transnational contact promoted by the CFU and MIH (23). Šovagović’s invitation to document this contact reflects a developing interest in narrating tambura music’s travels among Croatian populations, a discursive endeavor whose deep affective power I continue to trace in chapter 1.

      Šovagović’s celebration of Croatian (specifically, Slavonian) musical activity in a 1981 Yugoslavian text evidences the relaxing of attitudes and policies regarding musical nationalism following Tito’s death in 1980. Also in 1981, tambura singer Vera Svoboda released her Marian songs album Queen of the Croats, Pray for Us on the official Croatia-based label Jugoton. This album marked increasing openness to Croatian nationalism¹⁴ and Catholicism, which were principally antithetical to the multinational and atheistic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (where their representation in official media had rarely passed censorship under Tito). It set the stage for the production of additional Catholic tambura albums such as Slavonski Bećari’s Croatian Christmas Carols (1982) and influenced the proliferation of even more recordings (see Ceribašić 2000) and tambura Masses a decade later.

      The North American hosts of the 1979 tour mostly descended from Croats who had left Austria-Hungary before its disintegration in World War I and had played no part in the Yugoslav project. These ancestors’ strategies for deploying tambura music to solidify ethnic identity in the face of oppression from Austrian and Hungarian culture (see March 2013, 40–54) also served them well in resisting musical and linguistic assimilation in North America (113–114). Some even mobilized tambura performance as Croatian resistance to midcentury Yugoslav assimilationist pressures from Belgrade. Ante Beljo, who would later fund Franjo Tuđman and become his party’s “propaganda chief” (Perica 2001, 58–59), wrote about how his Sudbury community resisted “Austrian rule,” then interwar Yugoslavia, and finally postwar North American Yugoslav clubs, which “discouraged the formation of Croatian organizations” (Beljo 1983, 71). In the 1930s, he recalled, when Sudbury was seeking a tambura and Croatian language instructor, the “Yugo-regime tried to infiltrate the Croatian communities with their own men. The Sudbury community succeeded to avoid such a ‘teacher’” (85).

      North American Croatian organizations responded to Yugoslavian unity differently. Both the CFU headquarters and the Tamburitzans (at Duquesne University until 2016) are in Pittsburgh, and their Croatian directors differed for several decades over the latter’s multinational program.¹⁵ Among the biggest supporters of the 1979 tour, Croatian communities in Pittsburgh also welcomed non-Croat ensembles from Yugoslavia in the 1980s, such as that of famous Rom prim tambura virtuoso Janika Balaž. Peter Kosovec (2008) enthusiastically recalled his father bringing Balaž to their home near Detroit during his (non-CFU) tour. The CFU prioritized nationally conscious ensembles, for which interaction with North American Croats was particularly desirable, if also potentially dangerous for their standing in Yugoslavia.

      The affective impact of the ceremonial celebration of relations among the CFU, MIH, musicians, and audience was emphasized on the 1979 tour, which opened with a concert in Brantford, Ontario, and with gift exchanges between “friends” (Šovagović 1981, 23). Osijek’s musicians, Šovagović writes,

      act like they still can’t believe their eyes that this before them in the full auditorium is no longer that domestic audience from Beli Manastir and Osijek […]. But this, too, is a world that has felt the real value of their musicking¹⁶ on tamburas, and when Kićo lit up the Slavonian songs with the “Bećari,” the auditorium pounded from hand[clap]s in the rhythm that the tamburaši were giving. (23; my translation and emphasis)

      Here musical feeling involved not only conscious musical valuation but also bodily experiences of clapped rhythms, reverberating space, and musical ignition. Moving Croatian American audiences to intense affect (embodied feeling) was already a primary concern in Croatian nationalist discourse and helped to naturalize its tenets through somatic experience. In Šovagović’s description the Osijek travelers also reveled in influencing audience members’ own tambura performance practice. Croatian American folklorist Richard March notes from firsthand experience that “the 1979 tour made Kičo’s [sic] Slavonian songs and the Slavonski Bećari’s tight, transparent music all the rage. Rabid fans drove hundreds of miles from concert to concert to see the show again and again [and] eagerly snatched up” his “records and cassettes” (2013, 205). These releases soon became staple sonic vehicles for Croatian tamburaši’s affective labor throughout North America.

      For their part, Osijek performers particularly valued the homestays. Vesna, a future STD “Pajo Kolarić” secretary, went with Šokadija in 1979; she recalled fondly to me how enthusiasts and performers in the two countries had connected during visits with midwestern Croatian families, including her relatives.¹⁷ These homestays reinforced tambura music’s expressive and affective power for celebrating family and homeland across varying degrees of temporal, cultural, and territorial separation.

       New Tambura Relations and Projects in the 1980s

      Ensemble tours between North America and Socialist Croatia also engendered new transnational familial relations, contributing significantly to the mobilization of national sentiment within and beyond Croatia’s borders. The CFU instituted regular North American tours by professional male Croatian tamburaši, many of whom wed Croatian American women. In 1986, for example, Slavonski Bećari invited Miroslav Škoro, then a little-known rock singer-cum-comedian, to tour North America with the band. Škoro met Croatian American Kim Ann Luzaich in Pittsburgh and soon wedded and joined her there.

      Škoro’s