Richard March’s monograph examines the history and social import of the tambura, a plucked chordophone instrument that is common throughout much of the northern republics of the former Yugoslavia. Often known in English-speaking countries by the diminutive, Anglicized term tamburitza, the instrument has helped sustain an important set of traditional musical practices among the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian diasporas, and March details the development, propagation, and politics of tamburitza performance in both Europe and North America. Based on field and archival research conducted over several decades (though most intensively in the 1970s), his extensive treatment of the many forms of the tamburitza and its music offers substantial insights into the relationship between expressive culture and social change during periods of nationalism, migration, and urbanization since the early nineteenth century.

Chapters 1 through 3 examine primarily the history of the instrument among these peoples prior to World War I. The solo tambura arrived in Southeast Europe with Turkish forces by the fifteenth century, and Slavic-speaking converts to Islam and adherents to Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires adopted several versions of the instrument over the next few centuries. March traces its development into an orchestral tradition in the southern lands of Austria-Hungary, beginning in the Eastern Croatian city Osijek. Urban intellectuals, many of them folksong collectors of non-Croatian and even non-Slavic descent, selected the tambura as a national symbol for the budding Illyrian movement and, following the ideals of Johann Gottfried Herder, promoted tambura ensembles, opera, and folk choirs as media for the embracing and uplifting (i.e., modernization) of Slavic peasant culture in the face of Austro-Hungarian cultural and political domination. Tambura music’s potential for engendering solidarity among Slavic peoples with limited political and economic power also made it an effective form of expressive culture for Croats and Serbs who in the late nineteenth century left Austria-Hungary for North America; there, they quickly established orchestras in order to lighten the hardships of cultural prejudice and oppressive industrial employment facing them in U.S. cities.

March dedicates much of the rest of the book to the development over the past century of the Croatian and Croatian-American tamburitza scenes that he witnessed during his fieldwork, beginning with a discussion of music in social and political life that he sustains throughout chapters 4, 5, and 8. In the interwar and socialist periods in Yugoslavia, ethnologists among the Croatian Peasant Party successfully implemented folklore festivals (smotre) of village singing (and eventually dancing, costumes, and instrumental music as well) in order to promote a Croatian consciousness rooted in an appreciation of authentic peasant culture. These ethnologists sometimes ran afoul of the Belgrade-based government, as they often defined their folklore in opposition to that of Serbs (fellow Slavs) rather than as a point of pan-Slavic commonality in resistance to Austrian and Hungarian culture. In Zagreb in 1966 they reorganized their largest event as the International Folklore Festival and incorporated ensembles from throughout the Yugoslav republics.

Immigration from Southeast Europe decreased significantly after 1924 and, having little contact with Yugoslavian musicians, Serbian- and Croatian-American tambura players did not embrace these new ideals of authentic folk music. They sought, rather, to integrate into American society by presenting their music as an elegant, uplifted (i.e., orchestrated) European tradition and by adopting American popular music into their repertoire. Tours of American groups throughout the continent on the Chautauqua and Vaudeville circuits established networks of musicians and facilitated the formation of national performance programs through the Croatian Fraternal Union and the Duquesne University Tamburitzans. In the 1960s, as Yugoslav emigration increased and as international flights became more affordable, Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs from Southeast Europe and North America increasingly began to visit one another, and although initially American tambura players were only the recipients of musical influence from Croatia and Vojvodina (Serbia), by the 1990s a number of them were actively influencing tambura developments in Croatia. The wars of secession during Yugoslavia’s disintegration reinvigorated the promotion of the tambura as the national instrument in both Croatia and its diaspora, and intensified connections between the two as interethnic relations soured on both continents.

Chapters 6, 7, 9, and 10—at times repeating information given earlier—discuss the common musical and sociological dimensions of several distinct tambura practices in the former Yugoslavia and North America. The tambura as a solo instrument (one found in diverse variants that also differ in construction from tamburas for ensemble performance) remains an important tradition in Croatia and Bosnia, and to a certain extent among more recent immigrants in North America. Small tamburitza combos (as they are known in North America) afford musicians, usually men, opportunities to earn money and to socialize within their own gender. Orchestras and folk dance groups more commonly admit women into their (much larger) ranks and are often composed of amateurs, though notable professional groups in Croatia are particularly influential for the new arrangements, compositions, and choreographies that they produce.

As March notes, he is closely involved (as a member) in Croatian-American communities, and this book is a welcome update to a dissertation long in circulation among American tambura players (March 1983). The first full monograph on the subject in English, its chapters and the insightful appended essay on sources make more broadly available a wealth of linguistically diverse primary and secondary literature, much of it produced by scholars and practitioners immersed in this music. Its theoretical argumentation is strongest with issues prominent in the field of folklore at the time of the dissertation’s publication. The book benefits from March’s regular fieldwork and lived experience since the 1970s and from several recent secondary sources not available in the 1980s. Engagement with the history and theory of postsocialism and with more critical recent literature by scholars at institutions not connected to Croatian tamburitza performance (e.g., Baker 2010, Bogojeva-Magzan 2005, MacMillen 2011, Pettan 1998, Port 1998) would enhance the study. March’s work is a rich addition to Southeast European music studies and will be of interest to practitioners and to scholars of East European folklore, music, nationalism, and nineteenth-century history.

Works Cited

Baker, Catherine. 2010. Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991. Surrey: Ashgate.

Bogojeva-Magzan, Maša. 2005. “Music as Ideological Construct: Prevailing Ideology in the Music Curricula in Croatia Before and After Its Independence.” PhD Dissertation. Ethnomusicology, Kent State University.

MacMillen, Ian. 2011. “From the Center in the Middle: Working Tambura Bands and the Construction of the In-Between in Croatia and Its Intimates.” Current Musicology 91(2011): 87-122.

March, Richard. 1983. “The Tamburitza Tradition (Yugoslavia).” PhD Dissertation. Folklore, Indiana University.

Pettan, Svanibor. 1998. “Music, Politics, and War in Croatia in the 1990s: An Introduction.” In Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia, edited by Svanibor Pettan, 9-27. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research.

Port, Mattijs Van de. 1998. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilization and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

--------

[Review length: 1151 words • Review posted on April 9, 2014]