The tamburitza music tradition has remained very little known in North America outside of the Croatian- and Serbian-American communities that have nurtured it. Thus it is indeed welcome to see a book appear entitled Tamburitza America . It is all the more welcome that the author is Milan Opacich, a musician, instrument maker, community scholar of tamburitza, and a National Heritage fellow. The term “tamburitza” refers to a family of fretted stringed instruments of Eastern European origin ranging in size from smaller than a mandolin to as large as a string bass, as well as to the music typically played on them and to the socio-cultural tradition surrounding their use.

For more than twenty years, Milan has shared his encyclopedic knowledge of and strong opinions about tamburitza in his “Milan Opacich Presents” columns in Serb World USA , a bi-monthly magazine, in English, with a largely Serbian-American readership. The publisher of Serb World USA , Mary Nicklanovich Hart, has assembled into an attractive volume many of Milan’s best columns and the accompanying photographs. The book makes this rich primary source material much more accessible to readers.

Reading Tamburitza America is like spending a long day (or several days actually) visiting Milan in his northwest Indiana garage workshop, poring over and discussing his extensive collections: vintage tamburitzas, historical photographs, clippings, and recordings in 78 rpm and LP disc format. The volume clearly is intended to be a “coffee table book.” It has a large 11” x 11” format, high quality glossy paper, and excellent reproductions of over 150 black-and-white photographs. If expecting a synthetic or scholarly treatment, however, the reader will be disappointed. The audience to whom the book seems to be intended is the existing readers of Serb World USA or other readers who already would be well acquainted with tamburitza. Although Nicklanovich Hart asserts that Milan’s original columns are presented in “revised and expanded” form, much more might have been done to render the book more useful and comprehensible to outsiders and scholars.

Nicklanovich Hart’s preface has good biographical information about Milan, but it does little to give readers a general understanding of tamburitza, its history, or its contemporary place in American musical culture. Indeed, it should not be expected that she would be prepared to do so. A valuable addition to the book would have been an introduction by a scholar--a folklorist or ethnomusicologist--who might have placed the tradition in a broad historical and socio-cultural context as well as explained the significance of the detailed material that Milan presents. Unfortunately, despite the more than two-decade span of the writings included in the book, the original publication dates of the revised and expanded columns are omitted.

The tamburitza scene, like most traditional music cultures, is fraught with numerous internal polemics. As an important direct participant in the tradition, Milan expressed firm positions in his columns on polemics regarding such issues as the origin and form of the instruments, preferred tuning, and preferred shapes and materials for picks. To an uninitiated reader, it must seem like listening to someone arguing over the telephone--you can hear only Milan’s statements responding to an unclarified other side, leaving you trying to intuit what the argument is all about.

Even more complex are the issues relating to the tamburitza musical culture’s connection to the complicated politics of the Balkans. Tamburitza, like Celtic music, is a shared heritage of closely-related nationalities that have a history of stormy relations. Political and religious issues have divided Croats and Serbs in a manner that is in some ways analogous to the Irish-Scottish divide. As a child of a Serbian father and a Croatian mother, Milan has occupied a liminal position in the complex Serb-Croat relationship. Understandably, he has endeavored to minimize nationalistic issues. Because he has written in Serb World USA , it is not surprising that Milan emphasizes the Serbian tamburitza musicians, but he includes profiles of several important Croatian tamburitza musicians and groups as well. Probably to avoid riling a noisy minority of Serb World USA readers who may harbor negativity about Croatia, Milan generally fails to identify the nationality of the Croatian musicians. Frequently, he obfuscates their place of origin, e.g., “Bjelovar, Slavonia,” omitting that Slavonia is a region of Croatia.

It is wonderful that Milan has compiled so much valuable information, focusing mainly on Serbian tamburitza musicians, but titling the book "Tamburitza America" and nowhere acknowledging that this work focuses mainly on the Serbian component might lead the reader to some incorrect conclusions. Much of Milan’s intention--indeed, the underlying reason for his columns and hence the book (moreover for his whole career)--is to argue correctly that tamburitza music is a Serbian tradition worthy of support and nurture in that community. It might be surprising that Milan would need to make this argument at all within the Serbian community. There are, however, influential Serbians who contend that tamburitza is not a part of Serbian culture, that it is Croatian, and that tamburitzas should be replaced by other instruments--especially accordions. It is true that for more than a century Croatians have foregrounded the tamburitza as their symbolic national instrument, while Serbs have bestowed that status upon another instrument, the gusle . (In fact both Croats and Serbs play both the gusle and the tamburitza.)

So when Milan bemoans the lack of young people learning to play tamburitza in his column titled “Where is the Next Generation?” a reader may get the impression that the tamburitza tradition is dying out, while on the contrary, the Croatian component of the tradition is burgeoning. American and Canadian Croatians, working most notably through the Croatian Fraternal Union, have established scores of youth and adult tamburitza orchestras. To scholars interested in American ethnic musical cultures, Tamburitza America is an attractive book that has useful primary source information. I’ll treasure my copy and mine it for nuggets of information. It is a compilation revealing much of the knowledge of Milan Opacich, a very significant figure in the tradition. Nonetheless, a synthetic work on tamburitza in America still has not been published.

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[Review length: 1004 words • Review posted on January 25, 2007]