engleski

Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

This dissertation represents the results of a music ethnography set in a small town of Križevci and its surrounding villages in central Croatia. The aim of research was to show the role of local musicians as workers within the local social life. The selected musicians were those who earned money through their full-time or part-time music labour, who were mostly visible only locally, and who worked within the local social infrastructure, including concerts, dance venues, festivals etc. In that way, the selected musicians acted as agents of the local social life and were subsequently involved in the creation of local cultural identity. Their diverse stories and the changing situation in local infrastructure have been observed in diachronic perspective, through the past 70 or more years, reflecting politico-historical changes of the pre-socialist, socialist and post-socialist times. The results of ethnographic research in the town and surrounding villages showed that the infrastructure previously induced appearance of a large number of self-taught musicians. In the villages, the organisation of the social infrastructure through various civil societies had its peak during the socialism, and a large amount of regular dance parties dictated a high demand for local musicians. Today, due to complex socio-political changes, social life in villages is practically non-existent and the sparse local musicians no longer direct their work locally. In the town, the social infrastructure and the local musicians continued to work together on the production of the local social life, but the socio-political changes likewise caused gradual decrease of demand for the local musicians. The musicians answered the changes through adopting different strategies for maintaining their economic sustainability, expending their networks, but still regularly returning their pathways “back home”.

Music Ethnography, Music Labour, Social Life, Križevci

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