engleski

On constant looking back – is (Croatian) ethnomusicology oddly hiding from contemporaneity and what can be said in its defence?

This paper will tackle the question of ethnomusicology’s tendency to research the musics of the past within the context of Croatian scholarship. Part of the local and regional ethnomusicology was always turned towards collecting and analysing of older layers of traditional folk music, leaving big parts of the current music-making unnoticed. Many members of the younger generation of Croatian ethnographers turned their attention towards the subjects that the previous generations neglected, for example, researching the dynamics of socio-political and cultural changes in socialist and post-socialist times, hence again potentially neglecting many of the issues of today’s music-making. With this critique in mind, what can be said in the defence of historiographic research in ethnomusicology? Is ethnomusicological research of the musics of the past necessarily a way of “hiding” from the difficult contemporary questions, or can it be the opposite, a way of denuding problems of today? Opting for the latter, I offer results of the ethnographic research on Croatian folklore societies oriented towards the bourgeois and court dances. These societies claim to revive forgotten and neglected dances of a vanished social class and time revealing as much about the politics of the present as about the poetics of the past. I argue that their occurrence and popularity cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the ambivalent attitudes towards folklore in socialism and the subsequent reactionary tendencies of the folklore societies in the 1990s.

historiographic ethnomusicology, Croatian ethnomusicology, contemporaneity

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