engleski

Musical Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Croatian Civic Press, Ethnomusicological Sources and Kuhač’s Legacy in the 1920s and 1930s

Until today, the oeuvre of Franjo Ksaver Kuhač has remained indispensable for understanding historical processes in Croatian traditional music from the end of the 19th century up to now, as well as for comprehending changes within the subject of ethnomusicological research. During the 1920s and 1930s, the influence of Kuhač’s oeuvre was somewhat limited: the public sphere was characterized by the endeavours of the society Seljačka sloga (The Peasants’ Concord) to equate national culture with an autochthonous peasant folk culture, and the cultural- historical approach started to develop within the scholarly sphere. The blending of autochthonous culture and cultural- historical interpretations has been extended up until today, along with a part of Kuhač’s insights and ideas adopted by them. The intention of this paper is to revisit this conventional framework of historical changes in Croatian traditional music and its research, by adding data and views on folk and popular music in Croatian civic press – mostly the journals Svijet and Kulisa – in the formative period of the discourse and practice of the Seljačka sloga society during the 1920s and 1930s. These journals are basic sources on popular music in Croatia between the two world wars, being at the same time important for understanding social dynamics of the folk music of the period. They reported on and advocated a kind of musical cosmopolitanism, in distinction from the musical nationalism of Seljačka sloga. At the same time they implicitly questioned the very opposition between folk and popular (as well as rural vs. urban, Croatian vs. foreign, participational vs. presentational, etc.). Therefore, it seems as if they indicated the future understanding of traditional music, which was established only by the contextual ethnomusicology of the 1970s. In all that, Kuhač’s legacy could have been a foothold and/or inspiration for both cosmopolitans and nationalists. In other words, it is of unquestionable durability in scholarly and broader cultural spheres.

cosmopolitanism, nationalism, traditional music, civic press, ethnomusicology, Franjo Kuhač, Croatia

engleska inačica članka objavljenog u Arti musices 2012