List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Introduction
Part 1. Balkan Geographies
Chapter 1 Exodus
Sarajevo: little Jerusalem
Two peninsulas: the Sephardic diaspora
Singing the community: music of the Sephardim
Opening out: themes and developments
Chapter 2 Ecologies
Music and place
Ringed by mountains: the Oaş Country
On the voice: the Dinaric Alps and other mountains
Deep in Šumadija
Chapter 3 Displacements
Investing in place
Migrations: Serbs in a Habsburg world
Trading places: Greece and Anatolia
Tallava rules: Kosovars in Macedonia
Chapter 4 Ecumenes
In the minority
All together in Vojvodina
Orchestrating Thrace
Chapter 5 Centres
All in the family: mapping Montenegro
Finding the centre: people and traditions
East - West
Part 2. Historical Layers
Chapter 6 A Makam-Echos Culture
Grand narratives
Byzantine reflections
Ottoman canons
Chapter 7 Eastern Recessions
Allahu Ekber
Coffee break
Turning West
Chapter 8 Infrastructures
Littoral Balkans: Venice and the Adriatic
Mitteleuropa: the reach of the Habsburgs
Reciprocities: modernising the peripheries
The Principalities and beyond
Chapter 9 Nations
The first steps
Two nations
The Berlin Balkans
Yugoslavism
Chapter 10 Inspirers
Building the pyramids: reflections on high culture
Greeks ….
…. and other agents
Either/or: reflections on modernism
Part 3. Music in Transition
Chapter 11 Mixing It
Discourses of transition
Nuts and bolts: elements of popular music
On the record: surveying the legacy
Chapter 12 Join the Club
Following the leader: Manolis Kalomiris
Drawing the circle: the Greek National School
Another way: the failure of Greek modernism
Chapter 13 Moderna
Garlands: Stevan Mokranjac
One people, three names: the first Yugoslavia
Late arrivals: Croatian modernisms
Parallel tracks: Bulgarian advances
Transit to Prague
Chapter 14 Serbo-Croat
Who owns Slavenski?
From the Balkans …
…to the cosmos
Chapter 15 Placing Genius
A tempting comparison: locating George Enescu
Closing in: Enescu’s journey
Wider again: in the modernist canon
Part 4. Eastern Europe
Chapter 16 The Curtain Descends
Left, right….
In extremis: the singular case of Albania
Administered music: performing communism
Composers on message
Chapter 17 Diverging Paths
Traffic with Moscow
The acolyte: Bulgarian bridges
The zealot: Albanian austerities
The maverick: Romanian renewals
Chapter 18 Another Try
Politics versus culture: the second Yugoslavia
The dark decade: mainly Serbia
In from the cold: mainly Croatia, a little Slovenia, and back to
Serbia
Catching up: other republics
Chapter 19 Birthright of the People
Orchestras: classicising traditional music
Newly composed folk music
Simulacra: wedding music and more
Chapter 20 One Got Away
Popular art music: Theodorakis at large
Art music: modernism is official
Popular music: rebetika and beyond
Part 5. Global Balkans
Chapter 21 All Change
Brave new world
Another Balkans: the diasporic imagination
Composers in exile
Chapter 22 Conservation
Who needs classical music?
Has modern music really grown old?
Where have all the folksongs gone?
Chapter 23 Balkan Beat
Heroes
Reinscribing Yugoslavia
Divas
Greek mythology
Chapter 24 On Boundaries and Events
In theory
Greece and its neighbours
Music partitioned …
… and not quite partitioned
Chapter 25 Endgame
Degenerations
Generations
Balkan ghetto: the story of Kosovo
Are we there yet?
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Jim Samson. Emeritus Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on Chopin and Liszt, and on analytical and aesthetic topics in 19th and 20th century music. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds the Order of Merit of the Polish Ministry of Culture.
“Jim Samson’s Music in the Balkans is breathtaking. Its scope,
theoretical sophistication, interdisciplinary breadth, and
synthesis of a vast range of literatures, histories, and musical
styles is unparalleled within recent scholarly literature on the
Balkans.” - Roland Clark, Eastern Connecticut State University, in:
Balkanistica 29
"Music in the Balkans fills a huge void in the scholarship on art
music of southeast Europe and will equally serve native scholars in
and outside the region. While Balkan composers' achievements should
not be overstated, as Samson warns, their integration into the
European music canon is long overdue. This book shows the way." -
Ljerka V. Rasmussen, Tennessee State University, in: Slavic Studies
73/4
"Music in the Balkans is an important book that, like its subject,
defies easy categorisation. Ambitious in its scope, the book
repeatedly crosses ethnic, national, religious, historical and
disciplinary boundaries in what amounts to an idiosyncratically
structured yet comprehensive historical treatment of the
transmission, development and interaction of a wide range of
musical traditions and repertories—sacred and secular,
agrarian/traditional and urban/popular, Christian, Muslim and
Jewish, Ottoman and western art in South East Europe. Samson
displays sensitivity both to commonality and difference as he casts
light on a region ‘visited by musical styles whose centres
invariably lay elsewhere’ (662) as its peoples have been affected
over time by migration, imperialism, nation-building, displacement,
religious change and modernisation. What emerges is a Balkans
characterised by various forms of mediation conducted at levels
ranging from the individual to the trans-national that he conveys
through references to ‘bridges’ and states of being ‘in between’ or
‘in transition’. Samson's synthesis of vast quantities of
information about demotic, liturgical, popular, art and ‘popular
art’ traditions of music in the modern state of Greece is exemplary
in its coverage and critical discernment." - Alexander Lingas, City
University London, in: Ethnomusicology Forum 24.1 (February 2015),
pp.134-136
"Samson successfully combines academic discourse and a fresh and
unobtrusive personal approach, especially in polemically sensitive
areas. He should be given credit for not avoiding the sensitive
questions regarding the Yugoslav „wars of succession“ from the
1990s. The book as a whole is magnificently erudite, broad-minded
and coherent. Music in the Balkans is indeed a brilliant
achievement that will certainly prove to be indispensable and
inspiring for both scholars in Balkan studies and interested
laymen, and will no doubt be hard to surpass.“ - Melita Milin,
Principal Research Fellow, Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy
of Sciences, in: Musicology 16
"The book’s task is ambitious, and its intentions important: to
provide an account of art music, church music, popular music and
traditional music in the Balkans which will identify ‘patterns in
the cultural history of the region as a whole. [...] The strength
of Music in the Balkans is that it places all examples into the
longue durée [...] The aims and scope of Music in the Balkans mean
that research libraries with serious interests in the region should
not be without this book." - Catherine Baker, University of Hull,
in: European History Quarterly 44 (2014) [full review text:
http://ehq.sagepub.com/content/44/3/573.citation]
"The highly innovative potential of this volume, searching for
commonalities and not for differences in Balkan music history,
cannot be valued enough. The extensive and complete list of
references (mainly in Western European languages) on 31 pages is
worth alone buying this book. The book will surely have a lasting
and positive impact for all following studies on Balkan music for
two reasons: firstly, the attempt to look beyond the East-West
dichotomy as translated into music, and secondly, the visionary
call for a denationalisation of music history." - Eckehard
Pistrick, in: Anthropological Notebooks XIX/3 (2013)
"This book is a monumental contribution to musical scholarship; the
depth and range of the final product is astonishing. The book is
divided into five parts, of which the first, ‘Balkan Geographies’,
endeavours to explain something of the hugely complex
micro-geographies of the region, beginning with a discussion of the
Jewish presence in Sarajevo and covering ethnic groupings and
movements particularly in the former Yugoslavia and Greece. The
second, ‘Historical Layers’, cuts the cake vertically, discussing
such complex interrelationships as that between Byzantine chant and
Ottoman music (‘A Makam-Echos Culture’), the beginnings of
modernism, and the phenomenon of Yugoslavism. ‘Music in
Transition’, the third part, deals with the consequences of
modernism, the impact of nationalism and includes specific
contextualized case studies. The fourth part, ‘Eastern Europe’,
deals with the Communist period, and the political situation in
Greece. The fifth and final part, ‘Global Balkans’, gets to grips
with the maelstrom of confusion that has characterized the region’s
post-Communist history. Conclusions might be thought perhaps
impossible, but Samson does not shrink from trying to pull all the
threads together in his substantial final chapter, ‘Endgame’.
‘There is’, he says, ‘a narrative of emancipation, but there is
also a narrative of homecoming, of roots. There is a strong current
drawing this region inexorably westwards, but there are eddies,
undertows, that pull it back constantly to the East.’ This neatly
enshrines the complexity, the paradoxical quality and the
astounding richness of the Balkans so well presented in this
outstanding book." - Ivan Moody, in: International Record Review
(April 2014), pp. 78-79
"A many-voiced world of opinion and thought is opened up. This work
is unprecedented in its compass, and its insights apply far more
broadly than its remit." - Kim Burton, in: Songlines 98, p. 82
“a hugely significant contribution to our understanding of this
region's culture.” - Adrian Thomas, Cardiff University
"Eίναι η συσσώρευση έγκυρων πληροφοριών, η σοφή και ευέλικτη
ερμηνεία τους, βασιζόμενη σε αντιμαχόμενες αισθητικές,
κοινωνιολογικές και
πολιτικές θεωρίες, και σε βαθιά γνώση της μουσικής ιστοριογραφίας,
η μουσική ευαισθησία, η κατανόηση της πολιτιστικής ατμόσφαιρας, η
ακρίβεια, η καθαρότητα και η πυκνότητα της έκφρασης." - Καίτη
Ρωμανού, in: Пολυφωνία volume 24 (2014), pp. 136-144
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