In January 1967 I was approached by the New York publishing house J. J. Knopf with a request to write an entry on ‘the Balkans’ for a planned one-volume encyclopaedia of music. I was still a graduate student at Oxford and despite feeling flattered by the offer, I replied that in my opinion it would not be possible, and certainly not wise, to lump the whole of the Balkans into one entry and that, if they wanted me to do the job, I would write separate entries on Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia. My suggestion was accepted, I wrote the entries, but then the project was abandoned (I got my fee, however). I remember thinking that it was possible only for someone in the offices of J. J. Knopf, miles and worlds away from the Balkans, to get the idea of a single entry, and that even if such an entry were to be written, it would have to come from the pen of someone who had no direct link with any of the cultures of the peninsula and was totally free of prejudice. In spite of the failed project, I was grateful to J. J. Knopf for providing me with an impetus to look at the history of (art) music across the Balkans. I certainly learnt a lot, saw some parallels and, equally, became aware of some huge differences in the ways in which chronologies, compositional activity, musical idioms, musical institutions and forms of musical life worked across the peninsula. A fascinating range of diversities, but a range that – to me at the time – did not make much sense when looked at as a whole, apart from some obvious similarities that are likely to be observed in a parallel study of any group of adjacent areas. Since then much has changed in our perceptions in general and in the way we do musicology, and Jim Samson's Music in the Balkans, impressive in its scope, stretching as it does over the fields of folk, art and pop music, offers many fascinating insights.

The Balkans

The very term ‘the Balkans’ is not just geographically vague, it is emotionally loaded. A region of permanent turmoil, an exotic backwater of Europe, an area inhabited by nations who hate their immediate neighbours and, if united with them in a common state, wish to break apart (in other words, to put into practice a process known as ‘Balkanization’) – these are some of the notions associated with the Balkans. Indeed, if ‘the Balkans’ did not exist, they would have to be invented in order to provide the rest of Europe with an object onto which their own failures could be transferred – a scapegoat for all the unseemly historical and political debris to which ‘the more cultured nations’ would rather not own up. Even the geographical term is vague and difficult to define. Although Balkan (in the singular) is the name of a mountain range in present-day Bulgaria, this range by no means defines the area in the way in which, say, the Apennines provide the dorsal bone of Italy. The term ‘Balkan peninsula’ can be attributed to the German geographer J. A. Zeune, who first used it in his Gea: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Erdbeschreibung (Berlin, 1808). Zeune made a colossal mistake by assuming that the Balkan range stretches continuously between its Bulgarian location in the east towards Istria and the Alps in the north-west.Footnote ¹ He was equally vague about the northern border of the peninsula. The Iberian and the Apennine peninsulas had the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively as their northern limits, but what about the Balkans? Zeune preferred to describe the region in terms of the states that controlled it and the peoples that inhabited it. The states were Austria, Turkey in Europe, the fledgling Greek Free State and, yes, Britain, who controlled the Ionian Islands. Zeune listed the peoples as: the Greeks, Slavs, Wallachians or Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Germans, Turks and Gypsies. The Balkans thus came to be defined primarily politically and ethnically, rather than geographically.Footnote ²

Soon a confusion arose because of the emotions with which the European, particularly the British, philhellenists viewed Greece. Believing that somehow the modern Greeks had escaped all historical changes and were immune from the influence of the peoples with whom they interacted over the centuries (the Turks, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Albanians), they took them to be the preservers of pristine classical values, which in turn required the peoples to the north of them to be considered in ancient terms as the Hyperboreans – untouched by the blessings of civilization and hence barbarians (Samson hints at this on p. 133). The absurdity of this view is clear when the details are laid out, but the belief is widespread and even the current Oxford English Dictionary states: ‘In recent use, however, Greece and Turkey are less likely to be considered part of the Balkans. The term is now primarily associated with the region north of Greece, and particularly with Albania and those countries which made up Yugoslavia.’Footnote ³ The northern limits of the peninsula seem equally movable at a whim. If Greece is not in the Balkans, it is not logical that Slovenia, which certainly ‘made up Yugoslavia’, is in the Balkans, for neither its history nor its geographical location (the south-eastern ranges of the Alps) link it to ‘the Balkans’. Of course, one could simply be emotional and take the Balkans to be what one wants them to be. The Austrian chancellor Metternich remarked that ‘the Balkans begin on the Rennweg’ – the Landstrasse which in his time was in a south-eastern suburb of Vienna, and is now well within the city limits. Metternich wanted to say that the political order, which he wanted to ensure in his dictatorial manner, easily broke down the moment one went a little way away from the very centre of power. The Balkans to him meant not only the Slav lands to the south, but also the Hungarian lands to the south-east.

The irrational web of beliefs and impressions and the shaky historical arguments that have been linked to the Balkans make it so difficult to grasp this geopolitical concept that the very idea of writing a book devoted to both the folk and the art music in the Balkans seems an act of some considerable scholarly audacity. Yet it is not a non-subject, precisely because geographical areas do have their individuality and display continuums of historical sense – in general requiring a great deal of hindsight, meaning also that the necessary ‘historical sense’ can easily become a product of an individual's power of imagination. Having started to plan the contents of his Music in the Balkans, Samson must have been facing a seemingly amorphous mass of detail, wondering where to start.Footnote ⁴ His first step was an ingenious one: the book opens with a discussion of the Jewish Sephardi tradition in the Balkans, the Jews having arrived there after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. In the Balkans, the Jews never took part in the jostling for positions of national or regional supremacy that was typical of the national groupings among which they settled, and instead provided an undervalued web of cultural consistency and stability that was transnational, yet open to all the influences that coexistence in a defined space brings upon a single culture. During the Serbian siege of Sarajevo (1992–5), one of the rare points where medicines were available was the pharmacy set up in the offices of the Jewish community. Above the counter was a large inscription: ‘If you cannot get the medicine you need, do not blame us but those for whom you had voted.’ If the war in Bosnia was provoked by an excess of nationalist fervour, then the Jewish community wanted to proclaim that it stood outside, indeed above, the war, although its members were at the mercy of Serbian gunners from the hills surrounding the city just as much as anyone else in Sarajevo. The urban youth of Sarajevo, equally eager to proclaim their distance from the nationalist way of thinking, took to singing old Sephardi ballads as a symbol not only of the people who had traditionally suffered, but also of the people whose ancestors, having found refuge in Bosnia, now served as a cohesive force in a divided society. Samson's decision to start from perhaps the only musical tradition which spread across the whole of the Balkans was a very appropriate one: dealing with an area of national and linguistic diversity, one needs a relatively firm starting point, and preferably a point which is not situated in some imaginary and mythologized past.

The Sephardi Ladino culture and music stretched from Bulgaria and Greece (especially Salonica) to Bosnia and to the cities of the former Venetian Dalmatia. And here is an interesting, symbolic detail: it is the Ladino tradition that ties Dalmatia to its mountainous Bosnian hinterland – the sinews lead from Dubrovnik and Split, both boasting early sixteenth-century Jewish communities, towards even more numerous communities in Mostar, Sarajevo and further east. The Dalmatian coastal strip, long ruled and culturally influenced by Venice, should be seen as a part of the Mediterranean commonwealth, while the Balkans have traditionally been judged as somehow distinct from the Mediterranean. However, the spread of the Jewish Ladino culture created a link between the coast and its hinterland, so that the justification for imposing imaginary cultural borders becomes very weak indeed. Yet, if one bears in mind that madrigals were dedicated to Dubrovnik noblemen and that Venetian-style liturgical music was composed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dalmatia,Footnote ⁵ while in the hinterland, in Bosnia, a completely different cultural pattern was in existence, then suddenly the idea of the border does not appear to be out of place. Philip Bohlman has written about the perception of the Other in relation to the Jews of Venice and their music, but the pattern can be perfectly well extended to the Balkans, an area which lay outside Bohlman's concerns.Footnote ⁶ The nature of the Other appears to be subject to political considerations and the perceptions of the observer. An English traveller in the Balkans in the 1860s offers an interesting argument:

We may think that Tozer had prescience, since, of course, in 1914 there appeared ‘an assertor’, and there was a war. However, the ‘benefit that had been gained by years of preparation’ was in Tozer's imagination to lead to a self-governing, Turkish-dominated state in the Balkans, since he believed in the magic balance of power theory, presupposing a steady equilibrium between Austria and Turkey. Anything that might upset this balance would be a bad thing – bad for the Great Powers, that is. Tozer was blind to the fact that movements for national emancipation were gaining in importance and that they would act as a counterforce to the schemes of the Great Powers. This is, of course, the root of the Balkan curse, if there is such a thing, since conflicts of interest in various ways engulf all Balkan nations, causing them to become proxies for the interests of their protectors in Europe, while fondly believing in the sanctity and purity of their national goals.

Although Samson does not write explicitly about politics, a political dimension informs just about everything that the history of music in various Balkan countries might subsume. One may say that the role of politics is undisputed whenever music is viewed in its social context, and that therefore the Balkan countries are no exception. The special case of the Balkans may be seen in the fact that only in Slovenia, Istria, Dalmatia and those parts of Croatia that escaped Turkish conquest is there an unbroken tradition of layering in musical practices: here for centuries folk practices coexisted with the ‘art’ music which did not necessarily nourish itself on the sources of folk music, operating instead on (rarely) original or (mostly) imitative applications of Central and Western European models. The folk and the art layers were two aspects of musical experience – one would now say two musics – reflecting societies in which the Catholic Church, cultured aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie (the last particularly in Dalmatian coastal towns) followed a different pattern from that of folk music-making, without the two patterns ever conflicting with each other. Greece is another interesting case, for there in the nineteenth century a strong Italian influence on the Ionian Islands enabled a number of musicians to gain a level of sophistication still denied to their contemporaries in Turkish-dominated Serbia and Bulgaria. Elsewhere, folk musical practices were absolutely dominant. However, once the resurgent national consciousness and the crumbling Turkish rule created the need for definitions of national identity, folk music became an important political commodity. The singing of ‘the people’ was appropriated as a symbol of national awakening, but soon this idealistic romantic image became saturated with elements of political import: while Western scholars interested in the folk music of this region employed a method of contrasting the music of the West with that of the Balkans, a different approach was adopted in the emerging Balkan countries. This approach was shaped by the urge to determine the identity of national groups living in close proximity to each other, or even to discriminate between layers of authenticity within a single grouping. What was ‘genuinely’ Greek (Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian …), as opposed to some usually imagined corruption of the pristine national ideal, became a favourite theme of politicians. This gave rise to value judgments that defined the Other not in terms of large-scale cultural confrontations such as the West–East one, but by reducing everything to a much narrower scale. Certain musical practices were deemed foreign or coloured by some alien (especially Turkish) elements and therefore undesirable even if the supposedly alien elements belonged to a subgroup within a larger national whole. The search for the very kernel of a national soul in music or dance reflected, of course, the positivist inspiration of much early ethnomusicology, but in the Balkans any desire to be ‘objective’ in the positivist sense was completely lacking. Music was a tool of national politics, the last refuge of a scoundrel, to vary Samuel Johnson's much-quoted adage. Samson does approach this issue from time to time, but one wishes for a more detailed and integrated sociological insight. Class aspirations and the tensions between the urban classes on the one side and the village and small-town dwellers with their agrarian peasant views of communality on the other often created tensions that drew music into the political domain, yet this context remains largely underexplored.

Places, myths, sounds

Much has been made of the epic songs of the Balkans, of which several varieties existed in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Bulgaria. Undoubtedly, these songs once performed a valuable role in illiterate societies, serving as vehicles for individual creativity in communities deprived of written sources and acting as focal points at social gatherings. The philhellenic critical approach saw in the epic songs noble modern survivals of the ancient Homeric tradition, elevated to the position of a quasi-sacred object. Antiquity, morality and chivalry were ardently sought and found in the epic repertory, and the fact that prominent figures of the Enlightenment and Romanticism (foremost among them Goethe) were enthusiastic about what they understood these songs to be gave them in the eyes of the emerging Balkan intelligentsia a useful legitimation, and contributed to the process by which the accounts of heroic deeds in the epic repertory became a valued currency of nationalism. The persistent identification of aspects of folk tradition with politics, usually of the extreme kind, was demonstrated in the 1990s during the war in Croatia and Bosnia. On the one hand, the ancient gusle and the heroic song became symbols of Serbian nationalism, with even Radovan Karadžić being shown in a 1990s news item on BBC television inexpertly trying to produce some sound on the gusle, while on the other hand, at the traditional chivalric contest in Sinj, the hub of regressive Croatian nationalism, a Croat gusle player could have been heard singing the praises of some of the Croatians indicted at the Court of Human Rights at The Hague. Such cases only help to endorse Adorno's condemnation of folk-inspired art: ‘Chopin's work [the F minor Fantasy, op. 49, from 1841], dating from his late period, may well be the last in which a nationalism attacks oppressors without celebrating an oppression of its own. All subsequent national music is poisoned, both socially and esthetically.’Footnote ⁸ Even Samson seems to have had these words somewhere in his subconscious mind when he mentions Chopin as an example of national feeling that did not contain within it an explosive charge (p. 305). Unfortunately, Chopin has been swept aside by subsequent waves of nationalist sentiments in music which, even if linked to noble causes, only too easily became corrupted by the appropriation of music by populist leaders and assertive regimes.

Political manipulations of music, especially folk music, required the formation of a sacred national canon, often linked in some symbolic way to places of special significance such as those associated with pilgrimage or past military glory. ‘Don't mention folk music to me!’ said a Bulgarian friend of mine, long resident in Britain, when I told her that I was writing this review. To her, folk music meant mass political meetings and youth rallies in Stalinist Bulgaria – music which had lost all of its light and optimism becoming a tool of social engineering. Of course, away from the Balkans, in Western Europe, this political content vanishes, as modern society imposes another burden on it: folk art becomes a marketable commodity, at the mercy of concert promoters and record producers. Eugenia Georgieva, the leader of the Bulgarian Perunika Trio in London, told Garth Cartwright: ‘I came to the UK in 2000. At the time, it was difficult to do anything in Bulgarian music, as things were such a mess, so I shifted to London and first sang for dance-music producers. An agent advised me to do Bulgarian folk music, and it has drawn me back to my roots.’Footnote ⁹ Of course, it is the local colour that mattered to the London agent, while all the connotations that may have been present in the minds of those who lived closer to the music's source were removed. Similarly, it would be difficult for many in the former Yugoslavia to accept the sound of the Serbian gusle as a purely musical phenomenon, unconnected to the myths of Serbian national glory that played such an important part in the destructive wars of the 1990s. However, far from the Balkans, the sound of the gusle, incorporated into the works of Aleksandra Vrebalov and Milica Paranosić, two young Serbian composers, both living and working in the United States and addressing American audiences, becomes through cultural transplantation cleansed of all undesirable associations.Footnote ¹⁰

What seems innocent or unproblematic from a distance remains forever burdened by history in the Balkans. Places and regions as traditional repositories of national consciousness are a part of Samson's method of constructing the complex picture of the Balkans overall. To this end he pays special attention to three locations: Thrace, conveniently spanning a zone of interaction between the Bulgarian and the Greek cultures; Vojvodina, until 1918 a Hungarian province and now in northern Serbia, representing an Austro-Hungarian Empire in miniature, where Serbs, Hungarians, Germans and Romanians lived intermingled lives; and finally Šumadija, a region in central Serbia, south of the Danube and east of the Drina. Thrace, with its ancient connotations, its mixture of peoples and languages and its location further to the east, is conveniently marked as ‘the point at which Europe might be said truly to begin’ (p. 92). Šumadija, in central Serbia, differs in the sense that nations and languages did not mix there, but this small area becomes especially problematic when viewed in the context of recent political history. Because of its connections with the beginnings of the Serbian uprising against the Turks in 1804 and with the Karađorđević family, the later royal house of Serbia and the first Yugoslavia (1918–41), Šumadija has special weight in the Serbian psyche. Šumadija, as Samson observes, has received a boost in the post-Yugoslav new Serbia: there is ‘renewed interest in Šumadijan traditional music in certain circles today, and there are sustained attempts to “recover” it, not least because it can be read rather easily as an assertion of ethnic identity against the homogenising tendencies of the modern nation state’ (p. 56). There is more to this seemingly matter-of-fact statement than meets the eye, and the references to ‘certain circles’ and ‘read rather easily’ hint at a hidden set of pointers; one wishes that Samson had been more explicit in what he had to say. The ‘circles’ are those which nowadays glorify Šumadija as the stronghold of the anti-Communist Chetnik movement, viewed as an authentic expression of Serbian national sentiment, as opposed to the pro-Yugoslav, Communist-led Partisan resistance in the Second World War – a favourite theme in modern nationalist Serbia. Samson's hint at an ‘easy reading’ is not strong enough to reveal the truth that rather than Šumadijan music being a means of opposing the homogenizing tendencies of the modern state, as he claims, the opposite is true: it has become a nationalist sacred object, a means of invigorating the nationalist state and of opposing cultural diversity.

‘Folk’ versus ‘art’

The balancing of the themes of folk music and art music was obviously in Samson's mind, and one should welcome his intention to rebalance it in favour of art music. He draws attention (p. 472) to the discrepancy in favour of folk music in the entry on Yugoslavia in the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980): five columns on art music, 23 on folk music. I remember that at the time I was asked to write the section on art music, I imagined that folk music would be given a similar space. When The New Grove came out I was rather shocked to see the relative length of the respective sections, and a disappointed Slovenian musicologist remarked to me: ‘The wide musicological world is still interested in us only as the dancers of the kolo.’Footnote ¹¹ In the consciousness of many older Central and Western European scholars writing about the music of Eastern Europe (in any case a term difficult to free from inherited clichés and prejudices), the link between art music and folk music was regularly perceived as being much stronger than in the rest of Europe. This is not an objective state of affairs, but rather evidence of the need to create an Other in music historiography and to show the superiority of the Western model. It is a credit to Samson that in the overall planning of his book the need to revise this attitude has been taken so seriously.

Samson's study does not cover a defined historical period in art music, though the general tendency of his narrative is to single out the nineteenth century as the time at which the politically motivated movements for national emancipation provided a boost to the development, indeed, to the ‘rise’ of art music, thus creating the basis for further exploration of trends in the twentieth century. This opens a historiographical can of worms, since the concept of the rise hints rather too strongly at the Hegelian or even positivist view of formation, ripening and decline, and is bound to provoke criticism in certain quarters. It is difficult, though, to imagine a different approach, because several Balkan countries experienced in the nineteenth century a rush to embrace a series of musical ready-mades, as it were – styles and genres already well established further west and north of them. This gives a definite timetable for charting music history – clear in some regions, more complex in others. That Dalmatia, northern Croatia and Slovenia had a longer unbroken history of musical institutions hints at a danger that older periods are seen as simply preparatory for something more important to emerge later. The Mass and psalm settings by Tomaso Cecchino (c.1583–1644), written on the Dalmatian island of Hvar, belong, of course, to the history of music in the peripheral regions of the Serenissima, and the symphonies of the Dubrovnik aristocrat Luka Sorkočević (1734–89) are pre-Classical and Italianate, with no direct impact beyond the walls of Dubrovnik. Yet it would be difficult to exclude these works from a history of music in Croatia on the grounds that they do not fit easily into the scheme of the ‘awakening of the national spirit’ set up by the nineteenth-century Croatian ideologues of the Illyrian movement, just as it would be absurd to exclude the music of Peter Philips and William Boyce from the history of English music on the grounds that they do not lead directly into the revivalist movement of Elgar's time. The operas by the Greek Ionian composers (Pavlos Carrer, Spyridion Xyndas, Spyros Samaras) likewise do not easily fit into the history of Greek music viewed in the context of a culture emerging in a newly independent nineteenth-century state in the Balkans, but as aesthetic objects they once existed and made an impact and are therefore a part of a nation's cultural history.

It is not surprising that Samson encountered difficulties when attempting to construct an all-embracing scheme encompassing the ideologically interesting events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the musically interesting artefacts that existed before, or even during, these developments. Slovenia presented him with an especially tricky problem, and his solution (a sleight of hand, even) was to view Slovenia as a part of the Balkans only during its inclusion in the Yugoslav state (1918–91), but to see it as a part of Central Europe before that, and – by extension of that logic – after 1991. However, it remains unclear whether, following from this, one would need to investigate how the musical milieux of the ‘Central European’ Ljubljana and the ‘Balkan’ Belgrade now differ from, say, 40 years ago, when these two cities were in the same state. In this context it is significant that the only attempt before Samson at a history of music encompassing a broader sweep of the Balkans, in this case all of the Slavonic-populated Balkans, and transcending national borders came from the pen of a Slovenian musicologist. Dragotin Cvetko's pioneering Musikgeschichte der Südslawen was written for and published by Bärenreiter in 1975 (i.e. before The New Grove); it was primarily addressed to the reading public in Central Europe, and in it Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were treated together.Footnote ¹² Rather surprisingly, Samson does not refer to this edition and includes in his bibliography only a Slovenian version published in 1981 (i.e. around the time of The New Grove), thus making Cvetko's study appear to look inwards instead of recognizing its ground-breaking role of opening up the Balkans to the mainstream of European music historiography.

Samson in any case seems to have found Greece and the areas of the former Yugoslavia more interesting than some of the other countries. Without the need for a tedious page-counting exercise, it seems that Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia provided him with more interesting material and threw up more interesting critical issues than, say, Bulgaria or Romania. This is quite aside from any engagement with the evaluation of individual composers and their work. Bulgaria and, after all, Greece, produced some fine composers, both in the genres of the characteristic ‘national’ style and in the modernist vein. In the case of Romania, the significant personality of George Enescu offered Samson one of the two pivotal case studies of what makes a composer outgrow his Balkan base and display a European breadth of vision. Here he had to assess such a figure from two different angles: as a national composer, bringing a more or less exotic sound to Central and Western Europe, and as simply a composer, schooled in the mainstream tradition, and contributing to it significant and original works. This duality always carries with itself the danger that an original creative spirit would be pigeon-holed and labelled so that the originality itself becomes attributable to some vaguely defined ethnic roots. Liszt had exploited this duality, cashing in on his skilfully exoticized Hungarian background, and at one point Enescu seemed to follow in his path with the two Romanian Rhapsodies – or is it that audiences outside Romania wished to perceive him as a latter-day Liszt, unthinkingly constructing a cliché applicable to a figure from the periphery? Samson was very sensitive to this duality, and in pointing out that in Enescu the ‘dialectic between improvisatory freedom and a unity of musical substance has some symbolic potency, and especially to the extent that it generalises aspects of traditional music’ (p. 403), he offered a very incisive explanation of what it is that makes Enescu an important composer.

Samson's other pivotal figure is the Croatian-born Josip Stolzer-Slavenski, who, though 15 years Enescu's junior, died in the same year (1955). He is in many ways the ideal example of a composer ‘from the Balkans’ whose life and career were shaped by a whole host of historical and political forces of fundamental relevance to the countries in which he lived and who struggled with the opposing tendencies of nationalism and internationalism only to be misunderstood and vilified from just about all sides. Born in 1896 in northern Croatia, in an area of conflicting Croatian and Hungarian influences, he was prodigiously gifted. He studied briefly in Budapest before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, existed precariously in Varaždin and Zagreb after the war, and studied with Vitězslav Novák in Prague for a couple of years. He finally moved to a teaching post in Belgrade, the capital of the new Yugoslavia, whose formation he enthusiastically welcomed as a protection against Hungarian aspirations in his native Međimurje.

With a German-sounding surname, Stolzer-Slavenski felt that he needed a Slavonic-sounding one and opted for Slavenski. Nevertheless, in Zagreb he was always better known as Stolzer/Štolcer or Stolzer-Slavenski, while in Belgrade he was simply Slavenski, the name under which Schott published him. After a period of neglect and near oblivion in the 1940s and early 1950s, he posthumously regained the reputation he deserved. All the turmoil of his time impacted on him, personally and musically, and the burden of his identity continues to be associated with his name. In Zagreb he is a Croatian composer, in Belgrade he is a Serbian one, with his Yugoslavism played down in Zagreb, while in Belgrade it is twisted into some sort of greater-Serbian brand of the Yugoslav label. There is so much political and ideological baggage heaped on the shoulders of this hapless man that any understanding of his music becomes nearly impossible. Samson's question (and chapter heading) ‘Who Owns Slavenski?’ is approached and answered in the light of the information he could get from recent Croatian and Serbian sources, both printed and, as it seems, oral. Following the ideas of some contemporary Serbian musicologists, Samson devotes some space to a discussion of the putative influence on Slavenski of the confused pseudo-Dada ideologue Ljubomir Micić, though the only attestable links between the two are the fact that in 1925 Micić published in his review Zenit a piano piece by ‘Stolzer’, composed back in 1912, and in 1926 Slavenski sent Micić a rather flippant greeting from ‘the foggy Paris’: ‘Please receive my sincere and friendly greetings, firmly believing that your path leads towards victory over our common enemies: intellectual poverty, reactionary forces and the impotent Europe!’Footnote ¹³

Caught between the need to affirm his undoubted originality and to provide a systematic backbone to his musical style, Slavenski was too easily swayed into believing that originality did not require creative discipline. He started confidently, and the success of his First String Quartet at Donaueschingen in 1924, as well as Erich Kleiber's championing of his orchestral music, boded well. Yet from the beginning he faced a dilemma between the need to address a wider world by joining the European international avant-garde and the compulsion to assert his otherness, to stress his credentials as a man from the periphery, proud of his originality. Whereas Enescu retained a sense of proportion and was able to command respect internationally, Slavenski overestimated the power of the raw spirit. It is not difficult to recognize in Slavenski's music from the 1920s a somewhat delayed attempt to oppose the worn-out gestures of late Romanticism by means similar to those of Bartók, Ives and early Stravinsky: a need to free the creative spirit from the chains of bourgeois conformity. His early interest in clusters and aleatory notation and his at times near-atonal idiom were certainly remarkable, yet he made no attempt to harness any of these elements into strong guiding principles, and he burnt out too soon. In addition, by the late 1920s in Europe this Dionysian phase was largely over, so that Slavenski carried in himself the seeds of the neglect into which he would fall, overtaken by the tamer, Apollonian mannerisms of neoclassicism.Footnote ¹⁴ The arrival of Nazism further weakened the lifeline that Slavenski maintained with the European mainstream through his publisher, Schott. In spite of his ‘folklorism’, he is someone who needs to be evaluated and understood on a wider European scale, above the regional ties to either Serbia or Croatia, or even the Balkans – a tragic example of how local concerns hinder the brave ones who dare to forge an independent path.

From painting a picture on a broad canvas and with a large brush, Samson had to alter his perspective once he started to explore stylistic and ideological trends between the 1920s and, say, the 1960s. Like everyone else dealing with music in this part of Europe, he was hampered by the lack of printed scores. Music of many composers, even some of the important ones, is still either unavailable in print or exists in sources difficult to access; though, on the whole, plenty of recordings are available in the archives of radio stations. Samson therefore had to rely on listening – not only to the music but also to a considerable number of interlocutors to whom he expresses his gratitude in the introduction (pp. 4–5). One may conjecture that this method often denied him a chance to double-check and verify some of his sources. This exposed him to the danger of misreading. One of his lines of argument, for instance, is that Croatian music of the 1920s and 1930s tended towards conservatism, while some of the younger Serbian composers, once they started going in the 1930s to Prague to study, became champions of the avant-garde. This is true, but only on the surface, and at one point he admits this: ‘It was one thing to produce music like this in Prague. It was quite another to bring it back to Belgrade’ (p. 367). Rather than comparing interwar Serbia with neighbouring Croatia, one may say that Croatian music and ideology of the period display some interesting parallels with English music. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Antun Dobronić had much in common with their desire to build a symphonic style on the basis of folk material, and Dobronić's reluctance to go for straight opera, preferring titles such as ‘dramatic mystery’, chimes with some of the English music of the time. Croatian reluctance to embrace a bolder, Central European idiom had much to do with the feeling that the centuries of being a part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were now over, and there was also a chance to escape from the dominance not only of Vienna but also of the Verdian idiom of Croatian late nineteenth-century opera – the belief that home soil had a lot to offer was strong. Neoclassicism was, likewise, not a Viennese phenomenon, and therefore was more welcome, so that the issue of conservatism, as Samson raises it, does not really apply.

Some of the Croatian composers believed that the solid musical institutions of Zagreb were able to offer everything that was needed, just as in London at that time there was suspicion about studying composition abroad. Only a few of the more enterprising ones were keen to look elsewhere. Blagoje Bersa, the Vienna-trained influential composition teacher at Zagreb Conservatoire, wrote in his diary on 20 September 1926: ‘This morning Spiller (Miroslav) left for Berlin. I gave him a letter of recommendation for Schrecker [sic]. Weiss (Leo) is also going to Berlin in a few days’ time. Interesting: Jews dream about Berlin, Schönberg and the German school – they do not realize that Yugoslavia has become a reality!’Footnote ¹⁵ Bersa's claim that the Jews were hankering for ‘the German school’ because of their lack of patriotism is an example of low-level anti-Semitism typical of his time. On the contrary, Spiller was a convinced Yugoslav, though he was able to see quite early on that the reality of Yugoslavia did not necessarily remove dangers of provincialism, which remained present in Zagreb as well as in Belgrade.Footnote ¹⁶ In Croatia, in addition, ways were sought to oppose domination by Serbia under the guise of Yugoslavia, and the rise of the populist Croatian Peasant Party added strength to the feeling that folk culture, combined with modernism, had much to offer. It is therefore an unfortunate misreading of Samson's (p. 367) to claim that the beginnings of the doctrine of social realism, in force in Yugoslav art in the period 1946–c.1956, were to be traced to Miroslav Krleža's influential 1933 artistic manifesto, a preface to the catalogue of an exhibition of works by the painter Krsto Hegedušić. Rather than being an early adherent of social realism, which Samson implies, Krleža, a maverick Communist, was among the first to sense that the early signs emanating from the Soviet Union, and influencing some of the Yugoslav leftists, contained a danger. The essay, referred to by Samson, is in fact a warning:

This had long-term consequences, being only one of a number of pointers of the fact that Zagreb intellectuals, especially the left-leaning ones, displayed an independence of spirit that, in a rather subdued manner, continued after the formation of the socialist Yugoslavia in 1945. Many an eyebrow will be raised in Zagreb and Ljubljana at Samson's claim: ‘In general Zagreb and Ljubljana lacked the “wider open” quality that had characterised Belgrade at its best during the inter-war period’ (p. 471). There is no evidence to support this claim, and I suggest that the opposite is true: Belgrade concert programmes were more conservative and the city was on the whole less open to modern tendencies than the other two centres. Slavenski, though working in Belgrade, was vilified by the Belgrade critics, who tended to be conservative, and his only real champions in Yugoslavia were Berg's pupil Rikard Schwarz and the Slovene Slavko Osterc. Of course, modern tendencies were brought to Belgrade by a group of younger Prague-educated composers in the 1930s, but their music was virtually unknown and left no impact on audiences.Footnote ¹⁸ Since he significantly overestimates the strength of Serbian progressive tendencies in the 1930s, Samson is open to further contradictions. He claims that it was ‘intriguing that this seminal event [the Zagreb Biennale of Contemporary Music, founded in 1961], as also the Opatija Festival, should have occurred in Croatia’ (p. 479). Not at all – Zagreb was in fact an obvious place, since its adherence to modernism, though not unproblematic, was more deeply rooted than that of Belgrade. It is therefore curious to see that what on the one hand appears as a contradiction in terms of the flow of Samson's own argument suddenly turns out to be true when considered in its own right: ‘Where the best of Serbian music since the war tended to look inwards, and to wrestle with issues of cultural identity, Croatian music seemed to merge seamlessly and easily into the mainstreams of European modernism’ (p. 480). If this stands, and my feeling is that it does, then the logic of Samson's preceding argument becomes suddenly subverted.

Whereas in the rest of Europe and to an extent the rest of the Balkans music during the last 40 or so years can be assessed in an unbroken continuum, Yugoslavia experienced a traumatic period of breakup and the ensuing wars. This has left a colossal impact on creative trends, personalities and institutions, and the pre-1990s and the post-1990s appear as two sometimes markedly different periods. Paradoxically, the war brought the music of younger Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian composers to the attention of audiences in the West to a higher degree than before, since unfavourable conditions at home caused a number of younger composers to emigrate and establish themselves in Austria, Germany, France, Britain and the United States. Most of the information that Samson seems to have had at his disposal relates to the young Serbian diaspora, but the trends are similar elsewhere. The composer and conductor Mladen Tarbuk, a very lively presence in the musical life of Zagreb, looking back recently to the heady days of the Zagreb Biennale of Contemporary Music, made a very pertinent observation that sums up the relation between music and political trends:

Tarbuk's diagnosis is not necessarily typical only of Croatia, or – viewed within the framework of Samson's book – Serbia, Bulgaria or Greece. What he says applies much more broadly, even to the United States, where modernism is likewise under attack and ‘the search for the essence of the national being’ (as opposed to the international and the European influence) fuels an anti-modernist ideology.Footnote ²⁰

Samson recognizes that the problem of interaction between politics and music continues to have its special weight in the countries under his scrutiny. But there is in this interaction a particular paradox. As, historically, in individual countries political and cultural trends differed in detail (even if countries like Croatia and Serbia appear to the outside observer as being almost indistinguishable), a synthetic historical account works only on the macro-level. This is the level on which Samson succeeds in this impressive and wide-ranging volume. Once he sharpens his focus, looking into details and formulating critical judgments, he faces the fact that, whether he wants it or not, each country emerges as a special case and the macro-level becomes overpowered by the specifics of the micro-level. It is difficult to judge whether this is an unwanted consequence or whether, as I am inclined to believe, it is impossible to avoid the fact that individual countries obstinately resist any imposition of a universal view. Such a view is more likely to succeed in the area of folk music, but, as Samson moves distinctly towards a detailed coverage of art music, the universal view weakens, until it briefly re-emerges once one begins to deal with very recent critical issues that fit into the global linking of cultural phenomena. An example of this is the comparison I attempted to draw between the assessments of attitudes to modernism in Croatia and the United States – though I may be unjust here, since Schoenberg's stock is, as I sense, still higher in Zagreb than in his adopted country. Globalization is certainly at work here, but otherwise the past, as encompassed by a historian's design, obstinately refuses to be subjected to it. Yet Samson persists and the resulting distance and critical detachment are the greatest assets of this book. His wide-angle historical lens enables him to view issues affecting several regions. This in turn leads him to give shape and sense to the broader issues that remain hidden when viewed from narrow linguistic, national or regional perspectives, and – alas – most music historians in the countries covered in this book are very good at defending their narrow patch.

… 'twixt cup and lip

The quality of Samson's elaborate design and the need to assemble and refer to a great mass of detail unleashed the inevitable devil that resides therein. Once the distance from the broad canvas is reduced and the reader becomes aware of details, other aspects of the book become apparent, the devil indulging in his merry dance. At this level a reviewer's task becomes quite unenviable, since the production of the volume leaves much to be desired. The areas that bear some scrutiny are the bibliographical apparatus, including the footnotes, and the process of copy-editing.

The footnotes are in the abbreviated author–date–page style, cross-referenced to the items in the main bibliography, and this in itself would provide no reason to complain had the author and the publisher been consistent. It appears, however, that the complete author–date–page references in footnotes apply only to publications in the English language; Samson's references encompass a good number of sources in other languages (Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Romanian and Serbian), yet in these cases one is faced with author–title–date references without an indication of the page. In order to test the efficiency of this system I decided to spot-check some of the sources that I had at hand and, indeed, my trawl would have been by no means easy had I depended exclusively on Samson. For example, Samson p. 347 refers to an opinion, expressed in 1920 by Petar Konjović, about the music of the Croatian composer Dora Pejačević: the footnote ‘Quoted in Kos 1994’ leads to the bibliographical entry ‘Kos, Koraljka 1994. “Začeci nove hrvatske muzike” [“The Beginnings of Croatian New Music”, though the bibliography does not give an English translation], Arti musices, 7, 25–39’. But volume 7 was published in 1976, while in 1994 Arti musices only reprinted in a jubilee issue some of the earlier pieces, and, to be correct, the reference should read: ‘Arti musices, 25, 203, fn. 4’. Elsewhere, writing about Stolzer-Slavenski, Samson says, ‘Far from inhibiting his modernist tendencies, as Bojan Bujić has argued, folkloric elements had a capacity to liberate those tendencies’ (p. 376), directing the readers to ‘Bujić, 1978’, that is, my essay ‘Tematska struktura u prvom gudačkom kvartetu Josipa Slavenskog’ (‘Thematic Structure in Josip Slavenski's First String Quartet’), Muzikološki zbornik/Musicological Annual, 14 (1978), 73–87. The trouble is that nowhere in this essay do I say this (though this is not to say that I don't hold such a view). The worrying aspect is that it becomes impossible to know how many other cases might also contain phantom references. This raises the uncomfortable question of how this material was assembled. Again, many names listed in the acknowledgments (pp. 4–5) suggest that Samson might have relied on them in one way or another, but their role is unexplained and, in the absence of any better explanation, one begins to suspect that the process of the transmission of some of the information from the sources to the printed page should have been better controlled.

Faced with a wealth of material that needed to be processed and footnoted, one may imagine that in some instances Samson thought it reasonable to refer to an item of bibliography that related to the theme of the book in general terms, or that he may have recorded a source without consulting it in detail, and there a passim indication would have been sufficient. Unfortunately, Samson's method does not allow one to distinguish between references serving as general indicators or suggestions for further reading, on the one hand, and references that aim to pinpoint a precise detail, on the other, and only one's close familiarity with the source may be of help. This seriously undermines the trust that one has, indeed wishes to have, in work into which a great deal of effort was undoubtedly invested.

In Italian, fruit salad is referred to as ‘macedonia di frutta’, suggesting that various fruits are intermingled in it like the numerous nations and languages in Macedonia – that very central Balkan region. Musicological research involving printed sources in a variety of languages inevitably landed Samson in a veritable ‘macedonia’ and, his own linguistic expertise notwithstanding, he faced complex issues of spelling, translation and transliteration from the Greek or Slavonic (Bulgarian, Macedonian) Cyrillic. Additional diacritical signs abound in Croatian (and Serbian when written in the Latin script), Slovenian and Romanian, all three of which use the Latin alphabet. A musicologist keen to do justice to the matter he is dealing with needs in this respect a considerable amount of specialist advice and editorial help, and here Samson seems to have been seriously let down by the publisher. The book has been published by Brill as volume 8 in their Balkan Studies Library, and the series has an editor-in-chief (Zoran Milutinović), a four-member editorial board and a nine-member advisory board, who between them cover the expertise directly relevant to the book's content. It is therefore regrettable that the copy-editing of the book has not been up to scratch, as if there had been no liaising between the copy-editor and the editor-in-chief with his editorial advisors, whose duties should have been to ensure the best possible standards not only of content but also of presentation. My own knowledge extends only to the Slavonic languages and here, spread across the whole text, there are simply too many misprints, illogicalities and inconsistencies, both in spelling and transliteration. In this respect the book has been rendered an unreliable source of information. Since for many readers this will be their only chance to engage with the musicological studies emanating from this area, the likelihood of erroneous information being disseminated further is not negligible.

There are currently two major systems of transliteration from the Bulgarian Cyrillic to the Latin script, one favoured by the British Library and the other by the Library of Congress. It seems that neither has been followed, certainly not with any consistency. For instance, we find Musikalen instead of Muzikalen (p. 353); Vassil (pp. 585, 705) as well as the correct Vasil (p. 455); ‘raichenitsa’ (pp. 99, 353, 723) instead of ‘r'chenitsa’/‘răchenitsa’ (in Bulgarian Cyrillic: pъчeница). To add to the confusion, some Bulgarian titles have been quoted in the Croatian/Serbian version of the Latin alphabet. Spellings and translations from foreign languages have not been checked and only a few examples are listed here. The Bulgarian journal Zlatorog, named after the gold-antlered stag of Slavonic mythology, has been translated as ‘Golden Way’ (p. 353); the periodical Jugoslovenski muzičar (‘Yugoslav Musician’) appears as ‘Yugoslav Music’ (p. 340); the name of the Serbian pop group Lutajuća Srca (Wandering Hearts) (p. 59) has been treated as a proper name and indexed as ‘Srca, Lutajuća’ (as if in an English publication we were to encounter ‘Stones, Rolling’). Pax Ottomanicus (p. 119) is curious Latin, and Bulgarisch-Deutschen Gesellschaften (p. 354) curious German, at least in this context. The name of the Croatian pop group ‘Haustor’ (p. 509) is not ‘Stairway’ but ‘Front Door’. Personal names are equally confusing at times. The surname of the Romanian nineteenth-century political-military leader Tudor Vladimirescu never appears in its correct form, only as Vladimerscu (pp. 212, 728). The Serbian composer Petar Ozgijan seems to have undergone a sex change and appears consistently as Petra (pp. 487, 721); another one, Vuk Kulenović, becomes Kulenikov (p. 488); while the Slovenian composer Marij Kogoj is twice referred to by his correct name (pp. 340, 360) and twice by an invented one, as Maciej (pp. 339, 716).Footnote ²¹

Samson's was a brave scholarly undertaking, and his book contains many illuminating thoughts. It is a great shame that the process of preparing the manuscript for the printers has so seriously, yet avoidably, undermined the integrity of a volume which otherwise does not deserve this.