Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania

Abstract

This sophisticated work of political theory and bureaucratic ethnography covers Albanian “light music” over six decades, particularly focusing on 1950–2010. In its sustained analysis of the Foucauldian governmentality underpinning socialist and capitalist cultural orders, Tochka's book is a valuable contribution to the anthropology of postsocialist states. The author focuses on the annual Festival of Song (Festivali i Këngës), a prestigious state competition that originated in the early socialist period and now determines which song Albania will send to the Eurovision Song Contest. The festival provides Tochka a stepping-off point for copious candid interviews with cultural administrators, composers, singers, and listeners. The author, who extensively perused state broadcast archives, notes that the Festival of Song's style of light music, comparable to Russian estrada pop, has received far less academic attention than socialist folkloric ensembles. Nevertheless, it too was subject to bureaucratic oversight within socialist cultural policy—a centrally “planned economy of symbolic production” (2)—and arguably appealed to a much wider audience.Albania was a political outlier, pursuing a policy of isolation even from other socialist regimes and resisting liberalizing “thaws” well into the 1980s—significantly longer than its neighbors; it also managed to keep a musical “gray economy” very miniscule, giving its government nearly complete control over musical consumption into the 1980s. But in line with other socialist countries, its “masses” were seen as uneducated, primitive, and in need of civilizing. This book devotes major attention to “social gardeners,” the music intellectuals and policy-makers responsible for guiding the masses toward the desired future. Tochka reminds the reader that states are not unitary actors but implement their policies through individuals in a multitude of localized contexts. While Albania was among the strictest of socialist regimes, it could not solely resort to coercion and also employed symbolic-ideological strategies in the realm of cultural production to buttress its legitimacy. The light music featured at the yearly festival promoted themes of national unity, the struggle against enemies, and the promises of socialism; winning selections tended to be serious epic lyrical works, but the runners-up would invariably be crowd-pleasing love songs.While Tochka acknowledges state repression, he also points out that composers and other musicians viewed themselves as creative actors, not simply cogs in an oppressive machine. The discourse of individual creativity was very important for light song composers in the socialist era, and the Festival of Song was a prized venue for them to display their work and build a reputation. Through the necessary collaboration between composers, lyricists, singers, and performers, even inadvertent challenges to state ideology would be ironed out in committee well before broadcasts. The author describes how the discourse of professionalism functioned effectively to cultivate internalized, disciplined aesthetic dispositions: “Highly developed field-specific artistic codes . . . did not mechanically police individuals’ conduct, but rather framed individual instances of potentially disruptive symbolic behavior (for instance, an aggressive vocal style, or a repetitive melody) as non-professional rather than subversive” (125). Tochka does not equate having a “voice” with speaking against power, arguing that the common understanding of art's role in antistate subversion is overstated. Rather, he asserts that “spectacular moments of repression” when artists directly challenged the system, or were punished for doing so, were “extremely rare” (89), even though they have disproportionately captured the imaginations of many commentators. He calls for greater examination of everyday musical creativity instead of searching all socialist creative work retroactively for signs of “hidden dissent” (152) or complicity.More than half of the volume is devoted to analysis of the socialist period, while the remainder traces its lingering effects into the early 2010s. Significant historical moments include the first Festival of Song, held in 1962 under the influence of a new Soviet-trained generation of bureaucratic elites; the 1972 festival, which attempted to liberalize the light music field by incorporating more foreign popular styles but instead led to a conservative backlash, firings, and even arrests; and the festivals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which themes of change and freedom heralded major political-economic shifts. Throughout, Tochka analyzes the texts and musical arrangements of some representative songs, showing how they reflected relevant debates over building socialism, the place of folk tradition in Albanian identity, winning over “the youth,” or European integration; however, scored examples are absent and musical theory jargon is kept to a minimum, making the book very accessible to nonmusicians. The book does not include a website or playlist, but Tochka notes that all the songs referenced in it are easily accessible online.The capitalist era has seen the emergence of new creative types: the amateur composer-producer and the would-be pop star. Accessible private recording studios entice many into a field marked much more obviously by self-promotion and individual entrepreneurialism. Despite this, some professionalized composers continue to be inspired by socialist-congruent ideals of artistic uplift, aesthetic complexity, and the superiority of conservatory training. For them, the Festival of Song remains an important venue to display their creative skill outside the whims of the market, but privately sponsored festivals often appeal to a wider and younger audience.In a brief epilogue that would be useful reading for any seminar on music and politics, Tochka restates his major arguments: “voice” and agency are not synonymous; the political oversight of music/sound necessarily requires the delegation of authority to sound specialists who have their own agendas; and we need to look carefully at discourses, infrastructures, and practices related to sound-making and consuming in any kind of state. Ultimately, Tochka warns us to listen carefully to the voices of interlocutors and to be suspicious of the lingering epistemological effects of dividing the world into the ideal political types of “free” and “unfree” societies. It is this last argument that may be the most challenging today, as left-leaning academics are forced to rethink their own understanding of the Soviet legacy during a “New Cold War.” Audible States offers a provocative analysis of musical political economy, and it will become essential reading on Eastern Europe and cultural policy.