Music Labour of Local Musicians in the Social Life of Križevci, Croatia

Abstract

This dissertation represents the results of a music ethnography of the town of Križevci and its surrounding villages in central Croatia. The aim of the research was to show the role of local musicians as workers within the context of local social life. The selected musicians were those who earned money through their full-time or part-time music labour, who were mostly only locally visible, and who worked within the local social infrastructure, including concerts, dance venues, festivals, etc. In that way, the selected musicians acted as agents of local social life and were subsequently involved in the creation of local cultural identity. Through focusing on music labour within this local context, the ethnographic research aimed to examine the economic reality of the researched musicians, to bring forward the aspects of their lives as workers, and within that reality to consider the value and importance of music for the society and communities in which the musicians work. The diverse stories of local musicians and the changing situation in local infrastructure have been observed in diachronic perspective, over the past 70 or more years, refl ecting politico-historical changes of pre-socialist, socialist and post-socialist times. The results of ethnographic research in the town and surrounding villages show that the infrastructure previously induced the appearance of a large number of self-taught musicians. The interviews and conversations with retired musicians and organizers show that the local social events were largely supported by local musicians, and vice versa. The local musicians also generated changes of trends and fashion. For example, in the town in the second half of the 20th century, the bands changed from being jazz and dance bands in the 1940s and 1950s, to early rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s, when the regular town dances disappeared, then the tamburica bands returned to fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas after the 1990s a greater diversity of styles occurred along with the rise in the number of performances of various non-local musicians. In the villages, the changes in music included a gradual substitution of traditional instruments (such as tambura and dude bagpipe) for electric ones, with the result that a large number of self-taught musicians emerged when these instruments became economically more available. However, in time, the players also changed from