Slovenian folk-pop music as a place and nation making strategy between heritage and popular culture

Cultural heritage tourism partly depends on authorized heritage definitions, and partly on complex bottom-up processes of heritage identification, interpretation, and communication. This paper addresses the ways in which music, when understood as intangible heritage, may be used for place making and nation branding purposes, and the dynamic between these two processes, as seen from the perspective of cultural and heritage tourism workers. To analyze this dynamic, we focus on the genre of Slovenian folk-pop music. Invented in the 1950s, it has since then become the prevalent (popular) musical element of the Slovenian cultural landscape, while its variants have also, and in parallel to ‘national’ characterization of the genre, been appropriated in various local contexts. We trace how Slovenian folk pop simultaneously partakes in the construction of the country’s national brand and in local place making strategies of heritage promotion, deployed by national, regional, and local stakeholders. We draw on an extensive literature review, document analysis, and interviews with folk-pop festival organizers. Based on this initial mapping of the major stakeholders, we propose a classification of folk-pop music festivals that accounts for the different ways in which folk pop is used as an instrument of heritage tourism, place making, nation branding, and entertainment industries.