Introduction:
"Even the burgeoning Literatur on postcommunism has scarecely taken music into account beyond a Faszination with "rock, continuing a widespread scholarly disinterest in expressive Culture's power to shape consciousness and organize daily live." (S.1)
Three perspectives: modernity, identity, and continuity.
1.Modernity
"Communism [could not] seriously contemplate facing the challange of the postmodern world: the world in which consumer choice is simultaneously the essential systemic requisite, the main factor of social integration, and the channel through which individual life-concerns are vented and problems resolved. -Zygmunst Baumann" (S.2)
1.1 A rule-setting bureaucracy
"Everywhere in Central and Easter Europe, networks and bureaucrats ruled the conert halls, airwaves, and record players of the socialist state, fostering and prohibiting musics, offering the carrot of patronage and brandishing the stick of censorship, even merasure, of individual voices and wohle cultural traditions" (S.3)
1.2 A set of standardized formats and venues
The States created a network of stages and competitions (festivals, parades, contests, houses of culture, amateur groups) that determined which kinds of music-making were acceptable and where they should be shown. Music schools acted like filters, sorting out the most talented children for classical music. Comparison to the soviet sports system, where the most talented where scouted and developed like olympic athletes. A prestige project with no free atristic development.
1.3 The ubiquitous presence of official repertoires
They tried to create shared experience of daily life and communal memory, by exploiting the appeal of arranged folg songs, mass songs, movie musical, and radio hits. (S.3)
"In extremely nationalist communist systems like Romania and Bulgaria, the doctrine of monoethnic identity was part of an invented homogeneity, so researchers could neither collect nor disseminate, say, Jewish, Turkish, or Roma ("gypsy") musics rexcept indirectly."(S.3)
"An important theme in the essays below is the dialectic between control and reaction, the planned and the unforced."
"While music will obligingly serve to animate marching men or Young Pioneers, it also anchors individual memory and group consciousness, placing them out of the reach of the state." (S.4)
"By spreading feel-good songs and movies throughout a mass culture, the state feels comfortable in avoiding danger, yet it must also close an indulgent eye to the possible meanings produced by the consumers of official culture. Local/subcultural sensibilities make full use of music's am- biguity, of which more below." (S.4)
"As for the accelerated pace of our lives today … ! One has only to switch on the wireless and wander over the airwaves to embrace a vast world of sound. I've come to feel that one shouldn't resist this but should relate to it as a fact of modern life. The problem is how to hang on to one's individuality within this vast world of polystyl- ism. (in Kagarlitskaya 1990: 7 I)" (S.5)
Identity
As Verdery says, "national ideology disrupted the Marx- ist discourse and thus-despite the Communist party's apparent appropri- ation of it-was a major element in destroying the Party's legitimacy" (I99Ia: 4) An anecdote she cites is illuminating:
"When I suggested that [the] villagers saw their "old customs" as "for public display only" rather than as an integral part of the life cycle still being practiced, the officials became (to my view, inexplicably) irate. Only later did I begin to realize that I had stabbed close to the heart of nation-building. (Verdery 1983: 23)" (S.7)
"The informals' success in reflecting broader moods depended in part on their ethnic closeness to the population … they could deploy national symbols, flags, emblems, and folk-songs … and they could impart an ethnic coloring to issues which aroused strong emotions, but which were not in themselves ethnic, such as the environment and the economy. (Aves et a!.: 105-6)" (S.8)
"Within the mind of each citizen, this translates into a multi- layered musical consciousness in which youth-group patriotic songs, na- tional pop tunes, dissident songs, and local survivals coexist and compete, all grounded in personal moments and memories. "Identity," as always, is layered." (S.8)
Continuity
Looking at the local is particularly critical in examining top-down societies, since it counters the sometimes facile tendency to look for the ways that powerful fists rearrange and even crush regional and ethnic landscapes.
"The Soviet state offers an extraordinary example of how control misfires: "almost everything the Soviet leadership tried to do in the area of nationality relations led to heightened, not repressed, ethnic consciousness" (Balzer 1994: 85)." (S.9)
"By highlighting how music, a powerful expressive resource, moves along these three axes, this volume hopes to make a distinc- tive contribution to the understanding of a region in transition." (S.12)
"They discuss how political groupings seek power through metaphoric musicality, genres, and songs that represent emerging national identity." (S.12)