Pavao Markovac was a musicologist, publicist, critic, political agitator, organizer, and a prominent member of the so-called Croatian left intelligentsia between the two World Wars. His extremely rich political and artistic work within the labor movement regularly, however, remained outside the narrow focus of scholarly debates. To illustrate, Nataša Leverić Špoljarić in the text “Pavao Markovac (1903–1941) – a musical enlightener between two world wars (on the 80th anniversary of his death)” (sic!) almost completely bypasses this part of his work, citing it only as a biographical episode, while other aspects of his work are elaborated in more detail. The reasons for omitting this key aspect still wait to be investigated, but it would not seem wrong to attribute them to historical revisionism, which casts a shadow on many fields and many depictions of left-wing artists and cultural workers of the interwar period. In different encyclopedic entries about Markovac there is only a remark that he wrote about music from a Marxist perspective, which does not show the width, complexity and intertwining of his journalistic, political and artistic work, based on the Marxist tradition. This text does not pretend to completely fill this gap, but to re-initiate the debate introduced by Markovac himself, which is, in short, on Marxist interpretations of music, its production, reception and, finally, it’s role in the society.
Continue reading “Domagoj Kučinić: Pavao Markovac and “Worker’s Music”: not for concert halls, but for meetings and trips”Mojca Kovačič – Creating Atmospheric Coherence through Commemorative Rituals, Singing Partisan Songs, and Rehearsed Affect
The journal Narodna umjetnost has published an article by Mojca Kovačič entitled Creating Atmospheric Coherence through Commemorative Rituals, Singing Partisan Songs, and Rehearsed Affect (https://hrcak.srce.hr/267009). The article presents aspects of affective atmospheres in the context of commemorating the events of the Second World War in post-socialist Slovenia. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of partisan songs in establishing relations between the past and the present, discussed with specific reference to commemorative events and the experiences of singers in a rural choir. Individual narratives revealed the internal dynamics of each singer’s experience while singing partisan songs, as well as the role that collective memory, the past, history, politics, and personal narratives play in that experience. The singers’ experiences also provide the basis for questioning the concepts of coherence within the theory of affective atmospheres.
Martin Pogačar – A microphone in a chandelier: How a secret recording sparks mnemonic imagination and affect
Memory Studies published a paper »A microphone in a chandelier: How a secret recording sparks mnemonic imagination and affect« by Martin Pogačar. The article examines a recording of an old Slovenian choral song made in 1941 during the Fascist occupation. Pogačar analyses the recording as a temporal object that drives affective mnemohistories; modulates individual and collective experiences, expectations and interpretations; and induces mnemonic imagination. He furthermore discusses the song’s historical background, its technical history, and compares its affective force in live performances and in mediated experiences in YouTube. The investigation of the song as a temporal object that engenders variegated, multilayered engagements with the past contributes to the debates on the study of music and memory, and the history of media technologies in the context of post-socialist memory.