Contemporary Urban Folk Music in the Balkans: Possibilities for Regional Music History

Abstract

Starting with Maria Todorova’s landmark study Imagining the Balkans (Todorova 1997), numerous authors have raised their voices against stereotypical images of the Balkans. Over twenty years after the publication of this book, the term “the Balkans” seems to have lost some of its negative connotations related to wars in favour of characteristics with positive overtones, such as the Balkan peoples’ joie-de-vivre and entertainment strongly related to music. The areal ethnomusicology drawing from fieldwork throughout the Balkan peninsula has been a fruitful topic for numerous local and foreign ethnomusicologists and the very term “the Balkans” has raised a special interest in the ethnomusicological research of “outsiders”, as well as in the music industry. This paper is written from the perspective of an “insider” ethnomusicologist from the Balkans. I raise the question of the definition of the “Balkan” popular music label and discuss its main structural characteristics. I offer a new possibility of (re)considering a specific musical genre of the region based on the research of urban folk music practices. I present characteristics of urban folk music practices from the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in the countries of the Balkans, with special attention paid to their common aspects. Also, contemporary urban folk music, which is often criticized as a specific popular music form, is considered.