Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas ed. by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm (review)

This slender volume of proceedings from a 2014 conference in Klagenfurt explores the role of vocal music (ranging from traditional song to opera) in relation to the plurality of identities (from individual to supranational identity) in the territories of the former Austrian–Hungarian Empire after 1918, with a particular focus on the Balkan peninsula and relative neglect of the empire's Italian regions and farther outreaches to the east. The editors' unforced conceptualization of identity in the context of such multi-ethnic, multinational, and multicultural complexity acts as an apposite curtain-raiser: individuality is voluntarily (though not always unproblematically) ceded to become subsumed in, as George Herbert Mead put it, the "generalized other" (p. 2). How might the voice, perhaps the most individual human expression, figure in this process of converging around or diverging from the new social models formed within the identity vacuum created by the fall of empire and beyond?

Ursula Hemetek's chapter on the role of traditional song and identification in the Balkans—buried towards the end of the volume—might have been an appropriate gambit to unravel the issue, but the collection is elegantly launched, nonetheless, by Gerda Lechleitner's chapter on the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv (initiated in 1899 as a matter of scholarly interest in ethnography and linguistics rather than music) and its spoken-voice recordings, with some discussion of music from Croatian Sprachinseln (language islands) and a brief gloss on how language and music might figure as markers of identity in the case of Burgenland Croats, based on recordings from the first three decades of the twentieth century. (Marko Kölbl offers a discussion emphasizing the tension between retaining and creating musical traditions within that particular ethnic minority in a later chapter.)

The essays that follow create a multifarious, somewhat eclectic path through a large variety of musical genres in geographies that could be grouped together as those of today's eastern central Europe (Czech Republic and Poland), aforementioned Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary, as well as a couple of essays on music in Austria, all largely by writers hailing from the countries in question. Bohemia is discussed by way of David Vondráček's essay on the music for jazz revues at Prague's avant-garde theater Osvobozené Divadlo (Liberated Theater; 1926–38), which had become reimagined as a specifically Czech sound of resistance against both Nazism and communism. In a similar vein, Anna G. Piotrowska offers insights into the selfportrayal and stereotyping of urban minorities (in this case Romani people) in Cracow's vaudeville theater during the early twentieth century as well.

Three consecutive chapters are devoted to Serbian music: Melita Milin provides an overview of identity issues affecting composers in interwar Yugoslavia, especially their oscillation between actively promoted supranational (Yugoslav) identity on the one hand and national (Serbian) identity on the other. These became musically reified by adherence to a distinct musical culture established in Serbia (1882–1918) as opposed to an embrace of more progressive tendencies—especially expressionism—in Slovenia and Croatia, even if these were nowhere near akin to Viennese modernism. A historically broadly conceived excursion into the orally transmitted Serbian folk epic, illuminating its eventual nationalist potential during the twentieth century, is followed by Nadežda Mosusova's discussion of the premiere of the opera Ženidba Miloša Obilića (The Marriage of Miloš Obilić) by Serbian composer Petar Konjović (1883–1970) at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1917. A pseudohistorical drama partly based on the Serbian Kosovo epic about the fourteenthcentury knight Miloš Obilić, the opera's perceived Serbian patriotism proved politically sensitive given the hostilities between Austria-Hungary and Serbia before and during World War I, as can be gleaned from its reception in the Croatian...