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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Folk-pop music
• heritage tourism
• place making
• nation branding
• Slovenia

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and generous suggestions for improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The concept of intangible cultural heritage and its safeguarding follows the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Convention), which entered into force in Slovenia in 2008. Intangible heritage includes ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.’ (Convention, 2003). The Slovenian Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the central database of national intangible heritage. The Register is managed by the Ministry of Culture and the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum is the coordinator for the protection of intangible cultural heritage.

2 Analysing data from the Slovenian Public Opinion poll (Hafner-Fink et al., 2021), Stanković and Bobnič (2022) show that the genre is popular principally among older, less-educated, religious, politically right-leaning people in the countryside (vs. Slovenian two big cities – Ljubljana and Maribor – where its popularity is the lowest). Even though the urban population has frequently distanced itself from this rustic genre with traditional connotations, the authors also highlight that folk pop is gaining ground among other segments of the population (specifically younger audiences aged under 30), albeit in a smaller degree.

3 Folk-pop music is the closest approximation to the Slovenian term ‘narodnozabavna glasba’ in English. The few extant studies on the subject have, however, also referred to it as ‘popfolk’, ‘national-popular’ and ‘popular-national’ music.

4 Avsenik’s style is characterized by a typical quintet instrumental line-up (composed of the trumpet, the clarinet, the baritone, the guitar and the piano accordion). Slak’s style on the other hand originated from the southern Slovenian region of Dolenjska and is more frequently described as closer to Slovenian folk traditions. It is characterized by a trio composition (of the diatonic accordion, the guitar and bass or baritone). Both bands collaborated with various vocalists as polyphonic singing is an important part of Slovenian folk and folk-pop traditions.

5 We have contacted all the relevant national and cross-border festival organizers, and all agreed to participate in the study.

6 This number was later disputed as an exaggeration by the entertainment editor at Television Slovenia (cf. Vardjan in Kaluža & Bobnič, 2023b). Nevertheless, it is an important indication of the organizers’ specific ambition to attract a nation-wide audience.

7 First organized on a smaller scale in 2003, the event gained unprecedented popularity in the 2010s. It was, however, discontinued in 2019 and its future remains unclear.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of the Slovenian Folk pop as Politics: Perceptions, Receptions, Identities project, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS), under project number J6-2582.

Notes on contributors

Jasmina Šepetavc

Jasmina Šepetavc is an assistant professor and a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana). Her research interests include film- and popular music studies, feminist- and queer theory. She also works as a film critic and film festival selector.

Natalija Majsova

Natalija Majsova is an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana. Her research cuts across the fields of memory studies, film and media studies, heritage interpretation, and (post-)socialist popular cultures. She is especially interested in the mechanisms of collective memory and remembrance practices at the nexus of projections of the future and imaginaries of the past, and in how gradual technological transformations contribute to nostalgias for past utopias.