The Aesthetics of Slovene Popular Music for Different Generations of Slovene Listeners: The Contribution of Audience Research

Abstract

What is popular music to Slovene listeners? How is it conceived of in terms of vocabulary, and what can be said of the political potential of its aesthetic instance? In the field of Slovene popular music and audience research, these issues have thus far remained un(der)explored. Nevertheless, they need to be addressed: if carefully contextualized, looking into the questions of what popular music signifies, and is connected with, for different Slovene audiences points to the cultural meaning-assigning power-play at work. Bearing this issue in mind, the text attempts to provide a contextually informed overview of how Slovene popular music audiences of different—inductively singled out—age groups conceive of the aesthetics of Slovenian popular music. The text analyzes 150 semi-structured interviews with popular music audiences in Slovenia, conducted in 2012 as part of the HERA POPID project. It employs a Bakhtinian conceptual framework and attempts to locate the aesthetic coordinates of popular music discourse in Slovenia, arguing that the aesthetic moment might offer a possibility of escaping stabilized connections between popular music, nation, identity, and ideology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^[1] “Popular music” is, in this text, used to designate genres other than classical or folk music. In Slovenia, the latter has been, to a remarkable extent, replaced by folk-pop, a genre combining the rhythms of polka and waltz with attire common for the Alpine region of Slovenia and a distinct set of instruments (accordion, clarinet, guitar, trumpet, violin). Folk-pop is considered popular music in this text.

^[2] The POPID project (further explained in the introduction to this issue) examined the increasing importance of popular music in contemporary renderings of cultural identity and local and national cultural heritage. In this project, we conceive of popular music as a form of music which, particularly in a post-World War II context, has principally been enjoyed through modes of mass distribution and primarily commercial aesthetics. More information on the project is available at: http://www.heranet.info/popid/index (accessed on 5 January 2014).

^[3] The cultural and post-cultural turns in social theory are, for the purposes of this text, viewed primarily as a series of emphatic shifts away from positivist epistemology and toward the problematique of meaning-construction.

^[4] This should not be equated with the bold claim “Everything is political” or “All art is political.” Political implications of aesthetics are viewed as a potentiality, not actuality.

^[5] Applying Bakhtin's framework to analysis of semi-structured interviews therefore involves delineating stylistic, thematic, and compositional canons of the genre. On a practical level, it means taking into account that the genre of a semi-structured interview is by definition hardly truly dialogic: the tone, theme, or change of speakers is not determined through dialogue but to a certain extent imposed on the interviewee by the interviewer. Dialogic relations nevertheless form within these constraints: both the interviewer and interviewee are allowed a certain degree of freedom in their choice of words, and the interviewee may refrain from responding to certain questions or give extensive replies to others. Nevertheless it is possible to assume that the genre of the semi-structured interview presupposes the following: the use of (or at least conscious attempts to do so) semi-formal conversational speech; attempts to give clear answers (based on the interviewee's voluntary agreement to participate in the interview); mutual respect between the interviewer and the interviewee.

^[6]Cresswell and Hawn stress that the core of Bakhtin's approach to analysis of both artistic forms and social reality relies on the presumption that “the whole of a language system cannot be analytically reduced to component parts of a machine” (4).

^[7] For Bakhtin, the boundaries of an utterance are determined in three respects: the change of speaking subjects, a certain, most often relative degree of finalization of content, and its relation to the speaker and others. The second boundary of an utterance—finalization of content—is then characterized by the (relative) exhaustiveness of the theme, the speaker's intent, and its formal, generic, and compositional characteristics. Speech genres are in turn primary, determining utterances used in most conventional, everyday conversation, and secondary, related to any type of more complex forms of discourse organization, from letters to novels and scientific research (Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres”).

^[8] Since Slovenia's independence in 1991, the concept has usually been applied to music created by Slovenian musicians and stretched further into history, to include the works of Slovenian musicians in the framework of ex-Yugoslavia.

^[9] A combination of pop, jazz, and chanson that was supported by the government from the ’60s and became popular in Slovenia then.

^[10] Tellingly, the only specialized Slovene music magazine is titled Golica and reports exclusively on events in the folk-pop scene.

^[11] Methodological note. The age groups were created inductively, on the basis of two factors: a) relative similarities in responses; and b) similarities in social statuses of interviewees of separate groups. All of the interviewees from the eldest group were retired, whereas all of the interviewees from the youngest age group turned out to have five years of work experience (or fewer), or were university students. Certainly, we could have performed further segregation of each group. However, as we were looking for potentials for commonalities, we took the risk of generalization, in order to be able to focus on major discursive continuities (and breaches).

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Notes on contributors

Natalija Majsova

Natalija Majsova is a researcher in cultural studies at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies (University of Ljubljana). Her main research fields of interest are cultural studies theory, politics of aesthetics, post-Soviet popular culture and cultural studies of outer space.