Popular music as living heritage: theoretical and practical challenges explored through the case of Slovenian folk pop

ABSTRACT

Produced, distributed, and consumed in a de-territorialised way, modern popular music presents a set of challenges to cultural heritage policies which largely rely on spatial frameworks, as needs for the preservation of local, regional, or national cultural heritage are typically highlighted. Moreover, certain popular music genres dating back to the mid-20^th century are both representations and re-inventions of local and ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ music and have become a part of many living heritage practices. Slovenian folk-pop (FP) music is a case in point: a modern genre in terms of history and production conditions, nationally registered as intangible cultural heritage. This article offers an analysis of how FP music is integrated into authorised heritage discourse in Slovenia, foregrounding the results of extensive interviews with 14 heritage gatekeepers, such as organisers of FP festivals and curators of thematic museums. The article discusses how operational definitions of FP as heritage, used by various gatekeepers that operate locally, regionally, and internationally deviate from the definition provided in the national intangible heritage register. The analysis traces how discourses about national and cultural identity get intertwined with music and establishes that gatekeepers’ understandings of culture as either territorialised or dynamic significantly impact their heritage activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Folk-pop music
• living heritage
• heritage gatekeepers
• cultural identity
• hybridity

Introduction

Slovenian folk pop (FP) music¹ is a prominent and easily identifiable aspect of the contemporary soundscape in Slovenia. It also includes a range of ritualistic (Sunday lunch; radio greetings; Friday broadcasts on RTV, etc.) and symbolic practices (the use of local, regional, and national symbols, e.g. costumes) (Stanković 2021). According to the recent national public opinion poll, Slovenians generally perceive FP as sounds characteristic of the Slovenian cultural space (Hafner-Fink et al. 2022). On 3 March 2017, FP was entered in the Slovenian Register of intangible cultural heritage² (RNKD), as ‘Slovenian popular-national music’ (‘slovenska narodno-zabavna glasba’). The definition provided by the Register offers a good entry point for grasping the music’s sociocultural significance, authorising it as heritage (cf. Smith 2006). Slovenian FP is not defined as a genre, but as ‘an integral part of both everyday life and festive occasions. It is performed by vocal-instrumental or instrumental groups, mainly to the rhythm of the polka or waltz’ (RNKD 2017).

The music’s significance for both Slovenians in Slovenia and Slovene diasporas around the world is underscored repeatedly, and precisely the capacity of FP to appeal to Slovenians at home and abroad is emphasised in the rationale behind the inclusion of this registry entry:

[Slovenian] popular-national music is a modern manifestation of our music culture, which has, since the 1950s, importantly shaped the everyday life and festivities of various social groups in Slovenia, and has also resonated internationally, contributing to our international distinction.

(RNKD 2017)

This definition summarises an expert review of the historical and current socio-cultural significance of Slovenian FP music as ‘official heritage’ (Harrison 2013, 14), and inaugurates authorised heritage discourse – an understanding of the meanings, properties, socio-cultural functions, and effects of heritage, supported by experts in the field (heritage institutions, heritage policymakers, etc.) (Smith 2006) around FP. At the same time, the current lack of targeted national heritage policies and funding mechanisms means that FP is mainly preserved and framed as heritage in the context of predominantly commercial local and regional initiatives; and in the media, FP music is usually classified by editors as ‘entertainment’, rather than ‘culture’.

Concurrently, thematic cultural events, such as FP music festivals, and institutions dedicated to the preservation and promotion of FP music as heritage, such as thematic museums, have been on the rise since Slovenia’s independence from the former socialist Yugoslavia in 1991. Festivals and museums of Slovenian FP music (and related forms present in Slovenian diasporas abroad) vary in age, scope, functions, target audience, etc. What they have in common, however, is that they perform an important role in framing and co-creating FP music as intangible heritage, both in the context of the practices identified in the RKND definition, and in the context of other, ‘unofficial’ (Harrison 2013, 18) practices, that is, those that are not necessarily directly mentioned in the Register. In doing so, they act as gatekeepers (cf. Van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015) of the definitions, meanings, musical elements, aesthetics, rituals, and symbols associated with Slovenian FP music.

In this paper, we analyse how these gatekeepers understand Slovenian FP music as heritage linked to cultural and geographical spaces and how they operationalise this understanding in their heritage activities. Relying on literature review, we first present the importance of studying heritage discourses and their relation to the signification of spaces, places, and identities in the context of contemporary popular culture industries. We then outline the research design and present the results of a preliminary mapping of FP heritage gatekeepers. Fourteen extensive interviews with local and national heritage gatekeepers, and actors working abroad are then analysed to address the following research questions:

1. How do heritage gatekeepers conceptualise Slovenian FP music as heritage, and to what extent is their understanding of FP music as heritage aligned with the Register’s definition?

2. In what ways do they consider Slovenian FP music as heritage in the context of festival events, museum installations, etc., i.e. events and institutions that they are involved in as organisers, coordinators, or curators?

3. In what ways do the Slovenian gatekeepers’ understandings of popular music as cultural heritage coincide with or differ from those articulated by diasporic gatekeepers?

Using Slovenian FP music as a case study, the article aims to highlight the contribution of spatial and migratory discourses around popular culture to the consolidation and contestation of authorised heritage discourse.

Heritage stakeholders as gatekeepers and localisers of popular-music histories

Heritage and modern culture industries

Practices like Slovenian FP music as heritage can be classified as heritage since the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) (henceforth: Convention), which was the result of several decades of expert and academic debates on the purposes, functions, and effects of defining heritage. These debates included criticism of the hitherto prevalent understanding of heritage in the context of the nature : culture dichotomy, and above all, as material, monumental and bound up with nationalist and progressivist ideologies (Smith 2006; van der Laarse 2019, 83–85; Harrison 2013, 95). The 2003 UNESCO Convention reflects the international community’s efforts towards a systemic shift towards understanding heritage as an effect of discourse or a process that operates performatively, spatially, memorially and in terms of identification (Smith 2006; van der Laarse 2019, 84). While the text of the Convention, which highlights the ‘living’ dimension of intangible heritage, is an important factor in the formulation of contemporary national heritage strategies and stewardship policies, it is contains no guarantee against the perpetuation of nationalist and progressivist discourses. In fact, as a modern practice that reflects globalisation and create relatively standardised space for the celebration of cultural diversity, relying on processes that ‘rationalise authenticity’ (cf. DeSoucey, Elliott, and Schmutz 2019), heritage itself, that is the process of narrating, categorising, curating, and promoting a specific practice as heritage, may well contribute to the transformation of this practice by way of transforming the primary framework of its operations. For example, some practices may become curated to best fit the heritage guidelines, as stakeholders like nation states and local communities hope to profit from heritage and cultural tourism.

This article draws on the critical definitions of heritage that have informed the text of the 2003 UNESCO Convention, and that point out that heritage is largely immaterial and fundamentally dissonant or subject to diverse significations and valuations (Brandellero and Janssen 2014, 224; see also Harrison 2013, 13). Smith (2006, 2–3) thus summarises that heritage is a cultural and social process of remembering the past in the form of communicative acts that allow people to create mechanisms for understanding the present and coping with it. Heritage is established through complex and multilevel networks of processes of remembering and forgetting certain aspects of the past (Lowenthal 1985, 44, in; Brandellero and Janssen 2014). These processes concern the actions of a variety of stakeholders that operationalise definitions of heritage and are, as noted by Bennett (1995), a part of the process of governance, as they establish repertoires of objects, practices and rituals that individuals and groups can interpret as part of their own or others’ traditions or heritage.³ Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) further points to the importance of the tourism sector for contemporary strategies of world-performance; indeed, the designation of spaces as ‘places’ of heritage or tradition⁴ reflects not only their importance to local communities, but also the commercial motives of heritage stakeholders.

The contemporary de-territorialised conditions of cultural production, dissemination, and consumption, and the hybridity, intertextuality and porosity of contemporary cultural industries challenge the division of products, industries, and practices into local, regional, and global (Van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015), posing a major challenge to heritage decision-makers due to modern popular culture’s fluidity and dispersive character. Yet, both consumers and decision-makers still often continue to situate popular culture primarily within national cultural frameworks, contributing to an authorised heritage discourse that is not neutral; it can, for example, lead to serious disputes over which culture has the right to own a particular song, melody, dance, etc (van der Laarse 2019, 79–81).

While the founders, custodians and curators of archives and museums dedicated to heritage, such as film and popular music, recognise the fluidity and hybridity of cultural production, in practice it is often nevertheless approached with the intention of either: 1) displaying the globally most significant inventions and/or cultural artefacts; or 2) presenting local, regional or national contributions to the history of technological breakthroughs, for example the history of local popular music or national cinema as heritage (Robinson and Silverman 2015; Van der Hoeven and Brandellero 2015). Both tendencies reflect the commercialised dimension of heritage in contemporary societies, its embeddedness in the ‘experience economy’ (Harrison 2013, 87–88), and suggest that even popular culture heritage in contemporary curatorial practices often remains spatially framed and associated with territorialised identification. This article intends to offer insight into how and why this gap occurs between current theoretical considerations of the immaterial, living, and dissonant dimensions of heritage and the pragmatic understanding of heritage on which heritage gatekeepers rely in their daily work (organising events, curating exhibitions).

Folk pop as twofold statement of cultural belonging

Slovenian FP is a modern musical phenomenon that refers both to Slovenian folk music and to the influences of the popular music of the specific time and place in which FP is created and performed. The link between this music that explicitly resorts to aesthetic, formal, and discursive signifiers of ‘tradition’, such as folk music, national costume, and nostalgic lyrics about the homestead, and national and ethnic identification has been consolidated throughout the 20^th century (Šabec 2023). FP has symbolically been territorialised as Slovenian, and an emphatically non-Balkan sound (see Bobnič, Majsova, and Šepetavc 2022), gradually coming to represent the nation, its identity, and even national territory.

While the ‘folk’ aspect of FP resides in the style’s explicit allusions to folk music outlined above, its ‘pop’ dimension is somewhat more complicated. It alludes to the genre’s modern origins in the mid-twentieth century, when the first FP records featuring polkas and waltzes were recorded in Ljubljana and released by the leading Yugoslav record label Jugoton, and to the mid-twentieth century modernisation of folk sounds characteristic of the Slovenian cultural context by way of innovative jazz-inspired arrangements, the introduction of the Oberkrainer Begleitung accordion accompaniment technique, and the refinement of ensemble compositions.⁵ Finally, the ‘pop’ in FP today also alludes to its openness to various developments in contemporary popular music and popular culture in general. FP music has incorporated a multitude of local traditions (the most characteristic being the distinction between Slavko Avsenik’s piano-accordion-reliant style and Lojze Slak’s diatonic-accordion-based style), and over the course of its history, also certain musical elements of genres such as jazz, pop, turbo folk, etc. Its aesthetics has also undergone marked modernisation, as producers and performers have sought ways to appeal to a younger and urban audience, for example, by betting more on youth, sex appeal, and cocktail-spiced fun than on Alpine landscapes and national costumes in videos and lyrics from the past two decades (cf. Stanković 2021). Due to this propensity for modernisation Slovenian FP of the twenty-first century may indeed sometimes get confused with standard pop, despite the mandatory presence of the accordion and polka/waltz template. Moreover, those unfamiliar with the history of Oberkrainer music and Slavko Avsenik’s seminal contribution to it may tend to identify Slovenian FP as ‘Austrian’, ‘German’, ‘Alpine’ or ‘Oberkrainer’ music. In the Slovenian popular imagination, however, FP music remains distinctly territorialised, partly because it is one of the most prominent signifiers of ‘Slovenian culture’ in diasporic communities.

Music – as a mobile, fluid cultural form – is a key element of diasporic cultural heritage; communities invest their efforts in organising dances, festivals, etc. to preserve their heritage and affirm their identity in the context of the majority society (Boura 2005; Shuval 2000, 42–43). Communities also incorporate the music of a certain place and time of the new environment into their musical traditions, creating their own hybrid musical forms that speak to the migration experience or articulate new hybrid identities (Baily and Collyer 2006, 174; Lidskog 2016). In a migration situation, the meanings people attach to the music of their homeland may also change, and there are generational differences about the ways in which people connect with the music of their culture of origin (Baily and Collyer 2006, 173–175; Lidskog 2016). All the above is also true for Slovenian expatriate communities; however, to what extent the definitions of popular music genres as cultural heritage in the diasporas and the homeland coincide or differ, remains an open question.

Heritage stakeholders and popular music

Van der Hoeven & Brandellero’s, 2015 study of popular music heritage in the Netherlands outlines museums and archives as the primary gatekeepers that establish the canon of popular music heritage (cf. also Baker, Istvandity, and Nowak 2016). These museums and archives are the result of national or local initiatives, or sometimes even entirely grassroots projects curated by enthusiastic individuals; they often exploit the local origins of certain artists and/or musical genres to promote their institution and their locality or wider national space. Authors such as Macdonald (2013, 141), Hofman (2014), Hafstein (2015, 156–186) and Gligorijević (2021) further point to the importance of festivals as contemporary heritage institutions that perform and frame tradition and heritage as a commemorative, touristic, and commercial spatialized and sonic social experience.

There is no central popular music history museum in Slovenia yet,⁶ and popular music is historicised and positioned in heritage discourses in a non-systematic way. Apart from the National and University Library (NUK) in Ljubljana, which archives one issue of every album produced in Slovenia, Slovenian popular music is mainly curated as heritage by grassroots archivists (Zevnik 2014). These are typically music enthusiasts who are usually more interested in alternative genres than in mainstream, commercially successful music (that is, genres like pop, rock, or FP). Stanković (2014) further points to the predominance of alternative music genres in Slovenian academic popular music studies; studies of commercially successful genres, including those that are internationally recognised as ‘Slovenian’ (i.e. FP music), as popular music phenomena are practically non-existent. On the other hand, Slovenian FP music is included in primary and secondary school textbooks used in music and history classes (cf. Majsova 2016; Zevnik 2014). Folk-pop music has also received considerable attention in ethnomusicological and ethnographic studies (cf. Cvetko 2007; Knific 2005), as well as in studies of cultural participation of Slovenian diasporas in the USA, Argentina and Australia (Debevec 2014; Hardwick-Franco 2010; Kunej and Kunej 2016; Molek 2017a; Molek 2017b).

Extant studies of FP are mostly aligned with the popular imagination that stubbornly links it to its ‘folk’, rather than its ‘pop’ dimension – that is, with music developed in rural communities, before the advent of modern popular-music industries (cf. Cohen 2006). Qualitative audience studies (cf. Majsova 2016) show that this is due to its characteristics, such as polka and waltz rhythms, national costumes, the accordion, lyrics that more often speak of traditional rather than contemporary social formations, and the countryside (cf. also Stanković 2021). At the same time, the gatekeepers of FP heritage, whose activities consolidate the authorised heritage discourse on FP, have not yet been the subject of research, and the conditions of authorised heritage discourse formation on the phenomenon remain obscure.

Methodology

In addition to the Slovenian Register of intangible cultural heritage, discourses on Slovenian FP music are shaped by the media, thematic institutions, events, and everyday uses of FP music. In the context of our research, we were particularly interested in the stakeholders who consolidate and have the capacity to contest the so-called authorised discourse on Slovenian FP as a heritage, by actively conceptualising this genre of music as a cultural form that, for certain reasons, needs to be preserved, maintained, and promoted. Our initial mapping of relevant stakeholders thus includes a selection of museums and FP festivals, as well as the custodian of the Register – the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum.

In 2022, we conducted semi-structured interviews with all the interested heritage gatekeepers – museum curators and festival organisers. The purpose of the interviews was to understand how their different ideas about Slovenian FP music as heritage and tradition are operationalised in the gatekeepers’ professional activities.

The interviews covered the following topics: 1) the context of the festival/museum’s establishment, objectives, and target audience; 2) the gatekeeper’s understanding of the origins and genesis of Slovenian FP music 3) the gatekeeper’s understanding and construction of the frameworks folk pop music within museums and festivals and the importance of music for local, national, and transnational identification and social cohesion. Finally, 4) we asked the interviewees about the embeddedness of the event/institution in heritage or cultural tourism as an important memory and commemoration practice (see also van der Laarse 2019, 84; Macdonald 2013, 137–161).

All but two of the interviews were conducted in person. Due to the gatekeepers’ schedules (Števerjan) and the distance involved (the National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland), two interviews were conducted online, on Zoom. On average, the interviews lasted 60 minutes. Interview transcripts were coded in QDA Miner software to facilitate classification and comparison of data across themes. The gatekeepers covered are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Overview of heritage gatekeepers.

Heritage stakeholder	Organization/Representative	Summary of stakeholder’s goals and activities
Slovene Ethnographic Museum (1923-)	Adela Pukl, museum adviser and curator, Custodianship for spiritual culture	Responsible for the entry on popular-national music in the Intangible cultural heritage register.
National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame and Museum (1987-)	Joe Valenčič, museum co-founder	Museum dedicated to the Cleveland-Style (also known as Slovenian Style) of polka music, which developed among the Slovenian expatriate community in the USA. The museum also has an archive of polka and Slovenian FP music and related materials.
Avsenik Museum (1989-/2016- (new image))	The Council of Heirs of the Avsenik family declined our interview invitation.	Museum dedicated to the Avsenik brothers and their ensemble. Focus on biographies and careers. Includes an archive of excerpts of individual compositions, numerous photographs, awards, accordions, costumes. Information about the museum was obtained through a visit, a review of printed materials and an analysis of its webpage and social media.
Lojze Slak and Tone Pavček Museum, Mirna Peč (2018-)	Ljudmila Bajc, head of the museum	Museum dedicated to Lojze Slak and his ensemble. Contains a multimedia archive related to the ensemble (media reports, photographs, videos of performances, etc.), artefacts (accordions, costumes, etc.) and a historical overview of the ensemble’s activities.
Alfi Nipič Museum, Pesnica (under construction)	Sandra Kurnik Zupanič, museum project leader	The museum will be dedicated to Alfi Nipič, a Slovenian FP and popular music star. It will contain Nipič’s personal collection of documents, objects, etc.
Folk-Pop Music Festival in Ptuj (1969-)	Radio Tednik Ptuj/Domen Hren, Radio Ptuj editor Domen Hren, Radio Ptuj editor	Oldest FP music festival in Slovenia. Emphasis on the national importance of the festival and FP music. Important element of Ptuj as a tourist and festival destination. Mostly national audience.
Števerjan Folk-Pop Music Festival (1971-)	S. K. P. D. Frančišek B. Sedej/Ilarija Bergnach, president of the societyand Stefania Beretta, society secretary Ilarija Bergnach, president of the society and Stefania Beretta, society secretary	Second oldest FP festival; a cross-border festival with a focus on community bonding and the preservation of Slovenian heritage among the expatriates. Tourism, gastronomy and highlighting local providers. Local and international audience.
Singing and Dancing on Graška Gora (1976-)	KD Graška Gora/Drago Plazl, president of this cultural association Drago Plazl, president of this cultural association	Third oldest FP festival. The wider local community is involved in the organisation. National and international audience.
Rattlesnake of Slovenske Gorice Cerkvenjak Festival (1986-)	KD Cerkvenjak/Danijel Zorko, president of this cultural association Danijel Zorko, president of this cultural association	Involving the wider local community in the organisation. Focus on local audiences, to a limited extent also attracts a national and international audience.
Vurberk Folk-Pop Music Festival (1992-)	Vurberk tourism association/Janez Toplak, association secretary Janez Toplak, association secretary	Initiated by the Vurberk tourism board, with the aim of revitalising the town and the castle courtyard. Emphasis on Slak’s style of Slovenian FP music. Nationwide audience.
Evening of Slovenian songs in dialect, Škofja Loka (2001-)	Radio Sora/Nada Jamnik, director Nada Jamnik, director	Emphasis on singing in dialects. Emphasis on the local audience, attracts the national and international audience to a limited extent.
Oberkrainer Hit Parade, Bled (2004-)	Public institution Tourism Bled/Lili Ošterbenk Janša, associate in charge of planning the festival	Tourism initiative to revitalise Bled in the proverbially unattractive month of November. Focus on the Oberkrainer or Avsenik style, both Slovenian and foreign ensembles invited. Primary focus on the international audience.
New Year’s Folk-Pop Music Festival Dolenjske Toplice (2005-)	Dolenjske Toplice municipality and Dolenjske Toplice Tourist information center/Franc Vovk, mayor of the municipality	Tourism initiative to organise a festive festival. Primarily aimed at the local audience, and to a limited extent attracting visitors from other parts of Slovenia.
Festival under the Pohorje Mountains Oplotnica (2017-)	Festival Oplotnica cultural association/Franci Ribič president	The wider local community is involved in the organisation of the event. Primarily aimed at the local audience, and to a limited extent at the national audience.
Modrijani Night (2003–2019)	Modrijani cultural association/Blaž Švab, concept creator and frontman of the Modrijani ensemble	Conceptual festival, designed to highlight music’s spiritual power. Organized by the nationally popular FP ensemble Modrijani with the help of many prominent media professionals, and with the ambition to become a “grand” event, showcasing the diversity of Slovenian culture, and using FP as the kind of music that can bridge all other differences. Currently dormant.

Analysis

The interviewees’ responses indicated that while the institutions, individuals and infrastructures that enable the practical implementation and dissemination of awareness of FP s as heritage understand and support the definition as introduced in the Slovenian Register of Intangible Heritage, they also pragmatically adapt it in their activities. In fact, the word ‘heritage’ was not equally familiar to all interviewees. It was used preferentially by all four museum representatives, while festival representatives tended to describe Slovenian FP using the word ‘tradition’, and not ‘heritage’. This partly reflects the museum workers’ greater familiarity with heritage frameworks in comparison to music festival organisers due to the nature of their profession, and partly the lack of heritage mechanisms and initiatives in the popular culture sector in Slovenia. Prompting festival representatives to think about FP as heritage did not result in any new insights, as they would simply use ‘heritage’ to refer to the same aspects of FP that they would earlier describe as ‘tradition’.

What is folk pop as heritage and tradition?

Folk pop as a “Slovenian sound” that reaches beyond Slovenia

Despite the diversity of the sample, which included institutions with different histories and agendas, ranging from the promotion of specific performers and their legacy (e.g. the Museum of Lojze Slak and Tone Pavček) to the promotion of a specific musical sub-genre (e.g. Oberkrainermusik in the case of the Bled Hit Parade), all interviewees confirmed that they perceive Slovenian FP music as a relatively young popular music style that has undergone changes and updates both in terms of line-ups and lyrics, as well as in terms of clothing and the contexts of the performances themselves. All interviewees perceived FP music as an important element of Slovenian national identity, and several highlighted its importance for Slovenia’s visibility abroad. Valenčič (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) pointed out that ‘[w]ithout FP music, other nationalities would not know Slovenians at all. […] [T]he symbol of Slovenian culture outside Slovenia, the [reason] we are known at all, is FP music’.

At the same time, the interviewees’ pragmatic, operational definitions of FP music as heritage that should be presented as heritage in a museum collection or in the context of a festival, articulated by the interviewees, were quite different and usually less inclusive. Valenčič came closest to the definition from the Register, unambiguously placing Slovenian FP music in the context of twentieth-century culture industries. He also stipulated that Slovenian FP music is a set of related but diverse styles and performance forms, which emerge in the process of mutual exchanges between Slovenians from the homeland and expatriates, such as those in the USA and Canada. Bajc, as well as all the interviewed festival organisers, emphasised that Slovenian FP music emerged at the intersection of folk songs and more contemporary modernisations introduced by the Avsenik brothers, as well as the subsequent diversification of the style through the Lojze Slak Ensemble and later, more modern ensembles.

All interviewees pointed to the international recognition and importance of Slovenian FP music ensembles for the Slovenian diaspora as a prominent feature of FP but did not mention the direct mutual influences of the musical inventions of Slovenian emigrants and Slovenians in their homeland. Bajc mentioned the influence of the Slovenian Emigrant Association (Slovenska matica) on the visual image of the Lojze Slak Ensemble, but this statement was also made in the context of a discussion about the ensemble’s international success: ‘when they went to America - […] the organiser [was] the Slovene Emigrant Association, which demanded that they perform in Upper Carniolan national costumes as the most recognisable Slovenian symbol’ (Bajc in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

Valenčič placed these and similar successes of Slovenian classical FP icons in the USA in the context of two developments: 1) the interest of Slovenian (post-World War Two) emigrants in the USA and their descendants in their Slovenian roots in the 1960s and 1970s, and 2) the decline of Slovenian-Style polka as a genre popular with the American youth prior to the emergence of rock’n’roll. It was in the USA that Slovenian FP music, as a genre related to Cleveland-Style polka, first became a museum item and a matter of heritage, with the establishment of the Hall of Fame and Polka Museum in 1987, preceding the Avsenik Museum in Begunje (Slovenia) by two years. The first ever overview exhibition dedicated to Slovenian FP music, organised in Slovenia, was put on display at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in 2007 (Cvetko 2007), while museums dedicated to individual – exceptionally popular and prolific – performers have been more widespread (see Table 1).

Practical operationalizations

The piano accordion as an exclusionary measure of excellence

The quality of music performers and FP music traditions was often cited by interviewees as an important aspect of the heritage they want to preserve through their institutions and events. Pukl, the representative of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, was the only interviewee who did not stress quality as a heritage-definition criterion.

The interviews demonstrate that quality may refer to several very different things in the context of Slovenian FP music. The representatives of the festival in Ptuj (Hren) and in Bled (Ošterbenk Janša) have both associated quality with the piano accordion. Hren also poetically aligned the quality of this musical tradition with the long tradition of cultural events in Ptuj – Slovenia’s oldest city – and even the city’s lesser-known industrial heritage. This connection is pointed out in the promotional material and considered in the annual planning of the venues:

What the Slovenian people working in culture and technology do not understand is that it is necessary to show all this [architecture, countryside] to the people and to educate them. And we put the engines on stage and said to ourselves that all this can be connected. All this is our heritage …

(Hren in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023)

The Ptuj festival is designed to present a ‘best of’ selection of Slovenian FP music, and the organisers envision the festival as a ‘high-culture’ event that would attract important public figures from the whole region. Although foreigners are listed as a segment of the audience, the festival is primarily aimed at the Slovenian public, and the organiser considers Slovenian FP music as a distinctly Slovenian phenomenon (Hren in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

This strategy is in stark contrast to the concept of the more recent Bled Oberkrainer Hit Parade. This festival, organised as a tourist product and primarily aimed at ‘German-speaking visitors’ (Ošterbenk Janša in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023), also builds on quality performers playing ‘Avsenik-style’ music, but does not restrict itself to Slovenian ensembles and does not position the music as a primarily ‘Slovenian’ heritage. Rather, the piano-accordion FP event is positioned as regional, Oberkrainer tradition.

The reliance of these interviewees on the tradition (sic!) of the piano accordion thus creates an effective dichotomy in heritage discourses between this tradition and all other Slovenian FP sounds, which become excluded for various reasons (‘quality’, ‘sound’, ‘unsuitability for the target audience’). A similar observation was also made by museum workers from Mirna Peč and Pesnica, who stressed their wish to cooperate and connect with the Avsenik Museum, but the lack of a similar ambition on the other side (Bajc Kurnik Zupanič, both in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

Community and the cohesive power of the diatonic accordion

Unlike the festivals in Ptuj and Bled, the festivals in Graška Gora, Vurberk, Števerjan, Cerkvenjak, Škofja Loka, Dolenjske Toplice and Oplotnica, as well as the Modrijani Night, while also stressing ‘quality’ as an important programming criterion, do not prioritise the piano accordion. When asked about the requirements for potential festival performers, Plazl, the organiser of the Graška Gora festival (Majsova and Šepetavc 2023), remarked: ‘We don’t have any minim[al requirements], only electronic music is not performed here, because it is a FP music festival. But we invite two groups from other countries every year, and it is prescribed that they perform music [like] Slovenian polkas and waltzes, but they [can sing] in their own language’. The special foci of this festival, whose organiser’s biography involves extensive periods of living abroad, are understanding Slovenian FP music as Slovenian heritage that is open to the international space, and highlighting both the piano-, and the diatonic accordion traditions.

The organisers of the other abovementioned festivals also build on the tradition of the diatonic accordion, but do not necessarily associate it with the international openness or accessibility of FP. The Števerjan festival has, over the past decades, primarily been aimed at strengthening the local Slovenian minority community in Italy and connecting local Slovenians to those in Slovenia through boutique tourism (Bergnach and Beretta in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023). The festivals in Cerkvenjak and Oplotnica also aim to strengthen local communities and identities, both through the organisational process, which involves many local people, and through the event itself, which is designed to showcase younger local ensembles (Zorko; Ribič, in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023). In this case, the international and networking importance of Slovenian FP music coincides with the concern for local cohesion and the aim to strengthen local identification.

The festivals in Vurberk, Dolenjske Toplice and Škofja Loka are events that celebrate Slovenian national culture. Toplak (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) observed: ‘the diatonic accordion was somehow not in the foreground with our neighbours in Ptuj. […] As we were informed that it [the diatonic accordion] was neglected, but we knew that people liked Slak’s music […] the idea came to us to organise the first FP music festival in Slovenia with the diatonic accordion and polyphonic singing] in Vurberk’.

The concept of the Dolenjske Toplice festival is not as elaborate as the one in Števerjan or Vurberk, but, tellingly, the event takes place on 26 December – national independence day (Vovk in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023). The Škofja Loka festival also has a national dimension, aiming to preserve Slovenian dialects; Jamnik (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023), the organiser, admitted that the Upper Carniolan dialect has been the most common, and that festival has been losing popularity among performers due to the condition to sing in dialect.

At the same time, all organisers of diatonic-accordion based festivals noted such events’ generally decreasing popularity, alongside the growing interest in the accordion among the youth. The Modrijani Night conceptual festival appears to have been an attempt at reconciling these two trends by bridging the gap between the ‘old’ (format of FP music festival) and the ‘new’ (the accordion’s growing popularity). ‘It has been our spiritual project’, Švab (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) remarked, elaborating that the one-night event was designed as a live and mediatised spectacle that succeeded in attracting an unprecedented audience, and nation-wide media attention. Apart from the ‘spiritual’ dimension that grew out of Švab’s ‘deep religiosity’,⁷ the event expressed his (and his ensemble’s) desire to celebrate their nation-wide popularity, and to ‘unite’ Slovenians across Slovenia despite local and regional differences.

Territorializations of folk pop

Music as homeland for the diaspora

In one way or another, all interviewees stressed the importance of FP music’s significance for the construction of collective identities: ‘[S]lovenian folk music […] was created with an “X” factor, this is how it has managed to stick around for so long. It has […] something that unites, regardless of gender, financial position, or status […] And if we look at other countries, in principle, none of them has such strong cultural symbolism’ (Hrenin Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

Hren’s reflection coincides with Valenčič’s opinion and at the same time raises the question of how such cultural forms associated with the ‘country’ are transformed in a semantic way in the context of foreigners and expatriates. In the context of minorities, Slovenian FP music is often conflated with the expression of national sentiment, and dedicated festivals and museums are a way of maintaining cultural ties with Slovenia. For example, the journal Števerjanski Vestnik (The Števerjan Newsletter), published at the 50^th anniversary of the festival in 2020, included this statement by Slavko Avsenik Jr.⁸ from 2010: ‘Here [in Števerjan], you directly feel the importance of belonging to your nation and to everything that helps to preserve the culture of your nation, which even in the middle of the capital of our country, Ljubljana, we are sometimes too rarely aware of’ (Avsenik in Hlede 2020). Valenčič’s (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) reflection on the importance of FP was close to Avsenik’s (and that of the organisers of the Števerjan Festival, who placed Avsenik’s statement in the festival bulletin): ‘FP music [has] replaced the Slovenian language in America as a means of uniting us’.

Unlike festival organisers in Slovenia, whose opinions are divided on the need for state support for FP music festivals, the international interviewees from Števerjan and Cleveland have pointed to the importance of support from the home country. In this context, Valenčič (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) specifically highlighted the symbolic and financial exclusion of FP music from financial mechanisms: ‘[…] in Ljubljana, they are reluctant to support cultural activities involving accordions’. Stakeholders working in the Slovenian context, on the other hand, did not foreground or even rejected the idea of state (or provincial) support for FP festivals and museums.

Hybridization of genres and identities

Slovenian diasporic communities abroad do not have a single, homogenous relationship to their home country and FP music. Even if the anchor of the building of Slovenian communities abroad is the connection with Slovenia, festival and museum activities point to glocal multicultural contexts. In the case of the festival in Števerjan, this is reflected in – for example – the organiser’s emphasis on the local specificities of the place and the landscape, and the support of the Italian regional financial mechanisms and the Italian RAI television in the organisation of the festival. Additionally, this festival has, over the years, exhibited a remarkable openness to different music and fashion styles within the FP tradition (as evident from the media archive of the old editions of Števerjan and the openness of the organisers to the possibility of future modifications to the call for participation, to reflect the style’s transformations). The greater openness of the definitions of FP music reflects the multicultural organisational structure of the event. Notably, the Števerjan Festival is consistently organised by the young (mostly under 30 years of age) generation of Slovenians living abroad, and FP music is an important aspect of the intergenerational consolidation of national and local identity; according to the interviewees, even those who no longer live in the village return to the village every year during the festival (Bergnach and Berettain Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

The hybridisation of identities and FP as heritage is particularly evident in the case of the American Slovenes. According to Cvetko (2007, 68) and Valenčič (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023), a century of the development of Slovenian-Style polka and related genres in the USA has been characterised by the combination of Slovenian folk music heritage, original Slovenian and other ethnic groups’ arrangements, and the incorporation of American music heritage.

The music heritage of the Slovenian diaspora in the USA, including the development of Slovenian-Style polka in Cleveland before World War II, is well documented (Debevec 2014) and represents a parallel tradition to the Slovenian one. At the same time, several interviewees stressed the symbolic importance of the post-war arrival of Slovenian FP music on the American market, which happened in the context of a new post-war wave of migration; the immigrants had brought along new Slovenian musical influences. The popularisation of Slovenian FP in both Slovenia and the USA went hand in hand with the increasingly frequent performances of Slovenian musicians in the USA, especially the Avseniks, the Slaks and Andrej (Andy) Blumauer (Cvetko 2007, 60). Valenčič (in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023) also described the arrival of Slovenian FP in the USA as an innovation that revitalised the local scene: ‘Around 1960, there was a kind of decline of Slovenian-American music. […] [Avsenik’s songs] acted as a new infusion of Slovenian melodies’.

The migration of musical influences was neither purely physical nor unidirectional; as early as in the 1940s, Radio Ljubljana was reportedly playing records by Slovenian-American musicians, which arrived to Ljubljana via Belgrade, where they had been commissioned from Columbia Records. The mutual influences became even stronger after the Second World War, especially on account of the tours of the Avsenik and Slak ensembles (Sivec 1998; Lojze Slak, n. d.). Valenčič also attributed the popularisation of Slovenian FP in the USA to the increasing number of tourist trips made by American Slovenians to Slovenia since the 1960s, and the presence of Slovenian FP on Slovenian radio stations, an important medium for the Slovenian diaspora in the USA (Cvetko 2007, 50).

Involvement in preserving and (re)defining Slovenian musical heritage in the Slovenian diasporas varies significantly. While Števerjan and the case study of the work of Slovenian immigrants in Argentina (Molek 2017a) point to the involvement of younger generations in these processes, Valenčič, personally involved in museum, festival and radio activities, mentioned the current decline in the popularity of Slovenian FP in the USA. Cleveland-Style polka has also been struggling, albeit to a lesser extent; it has partly been redefined by neo-polka bands, such as the Chardon Polka Band, and has benefitted from significant media exposure in old and new media (March 2019). In this context, Valenčič articulated the educational importance of heritage institutions and projects, stressing the significance of an open definition of heritage; although most listeners of radio programmes dedicated to Slovenian-American polka expect to hear songs by Slak and Avsenik, he clearly insisted on diversification: ‘In the middle of the programme I put something Slovenian and unusual – something archival, say a record from the 1920s, something classical, then something modern …’ (Valenčič in Majsova and Šepetavc 2023).

Conclusion

In this article, we have analysed the different ways in which the gatekeepers of Slovenian FP music as heritage co-create and consolidate the authorised heritage discourse on FP. Slovenian FP music is registered in the national Intangible heritage register in a relatively open way; however, the Register specifically highlights the phenomenon’s importance for Slovenian ‘national identity’. Folk pop is thereby associated with the discourse of national culture and – as is evident from the definition’s emphasis on its international resonance – implicitly positively valorised for its innovativeness, popularity, and commercial success. In this article, we analysed the extent to which this understanding of FP coincides with the opinions held about it by heritage gatekeepers – museums and festivals that promote, preserve, and operationalise FP music as heritage; and what this understanding means in practice, in terms of their professional activities.

Having mapped out the relevant heritage gatekeepers (museum curators and organisers of thematic festivals), we conducted 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews with them. Qualitative analysis of the interviews indicates that most of the initiatives that canonise and frame FP music as heritage generally accept the definition provided in the Register, but rely on other, relatively specific and closed definitions of FP music as a heritage phenomenon in practice.

It should be noted that those interviewees involved in festival organisation, but not in museum management or curation preferred to use the word ‘tradition’ over ‘heritage’ to describe FP music. In part, this may be due to the specificities of their professional jargon: in the absence of heritage festival funding mechanisms, festival organisers are not pushed to thinking about FP music as heritage. Partly, however, it points to the connotations of ‘heritage’. While speaking about FP as ‘tradition’, the interviewees tended to focus on the musical and experiential features of FP music, mentioning community bonding, intergenerational cultural transmission, common singing, and dances. When prompted to think about it as heritage, however, they tended to switch to national costumes, accordions, and the international resonance of FP. Heritage thus emerged as a practice with a predefined framework; but even as a ‘tradition’, it emerged as a matter of ‘national’ significance in the context of institutions like festivals and museums. Mundane heritage practices, such as village balls, radio-accompanied Sunday lunches, Friday night television or weddings were not discussed in the same context as museums or festivals.

Moreover, with the exception of the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, all gatekeepers stated that ‘quality’ is an important criterion for selection procedures, that is, for determining who are worthy representatives of the ‘tradition’ and what should be acknowledged as worthy of displaying as heritage. In fact, in practice, the heritage frameworks of FP music adopted by the examined gatekeepers are mainly narrowed down along the axis of ‘excellence’. Although ‘excellence’ could, in theory, refer to different things, such as the overall performance or innovation, our interviewees have most often mentioned this criterion with reference to the tradition of the piano accordion (Avsenik’s style). Admittedly, the stakeholders who stressed excellence as an important aspect of their heritage activities were in the minority among the interviewees; most museum and festival representatives, on the contrary, emphasised the diversity of FP and spoke of quality primarily in terms of professionalism and precision of the musical performance. National costume was also sometimes mentioned as an indicator of a band’s professionalism, and contrasted against casual attire, such as jeans.

The question of origin also emerged as an important point of distinction. The gatekeepers operating in Slovenia unequivocally stated that FP music originated in Slovenia, and some of them held strong opinions regarding the musicological and/or aesthetic of folk pop. On the contrary, gatekeepers from Italy the USA understood the idea of Slovenian musical heritage in a more dynamic and inclusive way. While they also tended to associate folk pop with national identification and community building, they refrained from narrowing down the framework of Slovenian FP in terms of formal-content characteristics, preferring to point to the productivity of cultural hybridisation. Their practices and framing of FP music were thus closer to the Register’s definition of Slovenian FP, which emphasises the music’s prominent place in everyday and diverse activities, than to those notions articulated by gatekeepers that emphasised excellence (Festival Ptuj, Avsenik Museum, etc.).

It is thus possible to conclude that the ways in which Slovenian FP is framed and constructed as heritage in practice are significantly linked to the specific gatekeeper’s implicit understanding of local and national identities as either stable and spatially fixed or hybrid and dynamic. Having said this, we may not overlook the differing degrees to which the interviewees exhibited a concern with FP as heritage. While heritage was a familiar way of thinking about popular music to those gatekeepers involved in museum curation, those exclusively acting as festival organisers and not prompted to preserve material artefacts (such as costumes or instruments), or to think about music as heritage by funding calls preferred to discuss FP as (national) tradition.⁹ These interviewees tended to consider ‘tradition’ and ‘intangible heritage’ as synonyms, inviting the question about where heritage practices begin. In the context of Slovenian folk pop, these seem to be aligned with museums that hold material artefacts and archives of recordings, rather than performances.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Social Science Data Archive: Majsova, N. and J. Šepetavc. 2023. Slovenska narodnozabavna glasba: Kulturna dediščina in turistični produkt skozi perspektivo deležnikov (2022). Fakulteta za družbene vede, Arhiv družboslovnih podatkov. doi: https://doi.org/10.17898/ADP_NZG221_V1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency under grant J6-2582.

Notes on contributors

Natalija Majsova

Natalija Majsova is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences). Her research focusses on popular culture, (post)socialism studies, (tech)nostalgia and heritage interpretation. She regularly publishes in international and Slovenian academic journals, and has authored two books about outer space, film, and utopias. Her book Memorable Futures: Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age was published by Lexington Books in 2021. She is the co-editor of the Social Science Forum journal, and an occasional film critic and essayist.

Jasmina Šepetavc

Jasmina Šepetavc is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies, University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences). Her research interests include film, popular music, and feminist and queer theory. She regularly publishes in Slovenian and international academic journals and film magazines (Studies in European Cinema, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Družboslovne razprave, Ekran). She is also a film critic and a film festival selector.

Notes

1. The Slovenian syntagm ‘narodnozabavna glasba’ can be found in existent literature as ‘Oberkrainer music’, ‘popfolk’, and even ‘popular-national music’. This article adopts the term ‘FP’ (or ‘FP music’) as semantically the closest to the Slovenian original.

2. The Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the central database of Slovenian intangible heritage (OPSI n.d..). The Register is managed by the Ministry of Culture and the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum is the coordinator for the protection of intangible cultural heritage.

3. Smith (2006) argues that, in practice, the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially among visitors to heritage events and institutions.

4. Hobsbawm (1983) has written about tradition in contemporary societies from a similar perspective, introducing a distinction between ‘political’ and ‘social’ tradition, which coincides with Harrison’s distinction between ‘official’ heritage, or Smith’s (2006) ‘authorised heritage discourse’, and ‘unofficial’ heritage.

5. Today, these are mainly the trio (accordion, guitar, contrabass) and the quintet (accordion, clarinet, baritone, trumpet, guitar, and vocals). The quintet was introduced by the Avsenik Brothers’ Ensemble in 1955 (known as the Gorenjska Quintet in 1955–1957). The Avsenik Brothers’ Ensemble promoted the Oberkrainer tradition of the piano accordion along with the Upper Carniolan regional attire, which has since come to represent Slovenian national costume. The ensemble’s initiator Slavko Avsenik (1929–2015) is widely regarded as Slovenia’s most successful popular music celebrity to date; in the popular imagination, he is often referred to as the inventor of FP music. Another popular style of Slovenian FP, usually associated with Lojze Slak (1932–2011), relies on the use of the diatonic accordion (frajtonarca, also known as the button box) and is sonically closer to folk songs than piano-accordion based ensembles. While the diatonic accordion was long considered inferior to the piano accordion by music gatekeepers (academies, music schools, music editors in the media), it is the more common type of accordion played in Slovenia today.

6. Several attempts at creating a national popular music museum have been detected over the past decade, but they have thus far remained inconclusive.FP.

7. Christianity in this context.

8. Slavko Avsenik, Junior is the famous accordion player Slavko Avsenik’s son. He works as a music composer, producer, and editor.

9. Most interviewees have highlighted the ambivalence of the state’s attitude towards FP music as cultural heritage. While they have agreed that it is recognised as such, they have also all pointed out that this does not affect their activities, as its preservation is not regulated through specific measures, strategies or supported through targeted calls for proposals; heritage stakeholders depend on local calls for proposals, sponsors, and the free market. Diasporas around the world do have access to calls for proposals from the Office for Slovenians Abroad and Internationally, but they must apply in Slovene, which can present a significant linguistic barrier.