Music (as) Labour: Professional Musicianship, Affective Labour and Gender in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article strives to broaden existing approaches in music scholarship, which, despite a long history of thinking about the role of music in shaping labour, have resulted in only sporadic attention to music labour itself. Drawing on Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's notions of affective labour as work intended to produce or modify peoples' emotional experiences, the article treats professional music-making as embodied labour, exploring its specific conditions—in particular, in relation to gendered practices of work. Based on empirical research into the values and concepts of music labour in socialist Yugoslavia, this article attempts to provide insight not only into the geographically and temporally specific context of socialism but also more generally, pointing to its shared somatic, gendered and affective aspects. Such an approach draws on recent calls for empiricism in the wake of critical deliberations of the ahistorical and decontextualised nature of existing approaches to affective labour. Through a case study of the material working conditions and work subjectivities of female professional singers, its aim is to emphasise music-making as both material practice and sensorial experience, taking into account that both are in constant and heterogeneous flux.

Keywords:

• Music Labour
• Affective Labour
• Kafana Musicians
• Professional Entertainers
• Female Singers

Acknowledgements

I thank Nebojša Jovanović for generously sharing information about the movies that portray kafana musicinas and particularly female singers. I also thank Daniela Špirić-Beard, Alexander Marković and Ian MacMillan for insightful and inspiring comments on the earlier versions of the article, the two anonymous reviewers who helped me to analyse material in a more nuanced way, and Trevor Wiggins for the editorial comments that helped me in shaping the text for publication.

Notes

¹ Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmTZ2RtcTY4, last accessed on 5 February 2014.

² I intentionally have not translated the term kafana, in order to refer to its specificity. In scholarly accounts, kafana has been translated into English in different ways, as a bar, a pub, a tavern, a café. In my opinion, all of these terms are too narrow to describe a specific experience in space that includes drinking, eating, listening to music and socialising. Moreover, kafana has been a ubiquitous environment for professional music-making in the Balkans and represented a key institution in shaping the specific profile of professional musicians—entertainers. Although a word in Serbo-Croatian and associated with the 'eastern part' of Yugoslavia—Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Macedonia— kafana has been well known as a term and concept in the whole territory of Yugoslavia and many former Yugoslavs went to kafanas and enjoyed performances of kafana musicians.

³ Such as ‘Gypsy Woman’ (Ciganka 1953), ‘Boiling Town’ (Uzavreli grad 1961), ‘Cross Rakoč’ (Krst Rakoč 1962), ‘I Even Met Happy Gypsies’ (Skupljači perja 1967), ‘Poor Maria’ (Sirota Marija 1968), ‘Wager’ (Opklada 1971), ‘Deer Hunt’ (Lov na Jelene 1972), ‘And God Makes a Kafana Singer’ (I Bog stvori kafansku pevačicu 1972), ‘Always Ready Women’ (Uvek spremne žene 1987) and ‘Wanderer’ (Lutalica 1987).

⁴ I do not maintain a conceptual division between concepts of labour and work although I am aware of the semantic differentiation and the political conotations these two can imply. Analysing Marxian theory of labour, Fuchs and Sevignani assert that since Marx wrote in German he uses one common word for work and labour (Arbait), which was translated in English sometimes as ‘work’ and sometimes as ‘labour’. Drawing on Marx, they propose labour as a form-giving activity, ‘a work under capitalist condition that stands in a class relationship with capital’, while defining work as the most general word for doing something with a broader meaning (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: 240). Hanna Arendt also defines the three practical activities of labour, work and action. She argues that the decisive element in the industrial revolution was the introduction of the division of labour into the work activity in order to increase efficiency (Arendt 1958: 123).

⁵ Scholarly works approach the important empirical and theoretical contribution of music and sound to our knowledge of work: their role in the workplace and in shaping working conditions, people’s use of music in structuring their working lives (e.g. with work songs), popular music’s place in the politics and policy of the labour movements, and the relationship between music and work. For recent studies, see Armstrong (2013), DeNora (2000), Gioia (2006), Green (1993), Gunderson (2010), Hall (2001), Korczynski (2003, 2007, 2011, 2014), Korczynski et al. (2005), Korczynski, Pickering and Robertson (2008, 2013), Lynch (2007) and McNeill (2008).

⁶ Such as the Session on the Ethics of Musical Labour, held at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, 10–13 November 2011; ‘Music: Parts and Labour’ graduate student conference, NYU Department of Music, 27–8 April 2012; IASPM conference ‘Music and Labour’, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 23–6 May 2013, and SEM pre-conference symposium ‘Music and Labour’ at University of Pittsburg, 12 November 2014. See also ‘Music and Labour’, the latest special issue of MUSICultures, the journal of The Canadian Society for Traditional Music co-edited by Christina Baade, Susan Fast and Line Grenier (Baade, Fast and Grenier 2014).

⁷ The latest article of Kelley Tatro about affective impact of extreme musical practice of screaming in the context of punk performances in Mexico City also demonstrates attempts to theorise music labour beyond the creative labour paradigm by using a notion of affective labour (Tatro 2014).

⁸ I draw on Born, who argues that music has no material essence but a plural and distributed materiality (see Born 2011: 377).

⁹ Which goes beyond typical narrative of the socialist state control over the production and dissemination also due to the fact that Yugoslav socialism was distinct from the Warsaw Pact countries.

¹⁰ Karl Marx called it ‘non-work’ (Hardt and Negri 1994: 7–8) or ‘perverted’ and ‘parasitical’ labour. On music labour as non-real work, see also Gramit (2002: 10).

¹¹ Workers’ self-management was the unique concept promoted as a ‘Yugoslav road to socialism’ and a way of reducing state control over the economy and enabling decision-making by the workers themselves. Socially-owned companies were supervised by workers’ councils that were made up of all employees and which decided on issues concerning division of labour, general production methods, scheduling, customer care, and so forth (for more on this, see Rusinow 1977: 50–2).

¹² The analysed data included official narratives of policy-makers, such as reports and documents, newspapers and documents of the musicians’ unions, media discourses about music labour and interviews with the musicians in the magazines dedicated to popular music.

¹³ Sonic affect, as conceptualised through the approach of sonic materiality, is an object that circulates and makes possible spatio-temporal collectivities based on shared vibrational experience (see Thompson and Biddle 2013). It is important to emphasise that there is no univocal theory of sonic materiality but rather various views to music materialities. For my case study, I will draw on Schrimshaw's deliberation on sonic affect as impersonal intensity and force (see Schrimshaw 2013).

¹⁴ Numerous ethnographic works on creative labour (specificially Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008; Pratt 2002; Pratt, Gill and Spelthann 2007; Taylor and Littleton 2008a, 2008b) highlight the main features of this kind of work, such as precariousness, long working hours, erasure of the boundaries between work and life, a high level of mobility, passionate attachment to the work, bohemianism and entrepreneurialism, informal work environments and distinctive forms of sociality.

¹⁵ Opponents of the concept assert that precariousness is inherent to all ‘creative’ professions. They warn of the fact that people who perform affective labour paradoxically can be both examples of precarious workers but also extremely wealthy entrepreneurs and, in this sense, ambassadors of capitalism (see McRobbie 2010: 73).

¹⁶ Roma have been specialised in a professional music entertainment for centuries in the Balkans.

¹⁷ Svanibor Pettan, in his article about Roma musicians and the music market in Kosovo, was the first scholar who more closely approached music-making in terms of trade in the Balkans. He looked at Roma musicians as merchants who invest their time and skills to please the audience and bring profit. Although not going more deeply into the issue of music labour, his article gives an important insight into economic aspects of professional musicianship in Kosovo (see Pettan 1996).

¹⁸ For a critique of the concept of affective labour from the feminist point of view, see McRobbie (2010).

¹⁹ For studies on gendered aspects of music labour, see Van der Nieuwkerk’s extensive study of female entertainers in Egypt, which addresses the question of music work (see Van der Nieuwkerk 1995; Leonard 2007; Armstrong 2013 and Morcom 2014).

²⁰ From the report of the Executive Board of the Association of the Music Artists of Yugoslavia (Udruženje muzičkih umetnika Jugoslavije) submitted to the Fifth Regular Meeting, November 1965, about the responsibilities of music artists in the ‘development of our musical life and socio-economic relations in culture’ (Archive of Yugoslavia-Belgrade 1965).

²¹ In the mid-1980s the amended law was passed in order to formalise categorisation in the entertainment business in Yugoslavia, which includes a distinction between categories of ‘independent artists’ and ‘Estrada workers’.

²² These two forms of labour overlapped, since many of the performers, although they recorded LPs, still continued performing at informal and private occasions (particularly weddings) as the most important source of income or in kafanas, especially for Yugoslav guest workers in Western European countries. Often musicians emphasised that, no matter how popular and big a star you are, work is work—‘a gig is a gig’ (tezga je tezga).

²³ The majority of musicians were wage labourers but many of them worked without formal contract and negotiated their wage with the kafana owners and celebration hosts. Such working conditions involved high flexibility and mobility, and made them affective workers in a sense of precariousness (which is, due to the limited form, beyond scope of this article).

²⁴ Which included mainly a genre of newly-composed folk music—NCFM (a literal translation of the term novokomponovana narodna muzika), for which ‘service work’ served as an essential setting for performance, maintenance, and dissemination (see more in Vidić Rasmussen 2002), but also various other genres such as dance music, urban folk music (starogradska muzika), jazz or even choir performances—all depending on the particular kafana (Dumnić 2013: 81).

²⁵ Hesmondhalgh and Backer’s (2010: 206) usage of the words of sociologist Howard Becker (1951) can be a perfect illustration of this. They refer to relationships between jazz musicians and audiences as fundamentally one of ‘conflict and hostility’.

²⁶ Tips were usually a greater source of income than the contracted wage. When a patron is really satisfied, she/he would inevitably give a generous tip. As Alexander Marković in his research on Roma musicians in Vranje points out, particularly throwing money instead of handing it to musicians, hit the musician hard when tipping on the forehead or cheek or practicing the so-called ‘bottle technique’ can be seen as a degrading gesture, which implies a complex patron–musician relationship (Marković 2013).

²⁷ Musicians stressed that communication with drunken patrons was particularly exhausting.

²⁸ Such as not keeping patrons waiting too long before coming to the table to play a request.

²⁹ Gypsy musicians are particularly recognised as masters of finding a way to reach the patron and ‘to touch people’s string’ (van de Port 1998: 182), not just making a judgement about the patron’s current emotional state but also changing or improving it.

³⁰ ‘Consultation about musical life and popularisation of music’ (Archive of Yugoslavia-Belgrade 1965).

³¹ The first musicians’ association was founded in Belgrade in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1928 under the name ‘Union of musicians, tambura players, accordion players, players, male and female singers in Kingdom of Yugoslavia’. It is interesting that in the archival sources the ‘Union of female musicians’ is also mentioned (Dumnić 2013: 83–4). It was estimated that in 1970 the number of Estrada workers in Yugoslavia was around 40,000 (Jugoslovenska Estrada 1970–71: year I, no. 1, 1970).

³² The Association of Estrada Artists and Performers of Serbia was established a few years earlier in 1962, and its magazine Estrada was founded in 1965.

³³ Such as Miodrag Bogdanović (the first President) and Dragomir Majkić (the Director and Chief Editor of the magazine Jugoslovenska Estrada).

³⁴ Some of the performers had their own ‘professions’ (some of them were dentists, students, etc.), and singing or playing was their hobby.

³⁵ For more about this dynamic in the field of Yugoslav popular music, see Arnautović (2012).

³⁶ The situation was similar in Bulgaria at the beginning of the 1970s with the economic reforms that enabled flourishing service work, the so-called ‘second economy’. As Timothy Rice writes, wedding musicians were allowed to sell their services to individuals as private entrepreneurs, which made them the main beneficiaries of such reforms (Rice 1994: 242). Furthermore, this challenged the state as the sole patron and arbiter of the music market, supporting flourishing a musical, aesthetic and economic system outside state control (1994: 243).

³⁷ In Bulgaria in the 1980s, some of the musicians were denied the right to join musicians’ union and even left waged labour in order to keep the position of ‘full-time’ wedding musicians (Buchanan 1996: 207).

³⁸ Certain restaurants and kafanas (such as Šumatovac in Belgrade) served as informal job markets and the most important places for the functioning of the music market. According to Rice and Silverman, in socialist Bulgaria, hiring musicians was always located in the realm of a free market—the so-called ‘musicians' markets (Rice 1994: 248; Silverman 2012: 137).

³⁹ Quotation taken from Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011: 220).

⁴⁰ Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTRvwGo1eYc, last accessed on 1 February 2014.

⁴¹ Existing studies about female musicians worldwide usually describe hard work in professional entertainment, patron–performer relations and musicians as service workers yet without going into a more deep examination of music labour as such (see e.g., Van der Nieuwkerk 1995; Sugarman 1997, 2003; Naroditskaya 2000; Ciucci 2012; Doubleday 2006, 2013; Arisawa 2013).

⁴² I refer to female singers only, since female instrumentalists were extremely rare. There were a few exceptions, such as the popular accordion player Radojka Živković (for more about this, see Hofman 2011: 99). For more about discourses of professional musicianship and gender in socialist Yugoslavia, see Hofman (2010: 144–5).

⁴³ Singers often played with various social locations and performed various identities as a part of their public persona self-representations. This was particularly a case with Muslim women from Bosnia and Roma women, who were often recognised as an embodiment of the ‘oriental mystique’ and marked by the discourses of ‘internal’ orientalism, where every country in the former Yugoslavia recognises its southern neighbour as more ‘eastern’, ‘oriental’ and ‘Balkan’ (for discourses of ‘nesting orientalism’ in a Yugoslav context, see Bakić-Hayden 1995).

⁴⁴ Employment was presented as one of the key elements in the emancipation of women in socialist Yugoslavia, and paid work and sociability apart from domestic duties were seen as an important part of women’s empowerment (Hofman 2011: 86). For more about so-called ‘socialist morality’ and female singers, see Hofman (2010).

⁴⁵ For the example of the ‘shikhat’—professional female performers in Morocco—and their problematic status, see Ciucci (2012).

⁴⁶ According to Silverman, dancing for money or being a professional dancer was a degrading profession for the Balkan Roma.

⁴⁷ A bohemian quarter in Belgrade.

⁴⁸ Many singers worked for a relatively short period and disappeared after a few years. In general, women retired early from professional music-making.