Danube, beyond the Blue: Riparian Power and Musical Affect in Southeast Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

A Serbian expression holds that more songs celebrate the Danube (its ecology, navigation, industries) than there are fish in it. Yet the Danube, as a site of border formation and sovereignty, engages diverse affective and power dynamics. With this conversation, we explore how sound and music participate in feeling out, following Božović and Miller (2016), the darknesses that lurk beyond tributes such as Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz.

We ask how sound imbued with riparian knowledge- and world-making disengages imperial fantasy and critiques regimes of control. Focusing on the waterway’s specific poetic relationships, we interrelate divergent, complementary ways of surviving with and against the Danube in Southeast Europe. One paper analyzes Scottian “hidden transcripts'’ in a Communist-era Romani song recorded in 1972 that encodes Roma memory of displacement and forced labor on Romania’s Danube-Black Sea Canal. Our second panelist examines how, following tambura music’s deployment for Croatian independence, Serbia’s tambura bands revived Croatian tours, mobilizing Yugoslav-era notions of love across prehistoric Pannonian seascapes subsuming the Danube, while navigating Danubian border-crossings’ disparate juridico-economic implications for Roma, Croat, and Serb bandmembers. The final paper analyzes the de-territorial politics of Annea Lockwood’s ethnographic process for her sound installation, A Sound Map of the Danube (2005): a quilt of field recordings made along the river’s bank, beneath its surfaces, and in conversation with people working and living alongside it. Collectively, we argue that sonically aestheticizing the Danube, as much as navigating or fording it, implicates people in relations of power and access.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Jeffers J. Engelhardt, Amherst College

Papers

• Sonic (Infra)politcs and the Romanian Danubian Death Canals - Ioanida Costache, Stanford U

• Fluid Revivals: Đorđe Balašević, Zvonko Bogdan, and Retouring to Restore a Hydrological Imaginary in the Trans-Danube - Ian MacMillen, Yale U

• 'Self-Possessed, Calm': Does the Danube Have an Environmental(ist) Sound? - Andrea F. Bohlman, UNC at Chapel Hill

Discussant

• Marijeta Bozovic, Yale U