Zagreb i Glazba 1094-1994. (Music in Eastern Europe).

Zagreb i Glazba 1094-1994: Zagreb i hrvatske zemije kao most izmedju srednjoeuropskih i mediteranskh glazbenih kultura/Zagreb and Music 1094-1994. Zagreb and Croatian Lands as a Bridge Between Central-European and Mediterranean Musical Cultures. Proceedings of the International Musicological Symposium Held in Zagreb, Croatia, on September 28-October 1, 1994. Edited by Stanislav Tuksar. (Muzikoloski zbornici, 5.) Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikolosko drustvo, 1998. [640. p. ISBN 953-609006-6. $45.]

The proceedings of the international musciological symposium held in Zagreb in 1994 on the occasion of the nine hundredth anniversary of the first mention of the town and the foundation of its Bishopric was a collaborative effort of the Croatian Musicological Society and the Department for the History of Croatian Music of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Zagreb, the focal point of a multileveled geographic panorama, borders north Croatia and Dalmatia, or on a larger scale, Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Such a concept, put forth by the editor, Stanislav Tuksar, is justified if we bear in mind that Croatia,

belonging to several different spheres, is culturally not a homogeneous land. In turn, each of the spheres belonged to larger European cultural realms: Italian lands shared the Mediterranean culture with Croatia; Austria and Hungary linked it to the Franco-German realm; the Ottomans spreading over the Balkans created an artistic language which merged Turkish with Greco-Slavic and Byzantine idioms; and finally the eastern Slavs promoting pan-Slavic ideas. (Zdravko Blazekovic, "Anonymous vs. Onymous, or When Will Croatian Musicology Remember an Unknown Composer?," International Journal of Musicology 6 [1997]: 209.)

Therefore, a comprehensive study of Croatian music would not be possible without such a panoramic view since "the history of its diaspora is not infrequently its better part" (Eva Sedak, "Extraterritoriality and the Revaluation of the 'National Idiom' in Music," History of European Ideas 14 [1993]: 737). Conversely, many foreign musicians also worked in Croatia.

In this volume, no fewer than forty musicologists and ethnomusicologists from Slovenia, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, with seventeen from Croatia, shed light on various aspects of Croatian music and explore links between Croatian and European cultures. The forty essays in Croatian (4), English (11), German (14), French (3), and Italian (8), ranging between five and twenty-seven pages with the occasional appendix, are set in (inconsistent) chronological order. Considering such an immense anthology involving various approaches to the long and intricate processes of acculturation and migration of different cultures indigenous to Croatia, I shall try to focus on a few particulars.

The first three papers provide a general direction to the book. While Marija Bergamo investigates whether musical parameters alone can express cultural surroundings, Hans-Peter Reinecke defines the European cultural world in an interesting (although not very original) manner as an intersection of different realms (including Croatia) united in historical, temporal, political, and geographical evolutionary processes. In his "sketch for a sketch," Stanislav Tuksar exposes the supposed main stream of Croatian history, emphasizing almost exclusively connections between the Croatian periphery and its center(s), claiming that "being too weak to create and impose their own norms, Zagreb and Croatia could satisfy themselves and the international market only by accepting norms from the neareast supra-systems, i.e., those of Central Europe and the Mediterranean" (p. 32).

The research of many other scholars here examines local traditions as the result of foreign influences on both the creative and performing fields. The creative field is examined by Koraljka Kos's paper on songs of Blagoje Bersa, and the performing field in excellent papers by Richard Gyug ("Innovation, Adaptation and Preservation: The Genealogies of Christ in the Liturgy of Medieval Dalmatia"), Katrina Livlijanic ("Between Dalmatia and Central Europe: Is There a ...