Abstracts

StubickeToplice
Croatia

13-17 April, 2011

at the invitation of

Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku

Giuseppe Massimo Rizzo,
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
massimoriz@gmail.com

Networked construction of Krk's island musical identities

The island of Krk's music-making is a specific musical context, part of a bigger cultural-musical area encompassing southern Istrian peninsula and Croatian Coastal-Mountainous region, related with na tanko i debelo bi-vocal singing. Differently than other Istrian instrumental practices, the island of Krk instrumental music-making is still strictly related with that kind of singing, made by two connected inextricable melodies in diaphonic relationship. That kind of instrumental diaphones are made by 2 players (called sopci because of the name of their instruments, that is it sopile, sopele or sopil, and double-reed aerophone) characterized by asymmetric social and musical status.
This features set sopila music-making out as an interesting dynamic system appropriate for deep analysis on musical outcomes, symbolically relevant even today, as a result of inter-individually related interactions. Sopila interplays are circular interactions, processed through different systemic dynamics, related to how players' individual musical skills and their capability to engage and develop social relationships in the island of Krk's time and space are build into each specific musical performance. In agreement with this model even the same player may musically interact differently according to each specific relational history he builds with different partners. On the other hand, this kind of systemic dynamics are connected to less musically skilled local networks (in which players usually live) by different kind of discourses and narrations, and serve as an identity and social sound maker for 21st Century insular communities, at local, regional and national level.
Finally, sharing with auditors’ ethnographic data and musical models, purpose of this paper is to outline some aspects of that kind of relational and networked roots of local processes of musical identities construction carried out by instrumental music-making on the island of Krk's context.