By Johan Palme, University of Stockholm

The flute kaval, traditionally used by Muslims and Albanians in Kosovo but emphatically not Serbs, gets constructed as the ultimate symbol of grand Serbian nationalism in the 2000s (SrTan Atanasovski). Austro-Hungarian military bands, sent to pacify the populace with Ottoman military marches, are appropriated for rebellious national identity building in turn-of-the-century Bosnia (Risto-Pekka Pennanen). Mustafa Kemal, great lover of Ottoman classical music, bans its performance because the almost entirely western “reformed” music is perceived as more in line with real turkishness (Ayhan Erol).

As Tejano-American queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes, borderlands are full of these kinds of self-contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes – and this applies not least to Europe's great borderlands, the Balkans. For “The Ottoman Past in the Balkan Present: Music and Mediation”, a conference organised by the Finnish Institute in Athens and the University of Athens Department of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies, perhaps the most central theme was the way identity, codes and expressions are shaped in such an ambivalent environment. How do rock musicians in Kosovo handle the double meaning of its western influence as both agent of modernity and rebellion, and as symbol of the KFOR oppressor and establishment (Jane C. Sugarman)? What does it means when Bulgarian record companies chose to rework specifically Romani chalga music into nationalist, conservative, even anti-ziganist entertainment (Carol Silverman)?

Not least both the keynote speakers showed how the region's pervasive instability reaches considerably beyond just issues of ethnic identity. Cem Behar from Bogaziçi University showed the exceedingly complex relationship between the written and the oral in Ottoman classical music, especially in its meeting with modernity which in the 20th century has produced more variations and oral traditions than ever before, while in another end has ossified some variant strands into supposedly original written scores. Derek B. Scott from the University of Leeds examined the Balkan entrants to the Eurovision song contest, viewing both the extremes and the various conflicting middle grounds in yet more fields of tension: assimilatory–nationally specific and earnest–camp, contrasting national debates against the ever-varying contest fortunes of different self-representational approaches.

Several members of the final round-table panel note d that existing paradigms of hybridity, Orientalism and appropriation are on the verge of being exhausted trying to deal with this massive specific complexity of the Balkans. Historical, political-structural and not least transnational comparative perspectives need to come into the discussion to a much larger degree, and we need to tease out the individual ambiguities and connecting threads between different identities, representations and fields of tension. Because, there is also always the danger, as Aleksandra Markovic showed in her paper on Goran Bregovic, of ending up romanticising the grand complexity itself and reducing that, too, to a cliché.