Vol. 64, No.

1 Ethnomusicology Winter 2020

Disobedient: Activist Choirs,

Radical Amateurism, and the Politics
of the Past after Yugoslavia
Ana Hofman / I nstitute of Cultural and Memory Studies,
Research Centre of Slovenian Academy
of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana

Abstract. From 2000 on, the emergence of activist choirs has greatly influenced
practices of political activism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. In
this article, I analyze how activists, singers, and listeners repurpose antifascist
music legacy in order to experiment with new forms of political engagement.
I propose the concept of radical amateurism, a political community that fuels
the politicization of a field of leisure, which enables people to form new au-
diosocial alliances at local, regional, and global scales. Locating my theoretical
framework within the field of affective politics of sound, I show that political
potentiality, when related to music and sound, is inscribed in the complex
relationship between imagined and real, exception and everydayness, emerg-
ing and routinized, and impossible and possible. In conclusion, I scrutinize
contingencies of affective politics and discuss the ways affective encounters
enable a new framework for practicing political engagement in a moment of
apathy and neoliberal exhaustion.

A ct 1, November 29, 2014, the streets of Belgrade: members of Horkestar

sing in front of several city institutions. They start with a performance
of “Pesma radu” (Work song) in front of the newly erected monument to the
Russian emperor Nikolaj.1 The banners in their hands read “freedom,” “fight,”
“barking dogs—keep them on a leash.”2
Act 2, the same day, the Rosa Lila Villa club, Vienna’s sixth district: Hor
29. Novembar celebrates its fifth birthday with lesbian-feminist choir Le-zbor.3
Promotion of the concert exclaims “Unite tonight” and “Love the fag—but also
Gastarbeiter, migrant, proletarian.”4
Act 3, a few days earlier, the Seventh March of Solidarity, Trešnjevka neigh-
borhood, Zagreb: members of Praksa sing during an educative-revolutionary

© 2020 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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 90  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2020

walk through the spaces of illegal antifascist resistance during World War II
organized by the Mreža antifašistkinja Zagreba (Network of Female Antifascists
of Zagreb). They champion the slogan: “Trešnja je crvena” (The cherry is red).5
Activist choirs Horkestar, 29. November, and Praksa made their “sonic
interventions” to express civil disobedience to xenophobia, fascism, and the
cultural and symbolic reconstitution of their cities.6 In doing so, they referred to
the particular historical past—a legacy of Yugoslav antifascist resistance during
World War II—as the most potent framework for articulating an alternative form
of political engagement. In this article, I analyze the practices of re-sounding
Yugoslav antifascist resistance that enable activists, singers, and listeners reimag-
ining political present and future and searching for new alliances and solidarities
after Yugoslavia. I ask the following questions: How does repurposing of the
antifascist legacy by activist choirs mobilize people to imagine potentialities of
thought, action, and life beyond the given conditions of being, doing, and living?
How does collective sound making call for new perspectives in thinking and
practicing political engagement? In order to answer these questions, I address
two aspects of choirs’ activities: (1) affective encounters produced by and through
collective singing and listening, and (2) self-organization and open participation.
I suggest that both aspects strongly contribute to creating a new sense of politi-
cal agency in the region: first, by making a rupture in the political atmosphere
affectively structured by the feelings of uncertainty, fragility, apathy, and lack of
imagination of the future, what I define as “political exhaustion,” and second,
as tools for building an alternative framework for political acting.7 I propose
the concept of radical amateurism, rooted in the practices of self-organization
and open participation as a political collective that fuels the politicization of a
field of leisure. In conclusion, I scrutinize contingencies of affective politics and
discuss the ways affective encounters can enable a new framework for practicing
political engagement in a moment of political foreclosure and exhaustion.
My methodology involves long-term, multilocational research as a singers
and participant-observer at rehearsals, concerts, protests, public rehearsals,
flash mobs, festivals, workshops, and public discussions since 2013. In addition
to this core work, I distributed online questionnaires, engaged in social media
ethnography, and undertook semistructured interviews, group discussions, and
informal talks with singers, activists, and listeners.8 The fact that many of these
people are my friends, colleagues, and comrades rooted my method in col-
laborative, action-related research methodology based on participatory action
research (PAR). Originating from the theoretical and methodological work of
Latin American theorists such as Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Guill-
ermo Vasco, this methodology assumes collaboration as a fundamental episte-
mological and political process and as a collective transformative praxis. It leads
to a different kind of knowledge produced “by” and, most importantly, “with”

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  91

people and communities under study considering its emancipatory potential

(see Araújo 2008:15; Cambria 2012:42, 44; Araújo and Cambria 2013).

“All in One Voice”: The Post-Yugoslav Activist Choral Movement

In 2000 Dragan Protić Prota and Đorđe Balmazović, both members of the artistic
collective Škart, founded Horkeškart, a choir that was supposed to act as a part
of their artistic project “Your Shit—Your Responsibility” at the Center for Cul-
tural Decontamination in Belgrade.9 In 2007 the choir continued its life under
the name Horkestar (Alternative Choir and Orchestra), while Škart founded
the new choir Prroba (Rehearsal).10 In 2005 the first feminist lesbian choir in
this region of southeastern Europe, Le-zbor, started singing in Zagreb. Inspired
by their predecessors, new choirs appeared almost every year: the female choir
Kombinat, founded in Ljubljana in 2008, and soon after Hor 29. Novembar,
which started singing in Vienna in 2009. The last two established choirs are
women’s choirs: Praksa from Pula, Croatia, and the feminist choir Z’borke from
Ljubljana, both founded in 2014. In recent years, some of the established choirs
are no longer active (e.g., LewHORe, Belgrade’s equivalent of Le-zbor, from
Zagreb, and Raspeani Skopjani, from Skopje, Macedonia), whereas some oth-
ers emerged in 2016—Belgrade’s antifascist choir Naša Pjesma (Our song) and
Domaćigosti (Hostguests), a choir that gathers refugees from the Middle East
and Zagreb residents. Choirs vary in the intensity of their activities—there are
periods in which they grow and those in which the number of their members,
rehearsals, and performances stagnates. Singing talent, prior music knowledge,
and sheet music reading skills are not required when people join the choirs.
Singers come from various geographical areas and very often have different
generational, family, professional, social, and cultural backgrounds. The major-
ity of them range in age from twenty to forty-five, yet particular choirs (such
as Naša Pjesma, Le-zbor, and Kombinat) also have older-generation members.
Four of them are all-female (Praksa, Le-zbor, Z’borke, and Kombinat), includ-
ing one feminist choir (Z’borke) and one feminist-lesbian choir (Le-zbor).11 The
choirs are in constant mutual contact by organizing visits, meetings, and joint
performances on various occasions—joint public rehearsals, concerts, and flash
mobs in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Pula, Belgrade, Skopje, and Vienna. As of 2018, they
had organized three festivals of activist choirs, entitled “Svi(e) u jedan glas” (All
in one voice), in Belgrade (2010), Ljubljana (2013), and Zagreb (2018).12 They
exchange lyrics, ideas, and information about songs, “borrow” repertoires and
arrangements, and share instrumental accompaniment.13 As their common goal
they state evoking a collective spirit of choral singing, emphasizing its revolution-
ary, rebellious side and emancipatory potential. In contrast to the other forms
of collective public engagement, such as protests or rallies, for them, singing is a

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more effective form of activism, as a day-to-day experience that creates a space

for alternative social relations and collective organizing. “Singing in a choir,
especially in a public space, gives you the opportunity to be spontaneous, to
react swiftly, something that other forms of activism don’t offer,” explained the
members of Le Zbor (Prtorić 2016).
Choirs use singing to reflect, cope with, and oppose ongoing structural
conditions of political exhaustion, economic precarity, and social disintegra-
tion in the area of former Yugoslavia. The dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia
in 1991, followed by bloody ethnic conflicts from 1991 to 1995 in Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia, and Hecegovina and in 2000 in Kosovo, resulted in a decade
of political and economic instability.14 Restoration of capitalism and aggressive
introduction of neoliberal economic “reforms” after 2000 brought about new
structural challenges and uncertainties, which in different scale and aspects
even more intensified from the global economic crisis in 2008.15 Despite the
different ways post-Yugoslav societies have responded to these instabilities, all
share the particular condition of neoliberal postsocialism that has marked the
period from 2000 onward and produced an intensive social atmosphere of fore-
closure, particularly in relation to political agency.16 Writing about the complete
lack of politics in the common interest in the region, post-Yugoslav intellectual
Boris Buden (2017) asserts people’s general feeling of the inability to intervene
in politics. In his words, they feel completely excluded from decision-making
and are left without any power and at the mercy of the elites. Jessica Greenberg
(2014) has developed a concept of the politics of disappointment for people’s
awareness of the contingency of political agency in the region caused by violent
conflict, poverty, and corruption. As a response to that, choirs opt for repurpos-
ing the antifascist past as an important political act of hope and imagination of
possibilities.

Theorizing Affective Socialities

Recent ethnomusicological writings aim to offer new insights into the role
music and sound play through affective technology in the current realities of
global neoliberalism (see Gershon 2013; Gray 2013; McCann 2013; Krell 2013;
Tatro 2014; Hofman 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Gill 2017). They elaborate on the
affective capacity of sound in cultivating alternative modes of sociability and
novel forms of political and cultural production. These works are fueled by the
general affective turn in the humanities, which shifts the focus to pre-, extra-,
and paralinguistic aspects of cultural practices and argues for a nondiscursive,
nonrepresentational approach (see Clough Ticineto and Halley 2007; Thrift
2007). Political registers of experiencing sound are grounded in the concept
of “affective sociality” (Raffles 2002), based on the premise that the fabric of

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  93

social relationships is deeply woven in the sensorial experiences. As a vital force

of visceral mobilization, music and sound are at the center of sociality and
collectivity-making and have the potential to model or suggest alternatives to
existing social formations through sensorial means.17
In my examination of the promise of affect in experimentation with new
forms of political agency and building alternative social relations, I explore the
ways collective singing and listening facilitate political community as a process
of coming together. However, this coming together is not necessarily limited
to the spatiotemporal moment of the sensorial experience of sound. In other
words, I examine how affectively produced encounters at the moment of sing-
ing/listening make room for new forms of social relations beyond the musically
bounded context.
Such an approach attempts to offer a deeper view of the general uneasiness
with music’s and sound’s efficiency in bringing about a concrete political change:
the agentive potentials of music and sound are usually seen as capable of pro-
ducing changes in the atmosphere, social climate, or certain social relations, but
their long-lasting effects in producing “real” social or political change are seen
as deeply dubious. In my examination, I aim to show that political potentiality,
when related to music and sound, is inscribed exactly in the complex relationship
between imagined and real, exception and everydayness, emerging and routin-
ized, and impossible and possible. Both the songs themselves and the collective
nature of choral performance as a necessary precondition for their effective
affective power enable the politics limited to “here and now” to be extended into
other aspects of political everydayness primarily in practicing alternative ways
of living, being, and doing. Experienced as affectively rich and mobilizing, the
collective voice of activist choirs thus not only produces a sensorial rupture in
the political atmosphere structured affectively by apathy and political exhaustion
but also facilitates experimenting with new forms of social organization.18

Antifascism Re-sounded
Over the last ten years, activist choirs have played an integral role in repurpos-
ing the legacy of antifascism in the post-Yugoslav space. In societies where
remembering both the antifascist resistance and the socialist past is burdened
by revisionism and devaluation (see Luthar 2012), these choirs offer an alter-
native reading of the past, using it as a political statement. The Yugoslav parti-
san resistance movement known in Serbo-Croatian as Narodno-oslobodilačka
borba (People’s Liberation War) was the World War II antifascist resistance
movement during the period 1941–45.19 It mobilized a wide front of people
from different ethnic, social, gender, and generational backgrounds, including
prewar communists, peasants, workers, and intellectuals from all areas of the

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former Yugoslavia.20 Being not just a resistance but also a socialist revolution led
by the Komunistička partija Jugoslavije (Communist Party of Yugoslavia, later
renamed into the League of Communists of Yugoslavia) and directed toward
the radical reshaping of social relations, Yugoslav antifascism was one of the
most important pillars of socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslav identity.21 Together
with samoupravljanje (workers’ self-management) and the nonalignment move-
ment, it represented a symbol of Yugoslavia’s “third path” and a peculiar version
of consumer socialism (Doder 1978:131), or Yugoslav market socialism (see
Dimitrijević 2016).22
Radical political and economic transformations after Yugoslavia’s dissolu-
tion brought about the complete devaluation of the partisan resistance not only
by renaming streets and physically removing/destroying monuments (Radović
2013) but also by silencing partisan songs, a main music genre of the World
War II antifascist struggle. Being sonically and thematically associated with the
multiethnic partisan movement and historical soundscape of a shared Yugoslav
identity, this repertoire was considered to be a threat to the newly founded
nation-states that emerged from the dissolution of the country and the sub-
sequent ethnic wars.23 Moreover, official discourses disregarded the legacy of
antifascism as related to socialist revolution, which after the breakup of Yugosla-
via was considered an inconvenient and unwanted totalitarian past. Therefore,
both aspects, Yugoslav and socialist, caused this repertoire to be regarded as a
threat to the ethnonationalistic discourses on which the formation of the new
post-Yugoslav nation-states rest (see Malešević 2002).
Activist choirs openly subvert the official discourses and claim that antifas-
cism still has cultural value and strong political implications in the post-Yugoslav
present. Rising militant nationalism, xenophobia, and open anti-immigrant
policies, as well as economic inequality, the diminishing of social and workers’
rights, public and private debt—what Slovenian philosopher Rastko Močnik
(1995) refers to as the “fascisms of today”—reopened a necessity to recast the
antifascist legacy in a new light. This is why the core of the choirs’ repertoire is
partisan songs with a strong anticapitalist dimension that refer to social awaken-
ing, class struggle and social inequality, solidarity, and workers’ rights—songs
such as “Nabrusimo kose” (Sharpen the cropper), “Padaj silo i nepravdo” (Fall,
force and injustice), and the aforementioned “Pesma radu” (Work song).24 Sing-
ers emphasize that they raise their voices against the corruption of the political
class and wild privatization, which have caused precarity and exploitation. Edna,
a choir leader and a member of Praksa, explained that the choir was founded in
order to support the workers of a shipbuilding company in Pula that has been
under the constant threat of privatization for the last twenty-five years: “The
workers of Uljanik were under threat of being fired, and we decided to sing in
support of their fight for the jobs. . . . We founded the choir precisely because

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  95

of this kind of situation: to support the fight for workers and social rights”
(interview with the author, June 15, 2015).25
However, it is not just the devastating consequences of the postsocialist
political and economic transformation that have prompted activists to start
singing partisan songs. Growing economic inequalities, xenophobia, fascism,
and racism on a global scale have fostered the choirs’ active role in the for-
mation of transnational communities of solidarity on a much wider scale, for
example, in the European antiausterity, Refugee Welcome, and Occupy Wall
Street movements. Choirs organize and participate in protests and events for
various global causes addressing migrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and human
rights or environmental issues.26 This is also visible in the repertoire, which,
apart from Yugoslav partisan songs, Yugoslav workers’ songs, and revolutionary
songs from the pre–World War II period, includes international pieces from
various historical periods, countries, and contexts. Choirs sing songs from social
movements around the globe, such as the civil rights movements in the 1960s
(John Lennon’s “Power to the People”), the Carnation Revolution in Portugal,
the Chilean revolution, labor, feminist, and environmental movements, and so
on. The most frequently performed songs come from what I call the “global Left
repertoire”: “Bella ciao” (Good-bye, my beautiful), “El pueblo unido” (The united
people), “Bandiera rossa” (Red flag), “Ay Carmela” (also known as “Viva la quince
brigada”), “Grândola vila morena” (Grândola, swarthy town), “La lega” (The
union; also known as “Sebben che siamo donne” [Although we are women]), and
“The Internationale.”27 Such repertoire shows a strong tendency to put Yugoslav
antifascism in dialogue with other revolutionary, social rights and resistance
movements across the globe. This also produces a more general framework of
understanding historical experience of Yugoslav antifascism, which is presented
as an emancipatory social movement dedicated to the struggle for human and
social rights.28 Activist choirs thus not only fill the notion of antifascist music
legacy with new meanings but also use it as a vehicle for critical reflection on
contemporary global processes.

Antifascism as an Affective Technology of Resistance

Choirs re-sound partisan songs in various performance settings, spaces, and
occasions: from neglected monuments of World War II, abandoned privatized
factories, and fired workers or evicted families in gentrified city outskirts to
protests, flash mobs and public rehearsals in main city squares, activist poetry
festivals, commemorations dedicated to World War II, concerts, and festivals.
Across these diverse settings, singers claim to revive a “primary function” of
partisan songs during World War II: to invite people to self-organize and fight
for freedom and radical social transformation. The songs choirs perform have

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powerful lyrics that describe a strong spirit and dedication to resist and fight
even in the most difficult moments, as in “Bilećanka”:
Sredi pušk in bajonetov,
sredi mrkih straž,
se pomika naša četa
v hercegovski kras.
Čuje se odmev korakov
po kamenju hercegovskem
Hej haj, ho, hej haj, ho!
Daleč zdaj si domovina,
nas izgnali so
ko da krivi smo zločina,
ker te ljubimo.
Vzeli materi so sina,
ženi so moža,
lačna je doma družina,
dosti je gorja.
Skoz pregnanstvo in trpljenje,
skozi ječe mrak,
prišlo novo bo življenje,
čujte mu korak.
Ko brez pušk in bajonetov,
prosta nam bo pot,
stopala bo naša četa,
svobodi naprot’.
Amid rifles and bayonets
and guards around us,
our troops are silently moving
through the karst of Bileća.
An echo of the footfall
on the Herzegovinian rocks is heard.
Hey, hi, ho! Hey, hi, ho!
Homeland, you are far away now.
We have been deported.
They persecuted us
because of the crime of loving you.
A mother has lost a son
and a wife a husband.
A family at home is hungry.
Our fate is bitter.
Through persecution and suffering,
through dungeon’s darkness,
a new life will arrive.
Hear its steps.

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  97

When without rifles and bayonets

our way is free,
then our troops will march
toward freedom.29
In reclaiming the political potential of partisan songs, activists assert their
ethical valency in a fight against current apathy, conformism, and selfishness. As
Teja, a member of Ljubljana’s Kombinat, explained, “The reason why we started
performing songs of resistance is actually very simple: these are the songs that
transmit values of solidarity, friendship, courage, freedom, and empathy. We
emphasize that this is still possible, even at a time when people are more and
more convinced that they cannot do anything, not even complain” (interview
with the author, March 28, 2013). Going against this grain, partisan songs are
employed as a wake-up call for people to start taking their political destiny back
into their own hands and to openly express their disagreement with the passive
bystander position.
However, for singers, lyrics are not the most important trigger of a song’s
mobilizing force. In their understanding, partisan songs are affectively imbued
sonic objects able to mediate a particular set of ideas and values through somatic
means. The fact that they were “born” in a historical moment of struggle and
resistance, members assert, suffuses partisan songs with a particular drive that
enables affective and somatic mobilization. Songs’ political capacity derives
from the affective intensities of revolutionary moment and the extreme mate-
rial conditions of their singing and listening. That specific power of songs is
narrated as an intensive somatic encounter that is generated in the moment of
performance. Talking about the first meeting and the moment of foundation of
Hor 29. Novembar, Aleksandar evoked: “From just ‘let’s sing’ we suddenly started
experiencing how powerful these songs are, how deeply they touched us. . . . I
mean, our bodies shuddered. . . . It was such a powerful experience” (interview
with the author, January 5, 2014). As visible from his statement, singing partisan
songs is experienced as full of high energy, passion, and emotional and bodily
investment (naboj). Such an affective expression of meanings and values of
the songs is presented by the members as the main reason to join the activist
choirs and a crucial difference from other groups or performers that share the
same repertoire. They, however, do not see themselves as passive interpreters of
the given content but emphasize the fact that they deeply believe the ideas and
values described in the songs, which enables them to more powerfully express
the songs’ mobilizing power. “When you see all these people who smile at you
and sing along with you . . . your heart is huge. Because it is not that you just
sing and people sing . . . but these are powerful songs . . . people crying. . . . We
sang ‘Konjuh planinom,’ and a woman came and said that she could not express
her feelings . . . and I think, This is it” (Edna, Praksa, interview with the author,
June 15, 2015).30 As illustrated by Edna’s statement, what gives value to the

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performance is an intensity of emotional exchange between singers and listen-

ers through an intensive affective and somatic encounter. When talking about
these experiences, members usually struggle to express verbally the energy that
circulates and coagulates but that is “felt” in the body as a fleeting vibration that
erupts and decays. Teja recollected this strong sense of the materiality of affect
that goes through bodies: “I feel that as I go forward to the audience, physically.
It is very difficult to describe that, this feeling when your skin crawls and you
feel inside of your body a kind of grace, affection, and mutual connection” (Teja,
Kombinat, interview with the author, March 28, 2013). Such sensory interactions
are narrated as the most powerful force in rebuilding a collective on a temporal
and spatial scale. Collective singing and listening discipline bodies in a particular
way, creating an invisible network of power. “This was like we were one body,
like we were breathing together,” as Teja described one of the performances. An
emergent sense of collectivity is thus galvanized through the transmission of
affect (Brennan 2004) that moves and mobilizes bodies and creates, in singers’
words, “an emotional-energetic collective.”
Described by singers and listeners as simultaneously a strong embodied
stimulus and an intensity of feeling, affective encounters are also the most impor-
tant confirmation of successful performance. Without an adequate response,
singing partisan songs can even be an unpleasant experience for members: “Once
it happened to us that we sung in a youth center, and these young people did not
feel us at all. At the end of the performance we were completely exhausted, like we
were singing in a vacuum. There was no reaction” (Maja, Kombinat, http://www
.delo.si/arhiv/pesmi-upora-in-revolucije.html). This statement demonstrates that
listeners’ reactions oscillate from one performance to another. Still, in the cases
when the listeners did not seem to react to their singing, it does not necessarily
mean that the affective exchange was missing. In some cases, singers explain, a
reaction can happen after the performance as a kind of a postponed emotional
reaction. Regardless of different types and intensities of the affective encounters,
collective singing of and listening to partisan songs are perceived by singers and
listeners as energetic, vital, and mobilizing and seen as an affective rupture in the
political climate of apathy and exhaustion. In the following sections, I examine
how such vitalizing potential and emerging sonic alliances, usually seen as lim-
ited to the moment of performance and musically bounded context (see Hofman
2015b), are transmitted into other aspects of the social life of activists, singers,
and listeners—the life of alternative forms of social organization.

Antifascism as Self-Organization
From their very foundation, choirs have practiced self-organization in order
to build a collective of cooperation and solidarity. Their internal structure and

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  99

everyday organizational practices show important interplay between the histori-

cal legacy of Yugoslav antifascist self-organization and future-oriented searching
for new social formations. “Today, I still think that we can apply many experi-
ences from the time of the People’s Liberation War, of course with critical con-
sideration, to the ways we operate here and now; in the first place, the fact that
they managed to self-organize and somehow achieved equality in agreements,”
Živa explained (interview with the author, December 27, 2013). The majority of
the choirs are not formally registered as societies or associations but work on a
completely voluntary basis driven by the enthusiasm of promoting shared ideas
and values. The internal structure usually does not imply fixed membership but
rather one that is relational and fluctuating. Some members reappear after hav-
ing been absent from rehearsals for weeks, months, or even years; others appear
only at performances. That means that anyone can join the choir at any time and
choose her or his own level of involvement. The choirs thus embody the specific
productive instability associated with the open participation structure: “There is
always a danger to transform into a more structured organization or disappear,”
explained Milan (interview with the author, January 15, 2014).
Decision-making is usually made by consensus, which produces an envi-
ronment that motivates members to participate in shared responsibility about
the choirs’ activities. Members regularly exchange their opinions and express
personal preferences, and in most cases, they collectively decide about repertoire
and performances and plan events and actions.31 In response to my question
about the internal structure of Hor 29. Novembar, Ljubomir said: “It is a col-
lective and a choir. It is a choirlective [horektiv]” (interview with the author,
January 10, 2014). Still, this does not imply the absence of hierarchies: choirs
are complex networks of disparate groups and individuals who cooperate, with
all the internal dynamics that accompany such a process. Being active in the
organization of the choir’s activities demands lots of time and energy, constant
communication among singers, and good task delegation. Self-organization is
thus not only a spontaneous collectivity-building process; it also implies a high
level of managing complex and sensitive internal dynamics, particularly between
more engaged people and the ones who contribute to the choir’s activities by
“just singing.” Singers who are more actively engaged with choir activities are
usually prepared to expose themselves and take responsibility for the choir as a
collective. Others are rather readier to approve the already made decisions and
contribute through regular attendance at rehearsals and performances. Usually,
new members rarely express their opinions, which they explain as a lack of self-
confidence to speak up before they feel they are a part of the collective. Such
relations produce certain tensions and long-lasting, often unproductive debate
followed by arguments and internal conflicts. Particularly in the moments when
choirs are growing with the number of activists, an internal structure based on

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consensus techniques becomes very complex and hard to realize.32 However,

people who understand their engagement primarily as “giving a voice” and who
limit their active presence to singing are not stigmatized or excluded. Various
types and scales of engagement are not only possible but also seen as important
for the choirs’ activities, their survival, and their development. Singers are thus
cautious about romanticizing the self-organization as a spontaneous “wish of
people to participate” (Gill and Pratt 2008:19), yet they still believe that such
a structure engenders feelings of accomplishment, social interaction, commit-
ment, and belonging. This is why despite all challenges, choirs remain dedicated
to self-organization as a cultural, artistic, and living practice that attempts to
build different social relations, as it is written on the Horkestar Facebook profile:
“Self-organization is more difficult, but it is more honest, more direct. It’s yours.
En générale: Do not wait until someone calls you, but take things into your own
hands and fight any kind of (unjust, unfounded . . .) ultimatum from the system
that is imposed on you. Because if we do not resist, do not fight for ourselves,
who will? [wink emoticon] We solve this with a song” (https://www.facebook
.com/horkestar/).
Moreover, in the general atmosphere of political exhaustion in the region,
activist choirs advocate the value of practices of cooperation, participation, and
other aspects of communal activities as a political act. Collectives of this kind
serve as a space for (self-)emancipation, which mobilizes people to be socially
and politically active beyond existent channels of public engagement. On the one
hand, they experiment with new forms for political acting beyond the framework
of official party politics of political elites. On the other, they offer an alternative
to the liberal human rights discourse promoted by professionalized and for-
eign donor-dependent NGOs and the civil sector social engagement that was
promoted after the breakup of Yugoslavia. As both of them are seen as deeply
discredited and emptied of real political potential, choirs call for an alternative
political infrastructure.33 In that sense, they are laboratories of cooperation, the
commons, and solidarity based on a different kind of power distribution. Practic-
ing an emancipatory approach of shared responsibility, choirs thus embody the
potential of collective singing to experiment with what Isabelle Stengers (2006)
calls “effective togethernesses.”

Radical Amateurism
The choirs’ self-organization is strongly embedded in an “open participation”
approach. Musical skills or previous singing experience are not the main cri-
teria for membership, and most singers do not have formal musical education.
More than half of them have no previous singing experience, and they empha-
size the importance of this distinction from traditional choirs. In doing that,

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  101

activists often directly refer to the so-called democratization of art fostered by

the Yugoslav antifascist resistance movement during the course of World War
II. Encouraging all people to play, sing, or write music as a deeliticizing and
decolonizing bourgeoisie approach to art, the partisan movement promoted a
new role for music activities as the most powerful transformational force of the
masses (see Komelj 2009:13). As already pointed out, collective singing is not a
tool for improving musical skills or broadening singers’ musical subjectivities
but primarily a channel for practicing collective political engagement. Choirs
refuse to be assessed by the quality of their performances, which is supposed
to be a “product” of their activities.34 “Flexible structure and non-goal-oriented
process are crucial. We do not strive to deliver a product, we are interested in the
process,” explained Milan from Hor 29. Novembar (interview with the author,
January 15, 2014). For singers, be a member of an activist choir is a process
of (self-)emancipation and a counterresponse to capitalist culture production
based on passivity. They call for the importance of regaining the power amateur
singing activities as an alternative form of music performing and listening in
capitalism. By cherishing self-organization and open participation, they express
a critique of the commodification promoted through the music industry and
professionalism after the collapse of Yugoslavia (Paunović 2011:10).
This is why choirs’ activities act as a (self-)emancipatory venue for what I
called “radical amateurism,” a political position that fuels the politicization of
a field of leisure. During socialism, official rhetoric promoted the concept of
amateurism (amaterizam) as an important feature in the creation of a new model
of leisure activities as communally based active participation in the social life.35
Renowned Yugoslav sociologist Rudi Supek (1974:8, 9) defined amateurism as a
spontaneous collective expression and a basic necessity of each individual in the
aspiration to be part of the wider social community. That also meant creating
broad infrastructures that supported music, film, sports, and other activities.
After the breakup of Yugoslavia and particularly after 2000, shifts toward the
commodification and commercialization of public culture did not just pro-
mote a figure of the passive consumer of cultural products but also significantly
reconfigured the field of leisure. Musical amateurism certainly remained strong
after the 1990s in folklore groups and church choirs, both of which were associ-
ated with nation-building processes, but the figure of the public amateur as an
engaged social and political subject that was promoted during socialism was not
desired. Through their dedication to self-organization and open participation,
choirs aim to provide a space for care for leisure beyond the culture production
of the capitalist corporate state. Their activities are close to Maurizio Lazzarato’s
(2004:187) claim that each human being should be an artist as a precondition
to challenging capitalist accumulation, which is no longer based solely on the
exploitation of labor but also on that of knowledge, life, health, culture, and

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 102  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2020

leisure. Moreover, choirs’ activities call for shifting our attention from work as
the most important field of political struggle in neoliberalism to leisure, which
becomes a crucial arena for contemporary political struggles for alternative
social relations. This, I believe, not only is relevant for the post-Yugoslav choral
movement but also can be a productive point of discussion of amateur music
activities today globally.

Romantic Anticapitalism?
The choirs’ engagement with both resistance and self-organization is certainly
not a one-sided undertaking; instead, as presented, it is a complex and ambigu-
ous way of using the past as a platform for experimenting with new forms of
political engagement. In fact, the activities of activist choirs can be seen as an
example of contestations and challenges in the sonic articulation of political
becoming in the current moment: singers refer to partisan songs as sonic arti-
facts that carry an affective power in mobilizing people. They avoid any kind of
ambiguities or negative values associated with this repertoire and present it as
cleaned of the historical and sociopolitical appropriations by different groups
and individuals, particularly during state socialism after World War II. They
attempt to temporally transcend concrete historical experience by reawakening
the affective intensities attached to the notion of Yugoslav antifascist resistance
and socialist revolution. Such a “romanticized view” is criticized as depolitici-
zation and dehistoricization, which, in Mitja Velikonja’s (Perica and Velikonja
2012:155) words, makes it easier to commodify the legacy of Yugoslav antifascist
resistance. Choirs’ approach to antifascism is also seen as a result of the fact
that the majority of the activists are well-educated young upper- and middle-
class people who take an elitist approach that does not necessarily mobilize the
marginalized social strata they sing about. Some critical voices even claim that
choirs are alternative, urban, pop revolutionaries (see Matoz 2013) that care
more about their self-representation than the concrete effects of their activities.36
However, I do not agree with the stance that romanticizing necessarily makes
choirs’ undertakings depoliticized, banal, or a joyful nostalgic commodification
of resistance in a moment of political exhaustion. I would instead argue precisely
the opposite: by taking the romantic approach, choirs produce a fictional space
positioned in the interplay between experience and expectation, memory and
possibility, bringing new dimensions into the politics of the future through
a reconnection with the past.37 Choirs do this by enabling affective alliances
through collective re-sounding of the antifascist past. Singing about collective
resistance, class solidarity, a vision of a better day, and a utopian reality helps
to cultivate new political feelings in an environment of political exhaustion.
Moreover, in a time when alternative political projects have seemed to vanish

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  103

from the political imagination not just in the post-Yugoslav societies but also
in many societies in the neoliberal fringe, members of activist choirs are on a
quest for future-oriented idealism. They reconsider the idealist view and utopia
from the renewed sense of the social and argue that is it not just allowed but also
necessary to strive for new social relations and another, “better” world. Recalling
both affective resistance and self-organization, choirs simultaneously remind us
that utopia exists only in the quotidian as a concept that embraces the politics
of the here and now (Muñoz 2009:10).38
Simultaneously, choirs, through their singing activities and their internal
organization, demonstrate a need for new forms of political subjectivity based on
radical amateurism and politics of leisure as an alternative to “market-led demo-
cratic individualism” (Šuvaković 2012:311). This looks even more important if
we understand neoliberalism as a technology of managing and administrating
our social lives through a system of calculations (Lazzarato 2004; Ong 2006).
Further developing an argument of Jonathan Crary (2013), Marina Gržinić
writes that a way to escape neoliberal devastation is not just to take time for
yourself but to “make time for [ourselves] and with others” (Gržinić and Tatlić
2014:17). Re-sounding partisan songs in a community with others cultivates
the feelings that compel people to start cooperating in ways alternative to those
espoused by neoliberal capitalism. In this way, affective solidarities produced
through the collective experience of singing and listening foster new forms
of social organization, making choirs’ activities an important vehicle for both
thinking about and practicing alternative social relations, transforming political
imaginaries, and emancipating potentialities.

Acknowledgments
This research is part of the project “Music and Politics in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Toward a New
Paradigm of Politics of Music at the Turn of the Century” (ID J6–9365), which is financially sup-
ported by the Slovenian Research Agency. I thank my colleagues and team members from the
Institute of Cultural and Memory Studies of Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts. This article was also partly written during my research stay at the Music Department of
the Graduate Centre of CUNY as a postdoctoral Fulbright fellow in the spring semester of 2018. I
would like to thank Jane Sugarman for her substantial support throughout this article’s preparation
and dear colleagues Monika Schoop, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Joshua Pilzer, Darci Sprengel, Kelley
Tatro, and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and insightful comments. Finally,
my deepest thanks go to all activists, singers, listeners, and people involved in the activities of the
post-Yugoslav activist choral movement.

Notes
1. The authors of the lyrics and melody of this song are unknown, yet it is believed that the
song dates from the October Revolution and came to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before World War
II, where it was performed by the workers’ choirs. In the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia

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 104  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2020

(later in the text just socialist Yugoslavia or Yugoslavia), this song became popular in the early
post–World War II years, during the period of so-called reconstruction and rebuilding (obnova i
izgradnja), as one of the anthems of the voluntary labor activities called Omladinske radne akcije
(Youth Labor Actions).
2. See the video of the performance at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndwxml6oSFY.
3. The choir based its name on the date of the foundation of the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (SFRY)—November 29, 1943.
4. For more about this event, see https://hor29n.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/unite-tonight-2/.
5. See the video of the event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1QlRImG2y0.
6. They use this name to underline their nonhierarchical and self-organized internal structure.
7. Political exhaustion is seen as one of the dominant affects of the time of global neoliberal-
ism in the sense of both subject formation (Chaudhary 2019) and the prevailing process of living
under the political depression (Berlant 2011:261–62). As I will later show, it also has a particular
meaning and modalities in the post-Yugoslav societies in the neoliberal fringe.
8. Almost all choirs systematically maintain video and audio archives. Two documentaries have
already been made about Hor 29. Novembar. There are also documentary movies about Le-zbor:
Bože čuvaj Le Zbor (God save Le-zbor, 2009), Kombinat (2016), and a movie on the Second Festival
of Self-Organized Choirs, Vsi v en glas (All as one, 2017). In 2015 an exhibition reflecting on fifteen
years of the choir Hostestar/Horkeškart was opened in Belgrade. The interviews presented here are
a selection from wider ethnographic research that included around fifty semistructured interviews
with choir members conducted in the period 2013–19.
9. For information about the Škart collective and that particular project see http://www.skart
.rs/.
10. The choir name combines the words hor (choir) and orkestar (orchestra).
11. The fact that one-third of the choirs are all female also shows a high female presence in
the movement and a general dedication to the women’s and LBTQ+ rights.
12. The choir Hor 29. Novembar also founded the Festival of Alternative Choirs in Vienna
(https://www.facebook.com/FestAltChor/), in which choirs from the former Yugoslavia regularly
take part.
13. For existing studies on individual choirs, see Paunović (2010); Petrović (2011); Radulović
(2012); Hofman (2014, 2016); Reitsamer (2016); Reitsamer and Hofman (2017).
14. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formally founded on November 29, 1943,
under the name Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (Demokratska federativna Jugoslavija). Until its
dissolution in 1992 it was led by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and it consisted of six
republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, and
two provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.
15. Vesić et al. (2015) use the term “restoration of capitalism” in order to refer to what is in
official and mainstream Western-liberal discourse known as the “postsocialist transition” or the
postsocialist socioeconomic transformation that ensued after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
16. About the ignored issue of neoliberalism as introduced in 1989 in Eastern Europe, see
Bockman and Eyal (2002); Gilbert et al. (2008); Gille (2010).
17. See recent works on sound as an affective vibrational force (Bull and Back 2003; Gilbert
2004; Cusick 2008; Goodman 2010; LaBelle 2010; Kassabian 2013; Thompson and Biddle 2013;
Voegelin 2014; Atanasovski 2015; Hofman 2015a; Tomlinson 2016). The ability of music to enhance,
disrupt, or transform socialities has been one of the key issues in ethnomusicological writings from
the early 1980s onward (see Feld 1984; Sugarman 1997; Turino 2008). These works also acknowledge
the sensory or affective aspects, which in new theorizations get closer attention (see Born, Lewis,
and Straw 2017:3; LaBelle 2018).
18. The genre of partisan songs was considered problematic not just after the dissolution of
Yugoslavia but also during socialism. Dominant approaches treated partisan songs as a broader
category that includes not only songs created within the partisan units but also other revolutionary

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 Hofman: Activist Choirs and Yugoslavia  105

and resistance songs “from all times and nations” that were performed during the People’s Liberation
War. In the accounts of the Yugoslav folklorists and ethnomusicologists, this genre was discarded
as not being “real” and authentic folklore (for more about the genre of partisan songs, see Hofman
2016: 27–54; Hofman and Pogačar 2017).
19. After the Axis forces attacked Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, and the Yugoslav Royal Army
signed the capitulation on April 17, uprisings against occupations were transformed into more
organized resistance, which resulted in the biggest resistance movement in Europe. Known for
their guerrilla fighting in difficult circumstances, Yugoslav partisans were formally recognized as
a part of the Allied antifascist forces at the Tehran conference in December 1943.
20. World War II in Yugoslavia was also a civil war, since Yugoslav partisans also fought against
local collaborators.
21. Official post–World War II discourses contributed to the so-called mythologization of
partisan resistance through education and a complex system of commemorative practices (Kirn
2011:239).
22. The Yugoslav workers’ self-management model, which was introduced in 1950, was directed
toward reducing state control over the economy and enabling decision-making by the workers
themselves. Socially owned companies were supervised by workers’ councils, which were made up
of all employees and which decided on issues concerning the division of labor, general production
methods, scheduling, customer care, and so on (see Unkovski Korica 2015). Socialist Yugoslavia
was not a member of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, as other countries of Eastern Europe were.
Together with Egypt and India, Yugoslavia founded the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961,
which gathered developing countries from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a response to
the bipolar geopolitical divisions.
23. This is in contrast to the collaborationist forces of the Ustashas, Chetniks, and Domobrans,
which had strong nationalistic agenda.
24. “Nabrusimo kose” was written by Milan Apih (1906–92), a writer, pre–World War II
Yugoslav communist activist, partisan fighter, and functionary after World War II. He wrote the
song in 1936 using a Polish melody by an unknown author. “Padaj silo i nepravdo” was inspired
by the uprising on the Dalmatian island Hvar (today’s Croatia), led by Matij Ivanović from 1510
to 1514. It is based on the lyrics of “Slobodarka,” a song written by Josip Smodlaka in 1908; the
melody was written by Split-based composer Josip Hatze. The song was popular among Yugoslav
partisans during World War II, particularly in Dalmatian units. For more about the genealogy of
the song, see Anić (1977).
25. At the time of writing this article, the factory is still majority owned by small shareholders
and governmental agencies, but the city assembly is about to give the green light for a final round
of privatization, which will transfer ownership to a large corporation or an individual tycoon.
26. See the Kombinat performance for Occupy Movement protesters in front of the Slovenian
stock exchange in Ljubljana in 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YB_9RytFlI.
27. For more about the transnational leftist repertoire, see Hofman (forthcoming). “Bella
ciao” is one of the most popular Italian antifascist resistance songs. It is generally believed that the
song derived from a folk song sung by female rice growers in the River Po valley in the early part
of the twentieth century. It is a transnational leftist song that has been translated into more than
forty languages and lately performed at numerous protests around the globe. “Bandiera rossa,”
also called “Avanti popolo,” is one of the most famous songs of the Italian labor movement; it was
written by Carlo Tuzzi in 1908 using the melodies of two Lombard folk songs. “Ay Carmela” is a
Spanish Republican song from the civil war based on a folk tune from the Peninsular War in the
early nineteenth century. “Grândola Vila Morena,” written by José (Zeca) Alfonso, was a symbol
of the 1974 revolution in Portugal. For more about how this song has been performed during the
protests in Portugal and southern Europe in the context of antiausterity protests, see Gray (2016).
“La lega” is a song of the rice growers of the Po River valley dating from the end of the nineteenth
century, when the unions started to be created.

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 106  Ethnomusicology, Winter 2020

28. This aspect of how a particular historical legacy is repurposed in the global context certainly
deserves closer attention, yet due to the limited scope of the article it cannot be further developed
here.
29. Another song written by Milan Apih in 1940 during his prison days in a political prison
camp in Bileća, a town located in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The English translation of the lyrics is
by the author.
30. Miloš Popović, a philosophy professor and poet, wrote the lyrics of “Konjuh planinom” at
the end of 1941. He used a melody of the Russian song Там, вдали за рекой (There, far beyond the
river), written by Николая Кооля (1924) and composed by Александр Васильевич Александров
in 1928, and added lyrics dedicated to the Husinjski miners, who massively joined the Yugoslav
partisan movement. Soon after, many partisan units adopted the song, which became widely popu-
lar among fighters. Activists emphasize an essential link between a fight for workers’ rights and
antifascist resistance.
31. Repertoire is usually chosen collectively by all members, but in many cases the choir
leaders and musicians are invited to give the final word about it. For more about the complexities
of repertoire selection, see Hofman (2016:80–89).
32. For example, in the case of Kombinat, which has around eighty overall and forty active
members, taking care of the internal organization is particularly challenging and demands constant
structural adjusting.
33. For more about activism in professionalized and donor-dependent NGOs, see Stubbs
(2012); Goldstein (2017).
34. My extended analysis demonstrates the complex relations between musical and extramu-
sical aspects of choirs’ activities. Members do not want their performances to be evaluated by the
quality of the performance, virtuosity, or originality, which highly depends on the performance
setting; for example, in the case of concerts, musical aspects are still given slight priority (Hofman
2016).
35. This concept was often applied controversially, and it has been changing in accordance with
the overall socioeconomic transformations of Yugoslavia; however, establishing an infrastructure
(culture centers, music schools, or other institutions) proved to make the most visible impact in
culture and artistic activities.
36. Activist singers are completely aware of such critical stances and embrace them in their
discussions and public appearances. See Hofman (2016:163–71).
37. For extensive discussion of the role of sound in the articulation of new notions of actuality,
possibility, impossibility, knowledge, and value, see Voegelin (2014).
38. Muñoz (2009:3) deliberates on Bloch’s classification of utopia to two categories of abstract
and concrete, the former usually seen as banal optimism and the later as the so-called educated
hope, which is related to historically situated struggles.

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