Identifications of Slovene music since 1991

The era of the World Wide Web (WWW) has brought many changes in musical practices. There is a plethora of antinomies involved in the glocalized world: issues juxtaposing between local and global, personal and public, formal and informal, etc. are being constantly raised and rephrased.

In the arts, especially in music, the identification of – among other variables – affiliation or identification is one of the fundamental issues in the cultural policies as well as in the business: each musical hit or historically important hallmark (»the classics«) in music has been raised upon its own identification context – music competitions and music industry is being redefined over and over again, especially since the emergence of the mass media.

As for the title of this project, it should be clearly stated that in the WWW era, national affiliation in music is but a part of a complex set of identifiers – there are many others variables that raise issues in identifying musical works and events besides the national affiliation, as the studies on musical style in the internet era indicate [28]. Slovenian music, as music, in general, today, is always addressed referentially, by no means substantial: it is defined by the makers, distributors, and users.

However, the concept of national music is by no means an abstract one. As with any music, also what people understand as Slovene music has a long history. It reaches into the 19th century (the Springtime of Nations), meanders in Slovenia's case through different national affiliations with different Slavic (and some Non-Slavic) ethnicities until it reaches its political independence in 1991. Ever since 1991, the concept of national musical culture is, of course, a concept that enters an identity debate that is closely connected to digitization and WWW, incidentally coinciding historically with the independence of Slovenia.

The objective of the project is to define specific forms and structures of Slovene music, address the circulation of Slovene music since 1991 and conceptualize the processes of defining national music since 1991 as constructed from two levels:

1.Defining the structures of Slovene music through analysis of symbolic music corpora (analysis of notated music) and music recordings (audio and video).

2.Defining the processes of identification of Slovene music through the analysis of metadata, reception and cognition

a.within the circulation of Slovene music through selected addresses of WWW,

b.within the database of music tagged as Slovene in the archives of the Slovene Broadcasting Corporation (RTV Slovenia) and newspapers

c.music reception and cognition analyses

The main objective of the proposed project answers the question regarding the identity of Slovene music since 1991 that searches for any structural features of Slovene music that entail certain forms – structures, patterns, modes of expression, or even archetypes – of Slovene music.