Këngë Korçare: Song Making and Musical Culture in the City of Korçë During the Twentieth Century
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UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO Scuola di Dottorato Humanae Litterae Dipartimento di Beni Culturali e Ambientali Dottorato in Storia e Critica dei Beni Artistici e Ambientali XXV Ciclo Tesi di dottorato di ricerca Këngë Korçare: Song Making and Musical Culture in the City of Korçë during the Twentieth Century L-ART/07 L-ART/08 Dottorando Mikaela MINGA Tutor: Nicola SCALDAFERRI Coordinatore del Dottorato: Gianfranco FIACCADORI 2011-2012 Këngë Korçare: Song Making and Musical Culture in the City of Korçë during the Twentieth Century To the loving memory of my grandapas Contents Introduction ...................................................... 1 Korça: A History ............................................... 15 Korça: Place-Making and Grassroots Urbanism ....................... 17 Urbanity and State-Socialism ....................................................... 33 Korçarë and their Experiencing of Time and Place .................. 43 Researching the Repertoire .................................. 55 Këngë Korçare and Urban Music Settings .................................... 57 Urban Folklore, Saze, and Këngë Korçare ..................................... 85 “Serenata Korçare” Programme, the Revival, and Radio Korça ............................................................................................................... 95 Këngë Korçare: An Analytical Perspective ............. 121 Reading the Cosmopolitan and the Local ................................ 123 ‘Mi Erë Të’: Appropriation Techniques and Creative Mechanisms ...................................................................................... 141 Recording Legacy: Ethnographic Notes ................................... 157 I Mikaela Minga Two Case-Studies ........................................... 163 Lira Group: An Ambivalent History .......................................... 165 Spanja Pipa: A Woman in Song .................................................. 179 The Emotional Discourse and Song Making ........... 203 The Secret Life of Korça’s Love Song ........................................ 205 A Digression to the Rule: Humoristic Songs and the Ironic Consciousness ................................................................................... 219 The Song and Self-Expression .................................................... 235 APPENDIX I................................................. 253 APPENDIX II ............................................... 261 Glossary of musicians ...................................... 265 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 273 II Aknowledgments I would like to express my deep gratitude to the protagonists of this re- search and more especially to Spanja Pipa, Viktor Çani, Pandi Tabaku, Vaskë Kolaci, Niko Kotherja, and Kostika Zdruli. The opinions of scholars and col- leagues during this research have been valuable to me. I am thankful to Nathalie Clayer and Gilles de Rapper for the feedback on earlier drafts of this dissertation. A special thank goes to my friends Maurizio Corbella, Ardian Vehbiu, Janice Mahinka, Andrew Pace, Ioannis Tsioulakis, Cecilia Pavarani, and Apostolos Poulios who were always welcome to my inquires. I would al- so like to thank Andrew Pace, Rosemaria Platen, and June Emerson for the language revisions. The music programs I attended enriched my research experience in many ways so I am greatful first of all to my “home” Department at the University of Milan and to the CUNY Graduate Center in New York where I would like to thank especially Jane Sugarman. I want to express my deep gratitude to my advicer, Nicola Scaldaferri for his stimulating suggestions and for inspiring me to look at this research as a lived experience. Finally, I would not be here if it wasn’t for the continous love and support of my parents and my sister that followed my work with the same interest and energies as I did. Faleminderit! Introduction I This research is focused on a song repertoire that has been widely per- formed in the city of Korçë during the twentieth century. Korçë has been dis- tinguished as an important center in the region with a relevant contribution in the history of Albanian nation. 1 Këngë Korçare (Korçare Songs) have been heard and sung in public and private performances, in formal and informal settings, so acquiring a singular status in people’s life. They were conceived as belonging to the city, engendering the attribution of Korçare, that is, from Korçë. This perceived status made my research evolve as the study of an ur- ban repertoire and a city. I grew up hearing and singing these songs as part of my own life experi- ences. I appreciated - as musician - the expressive melody, the simple chordal harmonies, and the enlivened atmosphere they created in different events. This familiarity made me hesitant to undertake scholarly research about the songs and my birthplace. During the course of my research, I visited and lived in other cities; sometimes distant and contrasting with Korçë, others close and familiar. The wide geography of cities did not leave me indifferent: beginning with Milan, where my PhD studies were settled, to New York, Boston, Phila- 1. Korça is the largest urban center in southeast Albania and one of the country’s main cities. The region is bordered by Greece and FYROM (Macedonia). It is positioned between two rather historically contested regions: Epir and Macedonia. People speak the Tosk dialect in a slight local patois. Mikaela Minga delphia and then Lisbon, Sofia, Thessaloniki, and Pavia. And while moving from one place to another, the link with one city remained contiguous. As Constantine Cavafy wrote: The city will be following you. In the same streets you’ll wander. And in the same neighborhoods you’ll age, […] Always in this same city you’ll arrive.2 I did not always arrive in the same city, but cannot say that it was always a different one. The musical events taking place in these locations contributed to evoking and organizing my thoughts. Parallel to this, my first fieldwork en- counters gradually dissipated the diffidence, making me realize that the pos- sibility of exploring the “taken-for-granted”, the thing one (thinks) she knows “from the inside” can be equally perplexing and challenging as the foreign. Now that this “journey” seems almost finished and the research accomplished - at least for the moment - I would say that on the foreground of these narra- tives are my experiencing of music, people, places, and books. II My initial surveys on the research project encompassed the last twenty years. During this period, these songs have been performed a lot. Popular singers from Korçë but nationally renowned, have recorded them becoming identified in some cases as performers par excellence.3 The pieces were heard live in bars, tavern venues and lately, they are gradually acquiring the attrib- utes of a tourist attraction. A revival process that started in the early 1990s nurtured this reality. Dur- ing the communist regime (1946-1990), the history of these songs followed dif- ferent dynamics. A part of the repertoire was popularized and disseminated through official national media by a male ensemble known as Lira group. Be- 2. Cavafy 2007: 29 3. I would cite for example Ermira Babaliu, Eli Fara, Mimoza Paraveli. (See Glossary). And the albums: Eli Fara. No- stalgji. Tetovo: Fuga [No Serial Number], 1996; Mimoza Paraveli. Harroje, Harroje. Gostivar: Studio Ha-Ha Gostivar [no serial number], ca. 1998; Ermira Kola. Qyteti i Ëndrrave. Tiranë: Eurostar [no serial number], ca. 1999. 2 Këngë Korçare: Song Making and Musical Culture in the city of Korça ginning in the 1960s, a number of prohibiting measures were employed for banishing the outdoor serenading and street singing of young males, a very popular performance in the city up to that period. Song practice continued to animate people’s lives in informal events as a latent condition. The repertoire remained “active” and popular among the urban-dwellers. The revival of the early 1990s, fueled by an emergent commercial reality, promoted these songs for wider audiences. This situation captivated me. I envisaged a project where I could discuss a number of topics, such as the commercial reality, the music idioms that shaped these pieces as studio music productions, the post-communist social life, mobility, migration, and regional music influences. A few primary sources dating from the communist rule period and brief oral accounts from elderly protagonists made me re-consider my ideas. Another view emerged. It looked limited in terms of documented sources, but still promising and attention-grabbing in terms of what people had to say about it. One of the main reasons that made me consider the case was the place this song practice had in collective memory. The discussion went far be- yond the official and banned aspect. It pertained to the way the latter perme- ated people’s lives from the early twentieth century. The songs had a different ‘social life’ until the early 1990s, and had different protagonists that found on- ly a partial space in its actual representation. The situation was closely related to the history of the city and the main events that distinguished it during the twentieth century. I chose therefore to focus on the historical framework. My research combined primary sources found in archives and libraries with the ones coming from fieldwork. As previously mentioned, the primary sources in the remnant archives of artistic institutions were in a poor physical condition. Lack of administrative