Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s (review)

Abstract

MUSICAL GEOGRAPHIES Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s. By Eno Koco. (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities, no. 2.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. [xxviii, 400 p. ISBN 0-8108-4889-2. $73. (hbk.); ISBN 0-8108-4890-2 $45. (pbk.).] Music examples, index, bibliography, 2 compact discs. urban must not remain only in the mouths of singers dressed in costumes and fez, but it needs to put on the modern dress of our time (p. 59). Such is soprano Marie Kraja's explanation for the efforts of a generation of singers from the educated middle class, trained in western Europe in operatic technique, who returned home in the 1930s and transformed the older urban repertoire into art to be performed to the accompaniment of piano or chamber orchestra. By recasting urban as a cultivated art form that could share a concert stage with operatic arias, these performers helped to assure a prominent place for it in musical life up to the present day. It is the of the 1930s and the singers, instrumentalists, composer-arrangers, and lyricists who developed it that are the primary subject of Eno Koco's excellent and wellresearched study. As the first monograph in English to examine an urban repertoire from southeastern Europe, and the first to detail musical life in the region in the early twentieth century, it will be revelatory for international readers. Aside from his skills as an ethnomusicologist, Koco is a highly accomplished classical musician who, as longtime conductor of the Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, arranged and recorded many examples of the songs he examines here. He is also the son of two of the singers who helped to develop lyric song: Kristaq Koco, a baritone who studied in Milan; and Tefta Tashko-Koco, a soprano who studied at the Paris Conservatoire. The lives and careers of Koco's parents, born respectively in Romania and Egypt, together with artists such as Austrian-trained Kraja and tenor Kristaq Antoniu, who studied in Romania and Italy, illustrate both the far-flung character of the middle class in the early twentieth century and their strong sense of affinity for European high culture. Koco's study does much to counter stereotypes of cultural isolation by illuminating a fascinating period of musical Europeanization in the decades before World War II. Throughout his study, Koco distinguishes between what he terms Albanian urban song (AUS) or urban song, and Albanian urban lyric song (AULS). AUS refers to the repertoire of urban songs created and performed up to the present by musicians within a framework of local performance practices; and AULS to the concert repertoire composed of reworkings of AUS as well as newly composed songs. Koco focuses on four towns that served as centers of urban musical life: Shkoder in the north, Elbasan and Berat in Central Albania, and Korce in the south. Songs from these towns are known today not only in Albania, but also in communities in the former Yugoslavia as well as throughout the large diaspora. While many present-day listeners are acquainted with recordings of performers, perhaps many more are familiar with the larger repertoire of urban songs performed in a more local style by several generations of professional folk singers. Following a short introduction and a historical overview in chapter 1, Koco provides, in chapters 2 and 3, substantial information on the historical and social context of urban song. First he surveys possible sources for the musical style of this repertoire, with particular attention to the Byzantine legacy and the many genres that were introduced to the region in the Ottoman period. He then focuses on the performances and styles of small ensembles of singer-instrumentalists, known in the north as aheng and in the south as saze, whose members were the principal creators and performers of traditional urban song. …