Music Heritage in Relocation: The “Guča na Krasu” Festival

ABSTRACT
This article attempts to turn from describing heritage in the framework of official and everyday discourses of identity and politics of belonging towards acknowledging its spatial nature. As an example, I use the Guča na Krasu festival in order to explore two main questions: how a strong notion of locality is mediated by the non-locality of sound, and the ways in which globalization and mobility are remodelling music heritage protocols, particularly in the case of migrant communities. I explore the ways in which trumpet orchestra music, as one of the main genres of Balkan music on the world music market, is becoming an affective tool of identification and affiliation, and bringing a newly emergent globallocal dynamics to the existing heritage management of the Serbian community living in this area. The discourses of heterogeneity and transnationality in branding Balkan music have led to an ambivalent identification with the festival among community members. Navigating between sound environments, music heritage protocols, globalization processes and affective technologies, the space is approached through an examination of the complexity of relations among communities, affective spatio-temporal sound collectivities, and music globalization processes.
KEY WORDS: Guča na Krasu, spatio-temporal sound collectivities, trumpet orchestras, Balkan music, heritage protocols