Dynamics of Crossover Fads.

Since the turn of the Millennium a new musical fad has been spreading across Western Europe: Balkan music. The composer Goran Bregovic, the brass-band Fanfare Ciocarlia, DJ Shantel & the Bukovina Club as well as Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries enjoy enormous popularity among Western-European listeners and critical acclaim from the press. Balkan music had been brought to centres of Germany and Austria already in the 1970s and 1980s by so called guest-workers. But it was not before the end of the century that it was marketed on a large scale to the German-speaking majority. Are there any explanations for the crossover of Balkan music to an urban audience at this time? Combining Bourdieu`s field theory with insights from the US-American New Institutionalism and the Production- of-Culture-Perspective we argue that cultural processes are only fully understood when analyzed against the background of the structure of the field of cultural production. Internal and external forces, like the creativity of individual creators as well as the demand structure of the society as a whole, are refracted by the dynamics of a field in which actors endowed with different amounts of cultural, social and economic capital compete for specific recognition and consecration. While Bourdieu stresses distinction and conflict, US-American sociologists of culture refer to the isomorphic institutionalization of practices across the field and to more co-operative forms of strategic action. Using the Balkan music boom in Austria as a case for illustration we assume that success of crossover fads depends on three field-specific prerequisites: a) actors who possess sufficient cultural, social and economic resources to mobilize support, b) institutionalized genre classifications which enable people in the industry to deal with this kind of music, and c) entrepreneurial brokers who bridge the gap between marginalized and established positions in the field. To understand the dynamics of the Balkan music fad in Austria we will reconstruct the whole process from the early 1990s to the present. We will combine historiographic methods (research of magazine and newspaper archives) with methods from social sciences (especially qualitative interviews.) Central to our project is the drawing of field maps at different points in time. These maps show the positions of persons and organizations in accordance with their endowment with different sorts of capital at different stages of the process. Additionally, the amount of institutionalization of certain genre classifications and entrepreneurial brokerage will be illustrated using field maps.

During the first decade of the 21st century music from the Balkan undoubtedly experienced a boom in Austria. The number of Balkan related events increased sixfold since the turn of the century. The Balkan Fever Festival and the ost klub in Vienna are the most visible signs of this boom, but eventually spread the whole country. What is striking thereby is not only the enormous interest in this kind of music but also the point of time of its emergence. Keeping in mind that Balkan music came to Austria with migrant laborers decades ago and has been an enduring part of immigrant`s everyday life since then, we must ask, why it took Balkan music so long to gain acceptance on the domestic music market beyond immigrant communities. In order to answer this question the history of Balkan music in Austria since the early 1990s was meticulously reconstructed on the basis of newspaper and journal coverage, promotion material and interviews with musicians and organizers of events. The focus of the three years research project was on actors and institutions, who essentially contributed to the success of Balkan music in the majority. Comparing conditions of cultural production of immigrants in the early 1990s with those of Balkan boom representatives of the first decade of the new millennium makes the prerequisites of crossover success clear. The latter are not only better (mostly academically) educated, they also maintain strong intercultural ties to important institutions in Austria`s musical life. Furthermore, they manage to frame their musical productions in a way, which at the same time resonates in the public and mobilizes support in the field of musical production. While for a long time the music of migrant workers had been regarded as traditional folk music and had been often presented to a larger audience in an academic or integration policy context, at the turn of the millennium Balkan music was framed as World Music and assigned with the popular music attributes of spontaneity and vitality. Entrepreneurial brokers who overcome cultural and social barriers play an important role in this process. The results not only offer an exciting insight into the logics of a specific musical field but also contribute to the understanding of social integration and therefore to the solution of one of the most urging social problems.