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Since the beginning of the 1990s, klapa singing has grown into a movement that has crossed its local and regional borders. Along with winning awards at the Festival of Dalmatian Klapas Omiš (Festival dalmatinskih klapa Omiš), the success criteria for klapas also became their media exposure, which partly influenced the emergence of a new type - the modern klapa - which searches for new music sources and new ways of presentation and communication. Because of its collaboration with pop singers and reaching out for elements of popular music genres such as rap, soul, rock, and reggae, this type became popular among the widest audiences. Circumstances of that period indirectly influenced the founding and development of the Dalmatian Song Evenings (Večeri dalmatinske pisme), a festival founded in 1999 in Kaštel Kambelovac, Dalmatia. Its first section is dedicated to klapa performances of Croatian (mostly Dalmatian) and foreign popular songs arrangements, but also of new compositions, quite atypical for the canonic klapa repertoire. In the second section, popular music (jazz, rock, bluese, etno, ča- and island-wave) performers present new readings of traditional klapa songs. In the first decade of this festival, klapas performed about 360 compositions and arrangements, which could be roughly divided into: arrangements of traditional chants (which prevailed in the beginning, when the content and name of the festival events had not yet been defined), new compositions, performed at the New Compositions Evenings [Večeri novih skladbi], arrangements of foreign (performed at the Klapa Novelties event [Klapske novitade]) and domestic popular songs (performed at the Kaštela Style event [Kaštelanskiđir]). Through the analysis of several examples, the author of this article has tried to reveal some of the new approaches found in modern klapa songs used by composers and arrangers, often with the price or tendency of neglecting the main characteristics of the traditional klapa repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two types of the music in the film Pustolov pred vratima (The Adventurer in Front of the Door, directed by Šime Šimatovi&#x0107, 1961). The »classical« music was composed by the famous Croatian composer Boris Papandopulo and the »popular« music was composed by Vili Čaklec and Stjepan Mihaljinec. The use and the function of the two musical genres is unusual: Papandopulo uses his »contemporary« music composed mostly in expanded tonality (the only exception is one theme that additionally makes more complex the relationship between the music and the content) to mark the »normal«, »everyday« scenes (although these scenes are already a part of fantasy or realized wishes, so that the question is whether they are really »normal«). On the other hand, a foxtrot, composed by Vili Čaklec, is often used as diegetic music denoting »the door«, that is, »the passage« from the real world (the woman is dying in a sanatorium at the beginning of the film) to the unreal (her wish to live her life again, but with the husband and lover, that is granted by Death). This is completely different from the usual usage of diegetic music as synonymous for film reality, and the nondiegetic music as synonymous for the film non-reality. The »change« of the functions of the musical genres came directly from the story (the screenplay was inspired by a drama written by Milan Begović) where the notions of »real« and »unreal« also changed places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic aim of the paper is both to offer - through critical »reading« of the popular music cultural product in Zagreb between the two world wars - a review of the diversified usable characteristics of particular musical products that circulated on the then-market of symbolic assets, as well as to single out - in the context of accessible testimonies and data on the social and cultural status of music and its participants during that period - the possible functional dispositions which that product, specifically anchored in time and place, used to have. Creating a theoretical basis by drawing on various, primarily cultural and critical comprehensions of popular music, as well as from other broader context components of the functioning of culture, the paper offers a »polygonal« approach to the popular music phenomenon against the background of textual reading off of its articulations and meanings through (not necessarily) musicologically mediated media and analytical procedures. From comprehension of the very phenomenon of the popular and the popularity of music in the period under consideration, through the interpretation of popular music's functional nesting in the sociocultural context, the paper offers indications of certain basic implications of that way of studying music. The work also touches upon an attempt at the conceptual encompassing of music, not only as note and sound structures mediated by media, but also as a broader cultural product that is exposed to diverse usages and different aims, purposes and functions; of which the popular-fictional feature is certainly a significant one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the 39th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Osijek, Croatia on November 17, 2007 is presented. Topics include the light musical theater in the Southern Slavic lands, musical theater in Slavonia and light and popular music. The conference featured several panelists including Stanislav Tuksar, Vjera Katalinic and William A. Everett.