A family of fretted stringed instruments brought to the United States and Canada by
immigrants from Croatia, Bosnia, and the Vojvodina section of Serbia. Tamburitza (the
term also refers to the music played on these instruments) comprises an active American
musical subculture with the core of musicians and audience members from the Croatian
American and Serbian American ethnic communities. The tradition is strongest in
western Pennsylvania and in Great Lakes industrial cities, where tamburitza combos
regularly play for weddings and picnics and in taverns and restaurants. The activities of
more than two-dozen youth tamburitza ensembles in the United States and Canada are
supported and coordinated by the Junior Cultural Federation of the Croatian Fraternal
Union. An acclaimed touring collegiate ensemble is based at Duquesne University in
Pittsburgh. Thirty to forty professional combos assemble annually for the Tamburitza
Extravaganza, an event sponsored by the Tamburitza Association of America.
There are five contemporary tamburitza instruments, from smallest to largest: prima,
brac, celo brac, bugarija, and berde. They range in size from smaller than a mandolin to
larger than a string bass, but the instruments have never been completely standardized.
There are three competing “systems”: Sremski, which most American players use;
Farkas, an older system of instruments, now seldom played; and Jankovic, a newer
system utilized by school orchestras in Croatia.
The modern tamburitza is a South Slavic adaption of the Middle Eastern long-necked
lute with a small pear-shaped body. Precursors of the modern tamburitza were brought to
the Balkans by the Ottomans as early as the late 14th century. Since then the Middle
Eastern types of the instrument, such as saz and baglama, as well as such shepherd and
peasant adaptations as sargija, icitel, samica, and dangubica, have been played, usually
soloistically, by people of the various Balkan nationalities: Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians,
Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, and Roma (Gypsies).
From the second half of the 19th century until World War I, South Slavic musicians in
the Hapsburg Empire, imbued with the spirit of the era’s nationalist movements,
developed tamburitza orchestras as a refined but folk-connected symbol of national
identity. Such South Slavic musicians and composers as Pajo Kolaric and Miroslav Majer
from Osijek and Milutin Farkas and Ivan Zajc from Zagreb used tamburitza performances
as a form of opposition to Austrian and Hungarian political and cultural domination. To
“ennoble” the folk instrument, artisans created tamburitzas in various sizes, like the
members of the violin family. Unlike the earlier instruments, which played a Middle Eastern or a Western diatonic scale, by the end of the 19th century the newer tamburitzas
were devised to play a Western chromatic scale. The new compositions included
classical-influenced tamburitza symphonies and concerti as well as vocal pieces with
lyrics in the then suppressed national languages. (Analogous nationalistic musical
movements in the 19th century led to the creation of Italian mandolin orchestras,
Ukrainian bandura orchestras and Russian balalaika orchestras).
The orchestral tamburitza efforts originated in such urban areas as Osijek and Zagreb
but soon had an impact also upon villagers. Although some peasant players of the earlier
forms of tamburitza have continued to make and play them, more have learned to play the
more adaptable orchestral tamburitzas and have put them and the related orchestral
musical concepts and skills to their own uses. By the last decades of the 19th century,
small ensembles using orchestral tamburitzas became a fixture in village and small-town
taverns and at rural celebrations of weddings, saints’ days, and other festivities. Thus, the
village tamburitza combos and the urban orchestras were well established in their
homelands at the time of the greatest migration of South Slavs to North America.
Numerous reports and photographs from the beginning of the 20th century establish
the presence of tamburitza groups in the mining and industrial communities where the
bulk of the South Slavic peasant immigrants first settled: between 1900 and 1910, groups
were active in industrial cities such as Buffalo; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Milwaukee;
Chicago; Pittsburgh; and in small mining towns like Chisholm, Minnesota; Centerville,
Iowa; Rutland, Illinois; South Range, Michigan, and Bingham Canyon, Utah.
In the 1910s, record companies including Columbia, Edison, and Victor began to
record tamburitzans. Columbia recordings made in March 1912 by Andras Tavic with
singer Vlado Konstantinovic may be the earliest, while the influential tamburitza pioneer
Vaso Bukvic recorded on Columbia in 1916 with his brother Mirko and on Victor in
1917 with Sandor Huszar. The number of commercial recordings of tamburitza artists by
the major companies as well as by small ethnic labels such as Balkan in Chicago and
Zora in Detroit increased through the 1920s, continuing until World War II. Some of the
influential artists of this era included Stevan Zerbec, the Skertich brothers, the Kapudji
brothers, Dusan Jovanovic, Milan Verni, the Crlenica brothers, Djoko Dokic, the
Popovich brothers, and Dave Zupkovich, and the orchestras Zvonimir, Banat, Javor,
Jorgovan, Zora, Balkan, and Balkan Serenaders.
Orchestras like Zvonimir and the Elias Serenaders toured nationally on the vaudeville
and chatauqua circuits, exposing the music to a broader audience. Instruction manuals,
original compositions, and orchestral arrangements of folk songs by Charles Elias Sr., his
son Charles Jr., and Rudolf Crnkovic made it possible to establish the network of youth
orchestras in North America.
The Duquesne University Tamburitzans, founded in 1937 by Matt Gouze and led by
Walter Kolar from the 1950s through the 1980s, have provided college scholarships to
outstanding young musicians and dancers. A majority of them come from the ranks of the
junior tamburitza orchestras. Many of the veterans of the Duquesne or junior tamburitza
ensembles have gone on to perform in professional combos such as Veseli, Cigani,
Sinovi, and Slanina and to teach tamburitza to subsequent generations of young players in
the youth groups.
Richard March
References
Kolar, Walter W. 1975. A History of the Tambura. Vol. 2. Pittsburgh: Tamburitzans Institute of
Folk Arts, Duquesne University.