Written Sources About Tambura Sound from the Beginning of the 20th Century: Instructive Handbooks by Spasoje Tomić and Marko Nešić

Folkloristics 7/2 (2022):
Author: Julijana Baštić
Text:
https://doi.org/10.18485/folk.2022.7.2.4

The acceptance and transmission of musical knowledge, through which cultural, social, geopolitical, and economic systems are created and maintained, is the starting point in historiographically oriented ethnomusicological research. In this sense, the analysis of the two probably oldest handbooks, or two schools of playing tambura, instrument widely used in the area that today represents the unique geopolitical space of Vojvodina, reveals a broad spectrum of information about transmitted musical practice, ideologies and aesthetic values . The book Our Tamburas by Spasoje Tomić, published in Sisak in 1909, and the manuscript School for Tamburas by Marko Nešić from 1912, both located in the archives of City Museum of Novi Sad, represent important written testimonies of the types of tambura instruments used in Šid and Novi Sad. This acoustically oriented research of the written archive is directed towards two handbooks of tambura playing, that attest to the heterogeneity of tambura practice from the beginning of the 20th century, in the various spatial, cultural, and socio-political frameworks.

Keywords: tambura practice, Spasoje Tomić, Marko Nešić, tambura school, historical development of tambura, Vojvodina (Serbia).